Missing Persons Unit Case #8367: As of June 4: 688 manhours on telephone… 2,760 manhours on 345 search assignments… 880 manhours on 110 investigations, not including emergency service, harbor unit, aviation unit and missing persons…. Daily aviation unit aerial searches since May 26th…. Over 500 DD5 [detective interview forms] have been filed, 10,000 circulars have been distributed.
—June 4, 1979, NYPD Status Report on its two-week emergency response to the disappearance of Etan Patz
By the start of week three, with still no sign of Etan, the emergency response phase was called off. The centralized Missing Persons Unit would take over the case.
On the eleventh floor at Police Headquarters, the twenty-detective MPU oversaw some thirty-thousand new reports each year; people of all ages who’d disappeared in New York City, and whose descriptions were cataloged in drawer after drawer of four-by-six-inch cards. A specially created five-person task force would exclusively investigate Case #8367, Missing Person Etan Patz. Detective Bill Butler was “taken off the chart” for any other cases at the First Precinct and loaned indefinitely to Missing Persons.
The phones at the Patz apartment were still ringing in tandem on the table in the front room, but soon there would be no team of cops, pretending to be Stan and Julie, to answer them. Instead, a yellow legal pad and pen sat next to Stan’s powder blue phone.
“When you take a call,” Butler instructed Stan and Julie, “you need to mark it in the book. We need a date at the top of each page, and a time stamp next to each entry. Friends, heavy breathers, hang-ups, psychics. If it looks like something, you contact us and we’ll follow up immediately. But every single person who calls should go down in the books.”
The succession of notepads and then spiral notebooks—once the pads were found to shred their pages all over the loft—would go on to track not just the case, but the Patz family’s life. In the beginning, the overwhelming majority of callers were cranks, and one departing detective suggested maybe it was time to change their phone number. Stan and Julie found that inconceivable. They had taught Etan those seven digits—although, they regretted, not his area code—and they would never cut off his one sure avenue of contact. If he were out there trying to reach them, they wanted to be as reachable as possible. In the meantime, from the late-night caller who was sure Etan’s attacker had just tried to kidnap her own son, to the overwrought, misinformed folks who thought they’d found the quickest way to get in touch with the cops when they dialed the number on Etan’s missing poster, Stan and Julie took turns noting the times and taking down the messages. Julie wrote in a neat, rounded, clearly legible hand, and the dots over her i’s sometimes formed a perfect circle. Stan’s words were more crabbed and hasty, the letters often slurred together.
2:30 a.m. Mrs. Widholm [from a NJ number]; she was at Yankee Stadium—someone tried to grab her blond 10 year old—[she] has description
2:51 p.m. Jan [NY number]—Call Life Institute; re: Dr. Massy—psychic—he spoke last nite, and feels he can help us
4:21 p.m. Sel Raab, NY Times
4:39 p.m. $10,000? No money? No talk? Hispanic male—Info on your son
5:06 p.m. got a big fire in the project—get the police, please.
—Patz logbook, June 21, 1979
A few days after the crush of regulation blue had cleared out, Stan and Julie dared a first family outing to the nearby annual Feast of St. Anthony street fair a few blocks away. It felt terribly strange and inappropriate to be going somewhere so festive, and they were all too aware of the irony that St. Anthony was the patron saint of lost objects. But neither Stan nor Julie had spent any time in the last frantic weeks with their two other children. They felt a strong need to at least pretend normalcy, for Shira and Ari’s sake. The festival was an annual event and the kids always looked forward to it. For days now the aroma of Italian sausage and peppers had been drifting into the front room from the balcony windows, beckoning them out of doors. Julie strapped Ari into the fold-up stroller, and they set off.
As the family walked four blocks west on Prince Street to Sullivan, they passed the new round of Etan’s posters replacing ones that had been mistakenly torn down. Earlier in the week, Stan had bought ink pads to hand-stamp them with the urgent red message “Still Missing,” hoping to dispel the misperception that Etan was back home.
On this sunny early summer day, the three blocks of Sullivan Street south from Houston Street—where St. Anthony’s Church was—down to Broome Street were blocked off. Vendors wheeled their carts through the streets and hawked marzipan, pistachios, and torrone, the chewy Italian nougat and nut confection. Doughy balls of zeppole bubbled in huge vats of oil. Once fried to a crisp brown, they were swirled in powdered sugar and sold six to a bag. Squealing neighborhood children played water-pistol games for cheap polyester-stuffed animals, or rode the creaky Tilt-a-Whirl. One of the big annual draws was the three-story Ferris wheel that towered over Houston Street, its colored lights twinkling in the dusk.
As Stan and Julie carefully eyed their children, they became aware that they too were being watched, as though they were the fair’s new attraction. Some in the crowd had never met the Patzes but recognized them from the press coverage, which had conferred on them a macabre celebrity. Stan and Julie were equally nonplussed to recognize some of their neighbors, and then receive no return acknowledgment. It suddenly felt as though people they knew were shrinking from them. They felt badly to disappoint Shira and Ari, but it wasn’t long before the Patzes fled back to the relative safety of their loft. They felt branded as neglectful parents or, worse, suspected murderers.
If nothing else, many of their neighbors had been struck dumb by the understandable fear of saying the wrong thing. But until that moment, the Patzes had been cocooned by friends who’d wanted to show them nothing but humanity to counter their despair.
The newly created Etan Patz Action Committee, spearheaded by Sally Gran, a neighbor with a seemingly infinite amount of energy and organizational skills, would eventually swell to 170 members. Each had delegated tasks. There were poster “depots” sprinkled around SoHo where volunteers could pick up flyers to distribute. There was a message center, a media coordinator, even someone in charge of vehicles for transportation. Teams solicited donations from local businesses to keep the search going. A few neighbors even turned detective, seeking out the hidden sweatshop workers who might have seen something but would be reluctant to come forward to the cops.
Many of the Patzes’ friends were fellow freelancers, who took extended time off from work to devote themselves to the search. There were volunteer cooks and housekeepers, a babysitting network, and a team that brought groceries. People considered canceling summer vacations, and the Patzes began to feel like the neighborhood quicksand pit. “It’s a trap,” Julie told a reporter several months later. “You get caught up in it and you can’t get out.”
Julie sometimes wondered how much the parents who were helping her and her family were glad to be distracted from new fears about their own children’s safety. But when a neighbor’s nine-year-old daughter who’d been left in charge of her siblings called the loft one day, Julie became aware of some of the collateral damage their crisis had generated.
“Can you please let my mother come home for a while?” the girl asked plaintively. So some six weeks in, Julie called her friends together and sent them home. “Your own children need you,” she told them, “and we need to take care of ourselves.”
Both Ari and Shira had been left to struggle with their fears, nightmares, and confusion at a time when their parents were least able to help them. Their brother was suddenly gone, their parents were like strangers, and a rotating cast of caregivers couldn’t answer their questions. Assurances felt hollow, because they were. As uncomfortable as their own parents were about saying the wrong thing, Shira’s friends either shunned her or, too young to feel the discomfort, said the wrong thing.
“Your brother’s not coming back,” they’d blurt out, in the blunt way of children. “He’s probably dead.” Some who only knew Shira because of the newfound attention were jealous. “I wish my brother would disappear so I could get on television,” she was told.
Ari took to wearing Etan’s clothes, and, not yet three, he toilet trained himself almost overnight. He slept in the bottom bunk, below the empty one, and worried about playing with Etan’s toys. When Shira went up to Massachusetts to spend time with Julie’s family, Ari was terrified that she too would never come back. It was a logical conclusion. One of his well-intentioned minders had told him in the earliest days of the search that everyone was busy looking for Etan, who was “lost,” and he didn’t understand why his parents, who always found his lost toys and stuffed animals, couldn’t just do the same with Etan. Young children need the security of believing their parents are all-powerful, and it was devastating for both Shira and Ari to plainly see that their parents were completely powerless instead.
Ari seemed to pin his hopes on Bill Butler, the most familiar face, who stayed on the case when the larger police presence ended. At first, the revolver tucked into Butler’s ankle holster at toddler-eye level had frightened Ari, who thought his parents were about to be arrested—or that he was. But eventually, he grew convinced that if Stan and Julie had failed in their parental responsibilities, then the kindly hulking detective would bring his brother home. He would call “Policeman Bill” on his plastic play phone every day for an imaginary update.
Butler called the family for real every day too, and several times a week he could be seen walking the blocks surrounding Prince Street. He would start his canvass at 7:30 a.m., in hopes of meeting someone whose regular route would have crossed Etan’s path at that hour. In those first months, Butler worked the case seven days a week. He and his wife had long-standing plans to attend a wedding out of town over the summer, but his wife boarded the plane alone.
As the days wore on, Bill Butler became Stan and Julie’s touchstone. He never raised an eyebrow or betrayed irritation no matter how far-fetched the “leads” they passed along from wacky tipsters and the ever-present psychics.
9:09 a.m. Jim X Kansas City Mo.—wife psychic—picture boy—brown hair—city sidewalk… boy alone—emotionally deprived—streetwise—undernourished,… man on 2nd floor 60’s—maybe alcoholic—sad and angry—E. calls him “Red” but his name is Paul
??? Gloria X: alive—Sexual abuse—held for long time unharmed—abductors now running scared… 2 people involved: 1 tall, 1 med—Etan knew person very well—will be all over by 5/15/80—1st news by April
15:40 [Julie’s] return call to Zora X—psychic—Etan alive in a province of Italy,—boat trip: Bermuda, S.A. then Italy. “a relative,” maybe distant knows more than telling—someone is watching our pain + won’t tell (vindictive)
—Patz logbook, various psychic calls, 1979–80
Over the first months an astounding three hundred psychics weighed in, with no two scenarios alike. The only thing any of them could agree on was the recurrent phrase that Etan was “near water.” Nonbelievers from the start, Stan and Julie realized how useless that particular spiritual guidance was—what wasn’t near water? Are we talking river? A lake? What about a bathtub? Stan would shake his head in disgust. But one after the other, the Patzes welcomed these psychics to their home… just in case.
Jack Lembeck, the father of Etan’s best friend Jeff, had been a steady, calming face in the loft throughout the initial onslaught. Tall and quietly commanding, he’d unknowingly passed himself off as some enigmatic FBI agent, and his presence was never questioned. As the real cops had drawn back, Lembeck had stayed on, finding himself an unofficial liaison to this growing legion of psychics. He drove them around the city so they could soak up their “impressions,” took notes, and reported back. It was the most productive thing he could think to do.
12:30—Julie call to Dorothy Allison.—4 people know what happened that morning and are not coming forward.—1 or 2 people took [Etan] out of love.
—Patz logbook, August 17, 1979
Lembeck spent most of his time with Dorothy Allison. The fifty-four-year-old mother of four was by far the most renowned of her profession, and she was quasi-legitimized by her reported past success. In her trademark overalls and red sneakers, she walked into the Patz loft and started the usual way, by running her hands over Etan’s toys and stuffed animals. Some in law enforcement revered her skills, but Allison was scorned by others as a classic psychic “retrofitter,” tailoring her history after the fact to appear more credible. But she came with a track record, genuine or not, and the Patzes jumped at the chance for a breakthrough. Jack Lembeck repeatedly drove her around the five boroughs. She kept Stan and Julie—mostly Julie—immersed in following up on her cryptic visions. When Allison saw the name “Scott,” it sent Julie to the phone book for days, making pages of lists; every Scott in the city; first name Scott, last name Scott—perhaps Scotty’s Bar was the key, or maybe Dr. John Scotti.
Julie would compile hundreds of “Scott” entries, with accompanying addresses, maps, and overlays throughout the city, and hand them over to the detectives for further pursuit, just in time for Allison to see the name “Ralph,” or “Gonzalez,” and Julie would start again. In one way, she didn’t mind—it kept both her and Stan occupied. They were also grateful for Allison’s telling them she thought Etan was alive. The reason she was having such difficulty, she said, was that her gift was communing with the dead.
In between servicing the psychics and passing along leads now coming in from around the country, Julie’s goal was to establish a routine and stick to it. She knew such routine was critical, and it soothed her. The home daycare center was gone, but she took back her household duties from friends, the cooking and mopping, dusting and laundry; all the rote work that put her body through the comfortingly familiar motions she could salvage from her life pre–May 25.
Stan had a harder time. He couldn’t concentrate, and work was scarce. His freelance assignments had dried up, clients going elsewhere while he was consumed by the initial search. Now there was nothing in the pipeline and the personal contacts that had fueled his business were shying away. His routine was different from Julie’s. Every day he’d hold fast to sobriety until six o’clock, then check out in a haze of marijuana smoke.
When he began counting down the minutes until the hour hand hit six, he knew it was time to stop. Both he and Julie realized neither one could afford to lose their health—it would be too much to bear this alone. Besides, Shira couldn’t stand the smell of the tobacco pipe and wouldn’t sit next to him when he puffed on it. Sometime in late summer he quit both pot and tobacco on the same day, struggling more with the latter.
Instead, Stan spent a hundred dollars on a used three-speed bike, deliberately choosing one with peeling black paint, dilapidated-looking enough to deter thieves. In the days before bicycle safety was an issue, he fashioned helmets out of cast-off hard hats and, buckling Ari into the child seat behind him, Stan rode the length of the empty, under-repair West Side Highway with Shira. The exercise calmed Stan and gave Julie some downtime. They’d strap on their cameras—Shira had continued with her hand-me-down Argus and Ari toted a toy with plastic lenses that nevertheless took real pictures. Once, pedaling around Battery Park, they rode past members of the task force, and everyone exchanged waves. If I’m still under suspicion, Stan thought, this Father Goose and his goslings scene might sway them in my favor.
But often, when he biked alone, Stan would go for miles at top speed, and to distract or punish himself, he’d ride in the highest gear, deliberately making his muscles scream. Like a self-flagellating monk, he welcomed the physical pain. He was angry at the person responsible for his son’s disappearance, at the world, at himself, and he couldn’t vent on Julie or the kids. So he took out his fury in rants on unsuspecting pedestrians and cyclists who crossed his path.
Both Stan and Julie worked hard not to blame themselves for what had happened, and they never blamed each other. There was enough of that coming from outside the loft, especially toward Julie. Did she murder her own child, went the nasty gossip, or did she just somehow manage to lose him? And if she dared be seen in public—at the park or playground—with a smile or a laugh for the two children she was still trying to mother, she was the woman who didn’t care that she’d lost her son. She chuckled at some little joke one of the kids told, and strangers walked over to interrupt. They told her if she was so unfeeling about her missing son, maybe he was better off missing.
Stan and Julie weren’t imagining the widespread speculation that had been there from the beginning among their own community, even among their friends. For every awkward, heartfelt offer of help, there was a hushed whisper or unspoken thought about neglect or irresponsible parenting. Some of the parents who were saying, “There but for the grace of God go I” were simultaneously thinking, “It could never happen to me—I would never let Johnny walk by himself.” It was a common enough phenomenon, this mental trick designed to provide insulation from the tragedy of others. Recognized in psychology and even law enforcement as the “just world” theory, it was one reason prosecutors sometimes struck women from rape juries. If the world was just, so the theory went, you got what you deserved. If you can find any way to blame the victim, you yourself will feel less vulnerable.
So a neighbor who’d brought food over to the Patzes allowed herself to voice her thought to her husband—“How could she be so stupid?”—before feeling instantly ashamed at the words coming out of her mouth. And one June morning during the last few weeks of school, Karen Altman had been incensed as she waited with her daughter Chelsea at the bus stop, to hear another mother disparage an absent Julie for letting Etan walk alone. This was a woman whom, like most of the parents standing there, Karen had never seen at that bus stop before May 25.
Once, Julie took Shira and Ari to Little Italy and a group of mamas approached, tongues clucking, to offer their condolences. “How terrible you must feel,” one said, “especially since it was all your fault.”
“It’s almost like we have a communicable disease,” Stan told a reporter. “Like we’ve been touched by something very ugly and if people get close, it will rub off.” But, in fact, no isolating quarantine could keep this epidemic from spreading. Everyone had been touched.
Life had changed irrevocably not only for the Patzes, but for every neighborhood family. Etan’s face, in the posters that now hung on every SoHo storefront, lamppost, and blank wall space, was an ever-present, unavoidable reminder of the new reality. Fear was the prevailing emotion, as parents accompanied their children to the school bus stop, or better yet all the way to the schoolhouse door. Seven-year-old Vanessa Spina’s mother had been promising to let her walk to the corner bodega by herself for weeks. Soon, she’d said, soon. Soon was unforeseeable now. A young boy from a few blocks over, Etan’s age and also blond, rang the Patz buzzer one morning and tearfully begged Julie to tell police to stop pulling him aside for questioning.
Parents worked to shield their children and talked over their heads, with unsettling glances that were arguably worse. As a result the kids were often either confused or blissfully unaware. But the parents themselves were in panic mode. No one could say that the person who took Etan wasn’t still out there, an unknown, real-life bogeyman, poised to strike again. A few weeks before the end of school, a simple misunderstanding led Etan’s friend Jeff Lembeck to stay on the school bus past his stop. In the brief moments before all was well again, his terror-stricken parents felt the blood draining to their toes.
Even as the local media blitz was subsiding, national magazines and television had picked up the story and Etan’s image was reaching outside New York City. A U.S. representative from New York, Peter Peyser, read the story into the Congressional Record at the end of July. “I am asking all Members to do an act of kindness for a family in New York…. It is now assumed that Etan may have been taken away from the New York area and is somewhere in the United States. A poster is being delivered today to each Member’s office…. Perhaps someone, somewhere, has seen this young man and can help bring him back to his family.” A SoHo travel agency volunteered to send the poster to sixty foreign countries.
While at a standstill in New York, the investigation was also extending beyond the city. In July, a Missing Persons detective went to Rabbi Patz’s New Jersey synagogue for an unannounced visit and discovered from his secretary that the rabbi was on his annual six-week trip to Israel, leading a group of American schoolchildren to summer camp. The news raised eyebrows among investigators, who knew that in kidnapping cases, statistics showed a family member was the most likely culprit. The speculation was fueled by the unfounded rumors about religious differences in the family. Had Etan been spirited far away to a more religious environment?
The NYPD turned to Israeli authorities, who told them forty-one children had passed Israeli frontier control. All forty-one children were vetted, and every one of them returned to the United States six weeks after they’d left.
The FBI was tapped to interview Stan’s parents as well as Julie’s sizable family in Massachusetts, and they were ruled out as suspects. There was talk of a reward, but Stan and Julie worried the prospect of money might encourage copycats. The police adamantly advised against it. Already overwhelmed by false leads, they felt a reward would just elicit more crazies, offering information tainted by profit motive.
The summer ended and other children went back to school, including Shira and Ari. The little boy started part-time at a preschool in a church basement near Washington Square Park, where Julie then took to volunteering. It gave her an outlet for her natural affinity for children, and the little ones welcomed her unreservedly. It also gave her a sentry post from which to guard Ari.
Ari at bedtime: “I don’t like my bed anymore ’cuz Etan won’t come sleep with me.” Crying.
—Patz logbook, October 8, 1979
With the change of season, even the most stalwart civilian foot soldiers were overtaken by battle fatigue. Jack Lembeck turned to his wife, Mary, one morning and told her he just couldn’t do it anymore. Until then, he’d been propelled by the notion that he and his neighbors were no different than the Patzes. His mantra throughout the summer—it could have been our son—propelled him to drive the streets, answer calls, and search playgrounds. It could have been Jeff wearing his jacket instead of Etan who walked out the door into nothingness. But Lembeck had begun to realize his family differed from Stan and Julie’s in one critical way. He and his wife woke up every morning, and their child was still safe with them. The Patzes did not. At the risk of his family’s health, he and his wife decided they had to acknowledge that difference and move on. Mary Lembeck took her son out of state to stay with relatives for a few months.
Etan’s seventh birthday, October 9, came and went, bringing a spike in press calls and ensuing wackos. Police released the one and only sketch of a possible suspect, to another flurry of press, but this portrait was based on the flimsiest of connections, more a mark of the authorities’ desperation than anything else. A woman had seen a strange-looking man talking to a little boy near the Patz apartment on the morning Etan had disappeared. She’d come forward the very next day with a description. She had no idea if the boy was Etan—he’d had his back to her. She didn’t know if the man was doing anything nefarious. She wasn’t even sure her sighting was from the right day. But in the four-month interim she’d been questioned repeatedly, and finally hypnotized to provide a vague picture of the man’s features. Now his crude sketch was in every New York newspaper as a potential suspect. Nothing came of it, except for the predictable burst of false leads.
18:49 Ina X: [The first name of the man in sketch] has “D” and “V”; David Divine, etc…. [The man is a] surrogate who took Etan to someone else.
19:34 Pathmark, Bronx—looks like our kid—distressed w/a man who mishandled him.
16:16 You need a psychic witch—can break evil spells—their whole family has evil spell and cannot succeed.
—Patz logbook, various, October 1979
Tips trickled in on the answering machine now attached to the phone or in letters from all over the world, along with well-wishes and prayers. Stan Patz, who had always disdained organized religion, was deeply touched if not slightly bemused at the thought of strangers uttering his son’s name in their churches and synagogues. Then there were the fervent believers who blamed the Patzes, who, they rationalized, must have lost their child because they’d lost their faith.
If there is a God who punishes me this way for not believing, Stan thought when he read those letters, what kind of a stupid, jerky God would he be? It seemed specious logic to Stan, who felt God must have far more important things to deal with than one inconsequential nonbeliever. He wrote back to a few of the correspondents, but he never responded to those condemnatory notes.
There was even a religious/con artist combo variation: a man who guaranteed their son’s recovery if they slaughtered a sheep in their living room, after having a “good Muslim woman” clean and prepare it first. “You have to eat some of it,” he called back to say later. He would supply the sacrificial lamb for just $125, but he required an additional $2,000 after Etan was safely returned. The cops, who had begun to feel protective of this family battered on all sides by the press and the prying public, hated the idea of anyone taking advantage of their charges and instructed the Patzes to call the man back and set up a meeting. Then the detectives, who’d been hiding in the apartment, emerged with guns drawn and led him away. Julie felt a little sorry for him.
1:28 female, 20’s (?)—heavy N.Y. accent—well-wisher (at 1:28 a.m.!!)
23:20 Man—rang bell—on drugs?—came about Etan—had seen him once in Wash Sq—very emotional—had tattoo on left forearm
—Patz logbook, September 8, 1979
The preponderance of log entries were of angry or lonely or disturbed individuals who took advantage of their easy access to the Patzes. The most obsessive ones called repeatedly. Stan and Julie recognized they might be the only people these callers talked to. Sometimes the police were able to track down their therapists or counselors and Julie would get on the phone with them, to try to mediate a cease-fire of sorts. She didn’t just want to leave such a troubled sympathizer hanging. Once, a man actually appeared in their home, beaming at Stan and Julie.
“You are not going to believe me,” he said, in the only believable part of his remarks, “but I have become your son and I have come home for dinner.” Who, they would shake their heads in amazement, would leave the angry message “I fucked and killed your son”? But as dreadful as those were, perhaps the toughest were the ones Stan and Julie came to call the “look-likes.”
15:43 p.m.—anonymous, boy, blonde, pilot’s cap in courtyard behind Lex Ave everyday—not noticed before Etan reported missing—never leaves yard.
23:25 Anthony, on 5/31/79… NY upstate… picked up boy and 21 yr old w/girl hitching… almost positive was Etan… exit 113 dropped off 3 people.
2:05 Lisa from VA… female—approx 50 years old… boy looks like Etan and not belong to woman. [Woman is] nut—from Greenwich Village… boy was in 1st grade in public school system,…—boy called “Erin”—boy beautiful.
—Patz logbook, various, 1979–80
The intricate stories took up pages and pages in the Patz logbooks but never panned out. They exacted the biggest emotional cost, riding Stan and Julie on a steep vertical incline up the tracks, to plunge straight back down to hell every time.
They almost never talked to each other about the toll that it all took. The subject was too raw to think of inflicting it on one another, and besides, they had to stay strong. In self-defense, they began to see themselves as investigators, as though they were looking for someone else’s child.
The whole family was in counseling, off and on, and Julie found it enormously helpful, giving her a place to unload some of her grief. Stan was less enthusiastic. His New England upper lip was usually stiffened resolutely into a “No.” He kept his feelings in—where they belonged—but he was sure that within his body they’d rerouted into the excruciating, chronic back and leg pain that had only begun after Etan had vanished.
He and Julie took their small comfort from the task force’s reassuring, unflappable presence. The initial mutual wariness soon faded, as on one side the cops grew to understand the defense mechanisms behind Stan’s gruff manner and biting wit. On the other side, Julie acknowledged and rejected her unconscious biases toward police—“the man”—as some kind of faceless paramilitary force. She had grown to see them as humans—humans who made mistakes like everyone else, but who had the best of intentions to help. They worked overlong hours and came in on their days off, sometimes bringing their own kids to hang out in the loft and play with the Patz children.
With his benevolent smile and dry humor, Detective Bill Butler was lovingly dubbed a “second father,” cruising the neighborhood in his battered yellow car, prowling Prince Street with a stash of photo cards of Etan tucked into his pocket, scratching down new leads with an endless supply of patience. But the case clearly haunted him, and he took it home at night. He would jolt awake sometimes in his bed wondering, “Did I do that? Did I remember this?”
Butler was convinced that if Etan had been murdered, there would be a body to show for it. So he maintained a positive outlook.
“I know we’re going to get our boy back,” he’d say to Stan and Julie. “It’s just a matter of time.”
But Julie felt trapped between true believers on the police force like Butler and the shopkeepers who’d quietly begun to take down Etan’s posters, convinced there was no longer a need to look for him. If she believed, as they now did, that her son was dead, it might break her heart irreparably. But it would also allow her to begin to mourn. She herself had begun to tentatively feel out the heretical possibility he was not coming back, but she felt she could never say it—that would be a betrayal to the cheery optimism that met her every time a member of the task force came to the door. Despite her affection and gratitude for their efforts, she sometimes resented the cops’ blind conviction.
At Christmas the Patzes made the semiannual pilgrimage to Julie’s family in Massachusetts, where they would also see Stan’s parents. Along with Julie’s eight siblings and their families, the New York contingent would converge on Sudbury, to the modest house that never changed, not its faux clapboard aluminum siding outside to ward off the harsh New England winters nor its striped, flowered wallpaper inside. The Patzes would stay in the cozy upstairs bedrooms, once shared by all the siblings and still occupied by the two youngest ones. In the summer visits they spent the days dispersed outdoors, but at Christmas the house swarmed with children, babies passed from shoulder to shoulder, cousins playing with their parents’ old toys on the large enclosed front porch, teens swapping a year’s worth of tall tales. Most of Julie’s brothers and sisters had settled in the area, the only exceptions a sister who’d moved to nearby Connecticut and, of course, Julie.
When Etan had disappeared, Julie had called her parents soon after Stan had called his, but she’d forbidden her family from coming to New York. She’d been adamant. She hadn’t even wanted them to call, knowing she would fall apart in the face of their own sadness. The Patzes had missed the Fourth of July reunion, and so this marked the first time they had all been together since the previous winter. Remarkably, no one spoke of Etan or his absence. It was Christmas, Julie’s parents thought. He’s gone, and everyone knows it. It’ll just make things worse, when we should all just try to enjoy the holidays.
Back in New York, the new year brought not a single spark of light to shine on the dark hole that had swallowed Etan. How could a six-year-old boy have made it to seven on his own? How could Etan still be alive? How long could they sustain the fantasy of Etan alive and healthy, being cared for by strangers? In the real world, that just never happened.
5:38—WQXR—Bob Lewis, Merced, Calif. [Teenager] (14 yrs old—missing 6 years) found walking st. 200 m. N of home w/5 yr old kidnapped boy.
—Patz logbook, March 2, 1980
Almost ten months into a year that seemed to hold no hope, a small boy peered into the windows of a Ukiah, California, police station and was spotted by an officer, who followed him outside. On the street the boy was talking to a teenager.
“What’s going on?” the cop asked the two. “We’re just trying to find this kid’s home,” the older boy said.
The “kid” was five-year-old Timmy White. Missing for two weeks, he’d been the subject of an intense local search. The other boy, a fourteen-year-old named Steven, wasn’t sure of his full name. But authorities were astonished to discover he was Steven Stayner, abducted from Merced, California, seven years earlier by a forty-year-old man named Kenneth Eugene Parnell. Parnell had enticed the then seven-year-old into his car by asking if he wanted to contribute to a charity and then telling him they’d go ask his mother for permission. For almost seven years, Steven Stayner had lived two hundred miles from his home, with the man he’d come to call Dad. He had escaped only after being forced to recruit a new boy for Parnell. At the time of Stayner’s stunning reappearance, no one knew what horrors he’d endured. For a few weeks at least, the news was simply painted as the miracle it was. But soon, reports of his sexual abuse surfaced, changing the tone of the story.
For Stan and Julie Patz, Steven Stayner’s return to his parents opened the door to a whole new range of conflicting emotions. Was Etan out there thinking they weren’t looking for him? Despite an extensive search, that’s what Steven Stayner had believed. Your parents don’t want you, Parnell had told him, saying he’d legally adopted the boy from his parents.
If their own son were alive, Stan and Julie wondered, did he even want to come home? The thought was disturbing, although far better than an alternative that saw Etan abused and hurt. While the Patzes rejoiced at the news that the teenage Stayner had come home, his return also meant that unless they found their son, or his body, there would never be a date after which they could assume the worst. Not one year, not two, not seven, or even more. And after hearing some of what Stayner had gone through, they were no longer sure what “worst” meant.
12:43 p.m.—Harold—25 yr old girl w/hypo glycemia disappeared in middle of night almost a year ago—no clue.
—Patz logbook, March 21, 1980
Scattered among the look-likes and the lunatics in the pages of the logbooks were messages from bewildered parents of other missing children, who would call or write begging for Stan and Julie’s help. It was ludicrous, Stan and Julie thought, that they were considered experts and sought out for advice. But they had now spent the last several months learning as much as anyone else about what to do—and not to do—when your child goes missing.
Since her daycare center had closed, Julie had been unable to find work. Her skills and interest lay with childcare, but she still suffered from the stigma of “losing her child.” (“We didn’t ‘lose him,’ ” Stan would bite out angrily every time it was phrased that way. “He was taken from us.”) Finally, one administrator at a school where Julie had applied revealed that he feared the parents there would object to her hiring. After she was interviewed at another school, the director was approached by a group of parents who actively opposed her employment. Since no one yet knew what had happened to her son, they were uncomfortable having their own children in her care. The Patz family was slipping into debt, but there wasn’t much they could do to shovel out.
As Stan slowly returned to his photography, Julie’s full-time, nonpaying job was the search for Etan. But as the months passed it had gradually become about more than just her son. As she met other parents of missing children and heard their heartwrenching stories, as they shared the frustration of nowhere to turn for help, Julie saw a gap that demanded to be filled.
09:45 Gus Engelman WABC—Radio, telephone taped interview
14:32 Gene Ruffini, NY Post, sorry about the bad rewrite job….
16:10 Rich Lamb, WCBS—Radio, coming here now for interview
15:00 Carl Gottlieb? Ch 11 w/c/b for appt later in week
10:22 Pamela Roderick—WINS Radio
11:00 Jane White/AP
12:09 Richard Higgins Boston Globe 10 AM Thursday
17:04 Ch 2. News to be here 6:15 pm
12:00 60 MINS Allan Maraynes Mike Wallace/Producer
15:48 Peggy Stockton WNEW radio will come for interview
16:13 Jim Unchester WNBC-TV will call Sunday for interview
11:30 Mark Kresing (sp) Ch 11 re: interview today
11:55 Sylvia Pahy (?) photog will be here for NYT mag Sunday 5/25 at 11
15:13 Jerry Schmetterer Daily News article Sunday
08:00 approx WMCA Radio—I declined telephone intvw—woke me up.
—Patz logbook, various entries, week of one-year anniversary, May 1980
A few days before May 25, Stan looked around the front room at the circle of reporters and cameras gathered to prepare their stories.
“Thank you for coming here on this very sad anniversary. I hope you don’t mind me saying that next year I’d prefer not to be seeing you all again.”
In the weeks of press leading up to the one-year mark, both Stan and Julie had decided the media message deserved to be something beyond “Have you seen my son?”
“There are lots of failings in the system of locating missing children,” Julie said to the SoHo Weekly News. “No one even knows exactly how many children disappear each year. There is no effective nationwide system.”
They wanted to talk about a whole list of ideas for making change going forward, but the weight of the past year was also never far from their thoughts.
“It’s not getting easier, it’s getting harder,” Julie told the New York Times’s Anna Quindlen. “We thought that any minute it would be over,” she said.
“You can always come to grips with a set of circumstances—I mean the finality of death,” Stan continued his wife’s thought. “This is a psychological wound that will never heal, never close up, without a resolution of one kind or another.”
He shook his head sadly, his mouth tight. “We’re sitting here with as many questions as we had the first day.”
“More,” Julie said. As they talked, Julie’s feet perched on the couch next to her husband, Quindlen saw two profoundly broken people who seemed to each have their hands full holding the other together. She marveled at a marriage staying intact under such conditions.
An AP reporter whose anniversary feature appeared in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, Fargo, Honolulu, and dozens more papers around the country wrote a stirring account that highlighted the couple’s determination and the efforts so many were continuing to make on their behalf.
“Sometimes I think the worst thing that could happen would be never knowing what happened to Etan,” Julie told the reporter. “It is something we live with every day.”
There were few personal calls noted in the logbook in the days leading up to or just after May 25. Even on that Sunday itself the phone was relatively quiet. But a few days later, Stan took the kids on another photo expedition and spotted a local tribute to Etan on a cast-iron column around the corner from the loft. In uneven block letters, the paint trickling down from the I and the M, someone had spray-painted the words I MISS ETAN P.