The Etan Patz case gets stranger and stranger, with the latest news to come out of the 33 year old investigation being that the police might have overlooked a tip about the suspect years ago.
According to a relative of Pedro Hernandez, law enforcement was contacted in the 1980s after Hernandez confessed in a group setting about harming a boy in New York. But police thought the tipster might have been mad at Hernandez or had an ulterior motive for fingering him.
The tipster has got to be a woman. You don't see many men hunt down the police to rat on other men, typically. And it would have been just like a woman to make this next statement told to CNN.
"When he moved home, he was really nervous and shaking all the time. He constantly had diarrhea, and he spent a lot of time just looking out the window."
A woman would notice those things; a man likely wouldn't. In addition, police might discount a woman the way this confidential source claims they were discounted.
"You feel like they didn't believe you. I felt empty and a little bit mad. I was expecting something else."
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has gone on record officially to say that no one from Hernandez's family, or any spiritual advisor, ever contacted police with a tip.
That flies in the face of what the CNN source is saying. So who do you believe? The source who claims they told the police in the 1980s about Hernandez's confession—or the police, who've botched this case from the start?
It's no secret that police fielded an innumerable numbers of tips as they sought Etan Patz back then. And that they ran down all kinds of leads during the investigation in 1979. But a tip brought to them in the 1980s should have warranted more than a cursory glance, as the relative of Pedro Hernandez alleges.
One things for sure, however. The police were still going in the wrong direction in the Etan Patz case as late as this month, when they were tearing into a basement of another suspect in the case. So it's a good thing someone on the police force listened to the most recent tipster.
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Comments: 7 ( 1 removed by Hillary Hill )
Hernandez's daughter, who is in college now, may not have ever been told of her father's history for reasons many families keep histories from their own children now.
She wasn't even born back then, of course, so she would have had to have been told by someone else. Her mother, who may not have married Hernandez until years after the tip, may not have even known he "confessed" to the group either.
Believe it or not, some men's parents, siblings and relatives do keep things from their new wives about their bad pasts. So it is possible that no one ever told her...including him, since the "confession" was allegedly made years ago and no other crimes have been tied to him since.
The tipster appears to have made one try at telling and when the police didn't take them seriously then they didn't push it with the family or anyone else after that...until that NY basement started getting searched, of course. And then they may have thought someone might listen now. And someone did.
You could be right about the tip line call, about her speaking with someone and getting referred to another, who didn't follow up. That did happen back then, for sure, as all those old cases that still aren't closed attest.
Telling the cops is a whole lot different from telling the person who ends up being engaged to the suspect. For one thing, the cops can keep it quiet that you're their tipster...as they are doing now.