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The man found guilty of the 1979 murder of Etan Patz will not be getting a new trial.
In a 6-3 decision June 22, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Pedro Hernandez‘s 2017 conviction for kidnapping and killing Etan, who was 6 years old when he vanished during a two-block walk from his family’s home in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood to a school bus stop.
Etan’s “horrific murder,” which went unsolved for decades, “changed a generation of New Yorkers,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement responding to the high court’s decision. “This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family and will continue to stand by this important conviction.”
Defense attorney Harvey Fishbein said that their team was “terribly disappointed” that Hernandez—who’s serving a 25 years-to-life prison sentence—would not be retried.
“We firmly believe,” he told E! News, “that an innocent man is in jail for a crime that he did not commit.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled last July that Hernandez, now 65, was entitled to a new trial and ordered that he be retried or released from his sentence.
If his case had gone in front of a jury again, it would have been for the third time. His first trial, in 2015, ended in a mistrial.
Here is what to know about Etan’s disappearance and the murder case that gripped a nation:
REUTERS/Keith Bedford
What happened to Etan Patz?
On May 25, 1979, Julie Patz let her 6-year-old son Etan make the two-block walk from their home on Prince Street to a school bus stop, located at the corner of Prince and West Broadway, on his own for the first time.
The mother of three testified when Hernandez was retried for murder in 2016, according to the New York Times, that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the decision, but that Etan insisted, “‘It’s fine, Mom,'” and “‘I can do it.'”
Julie told the court during Hernandez’s 2015 trial that she gave Etan a dollar to buy a soda on his way. He was “totally outgoing and trusting of everyone,” she testified, per the Times. “Totally nonjudgmental about people. Everyone who he had met once was his friend and was a nice person.”
She testified that, when Etan didn’t come home that afternoon, she called the mother of one of his close friends and found out that her son never made it to school, nor was he on the bus that morning.
Police searched for weeks for the child, who set off for school wearing jeans, a blue corduroy jacket and a black “Future Flight Captain” pilot cap, a handful of toy cars stuffed into the tote bag he was carrying.
But weeks turned into months, and then years went by. A photograph of Etan taken by his father, Stan Patz, was one of the first to be featured in a missing child search publicized on the side of a milk carton.
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25 as National Missing Children’s Day.
Etan, whose body has never been found, was declared legally dead in 2001.
Who is Pedro Hernandez?
Hernandez was 18 and working at a bodega near the Patz family’s apartment when Etan disappeared.
He wasn’t identified as a suspect until May 2012, according to the Times, when he was arrested.
EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GettyImages
After authorities received a tip from a relative that Hernandez, then 51, had been making claims about killing a child in the late 1970s, he was questioned about Etan’s disappearance at a local prosecutor’s office near his home in Camden, N.J.
Hernandez at first denied having anything to do with it, Detective David Ramirez testified during a 2014 hearing regarding the admissability of the accused’s various statements. But after more than six hours of questioning, Ramirez said, Hernandez told them, ‘I’m sorry, it shouldn’t have happened. I did it.'” Then, Ramirez said, authorities read Hernandez his rights and started filming their interview.
Hernandez then said on camera, as seen in interview clips later played during his trials, per the Times, that he lured Etan into the basement of the bodega with the promise of giving him a soda and strangled him.
EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GettyImages
What happened when Pedro Hernandez was charged with the murder of Etan Patz?
In December 2012, Hernandez pleaded not guilty to murder and kidnapping charges, with his attorney maintaining that his client gave a false confession after being interrogated for hours. The defense moved to have the confessions surpressed, but they were allowed into evidence.
Fishbein argued that Hernandez was of limited intelligence, had trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and that he didn’t understand his rights while talking to police.
Hernandez’s first trial lasted four months and ended in a mistrial after, following 18 days of deliberations, one juror would not vote to convict.
Then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. opted to retry Hernandez and, in February 2017, the defendant was found guilty of kidnapping and murder.
“I’m relieved, and I’m relieved because I think it’s the right result,” Vance told the New York Times after the verdict. “I think it can bring all of us together in a moment of closure and healing.”
Were there any other suspects in the disappearance of Etan Patz?
Etan’s parents sued convicted sex offender Jose A. Ramos for wrongful death after he was named as a suspect in their son’s disappearance in the 1980s, jailhouse informants having told authorities that Ramos made incriminating statements about Etan’s disappearance.
Ramos, who denied killing Etan and was never charged in connection with the case, was deemed liable by default judgment in the Patzes’ civil lawsuit, per the Times, in 2004.
Julie and Stan never received any money from Ramos—who spent 20 years in prison on unrelated molestation charges—and withdrew the lawsuit when Hernandez first went on trial.
Ramos was released from prison in 2012 and died in March at the age of 82.
REUTERS/Louis Lanzano/Pool
Where is Pedro Hernandez now?
Hernandez was sentenced in 2017 to 25 years to life in prison and has been serving his time at Elmira Correctional Facility in New York. He’ll first be eligible for parole in 2037, according to state inmate records.
In 2025, a federal appeals court determined that the 2017 trial judge erred in giving the jury a one-word answer—”no”—when they asked during deliberations whether they should disregard one of Hernandez’s later confessions if they found his first one to be involuntary.
The three-judge panel ruled that the judge violated federal law by not further explaining precedent when it came to considering multiple confessions and ordered Hernandez either be released or retried.
The U.S. Supreme Court reinstated Hernandez’s conviction on June 22, prosecutors having argued that the jury’s verdict should stand as there was no “error in the decades-long investigation, in the admission of Hernandez’s confessions or in the evidence presented at trial.”
BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images
Where is Etan Patz’s family now?
In the 1980s, Etan’s mother Julie advocated to get missing-child reports added to the FBI’s national crime database. Since then, however, aside from testifying at Hernandez’s trials, she remained largely private while husband Stan was the more public face of their decades-long quest to find out what happened to their son.
The couple have two other children, daughter Shira and son Ari, and in 2019 they sold their Prince Street loft and moved to Hawaii, to be closer to Ari’s family.
Neighbor Susan Meisel told the New York Post at the time, “They are moving on to a beautiful place to share whatever time they have left with their child and their grandchildren.”
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