A New York judge declined Friday to dismiss murder charges against Pedro Hernandez in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz, clearing the path for a third trial in a case that became emblematic of the nation’s missing-child crisis. Judge Michele Rodney rejected arguments from Hernandez’s lawyers that prosecutors waited too long to charge him and that he cannot receive a fair trial after decades of media coverage. “The court will carefully work, together with the parties, to ensure that jurors are selected who promise to be fair and to consider only the evidence and the law, despite what they have learned about the case from the media,” Rodney wrote.
The decision marks a critical juncture in a 47-year legal struggle that has tested both the boundaries of criminal justice and the memory of a national tragedy. Etan’s disappearance on the first unaccompanied walk to school became a turning point in American childhood—his image among the first on milk cartons—while Hernandez’s case has become a barometer of what justice is possible after decades of legal delay.
A Suspect Emerges
Hernandez, 65, has remained in custody since his 2012 arrest. He is scheduled to return to court in June for a status update; no trial date has been set.
The road to this third trial has wound through decades of investigation, from Etan’s disappearance in 1979 to the first tip about a potential suspect. Hernandez was a 19-year-old corner store clerk working in Etan’s neighborhood when the boy disappeared on May 25, 1979. He did not become a suspect until 2012, when investigators received a tip that he had told various people he had killed a child in New York.
The Confession and Its Challenge
After hours of police questioning and before being informed of his right to remain silent, Hernandez told police he had strangled Etan in the basement of his shop after enticing the boy with the offer of a soda. When read his rights and asked to recount his statement on video, Hernandez said: “Something just took over me.”
Defense lawyers have argued that all of Hernandez’s admissions amounted to false imaginings of a mentally ill and intellectually limited man, haunted and confused by the highly publicized tragedy that had occurred near his workplace.
The Trial History
The first trial, in 2015, ended in a hung jury. A 2017 retrial resulted in a conviction. But a federal appeals court later overturned that conviction, ruling that the 2017 trial judge had mishandled a jury question about the validity of Hernandez’s confessions.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has committed to retrying the case. Meanwhile, the office is also petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to restore the 2017 conviction, though the court is not obliged to hear the case and has not yet indicated whether it will.
A Turning Point in Childhood
Etan’s disappearance on what would have been a routine first unaccompanied journey became a turning point in American childhood. He was among the earliest missing children whose faces appeared on milk cartons, and the anniversary of his disappearance, May 25, became National Missing Children’s Day.
For nearly half a century, the case has endured through changing investigative techniques, shifting legal standards, and competing theories about what can be known from a confession given 33 years after the crime alleged to have occurred.