The man linked with the disappearance of Etan Patz, the 6-year-old boy who was walking to his school bus in Manhattan in 1979 has now been charged with murder, a judge said Wednesday.
Pedro Hernandez, 52, of Maple Shade, N.J. is accused of killing 6-year-old Etan Patz. The judge said Wednesday there was enough evidence to sustain the charges against Hernandez, according to the Associated Press.
The ruling moves the case toward a trial that would likely examine whether Hernandez' confession amounts to a mentally ill man's imaginings, as his defense claims.
"We're prepared to move forward to trial and show the people of New York that Pedro Hernandez had nothing to do with whatever happened to Etan Patz in 1979," defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein said after court, according to the report.
Etan Patz became the poster child for missing children around the nation. Patz's disappearance left investigators changing cold leads as the decades rolled on. Etan Patz became one of the first vanished children pictured on a milk carton.
Hernandez, 52, was arrested last May after police got a tip that he had confessed to friends years before that he had killed a child in New York City.
Hernandez confessed to authorities at the time that he enticed Ethan Patz by offering him a soda after seeing him waiting for the bus. He brought him to a corner store where Hernandez worked and choked the boy in the basement.
He then took Patz's limp body, placed it inside a box and threw it out in the trash about a block away from the store. The body has never been recovered till this day. His attorney, Harvey Fishbein, had argued that Hernandez has a long history of mental illness, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and contends that the confession was false. Hernandez is due back in court July 31.
