WCI Featured Author: Lisa Cohen

Today, we’re kicking off our series featuring the authors of Women in Crime Ink starting with the fabulously talented Lisa R. Cohen. Lisa is best known for her book AFTER ETAN, which chronicles the disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz, who disappeared while walking to school in New York City on May 25, 1979. The disappearance of Etan Patz was one of the first cases that spawned a nationwide interest in missing children. Never found, Etan was declared dead in 2001. Prime suspect Jose Ramos is currently incarcerated for the sexual molestation of several boys—but he has never been charged with Etan’s abduction. However, in early 2010, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office reopened the investigation into Etan's disappearance.

Lisa Cohen is also an Emmy-award winning television news magazine producer with more than 20 years of network news experience at ABC and CBS News. At “PrimeTime Live” and then for “60 Minutes II,” she produced reports for Diane Sawyer, Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, Cynthia McFadden and others on topics as diverse as the right to bear arms, have abortions and exercise the death penalty. She has covered some of the biggest moments in recent history including TWA 800, the Oklahoma bombing, and the September 11 terror attacks. Her 1996 one-hour documentary for ABC News PrimeTime Live, “Judgment at Midnight,” won multiple awards, including the NATAS Emmy; CINE Golden Eagle; International Film and Television Award; and the Foundation of American Women in Radio and Television “Gracie” award.

In addition to AFTER ETAN, Lisa is hard at work on a long-term documentary following one extraordinary woman who spent a year fighting (and beating) breast cancer, which then inspired her to take on the American health care system. Cohen is also a media consultant and teaches journalism/television production. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism,and recently was a Princeton University Ferris Professor of Journalism.

Lisa has received critical acclaim and stellar reviews for AFTER ETAN, including:

"When our son, Adam, was abducted in 1981, my wife, Revé, and I felt no one could really understand what we were going through. Then we met Julie and Stan Patz and found that we were members of a horrible but exclusive club. Their courage inspired us then and inspires us now. Reading AFTER ETAN, made me even more grateful for dedicated public servants like the incredible prosecutor who ultimately produced some measure of justice for Etan. Every American needs to know Etan's story."

—John Walsh, “America’s Most Wanted”

“An engrossing account of a watershed missing-child case...

…The author tells the complete, heartbreaking story, from day one of the boy’s disappearance to his family’s continuing efforts to bring a rapist and killer to justice. First-time author Cohen, who covered the case for 60 Minutes and PrimeTime Live, admirably avoids a hysterical approach to the shocking subject matter. Instead, she lets the disturbing facts speak for themselves. The author had access to an astounding amount of information, including multiple interviews with Patz’s parents and former chief prosecutor Stuart GraBois…

...A masterful combination of deep human interest and detailed criminal investigation into a parent’s worst nightmare."
—Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews

“In the first-ever book on this celebrated case, Lisa Cohen finally gives us the answers behind the most vexing child kidnapping since the Lindbergh Baby. It’s a harrowing portrait of a family's grief and an engrossing detective story. A powerful lesson in humanity tested and triumphant.”
—Nicholas Pileggi, author, Wiseguys, Goodfellas, Casino

For more on Lisa Cohen and AFTER ETAN, visit her website here.

Tweet

Get to know Jose Antonio Ramos

by Lisa R. Cohen

As I wrote in my last post, Cyrus Vance Jr. is beginning his new term as Manhattan's District Attorney by taking a different tack than his predecessor, the legendary Robert Morgenthau.

Morgenthau meted out criminal justice in New York City for three decades until finally retiring in January. Throughout almost his entire reign, he demurred from pursuing the infamous Etan Patz case. "Not enough evidence," he'd say, on the few occasions he even deigned to comment.

The case involved the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz off the streets of New York on his way to the bus stop, walking the two blocks on his own for the first time ever. He was never seen again. The mystery sparked a nationwide manhunt and a shift in our cultural sense of safety.

Even if you didn't read my last post, you would know from reading any one of numerous headlines, or watching ABC News Nightline's lengthy top story last Friday, that Vance has revealed he's taking a fresh look at the 31-year-old case with an eye to (hopefully) bringing charges against Jose Antonio Ramos.

Ramos is coming to the end of a very long prison stint in Pennsylvania for molesting two boys back in the '80s. He's due out in November 2012, unless a new charge can start the clock ticking again. Since there's no statute of limitations for murder, nor, in some situations, for felony kidnapping, the Patz case might be the way to do it. But people need to know more about Ramos to understand why people like Stuart GraBois, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, have fought so hard for so many years to keep him locked up.

Ramos's mug shot, grim and forbidding, has been splashed across the tabloids for years, but few have ever really talked to him, or even met him.

I have, and it's not an experience I'd want to repeat. When he refused to talk to me for my book, AFTER ETAN, I was disappointed. But part of me was glad not to face the barrage of invective and crazy I'd been through on the first go round, for a prison interview I produced at ABC News back in 1991, the only time Ramos has ever talked on camera.

Ramos has been locked away since a June day, much like this one, in 1986, when he was arrested in his converted school bus by the side of a highway. He'd gotten stuck there when the bus sputtered to a halt, just as he was about to hit the interstate heading across state lines.

He was trying to escape the Pennsylvania State Police, who'd put out a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) for him, once they'd heard the story of a sweet faced eight-year-old I call Joey. Joey and his parents walked into a Western Pennsylvania barracks, sat down in front of a video camera, and with little hesitation and no artifice, Joey told police that over a period of two days Jose Ramos had anally and orally assaulted him several times.

Joey didn't appear traumatized, just slightly uncomfortable, mostly unaware that he would be affected for the rest of his life. That's exactly the kind of victim Ramos would go after. A boy, often, although one father I talked to said Ramos used to wheel his pre-verbal twin toddlers off to babysit for hours at a time, and we'll never know what happened to them on his watch.

But usually his target was a boy, one whose parents were either very open, absent or in some way marginalized - impoverished, or a junkie or alcoholic ... maybe just hapless.

Ramos was very attentive to both parent and child. He looked menacing, but his voice was soft and mellifluous. After a while, he'd offer to take the boy fishing, or to the movies, eventually on sleepovers; a welcome break for a beleaguered single mom. He talked about wanting to be a father figure, giving these little "friends" of his what they desperately craved - attention and affection.

On at least one occasion, another (four-year-old) victim told police Ramos threatened to kill him if he alerted anyone. But sometimes a child was so eager to please, he'd simply go along with Ramos's seduction, not understanding what was happening. Maybe some of it even felt good. That was the plan, to create a victim who had "participated" and so was just as much to blame. Joey hadn't been coerced in a classic sense, and in a way, that was part of the damage done.

I met Joey four years after Ramos had gotten to him. He was a likeable boy, but he seemed numb and slightly sad. In those four years, he'd been attacked countless times over, by other kids who knew what had happened, and who hurled offensive slurs, ostracizing him. His own brother, fearing he'd be tainted by association, was the worst offender. Joey's grades had tanked. He had recurring nightmares of Ramos chasing him. It was heartbreaking.

When I interviewed him for the book, Joey, now an adult, told me that was worse than the sexual abuse. By then he was old enough to understand what had really happened to him, to suffer anguish because he hadn't put up a fight, and to turn his loathing inward. His family hadn't had the resources to get him treated properly. Again, heartbreaking. Ramos left a swath of such victims around the country, wandering from one to the next. When I heard he'd settled for awhile near a home for Downs' Syndrome children, and even targeted some of them, it literally made me nauseated.

Since that June day in 1986, Jose Ramos hasn't had access to a young victim. In two years, if and when he walks free, he'll have been without for 27 years. Maybe he'll be too old, too wary, too chastened to stalk again. I very much doubt it.

I hope he never gets that chance. But if he does, take a good look. Get to know this face well.

Tweet

Red Letter Day for Etan's Family

by Lisa R. Cohen

 On Tuesday I called Stan Patz. "Hi," I said. "Am I the first of the legions of annoying media calling you today to check in?"

Patz is the father of Etan Patz, the famous missing six-year-old who disappeared 31 years ago Tuesday, the day now marked as National Missing Children's Day. He vanished during a two-block walk from his downtown New York home to the school bus stop.

His mother (above, with Etan) kissed him goodbye on the sidewalk in front of their loft apartment, and he set off, taking that walk on his own for the very first time.

Last year, when I wrote the book about this then-30-year case, the only book ever written on it, I called it AFTER ETAN: The Missing Child Case That Held America Captive. There was a "Before Etan," and an "After Etan."

Before Etan, parents didn't have the image of that beautiful blond-haired boy, an image of what could be their own child's fate, lurking in their hearts. After Etan, they did, and for many, the world changed forever.

The case has never been officially solved, although the book details the best convincingly detailed argument for what happened that day, and then tells what happened in the twisting, turning years following, as law enforcement struggled to make sense of the mystery, unraveling clues over time. Because it's this incredible, ongoing mystery, every year, on May 25th, the media calls come in, a trickle over the last several, but the day is always marked by someone.

"I think it's going to be a pretty quiet one," Stan replied to me. "I'm not anticipating a lot of attention." Which, to Stan (below left), is good and bad. He hates attention, but on the other hand, he's fought for 31 years to keep people interested in solving this case.

"I was wrong," he wrote to me later that day. "A Wall Street Journal reporter has interviewed me at length, and his photographer was just here to take pictures."

"There is news," he continued, and I could almost hear the excitement in his words on the page. "The new Manhattan District Attorney has announced he's re-opening the case."

I got the call from the reporter himself soon afterwards and filled him in on some of the background of the case. I told him that this break was a testament to the tenacity of Stan and his cohort, the former Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart GraBois, who had stood by Patz, followed the case for more than two decades, and had himself broken it, zeroing in on a most viable prime suspect.

Jose Antonio Ramos (right) has never been charged for Etan's abduction and murder, although in 2004 he was found legally responsible for Etan's death in a civil suit Stan Patz brought against him.

The former Manhattan D.A., Robert Morgenthau, had the case for decades but always insisted he didn't have enough evidence to prosecute. His spokesperson would always follow up with a "can't comment on an ongoing investigation," and no one could know exactly what their case was.

The new D.A., Cyrus Vance Jr, now says he's willing to take a fresh look. It doesn't mean they're about to convene a grand jury, or charge Ramos, or anything that concrete. But it does signal a willingness to go after Ramos for what many close to the case believe is the heinous crime he committed all those years ago. For that, and for the fact that he's not blindly sticking to the status quo, Vance (left) is to be commended.

There is no statute of limitations on murder. It's unclear, based on New York state law, if there's a statute of limitations on the kind of kidnapping charge they might be able to bring against Ramos.

Stan Patz is especially pleased because of a looming deadline. In 2012, Ramos will have served the full term for two other child molestation cases for which he was convicted. He was put in jail by prosecutor GraBois (right), not for the Patz case, but because of it. It was GraBois's gusto that led him to pursue the other cases when he couldn't nail Ramos on the Patz case. Ramos, it turned out, was a serial pedophile, but over the last 25 years, he's successfully been kept away from an entire generation of small victims.

But in two years, Ramos will walk free. Stan Patz and Stu GraBois want to make sure that won't happen. The wheels of justice grind slowly, and two years isn't very long at all by that measure.

Stan was grateful, after all, that Tuesday wasn't such a quiet day. And today, at last, there's a measure of hope.

Tweet

We Should All Be "Violently Enraged"

by Lisa R. Cohen

On Wednesday, pediatrician Earl Bradley shuffled into a Delaware courtroom, shackles and handcuffs accessorizing a gray prison jumpsuit above white sneakers. It was the first time he'd been seen publicly since the last time I wrote about his case here, almost a month ago, when he was indicted on 471 counts of child molestation.

Some in the audience, parents of his victims, cried openly. Others tried to get a closer look as Bradley moved to the lectern and pled not guilty to all 471 counts. These were all brutal acts that took place during thousands of visits to BayBees Pediatrics (below right), the private practice where countless parents in the sleepy fishing village of Lewes, population 3,000, trustingly took their children. From the outside, the office looked more like Disney Land, with a miniature Ferris wheel and colorful merry-go-round beckoning children. But inside, authorities say, it was a true house of horrors.

From as far back as 1998 until his arrest in December of 2009, prosecutors charge, Bradley forced at least 102 children as young as three months old to engage in sexual acts, including vaginal intercourse and oral sex with him. Often he took the kids to a basement room after the exam, without their parents. "Come down to my toy chest and pick out a prize," he'd tell toddlers and older kids alike. They'd be gone just a few minutes -- but long enough for him to do unspeakable things and damage them forever. The children would return to their parents, toys in hand.

Sometimes Bradley assaulted his victims right on the exam table, with prolonged internal exams, as when, for instance, one 12-year-old came in complaining of a sore throat and pink eye. According to police reports, Bradley penetrated her for two minutes, then gave her a toy meant for a toddler. Another mother complained that Bradley conducted a four-minute internal exam on a child brought in for ADD.

Yet another mother reported her three-year-old leaving the exam to ask her, "Why did Dr. Bradley kiss my tongue?" The mother went to the police with the same question.

But the complaints and outrage went on for years before Bradley was finally arrested this past December. And perhaps the toughest, most important question that bears answering is: Why did it take so long? Especially since police had fielded enough complaints by December 2008 to ask a judge for a search warrant to raid Bradley's office.

The warrant was denied. The judge said there wasn't enough probable cause. The name of the judge isn't being made public. That's probably good for him, because a lot of the folks in Delaware would jump all over him.

During the ensuing twelve months, Bradley continued to sexually assault dozens more of his patients -- 47 of them, the indictment says. Now the finger-pointing has gone beyond the shortsightedness of an unnamed judge. Delaware press and residents want to know why the prosecutor's office didn't persist in getting into that examining room to do their own examination. An excellent article by the Wilmington (Delaware) News-Journal's Cris Barrish, who's been covering the case, raises a lot more questions.

Why didn't police go to another judge? Or ask the judge to do something else -- sign an arrest warrant, for example, which would have allowed the cops to get in there and possibly catch Bradley incriminating himself? Or ask for federal help? Or report Bradley to the state medical board for misconduct?

Prosecutors have responded that they feared notifying the medical board would have tipped off Bradley, since he'd have been informed of their action. But it might have stopped him from molesting all those little girls in 2009 (only one of his victims so far was male). We know that girls ran from him screaming and crying, that he yelled and raged at them, demanding they obey. We know that his face at such times was terrifying -- "violently enraged," according to the arrest affidavit. And we know that at least five of his victims appeared to lose consciousness or stop breathing during the attacks.

We know all this because now, 47 victims later, there's more than probable cause. There's video. When Bradley was finally arrested, video files seized from his computer replay all the scenes described in the affidavit, and more. When the Feds were finally called in, it was to help access the files.

The video came from a camera Bradley himself set up, probably to enjoy his conquests over and over again, after the fact. But here's the really stunning part: police knew that Bradley had installed a camera in his office as early as December 2008, around the time they were asking for the search warrant, and that the doctor could view the video remotely from his home.

And yet they didn't push the case further until new victims came forward in the months ahead.

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. And it didn't help that the police investigator in the case retired in early 2009, when it was taken over by a new detective. But in this case, foresight and good old common sense should have provided a pretty clear picture.

Wednesday, the judge upped Bradley's bail from $2.9 million to $4.9 million -- cash. That's $10,000 for each count. A case review is now scheduled for May 19th, but Bradley's public defender said he doubts it will take place, since it would be based on the prosecutor preparing to offer a plea deal. That's not going to happen. Bradley's lawyer is talking insanity plea.

One of the mothers who cried at Wednesday's hearing said,"I just want to see him rot in hell."

Tweet

Season of Mystery

By Lisa R. Cohen


In recognition of the holiday season, the following was adapted from AFTER ETAN: The Missing Child Case That Held America Captive (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette May 09). This section takes place three and a half years after six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared from the streets of New York City's SoHo area, as he walked two blocks to the school bus stop on his own for the very first time.

In this section, the case, which had slowed to a dead halt after several years, suddenly lurched forward when the holiday season brought fresh, if confusing, clues to the forefront. Clues which led investigators in circles before inadvertently moving the case further along:

On the last day of school before Christmas vacation of 1982, Etan Patz's mother Julie did the usual volunteer stint at her younger son Ari's school in the morning, then hurried home to prepare for the holidays before picking up Ari at his bus stop in the afternoon. After a weekend of packing, gathering presents and doling out plant watering duties to the neighbors, the Patzes would make their annual holiday trek to Massachusetts, for a long-awaited week with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

Twice a year, as the New York City skyline receded and they were finally on their way "home" – which is what Julie still called it – she could always feel the tension leave her body. The house Julie had grown up in, then escaped from, was now a refuge; there the Patzes would be surrounded by family. But by mid-afternoon Saturday, in a perverse twist of fate, news from Massachusetts would delay the family from traveling there. A Missing Persons detective was once again sitting in their front room with yet another photo to show them.

The cops typically didn’t tell them where these photos came from. If Stan and Julie made a positive ID, there’d be plenty of time to fill in the details; if not, why bother. But the detectives had received a report that two weeks earlier Massachusetts police had raided a summer cottage in the beach town of Wareham. Three missing area teenagers, one from the Bronx and two from New Jersey, had been found there amidst a cache of pornographic photographs, some depicting children in sex acts with adult men.

Among the photos was a headshot of a handsome blond boy, his arm stretched to the side, elbow bent, his hand propping up his head. He was wearing clothes and alone in the picture. He stared straight into the camera and wore a look that might be interpreted as sophisticated coy, with an ambiguous Mona Lisa curve to his lips. He had straight bangs that matched the ones in several pictures Stan had taken of Etan, and he bore a striking resemblance to the missing child.

Julie looked at the photo closely, and thought how hard it would be to recognize their son from a two-dimensional piece of paper with no life and no animation and to make a judgment without all the things you use to really know people. Etan was full of life and animation. This couldn’t be Etan, they said, this boy had a cleft chin and Etan didn’t. Julie and Stan looked at each other. Or did he? Julie was suddenly panic-stricken. What if they said no to a picture of their own son?

As the detectives walked them through the boy’s face, feature by feature, Stan and Julie became convinced this wasn’t Etan. Yes, agreed the Patzes, some features were similar but some were not. Besides, Stan had his own extra assurances. The style of the photography dated it at least back to the ‘70’s. And then there was the paper. They were looking at an original 8”x10” photo and the paper stock and borders just weren’t contemporary. The detectives were less sure. The photo would be sent to an FBI lab in D.C. where analysts would compare it to Stan’s pictures of Etan, examining facial shape and bone structure. Sorry to bother you folks, the detectives said, as they always did. We’ll let you know if anything further comes of it. The Patzes knew it wouldn’t.

But the next day, a reporter from the Boston Herald American called to ask about the picture, which she explained had been found in a Wareham, Massachusetts, police bust of a group who advocated for “consensual love” between adult males and boys and called themselves the North American Man-Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA.The acronym would soon enter the lexicon, but this incident was the first most people - certainly Stan and Julie - had ever heard of it.

They were astounded an association existed that actually sought to legitimize child molestation. Stan considered himself as tolerant as the next New York liberal, but the idea made his skin crawl. Thank God the boy in the picture wasn’t Etan, so the thought of their son being in NAMBLA’s clutches wasn’t something they dwelled on.

The phone started to ring sometime after dawn on Monday, just after the Boston Herald American ran the photo beside a headline nearly filling its front page, “Did Sex Club Trap this Boy?” At 6:45 a.m. New York Post reporters were ringing the Patzes’ front buzzer, but the family had rules – no advance request, no interview.

Ten pages of press calls were recorded in the Patz logbook that day, as the family pushed back their vacation plans, waiting to hear from the cops if anything had come of the photo. Camera crews and reporters milled around in the street below, in front of the door that still bore the Etan’s missing poster, one of the few left hanging in the neighborhood. It was a full-on siege, for a story that until the NAMBLA connection hadn’t warranted more than a passing mention in months.

Late in the day, Stan finally ducked out the stairwell entrance to the building, eluding the crowd. As he reached the end of the block and slipped around the corner onto Greene Street, he heard the sound of high heels pounding the cement sidewalk behind him and realized he’d been spotted. He registered the strange sensation of being chased – by a woman no less.

He turned around finally and recognized her as an on-air personality at one of the local TV stations. As she drew nearer, he realized she was older than she looked on television, where the strong lights and heavy powder erased the fine lines he could see now starkly etched around her eyes and forehead.

He was embarrassed – to be sneaking out of his own home, and to be evading her, someone he’d almost certainly invited into his living room on an earlier occasion, eager then to get exposure for Etan. He was embarrassed for her, too. She was the one driven to loitering on street corners in the winter chill, chasing people up the street. He dispatched her quickly with a few succinct quotes – no there’s really nothing new here today – and went on his way. The next day, having heard nothing further from the cops, he and Julie set their answering machine, and fled for safe haven in Massachusetts.

As the Patz family were driving their rental car up the northern coastal route to the Boston area the next day, a 69-year-old retired cabbie named Chester Jones walked into the newsroom of the Daily News and told a reporter that the old photo of Etan they’d run in their paper next to the NAMBLA story had prompted him to come forward. He may have been, he said, one of the last people to see Etan Patz.

“I believe that I’m the cabdriver who picked up that boy in SoHo the morning he disappeared,” said Jones, pulling on a cigarette. "I have very little doubt in my mind that he was the boy I picked up.”

Daily News police reporter Jerry Schmetterer had covered the Patz case since the beginning, and he was skeptical to hear this lead coming in three years late, but he checked out the story through his sources. He was surprised to learn that there had been a very early report of a sighting that day, one of the hundreds that could never be substantiated, of a little boy and man getting into a cab. Why had Jones waited so long? He'd doubted his own memory, he said, and worried about getting involved. And he had didn’t think anyone would take him seriously anyway.

“Who’s going to believe an old black man like me?” he asked Schmetterer.

According to Jones, the two got into his cab and he overheard the man say something like, “I see you every morning from across the street. It’s a shame your mother lets you stand here on the street corner all alone.” The boy said, “My mother told me not to talk to strangers.”

They rode a few blocks north on West Broadway, and at Houston Street, Jones said, when the boy suddenly exclaimed, “This isn’t the way to go to school.” The man and the boy then got out of the car without paying and walked away.

Police questioned the cabbie for several hours. At the time they judged him a “credible witness,” although the conversation Jones had related between the man and boy didn’t match up with Etan's taking his first trip alone to the bus. This news, combined with the NAMBLA bombshell, brought Missing Person Case #8367 roaring back to life. The Missing Persons Unit recast the Patz task force, bringing in homicide detectives to start fresh, and adding back old hands. NYPD Detective Bill Butler was two days into a 16-day Christmas break when he got a call.

“Would you mind putting off your vacation to return to Missing Persons as part of the rejuvenated MPU task force?” the head of the force asked him.

“Of course not,” he said. Suddenly the new group was eight strong, up from one detective just a month before.

The Patzes passed a relatively oblivious holiday week in Massachusetts, hanging close to the house and watching the two kids reconnect with their cousins. Uncle George, the former Marine and now a Sudbury fireman, took Shira and Ari for a tour of the station, and they were delighted to sit up in the open cab of the lemon yellow firetruck and ring the bell. Julie might have converted to Judaism, but the Massachusetts family celebrated Christmas with all the trimmings. Her kids woke expectantly on Christmas morning to tear through stockings and gift-wrapped presents, welcoming neighboring cousins throughout the day, as each arrived with a new round of presents.

The family saw the newspaper accounts of Chester Jones’ story while still in Sudbury, and talked briefly to the police about it over the phone, but otherwise they worked hard to maintain a wait-and-see attitude so as not to spoil the holiday. But the Patzes arrived back in New York to a filled answering machine of media calls. Finally, an awkward press conference at One Police Plaza was convened, where Stan informed a room full of reporters that there was nothing to report.

There really was nothing to report. Ultimately, police concluded Chester Jones was one more dead end. After repeated sessions, they had begun to feel his story was changing -- including his description of the man -- enough to undermine his credibility. Jones couldn’t even give enough details about the man’s features to create a police sketch, and in one subsequent interview he told police the boy had actually given his name as Etan. Authorities considered hypnotizing Jones but anything he said under hypnosis might jeopardize his testimony in court.

The NAMBLA picture was discounted by police as well, but not before two outraged NAMBLA representatives held a press conference at a midtown Holiday Inn to indignantly assert that the police were on a witch hunt. They held up a 1968 "Boyhood Calendar" issued four years before Etan's birth, with the same photo of the boy who looked like Etan -- posing as January's model.

But both leads, fruitless as they were, served a critical purpose. As the New Year began, two homicide detectives on loan to the newly energized task force to provide fresh eyes sat in the Patz apartment one afternoon for a whole new round of debriefs. At their behest, Julie had compiled a fresh list of friends or colleagues for them to re-interview, although she was surprised to learn later some had never been questioned to begin with.

She particularly stressed the connection between Sandy Harmon* and Jose Ramos that had emerged the previous spring after an episode in a Bronx drainpipe. Ramos, an itinerant junk salesman, had been arrested living in the drainpipe after two young boys accused him of trying to entice them inside. Police had questioned the man after photos of blond boys were found among his belongings, and Ramos himself had volunteered that he'd dated a woman who'd taken care of Etan.

Yes, Julie said now, this woman had never been his babysitter, per se, but Julie explained the bus strike and Sandy’s temporary part-time hours walking Etan and his two friends home from school. That was the time frame directly preceding Etan’s disappearance, Julie pointed out, and if this woman was connected to Ramos as well as to Etan, then she was a direct link.

The cops were now eager to learn Ramos’s whereabouts and question him again. They looked for him in Brooklyn, at the address he’d given authorities back in March. They talked to acquaintances of Ramos in lower Manhattan who reported last seeing him at a New Year’s Eve party a few days earlier, looking fit, well-dressed and clean-shaven.

On January 12, 1983, Missing Persons detectives brought Sandy Harmon to police headquarters to ask about her relationship with both the Patzes and Jose Ramos. She later gave an angry account of this interrogation to authorities and described how police put her and her then-eight-year-old son Brendan into separate rooms and grilled them both for hours.

At one point, Sandy said, they led Brendan in and informed Sandy her son had just revealed years of sodomy at the hands of Jose Ramos. Sandy told the cops she was shocked to hear this, but they didn’t believe her. According to Sandy’s later account they then threatened to have her son taken from her. Seven hours after they’d brought her in, they told her they needed her back the next day, and she and Brendan were driven home to her East Village apartment at 2:30 a.m.

After less than five hours of sleep, Sandy was back at One Police Plaza, where she was questioned again. Still dissatisfied with her answers, police polygraphed her. Although she'd agreed to the test, she showed “signs of deception” as she denied any knowledge of Etan’s disappearance.

Polygraphs are not lie detectors, and Stan Patz hadn’t done so well on his either, but based on Sandy’s results, police certainly wanted to pursue her role in the case, as well as that of her ex-boyfriend Jose Ramos. She claimed to no longer see or know where Ramos was, although she did disclose they’d been together for a last sexual encounter less than two months earlier, over Thanksgiving. Again, police ended this round of questions by telling Sandy they had more to ask, but by this point, she’d had enough.

“I have a lawyer now,” she said when they came to get her the following day. “Any more questions – you go through him.” Sandy Harmon had little more to say about the case after that, but investigators couldn’t help seeing her as a nexus point leading to tantalizing clues beyond their reach. At the very least, authorities thought, she knew more than she was saying.


*Sandy Harmon's name has been changed, because her son turned out to be one of Ramos's victims.

Tweet

A Jew in St. Lou

by Lisa R. Cohen

I write this on a flight to St. Louis, where I'll be speaking today at their annual Jewish Book Festival. OK, my last name is Cohen, and that automatically confers Jewish bona fides - unless you're a British child these days trying to get into an elite private school and your mother is a convert! But other than my roots, what does AFTER ETAN, the 30-year-long (and counting) story of the most famous missing child since the Lindbergh baby, have to do with Judaism?

Turns out, a lot. Etan Patz was Jewish. His parents, Stan and convert Julie (Etan and his siblings wouldn't have been accepted to that British school), liked Israeli names. Etan's sister is Shira; his brother is Ari. Etan's uncle was a renowned rabbi who headed up a large suburban N.J. congregation. Early in the case, authorities learned Rabbi Patz took dozens of children on an annual summer trip to an Israeli kibbutz. The rumors ran wild - a family rift over religious differences? Maybe Uncle Norman had spirited Etan to Israel to bring him up more devoutly?

It was a ridiculous notion, not the least because Uncle Norman was a reform rabbi. But the Israel angle resurfaced repeatedly, after a mysterious photograph of Etan, taken by Stan Patz himself, surfaced in an Israeli magazine a few years after the boy disappeared. An even more bizarre twist? The picture's caption read "Etan Ben Haim" (Etan, Son of Life). No one could ever figure out how or why that photo appeared.

Ten years in, Federal Prosecutor Stuart GraBois, who at the time was just taking over this now-cold case, traveled to Israel with an FBI agent (photo at left) in an attempt to resolve the connection. The two men crisscrossed the country to visit Ben Haim families, knocking on doors and demanding birth certificates for any boy named Etan. All to no avail, and the mystery endures.

Then there was GraBois himself, a man who has relentlessly pursued the Patz case to this day. Despite the French-sounding name, Stuart GraBois was a Bensonhurst boy who celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in Brooklyn, where he'd grown up in a tight-knit Jewish home. There were French roots, to be sure. Before leaving Paris for New York in 1906, GraBois's grandfather had seen first-hand the damage of France's infamous "Affaire Dreyfus," and would often talk to his grandson with deep anger and sadness about the decade-long travesty. The elder GraBois vividly recalled the injustice done to Jewish artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus (photo at right). Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason and imprisoned for four years on the notorious Devil's Island, a French prison off the coast of South America, before his name was finally cleared. His case was immortalized by author Emile Zola's "J'Accuse!"

"That's why we came to America," Benjamin GraBois would tell his grandson. "Because justice is possible. Here you have a chance to go to school to make sure people get treated fairly." As an Assistant U.S. Attorney, GraBois took his grandfather's words seriously.

Over the last several years of this case, Stan Patz and now-former prosecutor Stuart GraBois joined forces against one man, serial pedophile Jose Antonio Ramos (photo below right). And here's where the Jewish ties start to strain credulity. But then, the best non-fiction stories are the ones that read like fiction. Two other unlikely allies also lent their time and effort to make the case against Ramos. These two informants separately approached GraBois, each unaware the other was doing so, because they both knew Ramos from behind bars. Both offered to help extract his confession.

In a clandestine undercover operation, GraBois inserted first one of the men, and then the other, into Ramos’s cell. One played an elaborate con. He passed himself off as both a lawyer and an amateur shrink. He escaped with incriminating evidence against Ramos but almost got himself killed in his high-stakes game. The other was more straightforward, but he, too, feared for his life. By the time he left the shared cell, he was convinced Ramos was a madman.

Their original link to Ramos? Both of them were Jewish, and both had met Ramos at prison religious services or as part of Jewish study behind bars! In fact, one of them later revealed to me that he’d risked his safety to go after Ramos because it made him crazy watching Ramos pretend to be a Jew.

Yes, that’s right, Jose Antonio Ramos underwent a jailhouse conversion. Even though he had Christian pen pals to whom he was still quoting New Testament scripture, Ramos also began wearing a yarmulke and dropping Yiddish phrases. He refused to cut his hair for religious reasons, and demanded the same kosher dietary considerations etc., as the few other Jewish inmates at the prison. He claimed to have discovered – late in life - his own grandfather’s roots as a Spanish Jew.

All of these connections, some more absurd than others, led me to the Jewish Book Festival, here in St. Louis, where I've now landed. But perhaps most resonant for me are the themes, prominent in Jewish history and culture, that this book echoes so fervently: survival under the worst of conditions; a search for justice no matter how long it takes; and the edict former Federal Prosecutor Stuart GraBois continues to live by – Never, ever, ever, ever give up.

Tweet

Left Behind

by Lisa R. Cohen

I've been thinking a lot about the Jaycee Dugard story, of course, because of the similarities to the Etan Patz case. Blond, beautiful Jaycee was abducted off her bicycle 18 years ago while on her way to school. Blond, beautiful, six-year-old Etan was abducted 30 years ago, walking the two short blocks to the school bus stop, on his own for the first time. Jaycee's stepdad was considered a suspect for years, as was Stan Patz, Etan's dad.

But then there are those important differences in the two cases: unlike Stan and Julie Patz, Jaycee's folks didn't sustain their marriage through such tragedy; and unlike Jaycee -- Etan never came home.

There's been so much talk about Jaycee's two daughters and how they will adjust to their shattering, new reality. But I've also been wondering about how this bombshell is affecting Jaycee's other family - her mother and stepfather, and her younger sister Shana who was just a baby when Jaycee disappeared.

Over the years, the Patzes had a lot of contact with other families of missing children. So much about the tragedy of an abducted or missing child is specific to that one circumstance and simply can't be understood except by another family in the same straits. It's like a terrible, exclusive club no one wants to be a member of.

In 1984, five years after Etan disappeared, Julie took her younger son, then 7-year-old Ari, on a very unique retreat organized by psychotherapist Gary Hewitt. Amid the growing voices clamoring for much needed new legislation on the issue, Hewitt's Center for Missing Children specialized in a narrow spot on the missing child spectrum, one that received little attention but demonstrated a huge need -- the families, and especially the children, left behind. Hewitt treated such families, as well as the rare young victims who returned, carrying the emotional baggage of their captivity.

Julie hoped the retreat would be helpful for Ari. He had come to her on his seventh birthday to express relief that he'd made it through the scary age of six, but a year later he was still suffering the effects of his brother's loss. He'd recently spent hours up in the night weeping after a particularly bad nightmare. Now he would celebrate his eighth birthday at a lakefront resort in upstate New York, in the company of trained therapists and siblings of other missing children.

On the first night, some 60 strangers sang to Ari, then shared his birthday cake after a buffet dinner at Keuka College, 212 gloriously green acres in the Finger Lake region. Gary Hewitt presented the boy with a newly minted coin set for his collection and hoped the familiar birthday ritual would help break the ice at this somber, awkward gathering of 14 families.

But it would take more than cake and party balloons to chip away at their sorrow. These were mothers and fathers who'd molded themselves rigidly into an unnatural public persona, or had kept an isolated vigil by the phone in hopes of a call. Many had completely lost sight of relating to other people. Looking around, Julie felt the oppressive weight of the collective tragedy. She doubted whether some of these people had smiled or laughed once since their child had disappeared.

The next day, at the first working sessions, the adults were split off from the children, as everyone divided their time between group therapy and play. Parents talked to parents, kids to kids. Ari sat in a classroom with other children ranging from seven to 17, who were encouraged to tell their stories. Gradually, the youngsters opened up, but it wasn't until the evening when the families came together again, that the parents had their own protective ice broken...by their children.

One after another, with safety in numbers, the youngest voices said what they'd been holding inside. Our brother or sister may be gone, but we're still here. We need to get out of the house, move forward, take a vacation, be normal. Every aspect of life had been on hold, and these children were suffering for that too, not just for the loss of their loved one. As parents listened, and the tears flowed, the adults acknowledged what their children were saying.

Talking about such things for the first time had a profound effect, but it wasn't the only healing tool. In between the talking and listening was what Julie jokingly called the "forced" recreation. These were people who had lost the ability to relax and to feel unencumbered by their grief, or by the appearance they needed to maintain, so that neighbors wouldn't find it unseemly, even suspicious to see the laughing. At Keuka, they were cajoled into waterskiing, swimming and canoeing. There was t'ai chi in the mornings for the most sedentary of the adults and counselors who doubled as clowns armed with balloon animals for the youngest of the kids. And there were goofy parlor games, designed to coax laughter from even the most disconsolate.

It was a rare adventure for all the children and an even rarer break for the parents. For Julie, the entire Keuka retreat was a singular experience, one she would never forget. For the first time in five years she was spending time with other parents - besides her husband Stan - who had shared the same horror she had, and they were free of media, law-enforcement and other "non" victims. She didn't have to worry what anyone thought of her when she cried over an irrational fear, or more importantly, laughed at a joke. For the first time in a long time, she was with a group of peers, so she could feel - almost - normal.

Both she and Ari also spent time with 18-year-old Steven Stayner and his parents. Steven had left his Northern California home in 1972 a freckle faced seven year old, and reappeared eight years later almost a full grown man. Once home, Stayner had struggled to adapt to a life that on the one hand was free of the abuse he'd suffered in his captor's clutches, but on the other hand was bounded by the parental limits he'd shed during his time away. But Julie and Ari saw a polite, pleasant young man, and a functioning reunited family, and it was evidence that it could be done.

Let's hope that in the future, Jaycee's family will be able to share such experiences with other families too. They could use time away from the rest of the world in the company of others who've been through something similar, even though very few ever have. Again, being able to feel that shared experience will give them one of the most precious healing tools there is at such a challenging time - a sense of normalcy.

Tweet