A Boy Vanishes; A Man Never Stops Caring

It remains the one case that Stuart GraBois can’t shake.

The former prosecutor still imagines 6-year-old Etan Patz, baseball cap on his head, walking solo to his school bus for the first time--and never boarding it. He dwells on Etan’s parents, whose son--who would now be 25--was taken before his seventh birthday.

“I think I’ll always carry that with me,” GraBois reflected.

NYPD case No. 836, officially listed as a “stranger abduction,” is better known as the incident that forever altered American parenting, put the photos of lost children on milk cartons, turned May 25, the date of Etan’s disappearance, into National Missing Children’s Day.

“I think of that little kid, and what he thought at the moment he realized that he was in trouble,” continued GraBois, now a union benefits fund official, sitting in his Manhattan office. “I can’t forget that.”

He hasn’t. GraBois, who joined the case as an assistant U.S. attorney in 1985, has emerged as the public point man on the 19-year-old case that instigated a worldwide search, with pictures of the missing Etan posted in 60 countries.

It was GraBois who recently declared, without elaboration, that evidence indicated Etan was dead.

And it is GraBois, a close friend of Etan’s father, who has made a mission of keeping a Pennsylvania pederast behind bars. Although the man has never been charged in the Patz abduction, GraBois accuses him of kidnapping and killing the blond-haired, blue-eyed child.

Convicted sexual offender Jose Antonio Ramos, 55, is “a demon, devoid of any decency,” GraBois said two days after this year’s anniversary of Etan’s disappearance. Ramos, convicted of sexually molesting two boys, is serving a 13 1/2-to-27-year jail term.

It was GraBois who put him there.

He pursued Ramos to rural Pennsylvania in 1990, intent on solving the Patz mystery. In an extraordinary legal move, the Manhattan prosecutor was declared a Pennsylvania deputy state attorney general and reopened a four-year-old child sex case against Ramos.

With his new powers, GraBois grilled Ramos about Etan’s disappearance. The prosecutor wanted a confession, wanted to end the years of tortured waiting by Etan’s parents, Stan and Julie Patz.

But Ramos, the friend of a Patz family baby-sitter, offered only teasing bits of information: Yes, he had picked up the boy on the morning of May 25, 1979, and tried to sexually abuse him. No, he had not killed him; he had put him on a northbound subway near the boy’s SoHo home.

It was another in an endless series of dead ends. Ramos, already serving time for molesting a 7-year-old boy, pleaded guilty in November 1990 to the Pennsylvania charge. GraBois eventually accepted the Manhattan district attorney’s decision: Without a confession, there was no case against Ramos.

The prosecutor, however, never abandoned the case. He kept in touch with investigators. He made sure that he stayed in the loop even after leaving the U.S. attorney’s office in 1993. He maintained contact with Stan Patz, who had become a friend.

In GraBois’ office, a courtroom artist’s drawing of the former prosecutor at Ramos’ sentencing hangs on the wall. But GraBois insists that he is not the Inspector Javert of the Patz case.

“I’m not obsessed,” GraBois insisted, his voice even. “The cases that stick with you are the very significant cases. And I happen to be fond of Stanley as an individual.”

Ramos’ response? The inmate “wants nothing to do with reporters,” said Jim Forr, the public information officer for the State Correctional Institution at Frackville, Pa.

GraBois won’t say if the Patz family shares his belief that Etan is dead, and the family no longer speaks with reporters. But Stan and Julie Patz have long held out hope that their missing boy is somewhere out there.

The misty morning when Etan fell off the face of the earth irreversibly altered the nation’s attitude toward missing children. It put a human face on a statistic: 12,000 children abducted each year.

The face was Etan’s--his unevenly chopped hair, his moon-shaped eyes, his crooked smile. Parents became instantly aware of the threat to their children, a threat that ends in death 300 times a year. A national day was established, and a national center to find missing children.

GraBois said Etan’s legacy goes further. The Ramos prosecution, prompted by the Patz case, “saved other children from similar fates.”

GraBois and Stan Patz intend to protect that legacy. Ramos comes up for parole on Sept. 13, 2000. GraBois, as the prosecutor in the case, intends to address the parole board.

Etan’s father cannot speak, because Ramos was never convicted of a crime against his son. But he will accompany his friend, the former prosecutor, to Pennsylvania.

“Stan and I,” GraBois promised, “both plan to be there.”