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Monday, April 23, 2012

FBI says search for Etan Patz ends with no new clues


The massive basement dig in search of missing SoHo boy Etan Patz ended with no human remains or blood found below a neighborhood building targeted by investigators, law enforcement officials said today.

FBI agents, assisted by NYPD cops, had been blasting through cement below 127B Prince St. since Thursday morning, but indefinitely suspended their excavation last night with little to show.

“The FBI has concluded the on-site portion of the search," a spokesman said. "The street and local businesses will be re-opened.”

The walls had no trace of blood, according to field tests conducted at the site, law enforcement sources told The Post. And it appeared that no human bones were in the cement, sources said.

Strands of hair were discovered but they don’t appear to match the blond locks of six-year Etan, who left his building at 113 Prince St. the morning of May 25, 1979, and hasn’t been seen since. Investigators are also not sure if the hair was human, sources said.

Investigators haven’t totally given up hope in finding clues in the basement and have sent blocks of cement to an FBI lab in Quantico, Va., for further analysis.

In 1979, the basement was the domain of Othniel Miller, a now-75-year-old handyman who did odd jobs around the Patz neighborhood. Cops interviewed Miller during the initial search for Etan after noticing freshly poured concrete on the basement floor, but they never dug it up.

Miller’s lawyer, Michael Farkas, yesterday said his client has been falsely maligned and accused — and likened the release of “unconfirmed information” to Florida’s Trayvon Martin shooting case.

“Mr. Miller decries these efforts to sully his good reputation and destroy his family,’’ Farkas said. “He has absolutely no responsibility for the terrible tragedy that befell young Etan Patz, and he grieves for Etan’s fate, as all New Yorkers have for decades.”

Meanwhile, a retired NYPD detective who worked the Patz case in the 1990s said he’s not optimistic about the basement search.

“Are they going to find something? I give it a 10 percent chance,” he said. “But I will never say that they are going in the wrong direction. As a detective, you always trace any lead you get.”

The retired cold-case cop said the search for Etan had led probers to several locations — first to a home in Vermont where pedophiles lived and then to a private house in Westchester County where, a jailhouse snitch told cops, the child was murdered.

The snitch then told cops that the child was buried on a large tract of private land upstate.

Police had been tipped off to the informant by true-crime writer Maury Terry, who had been talking with another snitch and was told by that source about the possible new Etan angle.

New York cops grilled the informant for hours, the detective recalled. By the time cops found the house more then a decade after Patz had disappeared, it had changed owners. No charges were ever filed. “We didn’t have enough probable cause, and we didn’t have corroboration of [all the snitch’s] statements,” he said.

Another person questioned in the case is Jesse Snell, who had worked with Miller and was seen in the SoHo building the day Etan disappeared, NBC reported.

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