Prosecutor Fences with Ex-Prosecutor at Patz Trial

By Elizabeth Elizalde

The Etan Patz murder trial turned hostile on Tuesday when the current prosecutor questioned the credibility of a former investigator who hunted down a convicted child molester, once a prime suspect in the case.

Retired federal prosecutor Stuart GraBois, a key witness for the defense got into a verbal exchange on cross-examination by Assistant DA Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, who is trying to convict former bodega clerk Pedro Hernandez for the murder of the six- year-old boy in 1979.

GraBois got Jose Ramos, a pedophile serving more than 25 years in jail, to admit that he was “90 percent sure,” the boy he picked up from Washington Square Park looked like Patz. One of the first questions Grabois asked Ramos in the June 1988 interrogation was, “How many times did you have sex with Etan Patz?” but Ramos denied the allegations.

“He never said he killed Etan Patz,” GraBois told jurors and emphasized that Ramos made no incriminating statements regarding the boy’s disappearance.

Patz vanished in his SoHo neighborhood while walking to a school bus stop. Hernandez told investigators in a 2012 videotape confession that he killed the boy without a motive but there is no forensic evidence tying him to the murder. Patz’s body was never found.

Hernandez’s attorneys claim that he falsely confessed to the crime as a result of his mental illness. A psychiatrist testified earlier in the trial and diagnosed the defendant with schizotypal personality disorder, which limits his ability to distinguish reality from fiction. The defense is now trying to inject jurors with doubt that Ramos is the right man to convict and not Hernandez.

Ramos is allegedly linked to Patz because he dated Susan Harrington, the babysitter hired by the Patz’s to walk their son home from school during a bus strike. GraBois didn’t know of their romantic relationship at the time, but knew Ramos used to entice little boys into the drainpipes he lived in.

In order to get Ramos to confess, GraBois said he held up a blank sheet of paper in front of him to make him believe he had a witness. Illuzzi-Orbon questioned the former prosecutor’s tactic and insinuated he was a liar.

“I didn’t have a witness,” GraBois said.

“So it was a lie?” the prosecutor asked him.

“No, it was a ploy,” the witness fired back.

Eventually, Ramos came clean to investigators but decided to plead the Fifth Amendment without further cooperating in the case.

“I’ll tell you about it,” Ramos told GraBois. “I want to get it off my chest,” he said.

Ramos described the moment he took the boy back to his apartment to have sex with him and gave him apple juice before feeling him up. After the boy rejected Ramos’s desires, he said he put him on a subway Washington Heights bound, but GraBois didn’t believe him.

A psychic was brought into the mix when she tipped investigators about a “psychic vision” she had of a boy. GraBois contemplated whether the psychic was a “wacko,” but found her to be “legit,” when she said she saw “children’s clothing,” “a body,” and “balloons,” along the East River where she had predicted.

Tension between Illuzzi-Orbon and GraBois escalated when the prosecutor called him out for not following up on the case and the defensive GraBois struck back to say he “left no stone unturned,” and was determined to resolve the case.

Judge Maxwell Wiley wasn’t fond of the showdown and scolded both sides.

“It’s been heated and aggressive and I don’t like it,” Wiley said.