NEW YORK — A former convenience-store worker confessed to luring 6-year-old Etan Patz from a school bus stop in 1979 and choking him to death in a basement, police said Thursday, ending a three-decades-long investigation into one of the nation’s most baffling missing-children cases.
Pedro Hernandez, 51, of Maple Shade, N.J., was arrested after he told police he promised the boy a soda, took him to the basement of the convenience store where he worked and killed him, said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Hernandez told police he put Etan’s body in some trash a block from the store, Kelly said. It’s possible that sanitation crews picked it up.
No body has been recovered. Kelly said it’s possible the remains will never be found.
Hernandez was questioned by police for more than three hours after he was picked up Wednesday and gave police a signed confession, Kelly said. His motive was not yet clear.
It’s not clear whether he had an attorney. No one answered the door at Hernandez’s New Jersey home Thursday night.
“He was remorseful, and I think the detectives thought that it was a feeling of relief on his part” to confess, Kelly said.
Kelly said police have probable cause to believe Hernandez’s story is true because of specific details he gave to police.
Hernandez, who had worked as a stock clerk at the store for about a month and lived nearby, wasn’t questioned at the outset, Kelly said. He later told relatives, as far back as 1981, that he had “done something bad” and killed an unnamed child in New York City, he said.
After a search of a basement near Patz’s home last month hurtled the case back into the news, a tipster pointed police to Hernandez. Kelly said the person wasn’t a relative but knew that Hernandez had said he had done a bad thing, he said.
Hernandez left his job days after Etan disappeared and moved to New Jersey, where he had relatives, Kelly said.
Etan vanished while walking alone to his bus stop for the first time. The anniversary of his disappearance became National Missing Children’s Day in 1983.
