New York: A man has implicated himself in the death of six-year-old Etan Patz, whose disappearance 33 years ago on his way to school helped launch a missing children's movement that put kids' faces on milk cartons, police said on Thursday.
Investigators were still trying to confirm details of the man's story. The development came just before the Friday anniversary of the boy's disappearance, when detectives traditionally receive a landslide of hoaxes and false leads related to the case.
"Let me caution you that there's still a lot of investigating to do," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
Pedro Hernandez was picked up late Wednesday in Camden, New Jersey, according to a law enforcement official, and was being questioned on Thursday by the Manhattan district attorney's office, which is heading the probe by the FBI and police.
Move to New Jersey
Hernandez worked at a bodega and lived in the same Manhattan neighbourhood as Patz, and moved to New Jersey shortly after the boy disappeared, the official said. He has been tied to the case in the past, but it was unclear what brought them back to him this week.
"An individual now in custody has made statements to NYPD detectives implicating himself in the disappearance and death of Etan Patz 33 years ago," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement.
Hernandez's emergence as a person of interest was not related to the search of a Manhattan basement in April, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
A woman who answered the door at Hernandez' Maple Shade, New Jersey, home confirmed he was in custody. Neighbours said he lived with a woman and a daughter who attends college.
"I can't believe something like that," Dan Wollick, 71, who rents the other apartment in the home said. "This guy, he doesn't seem that way."
Wearing a backpack with elephants printed on it, six-year-old Patz, a boy with sandy brown hair and a toothy grin, vanished on May 25, 1979, while walking alone to his school bus stop for the first time, two blocks from his home in New York's SoHo neighbourhood.
There was an exhaustive search by the police and a crush of media attention. The boy's photo was one of the first of a missing child on a milk carton. Thousands of fliers were plastered around the city, buildings canvassed, hundreds of people interviewed.
SoHo was not a neighbourhood of swank boutiques and galleries as now, but of working-class New Yorkers rattled by the news.
False leads
Patz' parents, Stan and Julie Patz, were reluctant to move or even change their phone number in case their son tried to reach out. They still live in the same apartment, down the street from the building that was examined in April. They have endured decades of false leads, and a lack of hard evidence.
The April excavation of a Manhattan basement yielded no obvious human remains and little forensic evidence that would help solve the decades-long mystery of what happened to the boy.
"I hope this is the end of it," Roz Radd, who lives a couple of blocks from the Patz family's home and knows Julie casually from walking dogs in the neighbourhood, said. "There's going to be hopefully closure to her, to know what happened to her son."
