Etan Patz. Those two words are code.  To many Americans and to an entire generation of New Yorkers - the two words are synonymous with the terror of suddenly, mysteriously, losing a child forever.

On May 25th, 1979 six-year-old Etan Patz vanished sometime between 8 and 8:10 a.m., somewhere between his home and the school bus stop. He was walking the two short blocks solo for the very first time. His smiling face on the posters, billboards and tabloid front pages that took his place tugged at America’s heartstrings in a singular way.  Like another iconic New York tragedy - Kitty Genovese’s brutal stabbing death as neighbors turned a deaf ear to her anguished cries for help – the Patz case didn’t touch most of us personally, yet it somehow went beyond the purely shocking, to fundamentally alter our collective perceptions. And like events of more historical significance - the Kennedy assassination or September 11th – Etan Patz’s disappearance off his own street in broad daylight is a moment frozen in time.  A bridge leading us away from a more innocent world, where such horror couldn’t possibly happen, to a darker one, where it did.

Today our President doesn’t travel unprotected in an open car like John F. Kennedy did in 1963. Americans stand acceptingly in long lines at the airport and uneasily scrutinize the faces around us; and when a scream is heard outside our window in the early morning hours, we think twice about ignoring it.  Thirty years after Etan vanished, his case has also changed our cultural landscape in ways that we take for granted: about our children’s safety, their independence, our peace of mind.

Today some of the children missing in 1979 would be found more readily, with the help of resources like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Amber Alerts.  Today, our children learn about “good touch, bad touch,” family security passwords, and for better or worse, they’re intensely aware of stranger danger. So are the parents, the ones who don’t let their kids walk alone to school these days; schedule them to the hilt with supervised playdates; and shake their heads sadly because those same children live in fear of the world outside their backyards.  For most of those parents, the Patz case seems like a mythic, cautionary tale, an artifact of a past era. But quite a few of them remember the Patz case vividly. One mother recently told me, with tears in her eyes, “It changed everything.”

Whenever I mention my years of reporting on the case to one of those parents, I get that immediate jolt of recognition, like a current of electricity, followed by a rush of questions.

“Didn’t the parents split up?” “Wasn’t the boy in Israel?”  “I heard they caught the kidnapper and he’s serving life.” The answers that I give surprise people and inevitably lead to more questions.  Until this account, the first book ever written on the case, no one has unraveled the details of this decades-long mystery.

So little is known publicly about the case itself. It has remained an ongoing investigation for the past 30 years, which means that a curt, official “No comment” by authorities has always precluded a full account.  But bit by bit, as over the last two decades I produced television reports on the story for both ABC and CBS News, then spent four years researching this book, I’ve been able to piece together a narrative that continues to amaze me. I found a mix of detective story, human drama and a thousand other twists and turns, as I traced the case from its origin in 1979 to its conclusion…of sorts, twenty-five years later.

I started reporting this story in the fall of 1990, when as a fledgling ABC News producer at the network's startup magazine “PrimeTime Live,” I was handed a newspaper article literally "ripped from the tabloids."  The New York Daily News’ Joanne Wasserman had followed a New York Federal Prosecutor to Pennsylvania, in his own pursuit of a prime suspect in the Etan Patz case.  “KEY TO THE PATZ PUZZLE?” read the bold headline running over a photo taken from high above a man sitting at his desk. A poster of Etan Patz emblazoned with the words "STILL MISSING" was prominent among the stacks of case files surrounding it. Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart GraBois looked straight into the camera, radiating determination and purpose. That impression was confirmed as I scanned the article, about an extraordinary move on GraBois’ part, to be sworn in as a deputy prosecutor in Pennsylvania in order to go after the man he believed had kidnapped Etan Patz, by prosecuting him on a completely different case.

“Check out this story,” my boss, senior producer Betsy West said, thrusting the article at me. “If it’s something for us, and you can get it, we’d let you produce it yourself.” It would be my first producer credit on the show, and I was out the door. My first trip was shorter than the Daily News’ Wasserman’s, a subway ride downtown to catch GraBois in the U.S. Attorney’s Office a few blocks from City Hall.  I came away intrigued by his passion and force, even more pronounced in person.  And so I joined the ranks of other journalists, like Wasserman, but also former WNBC crime reporter John Miller, and a coterie of stalwarts for whom this little boy’s story had burrowed irretrievably under the skin.  I eventually went to Pennsylvania too, and many other places, tracking this remarkable tale.

Crime stories are the bread and butter of television magazine shows, but they had never particularly appealed to me.  I preferred the subjects of my stories to be alive, and often the only living figure in a crime drama is the bad guy. I also preferred my subjects to be the good guys, the ones who showed viewers their humanity. So what initially drew me to this story wasn’t the crime part.  I had no children, so I couldn’t relate as a parent.  In 1979 I didn’t live in New York City, didn’t live through the power this case held over its inhabitants.  In 1990, what tugged at me was the unlikely intersection the Patz case had with the one in Pennsylvania, where another small victim, shoved aside by the system, had now been championed.  And the way that fate, resolve and exemplary detective work had combined against the odds to see justice served.

When my report finally aired on PrimeTime Live more than a year later, it featured a chilling appearance by Jose Ramos, his first and only television interview ever.   But his bad juju was overshadowed by an unlikely group of natural opponents who had overcome their differences to join forces against him.  I got to tell my story about the good guys, and I was hooked – on both a career and this particular story.  Along the way I’d developed an admiration for the prosecutor Stuart GraBois and his tenacious pursuit of the case. 

“You can’t just say it’s over,” he said at the end of the story, “because it’s not over.”

It wasn’t.  Ten years later I was at CBS News and produced a follow up for “60 Minutes II” with the first interview in over a decade of Etan’s father Stanley Patz. He had turned me down – politely – for the earlier piece at ABC, but for reasons that will become clear as this story unfolds, in 2000 he felt such a pressing need to come forward that he overcame his natural reserve.  And I found someone else who inspired me with his grace and strength.

By the time I sat down with him, Stan Patz knew what had happened to his son. But he talked vividly about the nights he’d lain awake, trying to imagine an explanation that would make sense. It wouldn’t ease the pain of losing Etan, but the not knowing was, for the Patzes, worse. Should his son’s death be mourned? Should his family try to move forward with their lives?  Should Etan’s toys be thrown away? Or was he not dead at all, but out there, somewhere, trying to get home? The need for answers drove Stan as much as anything else, and in turn it drove those around him who wanted desperately to help. Stan and Julie Patz are two ‘everymen’ - a childcare worker and a commercial photographer - whose lives would almost certainly have gone unchronicled except that they lived through what is always referred to as a parent’s worst nightmare.  And then they lived through its aftermath, and an unfathomable mystery, and they endured.  They are both wise, kind, empathetic people whose wryly humorous take on life and basic faith in others has seen them through not just a tragic moment, but the years that followed while they, and so many others, searched to find answers.

While reporting the story, I have interviewed more than two hundred people, including the Patzes themselves and their extended family, friends and neighbors, reporters, bystanders and policy experts. I’ve also spent endless hours talking to a long list of former investigators. They were the cops, FBI agents, attorneys and others in law enforcement who threw themselves into the search like they were looking for their own child.   One of them said this to me, and it bears repeating: It is always easier to investigative a crime going backwards in time.   Likewise, making judgments with the benefit of hindsight serves no purpose. This book is not an attempt find fault and lay blame.  Rather this book fills in the gaps, clarifies and sets several records straight about the trail of this case up to current day.

A few notes about methodology – first and foremost I could not have written this book without my primary collaborator and consultant, Stuart GraBois, who joined forces with me to ensure a faithful retelling of the story. Throughout this process, I turned to GraBois to corroborate, to hash through conflicting accounts, and to point me toward other sources when either he didn’t have information or because of legal constraints couldn’t give it to me.  He also read multiple versions of this book and corrected my language and occasional misperceptions. 

Beyond the hundreds of interviews I conducted, scores with Stuart GraBois and Stan Patz alone, I also pored through every available article on the case, and spoke with many of the reporters who wrote them.   The Patzes were gracious enough to offer me unfettered access to their copious files of news clips, personal correspondence and documents. This included 25 years worth of phone logbooks in which they recorded virtually every call and which ultimately became almost a faithfully kept family diary.  From those first days in 1979, the police taught them to record their every activity, and in the interests of cracking this case, Stan and Julie Patz were vigilant. The vast files served me well as primary source material in a story so distant in time to everyone I interviewed and so traumatic to some, that memories could hardly be my only resource.   I also spoke to Julie Patz on several occasions, although much less often than her husband, and I relied more heavily on lengthy early interviews she gave to the media, and her personal writings over the years.  The Patzes asked for one caveat, to which I easily acceded.  Their eldest child, wishing to guard her privacy, asked not to be included in the book, and I agreed, beyond a few important early scene-setting mentions.

But what the Patz family gave me was just one small part of my extensive body of research.  I immersed myself in court transcripts and documents; investigative reports; videotape archives and actualities from the time. Citing the case’s ongoing status, neither the New York Police Department, nor the District Attorney’s Office of the County of New York would make official comment. Jose Ramos also declined several requests to be interviewed for this book, but I was able to dip back into primary source material for conversations with him from my TV days. A self-avowed pack rat, I had held onto all my notes and original material since I first undertook the research and reporting of this case in the early 1990s. I also found that to be true of many of the subjects I interviewed – it was astonishing to see how many reporters and investigators still kept their files on this case buried in an attic, or hidden beneath their current work in a desk or cabinet nearby. 

When at all possible, dialogue in this book has been taken faithfully from transcripts, but by the very nature of this far-reaching story, many of the conversations have been reconstructed, based on historical records and interviews with at least one - and often more than one - of the parties present.  In a very few instances, particularly those involving victims of sexual abuse or their family members, I have changed names. In addition, there are two notable sources whose lives could be endangered behind prison walls by identifying them publicly, and I have changed their names as well.  In those two cases, I have seen timely corroborating documentation and interviewed other credible sources that back up the two mens’ lengthy conversations with me over several years.

Finally, all of the accounts I read and people I spoke to, whether they were searchers or survivors, inspired and moved me forward in the long pursuit of this story.  Although what follows in these pages was triggered by a terrible tragedy, what it’s really about, and what has always resonated for me, is what happened to the men, women and children whose lives were touched by one little boy after he vanished. Through 25 years of this unfolding mystery, life went on – agonizing, suspenseful, frustrating, even comedic, since that is what real life can be at the worst of times. Much of what followed that one day was not tragic.

The search to solve the mystery of Etan Patz’s disappearance is a heart-breaking story, but it’s not just a true crime story.  What happened to Etan Patz on May 25th, 1979 was a truly terrible crime. What happened afterwards is a story of true heroes.

HELP FROM ALL OVER

…“Hold on,” The Missing Persons detective put his hand up to stop Bill Sillery from saying anything more as he picked up the phone.  He talked to someone for a few minutes; then hung up. 

“Stu GraBois’s sending his people over to get you,” he said.  “He’d like to meet you.” Two men appeared soon afterwards and Sillery was escorted to One St. Andrews Plaza.

By late 1987, along with a full, unrelated caseload, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart GraBois had been working the Patz case for over two years, and within New York law enforcement circles the two names were usually mentioned in the same sentence.   He cast the net as wide as he could for new leads, and lobbied aggressively for support. At cocktail parties, he was wont to corner anyone with the resources to help his cause. He would stop at nothing.  No matter whom Bill Sillery might have approached with his information, they probably would have picked up the phone to call Stu GraBois. 

And it wasn’t just the Patz case that made people turn to GraBois. Over the last several years, Federal interest in sex crimes in general, and child exploitation cases in particular, had grown.  Interstate travel of abused children, the possibility of linked networks; child porn mailed cross-country thru the U.S. postal system; these cases were all getting more scrutiny.  Within the Southern District of New York, the uptick of new cases was being funneled to GraBois, because of his experience in the Patz case. Eventually, he was asked to oversee all the cases generated by the Sexual Exploitation of Children Task Force, a joint venture between New York police and the FBI that also called on U.S. Marshals, Customs, and Postal Inspectors.

Now he was learning about heinous crimes he’d never before even conceived of. Earlier that year, he’d prosecuted a New Jersey man whose victims were infants as young as four months.  The crimes against such small victims so appalled him that GraBois had gone at his defendant particularly hard, asking for the absolute max after the man had pled out. And in one sense the defendent got the max.  He shot himself the week before sentencing, and left a lengthy note blaming GraBois’ tough stance.

“I’m assuming prosecution will not be proceeding with this case,” said the judge at the subsequent court hearing where the defense moved to dismiss. “That depends, your Honor,” GraBois answered coolly. “I need to see proof first. Does defense have a coroner’s report?”  He had no sympathy for the defendant – and he wanted to be sure the man wasn’t pulling a scam.

GraBois had also heard plenty of farfetched stories like Bill Sillery’s. Soon after he’d finished with the baby molester, the prosecutor and one of his investigators had even flown to Chicago to hear from an institutionalized woman with multiple personality disorder who claimed she’d witnessed her father sacrificing Etan in a ritualistic cult murder. Although none of her personalities would speak to him when he got there, GraBois comforted himself with the knowledge that at this point, anyone with information on the case knew he was the one to call.  Even a so-called “medium” who claimed to be hearing it from the beyond.

“What do you mean, Denise Cealie tells you she has information?” GraBois asked Sillery now. The man didn’t seem like a wacko, but he’d have him checked him out before going much further, just on the basis of how seriously he was taking this woman’s claims. “She thinks she has information, or she has first-hand information?”

“She’s got this vision in her head of a place somewhere on the water, and you can see two bridges from this location. Somewhere, on a pier or breakwall, she sees the number seven or eight. She thinks Etan is buried right under there.”

Sillery talked about the Hell Gate Channel he’d found on the New York map and described other tidbits Cealie had offered up: the mental pictures that Etan’s killer had already been interviewed by the police, and that she thought the letter “M” – a name sounding like Michelob – connected the man significantly. The remains, either a body or bones, would be found in a location strewn with garbage including some kind of shirt, all of which was near shallow water.  She saw a wooden post or stick in the ground, too, and some kind of hook.  Sillery read off a long list of observations. It sounded like the typical “one from column a, one from column b” psychic list where odds were good that something amid all the details would pay off.

GraBois listened to the account and immediately presumed either Denise Cealie was a quack, or she must somehow be involved in the kidnapping, either explicitly or indirectly.  Maybe she wanted to get it off her chest, and had come up with this tactic.  If on the other hand she really thought she was getting her information from across the great divide, well, GraBois had been approached by psychics in the past, and he usually dismissed them out of hand. He’d found they often had their own personal agendas and were searching less for lost children and more for legitimacy by affiliating themselves with reputable law enforcement.  But he wanted to know more, especially since Sillery had bothered to do such intriguing follow-up. 

In mid December, GraBois called up Sillery and asked if he could get Denise Cealie to meet with him in New York.  He also arranged to have NYPD Detective Al Sheppard there, who was assigned to what had become known as the Devil’s Squad.  Originally tasked to investigate child porn cases, the squad had morphed into the realm of the occult, which overlapped when pedophilia cases were tied to cults and ritualistic crimes. Sheppard and GraBois had worked together on other child exploitation cases, and the prosecutor asked him to weigh in on Denise Cealie and her special gifts.

A few days before the Christmas break, both Sillery and Cealie took a day off from work and trained down to the U.S. Attorney’s office, where GraBois was able to form his own impressions.

On the short side and a little stocky, Denise Cealie looked to be in her late twenties, with shoulder length dark brown wavy hair, large expressive eyes, and a pleasant smile.  Neatly attired in dress pants and blouse, she was perfectly “normal” looking; no tarot cards, incense or zodiac references.  She had no criminal history and was gainfully employed as a special ed schoolteacher. She presented herself well and spoke as an articulate schoolteacher would.

“Start from the beginning,” GraBois said simply, “and tell me your story.”

Cealie talked of becoming aware of her “gift” as a teenager, that her mother accepted it, her father not at all.  For a year or two now, she said, she’d been hearing about Etan, from the voices, then from the boy himself.  Sometimes she heard the voices in her head, sometimes out loud.  There were also “pictures” that presented themselves, so that she knew what things looked like. And no, she’d known almost nothing about the Patz case when this started, and still didn’t. She’d brought notes with her and referred to them as she began to repeat the details she’d already given to Sillery.

GraBois was gracious and took pains to minimize any outward sign of his doubt in her tales from the supernatural, but he peppered her with questions.  Who did she know in New York? How often did she come there? Did she have a boyfriend here? How could they verify her statements? He was looking to uncover any tie she might have to the case, but it wasn’t immediately apparent.

“Can we get a car?” Cealie finally got the chance to ask her own question. It was getting late and she was itching to move out, to look for the site.  And off they went, GraBois and Sillery, Al Sheppard and the medium, in the direction of Hell Gate. GraBois knew where it was in the water, but not how to get there, and they drove across to Brooklyn, then uptown through Queens, until they reached a point in Astoria that looked out over the East River. At Cealie’s request, they piled out of the car, and regarded a scene that included two bridges spanning the water.  One was the Triborough Bridge, connecting the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens via Ward’s Island. The other was a picturesque steel arch railroad bridge named after the Hell Gate channel it rose 135 feet above.  At low tide, the channel descended six feet further and looked more like a glassy lake sheltered from the wind, but when the tides clashed, sparring from the Hudson and East Rivers, the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson estuary, its name was appropriate.  Cealie searched the skyline with a puzzled look.

“Something’s not right,” she said. “This doesn’t look like the picture.” Then her face cleared. “We have to cross over,” she said.

GraBois was too annoyed to make “crossing over” jokes. He squinted at the sun, estimating no more than a few hours of daylight left, and he wasn’t sure where this wild ghost chase was going to end.  Cealie was pointing to the other side of the steel span bridge. Ward’s Island was a sparsely populated speck on the map, once a pauper burial ground, and still home to a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane. That was where Cealie wanted to take them now.

“In the picture that I see, that bridge is on the left, not the right. We’re on the wrong side.”  The scenery all looked the same to everyone else, snow covering most distinguishable characteristics, and it was miserably cold. Cealie shrugged her shoulders, they got back in the car and since they couldn’t actually cross the railroad bridge, they had to laboriously work their way around, then across the Triborough Bridge.   Once on the other side, Cealie assuredly started to direct them, convincing GraBois she’d been there before, despite her protests to the contrary.  She’s playing us, he thought, but he let himself be guided to see where they’d end up. They finally approached the southern tip of the island.

“Stop the car!” Cealie screamed suddenly. She was pointing at a chain link fence that surrounded the outer edges of the land. 

“Bill, you need to go over to that fence,” she commanded Sillery. He did as she asked, aware that he had no boots, just the dress shoes he’d worn down from Albany. When he got to the fence he could see an embankment to the water’s edge, a rocky, muddy scramble from where he stood.  He looked back at Cealie and followed her hand as she motioned him down the fence line to a short section he hadn’t noticed where the fence had pulled away to allow access to a narrow path that led precipitously down to the rocks below. Cealie waved him towards the water.

“Go down, go,” she yelled, and he carefully picked his way on the almost vertical trail, sliding part way until he reached the bottom, rough stones and gravel that led to the shoreline.  He took just a few steps forward before he stopped short, flabbergasted.

He stumbled frantically back up, motioning the others out of the car. GraBois told Cealie to stay back and he and Al Sheppard joined Sillery.

 “You’ve got to see this.”  He wouldn’t say anything more.

Sheppard went down first, as GraBois and Sillery watched him struggle to keep his balance before disappearing down the trail.

“Holy shit, holy shit.” GraBois and Sillery heard his epithets and GraBois quickly followed. At the bottom, all three finally stood stock still, taking in the sight.  In the background lay a clear view of the two bridges, and closer, the water lapped at the rocky shoreline. But only a few feet directly in front of them stood a makeshift wooden cross. Draped over it, the worn pattern of teddy bears running in a wide strip across its middle, was the tattered remnants of a child’s sweater.

“How could she have known this?” Sheppard marveled. “You can’t even get to here without risking your neck.”  The men looked back up the steeply graded hill towards the car now out of sight.

“She’s got to know something,” GraBois asserted, circling around the cross for a closer look. “Where is she getting her information?  It’s just too much of a coincidence, and there’s no way she could have gotten down this steep of an incline on her own to know about it otherwise.”

“Come look at this,” Sillery called. He was standing in front of a flat-topped rock covered in graffiti. GraBois peered at it. His mind was racing. He was at a loss for words.

“Does that say ‘Prince St. Kid’?” someone asked.

When Cealie was brought down to join them, the others were busy looking around for any more traces that people had been there before them. Sheppard found a plastic bag filled with old clothes.   But GraBois was staring at the rock. He just didn’t know what to think. There were some battered abandoned cars lying further down the rocky shore. Was this a dumping ground, and if so, was it a convenient location for the dumping of human remains? Was this a makeshift headstone? And how could Denise Cealie have predicted this?

“Did you know that Etan disappeared from Prince Street?” he asked Cealie.

“No, I didn’t.”

It was getting dark, and they were all frozen and splattered with mud.  GraBois could see through the dim light that the woman was shivering. They still needed to sidestep their way back up the narrow incline and drive all the way down the length of Manhattan to GraBois’s office.  He would have to arrange for photographs.

“We’re going to need you back here in New York again.” He had a lot more questions for her now.

“It’ll have to be after Christmas,” she replied, and he nodded.

“This time we’ll fly you down,” he added.

There was no way around it. They would need a polygraph, for many reasons, not the least of which was GraBois wasn’t going to get anyone to authorize a dime spent on her information first. But they couldn’t let her know in advance. GraBois gave Bill Sillery a heads up, so he wouldn’t be taken by surprise, but made him promise not to say anything.  Sillery and Cealie arrived in New York the first week of January, and Cealie showed no qualms about going off with the FBI agent as soon as she walked in the door. I expected as much, she told everyone.  She was gone for what seemed like hours, while the others speculated endlessly about what was really going on. When the agent returned without her, he looked a little taken aback.

“She passed,” he said. “She appears to be telling the truth.”

“Can she have figured out a way to fool the polygraph?” GraBois wondered.

“These are highly sensitive systems,” the man said, “But they’re designed to pick up deception. If the subject truly believes he or she is telling the truth, they can pass, even if they’re spinning out and out lies. So this woman believes she’s a medium and has this gift. Whether she does….” He shrugged.

GraBois didn’t have the answer to that, but at this point he couldn’t afford not to believe that Denise Cealie might somehow know there were remains buried where she said.  That’s how he found himself on the next day, on a below zero morning, stamping his feet and wincing as he sucked the icy air into his lungs. With the Hell Gate Bridge as dramatic backdrop, GraBois, Cealie and Sillery watched as the NYPD divers adjusted masks and edged backwards to submerge themselves in the frigid waters off the Ward’s Island shoreline. Because of the temperature, the men could only stay down for a few minutes at a stretch before they were forced to surface and warm up at a nearby dive truck.  Bundled into his heavy jeans and blue down parka, the hood pulled snugly around his ears, GraBois was still freezing and couldn’t imagine how the divers could force themselves into the water. But he heard no grumbling as the officers prepared to go back under.   Denise Cealie feared they couldn’t help but miss the right spot, because they needed to wait until later in the year, when the shoreline receded into the spring.  After repeated dives and what seemed like an eternity in the deep winter weather, a sampling of bones was recovered, but when later tested, it proved to be animal remains.  Searchers returned days later to dig up long trenches in a wide swath around the cross site. Again, nothing. It all proved a futile exercise, just one more chapter in the long and storied case.   But ultimately, as these things often happen, the voices from beyond inadvertently set off a chain of events, which led to the most fruitful development in the case to date. 

Joe Veltre, a supervisor in the Federal Probation Office, was an old friend of Stuart GraBois’.  He and GraBois had known each other for years, and he was one of the legion who would stop by from time to time to fan the prosecutor's heated interest in the Patz case.  What’s new, he’d ask, and then sit back while GraBois thought out loud, hashing through the latest piece of the puzzle together. Veltre was a good listener and made helpful suggestions whenever he could. When he could lend a hand with a little extra fact-finding, GraBois was always happy to let him. He would take all the help he could get.

The license plate number Denise Cealie had envisioned did in fact turn out to be a registered plate, but it had been reissued more than once. By this point, GraBois had stopped caring about where the medium got her information, he just knew it needed to be checked out.  Maybe Cealie was trying to signal she really knew someone with a car who’d been involved in the kidnapping.  Or maybe bigger forces were trying to tell him something. Cealie had also envisioned an Hispanic man and Veltre was on the trail, looking for the particular Hispanic man to whom the plate number had been registered. Veltre had invested considerable time in the project, his own time, just like all the other cops and government officials who volunteered their experience and insights, gratis.

Veltre was in GraBois’s office one day with the latest results of his search, and he picked up some of GraBois’ case material lists, leafing casually through it.

“Who’s this Jose Ramos character? What’s his story,” Veltre asked the prosecutor.

“Yeah, he’s always been interesting to me. He dated the babysitter, but it looks like it was so he could get to her four-year old son,” GraBois replied, looking over Veltre’s shoulder.

“Have you ever talked to him?”

“Don’t know where he is. He’s a transient; went to ground before I got the case, and no one’s seen him for years.”

Veltre wrote down Jose Ramos’s name and date of birth. “I’ll nose around a little and see if I can find anything,” He knew a lot of people, who in turn knew a lot of people. “Have your guys run a rap sheet on him? I’ll take a look.”

“Let me check the files, and I’ll get it to you.” GraBois started towards one of the cabinets where he stored his paperwork.

“Don’t bother.” Veltre waved him off.  “I’ll just run it again.”

He called GraBois a few days later. The excitement in his voice was palpable.

“I found him,” he told GraBois. “Jose Ramos is in.” It was much easier to track someone down who had a prison address.

Between the time investigators had last come up blank on Ramos’s whereabouts and the moment in 1988 when Joe Veltre ran his rap sheet, Jose Ramos had preyed on the Rainbow Family of Living Light, and they had put him somewhere Stuart GraBois could easily get his hands on him.  With one look at his rap sheet GraBois could now pinpoint Ramos’s exact whereabouts - the State Correctional Institute at Rockview, Pa. 

Veltre brought the sheet over. GraBois saw the Erie misdemeanor sentence, which would hold Ramos in place for at least one more year. But when he turned to the sheet’s last page, he saw an entry that interested him just as much. There was another charge, a felony rape, which had been dropped the previous year.  The sheet didn’t reveal the whole story of Joey Taylor and the suppressed confession, but it raised some interesting questions that bore further research.  While the prosecutor immediately began to make plans to writ Ramos into Federal custody so the two could meet, he also wanted to know more about the charge that had gotten away.

The next week was exhausting. Knowing that a potentially promising suspect was so close, GraBois began the necessary paperwork to have him brought closer. But that was just part of his workload. In just that week, GraBois appeared in court against a defendant so unruly he had to be carted to his hearing in a wheelbarrow and questioned a suspect in a grisly sadomasochistic murder involving bondage masks and violent sex games.  By Friday, GraBois was grateful for the weekend break, as he left his office early to pick up his family and get back into Manhattan in time for a Passover Seder there.  He’d been feeling under the weather for a few days, which he credited to his hectic schedule.  But by the time he arrived home, he was having searing chest pains and trouble breathing. A trip to the local ER was reassuring – it looked like nothing more than a pulled muscle, and he went on to his holiday meal.

GraBois took it easy that weekend, and would have stayed home Monday morning, but members of his Task Force were bringing him a suspect to interview. By the time he drove home afterwards, the pain had returned, this time so severe he was forced to pull off the road and wait until the worst of it subsided.  He made it inside his apartment before collapsing on the living room floor. This time the hospital stay was weeks, not hours, as doctors shook their heads, fed him more antibiotics and ordered more tests.  IVs laced around his prone body, and an oxygen tube was his lifeline, as his lungs grew weaker, ravaged by the worst case of double pleurisy his physician had ever seen.  GraBois spent the days in a fog, although he remembered the hospital clergyman leaning over him at one point.

“Get your affairs in order,” the man counseled.

Two weeks after he was stricken, doctors tried one last test and discovered the reason he wasn’t responding to treatment.  It was a rare case of Legionnaire’s Disease, contracted either on the icy Ward’s Island shoreline, or from a germ-filled air conditioner in the Syracuse hotel room where he’d gone the previous month to question a small group of Denise Cealie’s fellow mediums.   GraBois made steady if slow progress after that, but it would be two months of bed rest and working from home before he was back in the office and operating at full capacity. During those months, Jose Ramos had gotten a brief reprieve.  As GraBois was heading to the Emergency Room, Ramos was being upgraded to a coveted new status that allowed him to work outside the prison fence.

“It means that I now have a little more freedom,” Ramos wrote to a pen pal. “Thank God for this.”