Dear Stuart,
Hi, hope that this letter fines [sic] you and your family well and a merry Christmas, this coming new 1991 New Year. My family and I wants to thank you very much for all your help.
—Cherie Taylor’s Christmas card, December 20, 1990
To Mr. Stuart R. GraBois and Family
“Especially for You:
May Hanukkah be a season of beauty, shining with warmth, joy and love.”
[handwritten:] “Thou shall take no Vengeance (Leviticus 19:18)”
—Jose Antonio Ramos’s Hanukkah card, December 28, 1990
The year wound down slowly, compared to the pace of the fall. Little could compete with November’s crescendo in the courtroom. Jose Ramos remained safely locked away at Rockview state prison, serving out the last four years on his Erie conviction. Any chance for early parole on that charge was blown to pieces by this new conviction. Ramos was working himself into a state, trying to find a loophole in the sentence he’d just been handed. Within days he’d filed an appeal, then furiously filled even more long yellow sheets with invective and pleadings to the judge, citing mind-numbing precedent, the Greek goddess Themis, and Plato. Jose Ramos held one person responsible for his personal nightmare, and boxed up in a fifteen-by-ten-foot world at SCI Rockview, his enmity was festering.
Stuart GraBois stayed in touch with the Rockview administrators. Once again, GraBois’s ability to see setbacks as opportunities kept him moving forward. The fact that Ramos hadn’t broken down further and coughed up the missing pieces to the Patz case was a bitter disappointment. But it was mitigated by the prospect that far into the foreseeable future, GraBois could count on dealing with a stationary target. GraBois hoped it wouldn’t take twenty-five years, but he wouldn’t think that far ahead, just to the next step in his work-in-progress.
There were other payoffs, smaller perhaps but powerful in their own right. GraBois opened a stack of Christmas mail in late December 1990 to find a card addressed from a rural route postbox in a small midwestern town. “May the faith and hope of Christmas light your way the whole year through” was the inscribed message. The Jewish prosecutor was touched by the sentiment beyond the words. A long, heartfelt note was folded into the card.
Cherie Taylor thanked him not just for taking on the court case, but because “it was also a part of our life that made my family stronger and closer together in love and in heart.
“Thank you very much once again,” she wrote in a large, loopy scrawl. “I am sending a school picture of Joey and William for you.” Thirteen-year-old Joey was still a round-faced, cherubic-looking seventh grader; at twelve, Billy’s eyes were warier. The typical overlit, stilted studio photos portrayed two scrubbed innocent faces. GraBois had spent the previous months with these boys, and knew it wasn’t like that; you can’t go back and change things. But, he now thought, their expressions hinted at a life retrieved.
“When you look at them,” Cherie wrote, “remember that the hope and faith we put in man’s law is really the love God has for his children.”
It was a slightly garbled but lovely thought. Cherie had talked before about how this prosecution had given the Taylor family a new, if guarded, belief in the law, and that’s how GraBois interpreted this sentiment. Prosecutors aren’t often afforded such appreciation, he thought, and he tucked the note away in his files.
It helped rinse away the bitter taste of GraBois’s most recent exchange with Jose Ramos. The week before Cherie Taylor’s letter arrived, GraBois had taken his last shot of 1990, launching the next phase of his campaign. In search of a bargaining chip, GraBois’s investigators had tracked down Jose Ramos Sr. at his Florida home. He was deeply ashamed of his son, Ramos Sr. told GraBois over the phone. In fact, the family had had nothing to do with him since the early seventies. He often wondered if his son’s problems stemmed from an accident during his Navy stint, some kind of explosion on board ship that might have damaged him this way. “He was regular before that,” said Ramos Sr. As GraBois filled him in on recent events, he sensed a dignified elderly man whose family had thrown up their hands. Ramos Sr. told GraBois that his wife was very ill in Florida, but if the prosecutor thought he could help, he would make arrangements to travel to New York.
GraBois thanked him, and the next day he called Jose Ramos Jr. It was a terse, awkward exchange.
“I had a long talk with your father,” GraBois started. “Your parents are willing to come up to see you. I would bring them up.” But the Patz family need something as well, he went on. They need to hear about their son.
“I am no longer interested in prosecuting you in New York,” GraBois continued, which was not the truth. He simply wanted to know if Ramos would take any kind of bait, whether there was even any point to keep on fishing. Given the decades facing Ramos, “to try to prosecute you here on something else makes little sense now. And we think you can help us out on this end.” The prosecutor offered to get Ramos a lawyer to work out a deal.
“So I throw that out to you, for what it’s worth. If you want to tell me to go to hell, go ahead.”
Ramos listened in silence, but he wasn’t buying it. “You have a Happy Hanukkah, yourself and your family,” he replied. “I have nothing else to say to you. I don’t know what you want and I’ve told you I don’t have anything more to offer you.”
“You certainly do.” GraBois wasn’t going to just let that go. “Look, I’m talking about the Etan Patz case, you know that and I know that. You told us what you told us… and I have other facts too, now. You could help to put this case to rest once and for all for that family, and I could help put you together with your family. That’s your call. I’m not dealing with you here, I’m just asking you to listen.” GraBois gave him new contact numbers and could hear the sound of Ramos writing them down. “You can call collect anytime.”
GraBois hung up in frustration. The phone rang a few minutes later. “I don’t know what you said to him,” Jack Allar, the Rockview superintendent’s right-hand man, reported, “but he was crying when he got off the call.” Some small satisfaction, thought GraBois. This is working on him. I just need to find more of the same.
When the card arrived from Ramos just days later, wishing him and his family a Happy Hanukkah, GraBois felt sure that the inmate wasn’t ready to walk away from their game just yet, which was good because GraBois wasn’t either. He left for the holidays, after making an appointment for January with the FBI agent currently assigned to the case.
“Does this mean you’re going to have to get him a gift?” Special Agent Mary Galligan had just read Ramos’s greeting card and it made her laugh out loud. She was twenty-seven years old, and just two years out of the training academy. She was now juggling the Patz case with several others, but it was particularly close to her heart. Galligan had only assisted on other investigations before this one, her first solo flight.
Galligan’s parents had worked hard to send her to the Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls Long Island college prep school where the sisters didn’t use rulers, just plenty of rules. No clogs, no dark nail polish, no listening to Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young.” There was no rule, however, that a girl couldn’t do a boy’s job, because there were no boys to cede to. Tall, strong, and athletic, with wavy brown hair and a scathingly sarcastic wit, Galligan had been the editor of her school newspaper and a standout on the swim team. At Sacred Heart she’d developed the inner confidence that would allow her to handle a position with the prestigious FBI Bank Robbery Squad only a year after she joined the Bureau. Timing played a major part too—the only woman on the squad, Lisa Smith, was leaving, so there was room for her replacement. That’s how things worked back then in the most sought-after ranks of the Bureau. Named when stickups—white-collar and otherwise—were the most serious crimes in the FBI’s purview, Bank Robbery would later be rechristened Violent Crimes, and include interstate kidnappings, extortions, and product tamperings.
As a rookie agent, Galligan had inherited the Patz case sometime around its ten-year anniversary from Smith, the departing agent. Growing up on Long Island, she was only vaguely familiar with the name Etan Patz. But her mother, who’d raised four kids, knew it by heart. Read up on the files, Galligan’s boss told her, and sent her to the twenty-seventh floor where the research was kept in floor-to-ceiling rotor cabinets.
“Can you direct me to the Patz files?” she asked.
“Over there,” the clerk said. Galligan looked at an entire tower labeled “ETAN PATZ 7-NY-186181.”
“And over there, and there and there,” the woman pointed.
Galligan tackled all of it, but it wasn’t until she was sent to meet with Stuart GraBois that it began to fit together. As Ken Ruffo had once done for him, GraBois now walked Galligan through the case, and he did so with such a passion and fervor that it proved infectious. In the early part of her involvement on the case, Mary Galligan dealt with P.J. Fox, who was brought to New York for follow-up; interviewed Sandy Harmon to hear her story and her denials; and chased a number of other leads while GraBois’s attention was on the Pennsylvania chapter. Every part of her first case had proved challenging, but the day she met Stan and Julie Patz in the summer of 1990 affected her most deeply.
It had become clear by then that P.J. was not Etan. The birthdates weren’t right, and other details didn’t fit, but in order to rule him out definitively and move on, the FBI wanted to compare his DNA to the Patzes’. Galligan was charged with ensuring the integrity of the blood samples, which would be taken and tested at a Madison Avenue lab the Bureau contracted to conduct the then-cutting-edge procedure.
By this point, she’d spoken with the Patzes over the phone several times. But while she was perfectly pleasant whenever she answered, Julie always handed the phone to Stan, and Galligan didn’t know what to expect the day she met them at the lab. She wasn’t prepared for how unsettling the surprisingly private moment soon became.
The agent watched as Julie Patz rolled up her sleeve. The nurse swabbing Julie’s arm doesn’t know, Galligan thought. She’s the only one in this room for whom this could be a simple blood test to check for drugs, or a parasite. But the rest of them were all too aware they were here to rule out the rough petty criminal P.J. Fox as Stan and Julie’s son. Stan said next to nothing, and Julie made little reference to what was really going on.
“People don’t understand,” she said sadly at one point, “what it’s like to have one day change your life so much.”
Galligan felt the discomfort hanging in the air. She didn’t want to make small talk; it felt so oppressively banal. She thought of making some effort to break the tension, but was at a loss.
“How long have you been an agent?” Julie Patz’s voice interrupted Galligan’s thoughts.
“Two years,” she answered, as the nurse labeled and packaged the vials. Julie continued to chat quietly, asking more questions as she and Stan waited patiently to be told they were through. She’s trying to put me at ease, realized Mary Galligan incredulously. She attempted to follow the other woman’s lead and respond politely, but all she could think about was the one thing she wanted to ask, but knew she couldn’t. Would Julie Patz want this boy to be her son, or hope to God that he wasn’t?
When GraBois came back from Pennsylvania with the triumphant news of Ramos’s lengthy sentence, Galligan was pleased, but she couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. The investigation seemed to be over without having been able to unravel the mystery of what had happened to Etan, at the very least for his parents’ sake. Until GraBois set her straight.
As the new year began, he laid out another avenue that had been slowly developing all through the previous fall. As it had in the past, whenever the Patz story surfaced in the public eye, it held out the promise of a ripple effect that could push the case along. The Pennsylvania case had gotten people talking. Certainly there’d been a buzz in the prison, as inmates realized they had a notable in their midst. GraBois appreciated that, not only because it meant tougher time for Ramos—even cold-blooded ax murderers treat child molesters like scum of the earth—but because his notoriety might also engender new information.
The prosecutor had been intrigued when, back in July 1990 in the midst of Ramos’s rearrest, a federal inmate serving time in upstate New York by the name of Jon Morgan had written to GraBois out of the blue, to hint at a connection to the Patz case. Or at least to Jose Ramos.
“He was my roommate in Otisville,” Morgan had written. He and Ramos had spoken often there, and although he didn’t want to “get involved,” he might be willing to talk to GraBois about those conversations.
GraBois had read the letter with interest. The Federal Correctional Institution at Otisville was an hour and a half outside of New York City; Ramos had in fact been there several times, whenever GraBois would bring him up from Pennsylvania for questioning. And GraBois had met Jon Morgan before when another AUSA had brought him into the office. Morgan had stuck in GraBois’s mind because when he wasn’t in prison, he lived in the same nearby New York suburb. He was also, GraBois recalled, a real piece of work.
Jon Morgan had a sordid, if not violent, white-collar history. He and his partner were an audacious pair of “entrepreneurs” who had skated the boundary between life in the fast lane and life behind bars, until they careened wildly over the line and went away for thirteen years each. The two men had made a fortune buying up chemicals for cheap that didn’t pass muster in the United States, then reselling them at a huge profit in the Third World where standards were much lower and oversight virtually nonexistent. They saw it as a win-win-win. Chemical companies got rid of expired product without expensive, annoyingly safety-conscious disposal costs. Businesses in developing countries got material that their governments sanctioned, or at least looked the other way from. And the partners pocketed more than a million dollars a year, for over fifteen years. Until they got caught. It turned out oversight served a purpose; in at least one case the two were selling pure poison in the guise of legitimate chemicals—unknowingly, they claimed. There was at least one toxic spill, and large oozing canisters were dumped in suburban East Coast warehouses. Jon Morgan was being tracked by at least eight government agencies when the Feds finally caught up with him.
Back in the mid-eighties, before he started on the Patz case, GraBois had met the “Biohazard Boys,” as they were known around the office, when the AUSA prosecuting their case had them in for questioning. From those previous dealings, GraBois knew Jon Morgan as smart, coherent, and open to working with the Feds. He was not someone you’d want your daughter to bring home, but informants never are. GraBois didn’t care. As long as his info was sound and verifiable, GraBois would welcome it. He was never going to torpedo a case with information he couldn’t corroborate. Trust but verify, as the last president liked to say. GraBois knew all too well that informants could be more trouble than they were worth, because you had to carefully vet what they were offering. But he also knew you didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Or at least you didn’t turn the horse away without a careful examination of his teeth.
If Ramos had indeed been in Otisville at the same time as Morgan, the two might very well have come in contact, and GraBois had wanted to follow out the lead. So, at the end of the busy summer, once Ramos had been arraigned, charged, and was awaiting trial, GraBois had talked to Morgan on the phone and learned a bit more.
Morgan and Ramos had become acquainted while hanging out in the Otisville law library, where they both spent time working on their cases. At one point, Morgan told GraBois, the two had even briefly been cellmates.
When they’d first met back in 1989, Morgan said, Ramos had spoken good-naturedly about GraBois, almost bragging that he knew him. He made it sound as though he was the model cooperating witness. “The reason I’m here at Otisville is because an AUSA brought me in from state custody to help on this Patz case,” Ramos had told Morgan. He’d talked about sitting in GraBois’s office for hours, even getting the red-carpet treatment of Sabrett’s hot dogs from a nearby vendor. “The agent went down and brought them back up to me,” Ramos had said, “and they were the best hot dogs I ever ate.” That was significant to GraBois, because the hot dog story had actually happened during the summer of 1988, in one of the meetings that followed Ramos’s “90 percent confession.” It was a small detail, but it added some credibility to Jon Morgan’s account.
Ramos had also spoken openly to Morgan about his link to the Patz case, explaining that he knew all about it because his “wife,” as he called her, had been the Patzes’ babysitter.
As Morgan relayed Ramos’s claims, GraBois scrawled, “Had info—eventually make deal” on his ever-present notepad. Ramos had led Morgan to believe he was just waiting for the right time to reveal all and solve the case. “Kid might be alive,” GraBois had noted. Indeed, Ramos had stressed this, Morgan had said. He’d also asked Morgan a lot of questions about federal law, about a statute of limitations for murder. “I don’t know how it is now,” Morgan had told GraBois, “because I hear from other inmates up here that you’re going after him on some Pennsylvania thing, but back when we met he was acting like your pal.”
Besides conversations in the law library, Morgan had said, he also knew Ramos from Jewish services. Ramos, Morgan had scoffed, was a self-styled Jew, who’d told Morgan he’d uncovered his roots during a trip to Spain. Ramos had taken to growing out his bangs, his version of the long curly locks—payes—that religious Jews dangled over their ears. GraBois also knew that to be true; Jack Allar at Rockview had regaled him with tales about Ramos’s nascent faith. But, Morgan said, Ramos was the most ignorant Jew he’d ever met, and the other Jewish inmates resented his “playing Jewish.” Ramos seemed harmless enough at first, Morgan had believed, but he’d later learned the man had two sides.
“He’s a lunatic,” Morgan had told GraBois in that first phone call, “and he’s got a hair-trigger temper.” Morgan had witnessed that temper once when several other inmates had to restrain Ramos in the law library from smashing in an elderly inmate’s skull with a typewriter. GraBois took notes on a yellow legal pad. “Absolute lunatic,” he wrote, “mentally deranged.”
In the summer of 1990, when Morgan had first sent his note to Stuart GraBois, he hadn’t seen Ramos in months, but he’d been hearing about him. Arriving up at his current home in FCI Ray Brook, a medium-security prison tucked in the Adirondacks, Morgan had met up with some old friends from Otisville. “How did it feel to be roommates with a cannibal?” one of them had asked Morgan. The other inmate had seen a news story about Ramos that made the Patz connection. “He killed a bunch of kids and ate them,” the man had misinformed Morgan, who then went on to learn about the Pennsylvania charges. Suddenly what had seemed like boastful jailhouse bullshit seemed worthy of passing along to authorities. Of course, it went without saying that for any inmate, it never hurt to be on the good side of a federal prosecutor.
At the end of that September conversation GraBois had told Morgan he’d be in touch, and he turned once again back to the outstanding Pennsylvania case. Then, mid-October, GraBois had gotten a nibble from another source.
An old friend, an investigator in the New York County District Attorney’s Office called one day. “We got a guy over here in on a local charge. I think you should come and hear what he has to say.” By that time, Ramos had finally taken his plea, and GraBois was preparing for November’s critical sentencing hearing. Still, he went down the street to meet a check-kiting career confidence man named Jeremy Fischer.
Fischer, trying to get some leverage on his state case, had a strange story to tell. At first, GraBois couldn’t believe his ears—and not just because, with his slicked-back hair and ponytail, cool delivery, and ready banter, Fischer immediately radiated con artist. GraBois’s incredulity stemmed just as much from the bizarre coincidence that Fischer, too, knew Ramos from Otisville, from the same Jewish prayer group as Jon Morgan. In fact, Fischer even mentioned Morgan’s name offhandedly when he was listing other inmates he knew in the group. What are the odds, GraBois had wondered.
Unlike Morgan, GraBois had no prior knowledge of Fischer beyond what was on paper, and he had no particular reason to trust him. In fact, it was quite the opposite. But he listened to Fischer’s story.
Fischer said he and Ramos had spent a lot of time together in private conversation at Otisville in the yard, the cafeteria, at services. It was a weird friendship, said Fischer, filled with fantasy- and mysticism-laced talks. Ramos would give him books to read, with sections on pederasty underlined. But the talk wasn’t pornographic, Fischer was quick to clarify, more intellectual, philosophical—long discussions about life in ancient Greece, for example.
Again, GraBois was completely unconvinced, but one word he heard gave credence to Fischer’s story.
Fischer recounted how the previous year, he’d seen Ramos after a Jewish holiday service. He was coming out of an area of the chapel behind Ramos, who didn’t see him. They were the only two in the room, Fischer said, when suddenly Ramos began to cry, then got down on his knees to pray. “I did terrible things,” Fischer heard; then something about how everyone was after him, that someday he’d be famous. At some point later Ramos began crying again, and wailed, “It’s gonna happen,” then, “Oh, Etan, Etan, I never meant to hurt you, Etan. I loved you.” Fischer said that at the time he didn’t understand what Ramos was saying, because of his pronunciation. “He said, ‘Eat-en,’ ‘Eat-en,’ and I thought he was talking about food or something. It wasn’t until I was down at MCC on this new charge that I saw a story John Miller did on the news about this case in Pennsylvania, and I finally made the connection.”
GraBois perked up at the boy’s name. Now he took Jeremy Fischer more seriously. Very few people could know that Jose Ramos pronounced Etan’s name exactly that way. GraBois had learned about it only from talking to Ramos himself the day he all but confessed in the prosecutor’s office.
Fischer had incriminating things to offer up about other inmates, too. GraBois learned later that this was Fischer’s MO—picked up for his latest scheme, he would immediately roll over if it meant working a deal. He was always looking to make his information work for him, greasing whatever tight spot he was in. GraBois left thinking the Ramos information wasn’t going to help in and of itself, but maybe there was a way to put it to good use.
A jailhouse informant posed even more challenges than a snitch on the outside, although one advantage was he couldn’t drop out of sight; until he’s released, you always know where to find him. The downsides were numerous: An inmate was invariably attached to his lawyer, adding—really, multiplying—to the complexity of the negotiation. Communication was a bigger problem, and the loop of people who’d have to know about such an arrangement was wider. Most critically, you couldn’t easily solicit an inside informant; it wasn’t like you could make an announcement over some prison loudspeaker. So the fact that two separate sources in different locations had reached out was not just a gift horse, it was a surefire tip in the Belmont Stakes.
In the first weeks of the new year Stuart GraBois and Mary Galligan were on the phone nearly every day, strategizing. Could they get either one of the informants inside to get next to Ramos? How, without making him suspicious? This all had to be orchestrated very delicately, since Ramos was both paranoid and clever, and would be automatically on his guard. Was Jon Morgan a good candidate? Jeremy Fischer? Galligan needed to meet and assess both, but it was good to have options, and either way it certainly kept the door open.