31 year old missing boy case reopened.

6 year old Ethan Patz disappeared in SoHo on his way to the school bus stop on May 25, 1979.


31 years later Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance has declared the case re-opened. Now, the Manhattan district attorney's office will take a fresh look at the evidence collected against the prime suspect, a convicted child molester named Jose Ramos, who is serving 20 yrs. In prison in Pennsylvania.

Vance's press secretary Erin Duggan declined to specify why the case has been reopened. Vance, who took office on Jan. 1st of this year, ran with a campaign to promise to reopen Ethan's case. The office said it cannot comment on open cases.

The search for Ethan was one of the most extensive missing child searches in history. He was the first child to be pictured on the side of a milk cartoon and president Ronald Reagan declared May 25th national missing child day in his honor.

In 1982 the Bronx police were questioning Ramos about suspected child molestation when he revealed that he had been involved with the Patz's former babysitter. However, this was not enough to convict him, and Ramos was released. Three years later in 1985, Ramos who then has been in prison for another child molestation case, was brought to New York to be questioned. He thought he was there for tax invasion, but when U.S attorney Stuart GraBois abruptly asked Ramos how many times did he have sex with Patz, Ramos “broke down”, GraBois told 60 minutes in 2000.

During his questioning, Ramos admitted to having taken a young boy back to his apartment and made physical sexual advances to him on May 25, 1979, and that he later recognized the boy as the same child Ethan Patz , who declared missing in the news and in the papers. Ethan was the only child mistress who went missing in Manhattan that day, GraBois told the Wall Street Journal yesterday. However, Ramos declared the boy had refused, and he had to let him go. The admission therefore doesn't constitute a full confession, and with hard evidence Grabois could not charge Ramos with the crime at that point.