Ethan Patz conviction being thrown out brings another prime suspect back into the picture

The missing child case of six-year-old Etan Patz ushered in the “stranger danger” era and a reckoning across the US as to how disappearances are handled.

Even though a conviction was secured in 2017, many involved in the case have never been satisfied.

A court ruled on Monday Pedro Hernandez should either be set free or re-tried. Although he had confessed to the 1979 murder of Patz, he had a documented history of mental illness and delusions. An appeals board found the judge had given the jury incorrect instructions during deliberations and threw the conviction out.

He may face court again, but the ruling brings back into focus the man who was originally the main suspect in Patz’ disappearance for decades – Jose Antonio Ramos.

“[Etan’s parents] Stanley Patz and Julie Patz certainly believe he murdered their child for a number of years,” Harvey Fishbein, a criminal defense attorney for Hernandez told The Post. 

Ramos, now 82, was friendly with a woman who babysat Patz and had been in the family’s house on the day of the disappearance.

An itinerant, he lived in a drainpipe which he furnished with a bed, religious items and, curiously, children’s toys. A police search also found Ramos had several pictures of him with young boys in his makeshift home, taken in Times Square near an X rated cinema.

Ramos once told a federal prosecutor that he was “90 percent sure” he met Etan near Washington Square Park the day he disappeared.

He admitted he tried to have sex with the blond haired, blue eyed boy, but the child refused. He claimed he then put the boy on a subway to Washington Heights.

“Trial testimony spoke about how [Ramos] molested the young child who looked a lot like Eton, who was the child the babysitter had taken care of.

“Six weeks prior, the babysitter was walking [Etan] home from school each day,” Fishbein told The Post.

In 1990 Ramos was convicted of sexually abusing an 8-year-old male minor in Warren, Pennsylvania.

He served 27 years in prison on two child sex offenses after also admitting having sex with a ten-year-old. He was released on Nov. 7, 2012, days before Hernandez was first charged with the murder and kidnapping of Etan on Nov. 14, 2012.

While in prison Etan’s parents brought civil charges against Ramos. In 2004, three years after Etan had been declared legally dead by a civil court judge, Ramos was found responsible for his death.  He refused to answer questions under oath about the child’s disappearance.

At that point he had also issued a denial that he ever kidnapped or killed the boy.

Etan’s parents, Stanley and Julie Patz, won a $2 million wrongful death lawsuit against Ramos, but he was never charged criminally.

In 2016, amid the prosecution of Hernandez they asked a judge to reverse the decision against Ramos.

In a sworn statement filed in court Stanley Patz said: “After sitting through the trial and hearing all the evidence, my wife and I — the parents of Etan Patz — now believe that Pedro Hernandez and not Jose Ramos was the perpetrator of this heartless crime.”

The Patz’s have since stopped commenting publicly on the case. Fishbein remains convinced they are wrong and Hernandez is not the guilty party.

“They were going to prosecute [Ramos] federally but there was no federal jurisdiction – the state didn’t pull the trigger because they didn’t have a confession, they didn’t have the forensics, the DNA.

“They had all the reasons – then, all the sudden, here is Pedro [Hernandez] confessing to it. There’s nothing physical to connect him to it, although he was working in that area in 1979, nothing he said could be corroborated,” Fishbein said.

“If the trial was Jose Ramos, he would have been convicted in a day, but Jose Ramos was not the defendant,” Fishbein said.

In Hernandez’s confession, acquired after a seven-hour police interview – during which he was given medication, including fentanyl, for his mental disorder – he told investigators he lured Etan into the bodega basement, strangled him, stuffed his still-breathing body into a produce box and dumped him in an alleyway a block and a half away.

The child’s body was never found and there are no witnesses that place Hernandez with Etan the day he vanished.

Hernandez’ first prosecution was declared a mistrial due to a hung jury in 2015, but he was then convicted after a second trial in 2017.

Ramos was arrested immediately after being released in 2012 for lying on a form about where he was going to stay. He is now out of prison but remains on the New York sex offender’s register. He is listed as a category three sexually violent offender, which is the most high-risk category, marked as of a “high risk of repeat offense” and a “threat to public safety exists.”

He also appears to have skipped the country, giving his last address in the Philippines.

For many, Etan’s case marked the end of a period of relative innocence in New York. The desperate search for him went national and he was the first child to be featured on the side of milk carts as a disappeared victim.

“I was with that little boy the day before [he went missing] sitting on the stoop. It was a nightmare. And it’s still a nightmare,” Susan Meisel, wife of Louis K. Meisel, who owns the art gallery that Etan passed on his way to the school bus for the last time, told The Post.

“I didn’t have a child at the time, but everyone that had children in the neighborhood – it changed their lives forever. People decided not to have baby sitters, not to have nannies, it changed a lot of things for the mothers in the neighborhood.

“A lot of the people who lived in the building [where Patz lived] moved.”

Julie and Stan Patz remained in their Prince Street loft in Soho, in hopes that their son would one day return, until 2019 when they quietly sold their home and relocated to Hawaii, The Post reported.

“It was a shock and a blow there were never really answers,” Meisel said.

In 1983, President Reagan created a day of memory for Etan on the anniversary of his disappearance on May 25, with the National Missing Children’s Day to raise awareness of all missing children everywhere.

 The Patz case also transformed the way law enforcement handles missing children’s cases, propelling the need for a national system feeding into the FBI crime database, as well as the inception of the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children. 

What’s more, it turbo-charged companies to get behind on searches for missing kids, with big box stores like Walmart posting photos of missing kids, among others.