A former store clerk accused of murdering 6-year-old Etan Patz
first confessed to the crime in 1979 to a prayer group and has admitted
to the killing more than a half-dozen times — to his family, to the
police, to a prosecutor and, finally, to several psychological experts, a
prosecutor said in her closing argument on Tuesday.
In
a four-and-half-hour summation, the prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon,
told a jury in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that the defendant,
Pedro Hernandez, had never retracted any of those confessions, the
details of which she argued have the ring of truth. And some of his
admissions, she noted, occurred decades before he was interviewed by the
police. “The defendant never took any of it back,” Ms. Illuzzi-Orbon
said.
The
prosecutor hammered away at the defense argument that Mr. Hernandez had
invented a false confession under police pressure because of his low
I.Q. and a personality disorder that made it hard for him to distinguish
fantasy from reality.
Instead,
Ms. Illuzzi-Orbon painted a picture of Mr. Hernandez as a quiet,
observant and canny man who watched Etan when he went alone to a store
where Mr. Hernandez worked or waited at a nearby school bus stop. She
asserted that the motive for the killing was sexual, though Mr.
Hernandez has denied he molested Etan.
“He
was sullen, observing, abusive and abused, and day after day, he saw
this beautiful little boy alone,” Ms. Illuzzi-Orbon said. “One day he
acted on his impulse and did something terrible to this little boy. And
spent the rest of his life waiting to be discovered.”
Etan
vanished on the morning of May 25, 1979, as he walked from his parents’
loft on Prince Street to a school bus stop two blocks away. His
disappearance shocked the city, forever changing what New York parents
considered safe for their children, and eventually led to a national
movement to raise awareness about child abductions.
Mr.
Hernandez, 54, was arrested in May 2012 after a tip from his
brother-in-law, who said Mr. Hernandez had talked to a prayer group in
1979 about killing a child in New York City when he worked at a bodega.
After more than six hours of interrogation,
Mr. Hernandez, living in Maple Shade, N.J. at the time, broke down in
tears and said he had lured Etan into the basement of the bodega in SoHo
where he worked and strangled him. He said he had put the boy’s body in
a plastic bag and a box, then left it in a subterranean passageway a
block away. Later, he repeated the confession to a prosecutor three
times.
Defense
experts say Mr. Hernandez has an I.Q. of about 70 and schizotypal
personality disorder, which not only leads him to confuse fact and
fiction, but also sometimes causes him to hallucinate.
After testimony that lasted 10 weeks, Mr. Hernandez’s lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, argued on Monday
that Mr. Hernandez’s mind was so suggestible and weak that he came to
believe he had committed the crime when the police used psychological
ploys, like appealing to his deep religious faith and telling him the
Patz family would thank him, to get him to talk. “He wanted to be part
of the team,” Mr. Fishbein said.
Mr. Fishbein also presented evidence pointing to another possible culprit: Jose A. Ramos, a convicted child molester who was a suspect in the case for years but was never charged.
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