The 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz as he walked alone to his New York City bus stop for the first time shook the country and still resonates in the present.
The disappearance became a national media phenomenon, spurred police reform and a national missing children’s movement, and continues to be the subject of legal disputes to this day.
Patz was among the first of the missing “milk carton kids,” whose pictures were printed on milk cartons as police sought help in the 1980s in solving a string of shocking disappearances.
After a decades-long investigation, a former New York convenience store clerk, Pedro Hernandez, was arrested in 2012, then convicted of murder and kidnapping five years later after multiple trials.
But on Monday, a federal appeals court overturned his guilty verdict and its sentence of 25 years-to-life in prison, ordering a new trial for the now 64-year-old.
Here’s what to know about Etan’s disappearance and the investigation and prosecution that followed.
A nationwide search
Six-year-old Etan disappeared while walking to his Manhattan school bus stop alone for the first time on May 25, 1979.
Word of his disappearance spread quickly in the family’s native New York and beyond. Etan’s father Stanley was a professional photographer and the family estimates that hundreds of thousands of his poignant portraits of the boy spread in the years after the disappearance.
The child’s disappearance was seen as a national turning point, helping usher in an era of public safety panic, and “stranger danger” fears about leaving children unattended.
“Up until that time,” the Patz family’s attorney once told CNN, “all of us felt that our children had free rein of the streets. From that time on, we guarded our children so there would not be another Etan.”
More than 100 police officers became involved in a international search for Etan, that stretched as far as Israel, though his body was never found.
A lasting legacy
Etan may never have been found, but the activism of his parents and fellow missing-children advocates paved the way for thousands of cases to go in a different direction.
Etan’s story inspired President Ronald Reagan to proclaim the fourth anniversary of the boy’s disappearance, May 25, 1983, the country’s first National Missing Children’s Day.
The following year, the Patz family helped co-found the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an organization credited with helping law enforcement find hundreds of thousands of missing children since.
It was the phone number for that organization that was printed on milk cartons in 1984, when an Iowa dairy seeking to help after two local children went missing kicked off a national movement of “milk carton kids,” the trend now most famously tied to Etan himself.
In addition to these changes, his parents helped press for new laws encouraging police information sharing and establishing a national missing children’s hotline.
Milk carton kids gave way to the AMBER Alert system in 1996.
A surprising break in the case
Patz’s family had Etan legally declared dead in 2001.
In 2012, police got a tip about a potential suspect in the long-unsolved case.
Hernandez, who was 18 at the time Etan went missing, worked at a convenience store in the boy’s downtown Manhattan neighborhood.
Police encountered Hernandez in their initial investigations of the area, but didn’t consider him a suspect until it was alleged Hernandez told a relative about killing a child in New York.
There was no physical evidence against Hernandez, but police said the man confessed to luring Etan into the store’s basement with the promise of a soda then strangling him, putting the still-living child in a plastic bag then leaving it in a box in a nearby alley.
Hernandez’s lawyers have since said the confession, made during a marathon seven-hour interrogation, was a false one.
They have also argued the New Jersey man suffers from mental illness, a low IQ, and difficulty distinguishing between imagination and reality.
Initially, a confession was made before Hernandez was read his rights, though he repeated his admission on tape multiple times.
A pair of trials and remaining questions
After he confessed, Hernandez was tried twice, with a 2015 trial ending in a deadlock, and a second one two years later resulting in a guilty verdict and his lengthy sentence.
The conviction came despite the defense urging jurors to consider another longtime suspect, who had dated a woman who sometimes walked Etan home from school.
That man was later convicted of molesting boys in Pennsylvania, and once told federal authorities he interacted with a child he thought was Etan, on the day of the 1979 disappearance.
On Monday, a federal appeals court overturned the second verdict over the nature of an exchange between the jury and the judge during deliberations during the 2017 trial.
During that proceeding, the jury asked the judge whether it should disregard the later recorded confessions, if the first one, before Hernandez was read his rights, was deemed to be invalid.
The judge answered “no,” but the appeals court held the jury should have gotten a more detailed explanation of its options, including the possibility that all confessions tied to the case were invalid.
The appeals court ordered Hernandez to be released unless he received a new trial within “a reasonable period.”
