A Manhattan grand jury today indicted a mentally ill former SoHo bodega clerk on charges that he lured 6-year-old Etan Patz into a basement and killed him 33 years ago.
The panel found there was sufficient evidence to charge 51-year-old Maple Shade, NJ, resident Pedro Hernandez with second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping, according to the indictment.
It's a case many investigators are privately calling un-winnable.
Hernandez has been described by his defense lawyer as bipolar and suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations. A six-month investigation has yielded no additional evidence beyond Hernandez's four, original arrest confessions plus the word of six of Hernandez's church and family members, who have told cops that Hernandez made incriminating statements about having killed a child or "done something bad" in the past, according to sources.
Still -- thanks to the low level of proof required for an indictment -- grand jurors voted based on little more than Hernandez's confession statements and police testimony establishing that Patz went missing as he walked alone from his home to his school bus stop, and has not been heard from since, according to sources.
Manhattan prosecutors declined to characterize the strength of the case or reveal details of the investigation, instead issuing a statement lauding their process as deliberative and the evidence against Patz as pursuasive.
"We believe the evidence that Mr. Hernandez killed Etan Patz to be credible and persuasive, and that his statements are not the product of any mental illness. The grand jury has found sufficient evidence to charge the defendant and this is a case that we believe should be presented to a jury at trial.”
Meanwhile, Hernandez's lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, broke six months of telling reporters "no comment" with a lengthy written statement criticizing the DA's actions.
"Nothing that occurs in the course of this trial will answer what actually happened to Etan Patz," said Fishbein.
"The indictment is based solely on statements allegedly made by my client, who has, in the past, been repeatedly diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and who has, over the last six months, been found to suffer from schizotypal personality disorder, which is characterized by, among other things, unusual perceptual experiences, commonly referred to as hallucinations," the lawyer said.
"Partly as a result of that disorder, my client has an IQ in the borderline-to-mild mental retardation range. The statements alleged by the People are not supported by any evidence whatsoever despite extraordinary investigative efforts by the police back then and now.
"In addition, over the last 6 months, I have provided to the prosecutor twenty years of medical and psychiatric records, including psychiatric records from Bellevue Hospital (where my client was held for one month), the Department of Corrections (where my client has been held since July), and from experts retained by the defense who are world-renowned leaders in their fields.
"These experts are Dr. Michael First, the editor of the DSM IV, and Professor Gisli Gudjonsson, Emeritus Professor of Forensic Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London," the lawyer said.
Investigators have spent hundreds of man hours laboring in vain to build a case beyond Hernandez's own admissions and the heresy echoes of those admissions by his six family and church members, law enforcement sources have said.
Little Etan's disappearance prompted an international search and spawned a movement to publicize missing children cases.
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