Many sexual offenders lie about their crimes…. Hopefully as you read this workbook you will understand that you must accept responsibility for your crime, recognize that you have a problem and want help in order to change.
—section underlined in pencil in Who Am I and Why Am I in Treatment? sex offender workbook Fischer “helped” Jose Ramos complete while in his cell, April 1991
You have to get over here,” the disembodied voice echoed into Jeremy Fischer’s cell. “C’mon, we can live together. I need to be near another Jew.”
For what felt like the twentieth time that week, Fischer found himself crouched in front of the toilet, as though he were paying the consequences for an overindulgent night out. But here in segregation at Otisville, drunken binges that ended by praying to the porcelain god weren’t even an option. Instead, prison toilets were useful for other things. You could wash clothes, tie dental floss to a makeshift weapon and temporarily flush it for later retrieval, even drink from it in a desperate moment. And sometimes, as in this case, if the acoustics were right your voice would carry the length of the sewage pipes and end up in the cell of the inmate downstairs.
Like a ventriloquist with his grotesque dummy, Jose Ramos had been speaking to Fischer through the commode for the last several days, and now he was urging Fischer to move in with him. Jon Morgan had just been sprung from segregation, leaving Ramos alone and unwanted by any other inmate. A pedophile is never “A list,” and Ramos was especially unpopular. Just as it had in Morgan’s case, Ramos’s request neatly sidestepped the challenge of inserting Fischer into the cell without arousing suspicion.
Jeremy Fischer and Jon Morgan were two very different animals. Both were educated, white-collar criminals, both were Jewish; but while Morgan was brusquely artless, Fischer was a slick talker, a real craftsman. As an informant, this had both its advantages and its drawbacks. On the one hand, it made Fischer inherently less believable to authorities, so both GraBois and Galligan had set the bar higher for him to prove his worth, carefully looking for corroboration of anything he said. On the other hand, he more naturally suited the task. Like the best three-card monte dealers, Fischer possessed an agile mind, a golden tongue, and a performer’s instincts, all of which served him well at Otisville in April 1991.
After he accepted Ramos’s invitation, the cell they shared was Fischer’s stage. Like Jon Morgan, Fischer kept copious notes while Ramos slept, grateful for the loud snores drifting up from the bottom bunk. What he found irritating in other cellmates worked here as an alarm system. After he finished each page, he would tuck it into the waistband of his pants. It grew increasingly uncomfortable to move around with as many as ten or fifteen pages pressed against his stomach, but the thought of Ramos discovering his true intent was infinitely more painful.
Unlike Morgan, Jeremy Fischer was not inured to the general discomfort of segregation. The cell was dank and dark, and he shrank at the sound of rats and bugs scurrying in the night. In such close quarters, the rank odor of two bodies, each limited to three showers a week, was not quite overpowering, but it was certainly unpleasant. Mondays were the worst, especially if either of them exercised in the yard; there were no shower privileges on the weekend. Fischer tried to keep sight of his goal, and the prize it would earn him—a federal prosecutor in his corner and the chance to beat a parole violation. GraBois had made no promises, but Fischer was optimistic.
From the beginning he approached the mission differently, more strategically than Jon Morgan. He went about his task systematically, following a predetermined plan. Part of the time he was Jeremy Fischer, Esquire, coaching Ramos on legal strategy. When they’d first met, Fischer had told Ramos that he was in fact a lawyer, thinking that Ramos would be more open if he viewed their conversations as free counsel.
“I’ll get my own lawyer involved too, and I have contacts with Kunstler and Kuby,” Fischer told him, invoking the name of famed New York radical and underdog defender William Kunstler and his partner Ron Kuby. “This is a case they’d definitely want. It’s a high-profile, overzealous prosecution. It reeks of misuse of power.
“We’ll start a defense fund for you. I’ll contribute, and I know others who would too. Don’t worry, I’m going to help you. We just have to figure it all out.”
This seemed to strike the right note with Ramos. He was eager both to appeal his Pennsylvania sentence and to elude the Feds on the Patz case. He’d already filed the next round of appeal papers himself for the Warren case, and as for the Patz case, Fischer listened to him muse aloud endlessly about how to recant his near confession to GraBois without incurring perjury charges. The thousand and one statute GraBois had read to Ramos repeatedly that day in his office must have made a lasting impression. Sometimes it seemed to Fischer that Ramos hadn’t forgotten anything GraBois had said or done to him. Clearly, the point of intersection between both of Ramos’s legal cases was the all-consuming animus he felt for his tormentor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart GraBois.
Fischer later told GraBois that Ramos’s desire to recant the 90 percent confession was as much about derailing GraBois’s case as it was for the inmate’s obvious legal benefit. “His obsession for you is total,” Fischer marveled.
Fischer’s legal conversations with Ramos would invariably disintegrate into revenge fantasies. “The next time GraBois hauls me down to his office, I’m gonna be ready for him,” Ramos would tell Fischer. Now he was actively looking forward to seeing the prosecutor. He would talk relentlessly, gruesomely—of hitting GraBois over the head with a hammer; of biting off his face; of ripping out his liver. Ramos would lie in the dark after lights-out, filling the space between his bottom bunk and Fischer’s mattress with invective. His favorite image was delivering the “Ramos Award,” conferred with a hard-driving baseball bat.
“Let’s give him the ‘Ramos Award,’ ” he’d say of GraBois, and anyone else on his lengthy shit list. With no actual bat in sight, his ravings would have been comical, except Fischer had good reason to think he was locked in with a serial child molester who had raped and murdered a helpless boy. He had no choice but to take Ramos’s threats seriously… and then had no choice but to ignore them.
When he wasn’t playing jailhouse lawyer, Fischer’s parallel role was as therapist/confessor. Back at the state facility in Rockview, Ramos had repeatedly failed his applications for parole. The commonwealth of Pennsylvania was not going to approve a known sex offender who refused treatment. Now facing a twenty-year maximum sentence, Ramos had finally relented, so when he’d arrived at Otisville he’d brought with him course material for the treatment program. Who Am I and Why Am I in Treatment? asked the title of his workbook. Fischer was hoping that by helping Ramos answer that question, he would ultimately answer another one: “Did you molest and kill Etan Patz?”
With each passing day, as Ramos gradually relaxed his guard, Fischer offered a sympathetic ear. He cajoled and flattered, he soothed and empathized. If it helped Ramos to think that Fischer too felt these same shameful feelings, then the good doctor obliged.
“You know, in ancient Greece,” Fischer counseled, “it was the most normal thing in the world. Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes—they all had boy lovers.” Ramos liked to hear that he was in good company. Fischer also offered to put him in touch with a NAMBLA chapter he pretended to know about. Anything to help lower Ramos’s guard.
During these informal counseling sessions, the two pored over the workbook. Disclosure, the book emphasized, was a critical first step.
“In your notebook,” read chapter 6’s assignment, “make a list of all of the different sexual offenses you have committed…. Write down how many times you did each type of offense and how old you were at that time…. Share this assignment with your friend, group, or therapist.”
“Okay, Jose, tell me what happened,” Fischer would say. “Tell me why you did this. Tell me what you were feeling when you were with this child.” The two inmates set aside a prescribed time period each day—a mock therapy session—to work on the notebook. Ramos didn’t speak about Etan Patz, but he quickly began to reveal other incidents, other horrors. Fischer tried to ferret out names, identifying details, but Ramos didn’t always know himself.
“Where did this happen? What did he look like?” Fischer would pump Ramos for whatever he could get, then scribble it down afterwards, until the pencil stub would lose its point and he’d have to petition a guard to sharpen it. He’d relay all this information to GraBois and Galligan later. There was Joey Taylor, whom Fischer knew as the “boy on the bus.” There were boys with Down syndrome Ramos had met while living two blocks from a New Orleans children’s hospital. And there was the camp for retarded children in Ohio. On the third day in, Fischer was able to steal away to the phone to call Stuart GraBois.
“I think I’m on first base.” Fischer had been given a code to use. For every hit he was getting closer to a full admission of guilt—the home run.
“He’s got plans to escape. He’s even drawn me a map and it leads straight to New York—and you.” Fischer didn’t know that the prosecutor had already heard this from Morgan, so he hastened to tell GraBois the details of Ramos’s plan.
“He knows where you used to live,” Fischer continued, naming the town. Fischer couldn’t himself know where the prosecutor lived—score one credibility point, thought GraBois. “All he talks about,” Fischer cautioned, “is that once he escapes, he’s coming to your office to get you, now that you’ve moved out of your neighborhood. And he takes no small pleasure out of knowing you moved because you were afraid he was coming after you.” That, in turn, pleased GraBois. It sounded as though Ramos had believed Jon Morgan’s story that GraBois was no longer his neighbor.
“I’m getting some results from the workbook,” Fischer went on. “It’s not what you’re looking for, I know, but it’s progress.” He reported the atrocities he’d heard, including a few names. GraBois recognized one, someone Fischer couldn’t have made up. Hearing Fischer pass on the name Bennett Harmon was significant. Fischer had to work hard to earn his trust, and Sandy’s son was authentic coin.
“He’s got a serious plan for blowing you up,” Fischer warned again. “It’s all he talks about. I’ll try to get more details. Just be careful.”
“You be careful. Let’s stay in touch.”
That wasn’t going to be easy. Soon after their call, the segregation phone broke, and Fischer could only track his progress in sporadic notes. His sense of isolation almost complete, the days took on a tense routine. Daily “therapy” sessions with Ramos became increasingly frenzied; Fischer suspected his “patient” was using their sessions partly to exorcise demons, and partly to reexperience the sex. He even wondered sometimes if Ramos did feel a spark of actual remorse, and every once in a while he would catch a glimpse of another lost child. After their first few sessions Ramos started lobbying Fischer first thing in the morning.
“When can we get to the book?” he’d say.
“Wait awhile,” Fischer would stall. “I’ve got my own things to do. We have to conduct our work on a schedule, just like the professionals.” Instinctively, he sensed that putting off Ramos would bring him to a faster boiling point, so when they did sit down, Ramos’s tightly held secrets would spill out uncontrollably. It was strangely satisfying for Fischer to use his con artist talents to good purpose. He was all too aware that they usually landed him in trouble.
During the sessions themselves, Fischer sought to tread a fine line between amateur shrink and amateur detective, knowing if he pushed too hard he would tip off Ramos. Mostly he just listened, sympathized, and tried to keep the conversation going. He’d come to realize that Ramos had no friends; that the only people his cellmate talked to regularly were in law enforcement, and Ramos knew they were only listening to build a case against him.
“This is good,” Fischer would prompt when Ramos slipped into confessional mode. “Tell me more. What about Ohio? What about Florida? Were there young girls involved too? What did it feel like? Who did you tell? Did you have anybody to talk to just to get it off your shoulders?”
These discussions lasted hours, ending only when Ramos, either out of genuine pain or wariness, would claim searing headaches and retreat to his bed. Fischer would wait to hear the snores, then he’d turn on his two-dollar commissary-issue Japanese lantern and start to transcribe.
“Ramos has taken me into his confidence,” he wrote in the notes he was saving for GraBois. Fischer explained how he’d told Ramos that he needed to fill him in if he wanted help on the legal case. “He’s starting to rely on me.”
Putting it on the page made it real, but most of the time Fischer refused to be moved by what he was hearing. Feelings were just too complicated, especially in this cell. He was playing a part, and like any good actor, he needed to just be the part and not overanalyze. Otherwise, he feared, Ramos wouldn’t respond, and he himself might falter. Any combination of fear, disgust, even self-loathing both for getting drawn into Ramos’s scheming and for the massive deception he was perpetrating—all those feelings would only jeopardize the work.
Fischer knew that his own moral compass often skewed wildly off course—he’d enjoyed a long career of bald deception and criminal acts. But now somewhere, in the hours either spent feigning his sympathy or in writing it all down, he could feel a shift. At some point during the feverish incantations of violence and the chilling admissions of child abuse, a line had been crossed, and Fischer’s motivations were now both self-serving and selfless.
He tried not to dwell on his own vulnerability. The indirect threats were constant. If I ever found a snitch, Ramos often said, I would kill him without hesitation, and Fischer knew that Ramos could, even in a bare cell. A sharpened pencil, a broomstick, those utilitarian toilets—four inches of water could drown a man whose head was lodged in one.
Fischer worked to banish such outcomes from his mind; he focused instead on advancing to second base. His own obsession ran to the Mets, and now he tried to see himself as just a player in the game. Daylight helped him maintain the illusion, so at moments like this, he would order himself to sleep. In a caged space that small, sleep was the only escape.
The first real mention of Etan himself, perhaps understandably, came not during a therapy session, but in the ongoing Patz case legal discussions, while the two were “working” on Ramos’s various briefs. In a recurrent thread, Fischer was attempting to ingratiate himself by mapping out a plan to remove GraBois from the case. He’d quickly learned that invoking GraBois’s name would make Ramos more volatile, and thus more loose-lipped.
“You’ve got a good case for prosecutorial misconduct,” Fischer would say, and they’d plot that for a while. Sometimes he’d instruct Ramos to lay out the facts of the Patz case, working GraBois’s name into the conversation as often as possible. Fischer tried never to ask a direct question, putting them instead in terms of GraBois.
“GraBois thinks this, GraBois knows that,” he’d say.
“GraBois doesn’t have a shred of evidence,” Ramos would retort, “except what I told him. He doesn’t know shit.”
Then, with any luck, Ramos would show how the prosecutor was all wrong by telling Fischer what was right. How ironic, Fischer thought, that I’m working for GraBois, and he’s working for me.
“You told GraBois yourself you picked the boy up in Washington Square Park,” Fischer now tried. “The newspapers even say that.”
“And that’s wrong, too. I didn’t pick him up there. It was blocks away.”
It was the sound of wood connecting with the ball. Fischer headed to second. “I need to see it on paper, Jose, otherwise the words just go into the air. If you want me to help you, I have to see it to understand, just like I need case law to write a brief. Something I can stare at over and over ’til it makes sense; that’s the only way we’ll figure out how to recant what you told GraBois.” Fischer found a piece of paper and prodded Ramos to draw it all out, just like he’d done for Jon Morgan some two weeks earlier. Ramos sketched in the X on the makeshift map where, he said, he’d picked Etan up. It was a spot on Prince Street, a block from the Patz apartment.
“Then what?” Fischer pushed a bit.
“Then we went back to my apartment. But I never forced him.”
“Why would he ever go with you?”
“I just walked up to him on the street and said, ‘Hi, remember me? I’m Sandy’s friend.’ ”
“Ramos didn’t meet him at random, he was very forceful about this point,” Fischer later reported to GraBois. “He didn’t elaborate as to whether he’d met Etan before. I think it mattered to him that I didn’t think he had just ‘picked him up.’ That’s it so far as direct Patz involvement goes. If anything’s going to happen, it’ll come soon.”
It wasn’t long in coming. Once Etan’s name had been broached in the legal discussions, it was easier to bring it up in the therapy sessions. Fischer believed that Ramos actually yearned to talk about what had happened back in 1979. At the end of previous confessional moments, he had always appeared relieved, drained, as though he felt expiated of his sins.
Within a few days, an opportunity presented itself. Ramos had already mentioned other boys by then; visitors to the drainpipe, a young teen in Greenwich Village, and the boy in Ohio, whom Ramos called Peter James. Once again, as he often did, Ramos distinguished between his “relationships” and abuse. Fischer egged him on—in the absence of force, he concurred, Ramos was guilty of a societal rather than a legal crime. “These young lovers of yours.” Fischer tried to appear curious about the technicalities. “What constituted sex with them?”
Ramos took the bait. He matter-of-factly described rubbing up against them from behind, sometimes taking them orally or having the boys fellate him. Penetration was difficult, he explained.
“Is that what you did to the Patz boy?” Fischer kept his voice very neutral.
“Yes, before I sent him home.” Ramos was still hedging his bets, but Fischer had just hit a double, and he had to go on playing his part for the team.
Ramos seemed completely at ease, and Fischer affected a casual air as he pushed for more detail, mixing in Etan’s name with the others he’d heard. This felt like the culmination of everything he had been working toward.
He was trying to commit the words to memory, so that later he could write them all down faithfully. When he got the chance he would relay to GraBois how Ramos was clear and graphic about the sexual acts he’d committed, both orally and anally, on the boy. How Ramos acknowledged that Etan had been fearful and unwilling but that Ramos had reassured him that he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
“I honor him every day,” Ramos said.
Now as the session swung back and forth between conversational and confessional, Ramos’s mood was alternately calm and overwrought. Sometimes, discussing the sex acts, his eyes would glaze over and he’d rock back and forth.
“You’ll never be whole until you get it out, Jose,” Fischer urged him on. “Redeem yourself.” This was a common tack. Fischer often encouraged Ramos to separate himself from his acts, so that he could purge those acts; the only way to heal, he told Ramos. Now Fischer wanted to hear Ramos finally say in no uncertain terms that he’d killed his victim. He knew GraBois needed that in order to clinch the case, as well as what Ramos had done with the body.
But the moment never came. Instead, Fischer later told the Feds, both men were jolted out of their session as the door banged open and guards announced they were searching the cell. Fischer never knew why, but the two men were separated long enough for the intensity of the moment and the mood to pass. Now he could only sort through all he’d heard, while he waited until it was safe to put it on paper. He knew from experience that Ramos would need a break before the next foray, so for a few days he made notes when he could and looked for his next chance to play therapist. But at night, as he relived the exchanges and wrote them down, he began to hope the chance wouldn’t come again. He couldn’t deny that playing the game was a kick; his senses were alert in ways he’d almost forgotten since he’d gone back inside. He wanted to get the job done, for Ramos’s victims now as well as his own agenda. But even the heartless character Fischer was playing during the day was starting to feel things, things that made him feel awful. And he was starting to feel he’d had enough.