Etan Patz

Case background and investigation

On the morning of May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Kalil Patz left his family's loft on Prince Street in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan to walk to his school bus stop alone for the first time. According to news accounts and later court records, he never boarded the bus and never arrived at school; he was reported missing that afternoon. His disappearance triggered one of the largest missing-child searches New York City had seen, and his face became one of the first to appear on milk cartons during the 1980s missing-children campaigns. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25, the anniversary of Etan's disappearance, as National Missing Children's Day, cementing the case as a landmark in the American missing-children movement.

For decades the case went unsolved. The most prominent early suspect was Jose Ramos, a convicted child molester who had been acquainted with a woman who briefly walked Etan and other children to the bus stop. Federal prosecutor Stuart GraBois pursued Ramos in the late 1980s and 1990s, and reporting notes Ramos made ambiguous statements about being with a boy the day Etan vanished, but he was never charged with the murder. In 2001 Etan was declared legally dead, and in 2004 a civil court awarded his parents a $2 million wrongful-death judgment against Ramos that was never collected. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. reopened the investigation on May 25, 2010.

The case shifted in May 2012, when police announced the arrest of Pedro Hernandez, who had worked at a SoHo convenience store in 1979. Authorities said Hernandez confessed to luring Etan with the promise of a soda, strangling him, and disposing of the body. A grand jury indicted him on second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping charges in November 2012. His first trial ended in a mistrial in May 2015 after jurors deadlocked, reported as 11-to-1 in favor of conviction. After a retrial, a jury found Hernandez guilty on February 14, 2017, and he was sentenced in April 2017 to 25 years to life. His defense argued throughout that his confession was false and unreliable, pointing to his low IQ and mental-health history.

On July 21, 2025, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the conviction, ruling that the trial judge had given a legally erroneous answer to a jury note during deliberations. Jurors had asked whether they must disregard Hernandez's later confessions if they found his initial, pre-Miranda statements involuntary; the judge answered simply, "No." The appeals court found this response "clearly wrong" and "manifestly prejudicial" and ordered that Hernandez be retried or released.

The legal outcome then reversed again. After the Manhattan District Attorney signaled an intent to retry Hernandez, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the matter and, on June 22, 2026, reinstated the conviction in a 6-3 unsigned opinion. The majority held that it was not "clearly established" federal law requiring the challenged jury instruction, and that the Second Circuit had exceeded its authority under federal habeas standards; Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. As of 2026, Hernandez's murder and kidnapping conviction and his 25-years-to-life sentence stand as reinstated. The DA's office had considered the matter resolved as a conviction; Etan Patz's remains have never been found.