Walking down Prince Street in SoHo today, few traces remain of the tragedy that took place 46 years ago and struck fear into parents across New York City – changing the way missing children’s cases are investigated across America forever.
Wealthy New Yorkers and tourists shop in the designer stores now lining the two blocks between the family home of 6-year-old Etan Patz and the bus stop he never made it to one morning back in 1979.
A group of Manhattanites are overheard musing about the food at celebrity haunt Nobu, totally unaware they are retracing the final footsteps ever taken by the little boy.
A worker at a novelty socks store has no idea that his workplace sits on the site of the former shop where the Etan met a horrific end in a case that went unsolved for almost four decades.
But for some old-time residents, the disappearance of the boy known as the ‘Prince of Prince Street’ is something the passage of time won’t let them forget.
‘It was a devastating time,’ Susan Meisel, a longtime resident and owner of the Louis K. Meisel Gallery, told the Daily Mail.
‘We were all very close in the neighborhood and it was a very tragic, horrible, horrible, horrible thing.’
Now in her 80s, it’s clear that it’s still a heartbreaking thing to talk about all these years later.
THEN: Etan and Julie Patz stand on the second-floor fire escape of their loft on 113 Prince Street
NOW: The loft at 113 Prince Street is in the affluent SoHo neighborhood where designer stores are at every turn
Meisel still remembers seeing little Etan just one day before it all happened.
‘I was with the kid the day before,’ she recalls.
‘We were sitting outside the gallery with him and I put my arm around him. And I said, “You’re so lucky, you know, your parents love you.”‘
It was the morning of May 25, 1979, when everything changed for the Patz family, their close-knit SoHo neighborhood and parents everywhere.
For some time, Etan had been begging his mom, Julie Patz, to let him walk the two blocks to the school bus stop alone.
It was a walk that should have only taken two minutes.
That morning, Julie finally relented and waved him off from their loft at 113 Prince Street.
Dressed in his favorite Eastern Airlines cap, carrying a bag adorned with little elephants and armed with a $1 bill to buy a soda on the way, the 3-foot-4 inch boy headed west along Prince Street toward the bus stop at West Broadway.
He was never seen alive again.
It was only when he didn’t return from school that afternoon that the harrowing realization dawned.
On May 25, 1979, Etan Patz vanished on the two-minute walk from his home to his bus stop
A huge search was launched to find little Etan, with police canvassing the neighborhood for clues.
The tight-knit SoHo community, a creative enclave long considered a safe place to raise a family, wrapped its arms around Etan’s devastated parents, Stan and Julie, brother Ari, 2, and sister Shira, 8.
Meisel, a neighbor and friend of the Patz family, said the impact on the neighborhood was colossal.
‘It was a tragic time… it was huge because we were all friends,’ she recalled.
‘It was very close knit. We were all artists, everybody knew each other. We all worked in the neighborhood.’
Etan’s name instantly conjures sad memories for another longtime resident.
‘Everybody was trying to figure out what happened to that child,’ the elderly woman, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1968, told the Daily Mail.
‘The poor parents were going nuts.’
Etan’s dad Stan and brother Ari Patz hold a photo of the missing six-year-old in 1985
While she didn’t know the Patz family personally, she said it was ‘a very small community’ at the time where everyone knew of each other.
‘I saw the boy every so often. It was terrible. It appeared to be and was a very safe community – and then this horrible thing happened,’ she recalled.
As the search for Etan threw up no clues, rumors swirled in the neighborhood about what may have happened – and who might be responsible.
‘A lot of people had thoughts,’ the woman said.
‘[Someone would say], “Oh you know, there’s a little bodega – it must have been somebody who worked there.” And somebody else would say, “It must be somebody from something or another.” Basically nobody had any idea.’
For parents living in the area and further afield, the thought that this could happen in a place where everyone knew and looked out for one other was chilling.
‘The artists were all friends. Everybody had children. It was terrifying, absolutely and positively terrifying,’ Meisel says.
The 1970s was a time before fears of child abductions plagued parents and the concept of ‘stranger danger’ was drilled into the consciousness of their children.
Etan Patz’s disappearance changed the way missing children cases are investigated
Etan’s disappearance – followed by a handful of other high-profile missing children, cases including the abduction of Adam Walsh two years later – changed all that.
He became one of the very first ‘milk carton kids’ whose face was plastered across milk containers and shopping bags across the country as part of a missing children campaign.
His disappearance also inspired the creation of the nonprofit National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and prompted President Ronald Reagan to proclaim May 25 as National Missing Children’s Day in his memory.
Despite the attention and legacy of Etan’s case, decades passed before his parents learned what had happened to their six-year-old son.
For a long time, a local man named Jose Ramos was the prime suspect.
Ramos was a convicted pedophile who had been in a relationship with a woman previously hired by the Patz family. The woman would walk Etan and other children in the neighborhood home from school during a bus strike.
The family was so convinced of his guilt that Etan’s father would send Ramos a message every year reading: ‘What did you do to my little boy?’
The family also pursued and won a $4million civil wrongful death case against him.
Yet, despite dogged investigators pursuing Ramos for years, he was never charged.
Convicted pedophile Jose Ramos (left) was long the prime suspect. In 2012, cops then zeroed in on handyman Othniel Miller (right)
Search teams excavate the basement of Othniel Miller’s former workshop in 2012
Then, in 2012, another lead came in the case when investigators swooped in on 127 Prince Street – between Etan’s home and the bus stop – looking for his remains.
The site used to be the workshop of local handyman Othniel Miller, who knew Etan and had given him $1 the day before he disappeared.
The basement floor had been newly poured with concrete around the time Etan went missing, a police source told CNN in 2012.
Miller had also once been accused by his ex-wife of raping a 10-year-old girl. He denied the allegation and was never charged.
Search teams excavated the basement and cadaver dogs were brought in, but nothing was found.
Instead, it would be a name never on anyone’s radar that would solve the decades-old mystery of the Prince of Prince Street.
Not long after the 2012 search, police received a tip about a man named Pedro Hernandez.
Back in May 1979, Hernandez was 18 and working in a bodega at 448 West Broadway, on the corner of West Broadway and Prince Street, right by Etan’s bus stop.
Days after the boy vanished, he suddenly moved to New Jersey.
NYPD evidence shows the bodega where Etan was lured and killed on May 25, 1979
Before long, he began telling multiple people he had killed a child back in the city.
When questioned by police, Hernandez confessed.
He told police he had lured little Etan into the basement of the bodega with the offer of a soda.
Once inside, he choked the little boy, wrapped him in a plastic bag and a box, and dumped his body among trash a couple of blocks away.
Despite Hernandez’s warped confession, doubts lingered over his guilt.
A mistrial was declared in his first trial in 2015 after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict because of a sole holdout.
The defense had argued his confession was the figment of imagination of a man with a low IQ, a personality disorder and a history of hallucinations about demons who was then subjected to a seven-hour police interrogation.
The defense also argued Ramos was the likely killer – with a jailhouse informant testifying he once confessed to molesting the victim.
When Hernandez went on trial a second time in 2017, jurors returned a guilty verdict. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Pedro Hernandez was convicted of six-year-old Etan Patz’s murder at his second trial in 2017
Julie and Stanley Patz at Pedro Hernandez’s sentencing. They have since moved to Hawaii
To this day, Etan’s remains – and his favorite cap and elephant bag – have never been found.
It’s a heartbreaking conclusion to a case that plagued the Big Apple for decades.
Two years after the trial, the Patz family, who had always stayed in their Prince Street loft waiting for their son to come home, moved to Hawaii. The family did not respond to requests for an interview.
And, over the years, the streets of SoHo have moved on.
Designer stores from Ferrari to Prada to Louis Vuitton continue to move in as the neighborhood has transformed into a luxury shopping district.
The fire escape from the loft where Julie and Stan were famously pictured looking longingly for clues about their missing son now overlooks a luxury clothing store.
The elderly woman who has called the area home since 1968 laughed when asked how much the neighborhood has changed.
‘When we first moved to West Broadway, we were the only tenants on the block,’ she said.
‘It was all sort of nothing, businesses that were closing. And then it became filled with artists… then it got too expensive for most artists… so the artists moved to Brooklyn and fancy businesses and wealthy people came. And that’s how it is now.’
Besides the few old-timers still on the block, 46 years later, the haunting case of the Prince of Prince Street appears to be little more than a distant memory.
TODAY: The bus stop once stood at Prince Street and West Broadway (left). A turquoise cybertruck parks along Prince Street (right)
The bodega that housed a horrifying secret for almost four decades is now a socks store
Today, several street vendors selling tourist wares and passersby walking past the high-end stores and a monstrous turquoise Cybertruck parked up along Prince Street say they have never heard of the case at all.
And the bodega that housed a horrifying secret for almost four decades has gone through many transformations over the years – most recently as a Happy Socks store selling colorful and novelty socks.
Inside, a part-time worker is shocked to hear what took place at that very spot years before.
‘It’s just surprising. I had no idea,’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘I’ve been working here for about two years and I had no idea.’
He revealed that the store is actually closing down in the coming days – soon becoming yet another remnant of Prince Street’s forgotten past.
