Man convicted of killing Etan Patz, NY boy missing since 1979

A former store clerk is convicted of murder in one of America’s most haunting missing-child cases, nearly 38 years after 6-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on the way to his school bus stop in Manhattan.

Pedro Hernandez shows no reaction as jurors deliver their verdict. Hernandez, who once worked in a convenience store in the Jewish boy’s neighborhood, had confessed, but his lawyers said his admissions were the false imaginings of a mentally ill man.

This time, the jury deliberated over nine days before finding Hernandez, 56, guilty of murder during a kidnapping in a case that shaped both parenting and law enforcement practices in the United States.

The Patz family and authorities may never know exactly what became of the boy. No trace of him has been found since the May day he vanished, on the first day he got the grown-up privilege of walking alone to the bus stop about two blocks away in a then-edgy but neighborly part of lower Manhattan.

— AP