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Murder trial begins 35 years after 6-year-old vanished in New York

 
Pedro Hernandez confessed to murder and kidnapping in the case.
Pedro Hernandez confessed to murder and kidnapping in the case.
Published Jan. 31, 2015

NEW YORK — Thirty-five years after the disappearance of a 6-year-old boy in Manhattan ushered in an era of protectiveness for America's children, the trial began Friday for a mentally ill man with a low IQ who confessed to his murder and kidnapping.

Etan Patz was snuffed out by a worker in the corner candy store on the first day he was allowed to walk alone to catch his bus to school, a prosecutor said.

"You will see and hear his chilling confession," Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon told jurors. "What you will see is someone who very keenly controls the information that he puts out."

The defense of Pedro Hernandez, 54, of Maple Shade, N.J., depends on convincing jurors his confession was false.

"He has visions. He hears voices," defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein said. "He cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not."

Etan was last seen alive walking to the bus stop in 1979. His body has never been found, and memories can falter with the passage of time. But the prosecutor told jurors that Hernandez, a teenager at the time of the crime, implicated himself long before police questioned him:

• Hernandez, without naming the boy, had told friends, relatives and his prayer group in the 1980s that he had killed a child.

• Hernandez said that he had sexually abused a boy before killing him.

• Hernandez's ex-wife, years ago, said she found a cut-out photo of Etan in a little box where the man stored keepsakes.

Hernandez's brother-in-law Jose Lopez tried to alert authorities for years, the prosecutor said, calling America's Most Wanted, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the New York police. No one got back to him until 2012, when he called again after seeing news of a failed effort to dig for clues in a neighborhood basement.

Etan's disappearance prompted changes in how police and parents think of missing children. His face became one of the first to appear on milk cartons. His parents advocated for legislation that created a nationwide law-enforcement framework to address such cases. The day of his disappearance is now National Missing Children's Day.