Judge declines to dismiss case in 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz, setting up 3rd trial

NEW YORK (AP) — The murder case surrounding the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz is on track for a third trial, after a judge declined Friday to dismiss charges against the onetime New York shop clerk charged with abducting and killing the boy on his way to school.

The man, Pedro Hernandez, 65, has been behind bars since his 2012 arrest. He is due back in court in June for a status update. A trial date has not yet been set.

Etan’s disappearance — on a two-block walk to his school bus stop on the first day his mom let him go unaccompanied — became one of the United States’ most well known missing child cases. He was among the first vanished kids to be pictured on milk cartons, and the May 25 anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children’s Day. His parents’ advocacy helped enhance law enforcement’s response to such cases.

A trial date has not yet been set in the wake of New York Judge Michele Rodney’s ruling. Hernandez will be in court in June for a status update.

Hernandez, now 65, was a 19-year-old corner store clerk in Etan’s neighborhood, and he was among many locals police met and interviewed in the immediate aftermath of the boy’s disappearance. But they didn’t suspect him then.

More than three decades of frustrating, inconclusive investigation followed. For years, authorities eyed another man who was never charged. Then, in 2012, investigators got a tip that Hernandez had told various people in his life years ago that he’d killed a child or young man in New York.

Hernandez then told police — after seven hours of questioning and before being told he had a right to remain silent — that he had strangled Etan in the shop basement after enticing him there with the offer of a soda. Hernandez later was read his rights and recapped his statement on video, telling authorities: “Something just took over me.”

Defense lawyers said all of Hernandez’ admissions amounted to the imaginings of a mentally ill and intellectually limited man, haunted and confused by a highly publicized tragedy that had happened near his workplace.

“The delusion, now squarely implanted with the image of Etan Patz, is, to him, an event as seemingly real as any of our most vivid memories,” defense lawyers Harvey Fishbein and Alice Fontier wrote in court papers recently.

His 2015 trial ended in a jury deadlock, a 2017 retrial yielded a conviction, and then a federal appeals court overturned the verdict. The court said the 2017 trial judge mishandled a jury question about determining the validity of Hernandez’ confessions.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office pledged to retry the case but also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to restore Hernandez’ conviction. The high court isn’t obliged to hear the case and hasn’t yet said whether it will.

Meanwhile, Hernandez’ lawyers asked Rodney to toss out the charges. The defense contended that prosecutors waited too long to charge Hernandez and that he can’t get a fair trial now that some witnesses have died, others’ memories have faded and prospective jurors have been steeped in decades of publicity about the case, plus coverage of the two prior trials.

Prosecutors called the arguments baseless. Once police got “a direct, reliable tip,” they arrested Hernandez two weeks later, and witnesses’ patchy memories are “simply the nature of a criminal trial,” Assistant District Attorney Sarah Marquez wrote in court papers.