NEW YORK — A suspect with a low IQ understood his rights when he told investigators two years ago that he choked a 6-year-old boy to death in 1979, a judge ruled Monday, allowing prosecutors to use the confession that appears to be their key evidence in a notorious missing children’s case.
The 53-year-old suspect, Pedro Hernandez, has pleaded not guilty to killing 6-year-old Etan Patz, one of the first missing children ever pictured on a milk carton. He vanished while walking to his school bus stop. His defense has said his confession to the wrenching crime was imaginary.
State Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley wasn’t tasked with determining whether the admission was true — just whether it was obtained legally and whether Hernandez comprehended what he was doing when he waived his right to stay silent.
Wiley called Hernandez’s waiver of his Miranda rights “knowing and intelligent.” While Hernandez has a very low IQ, his overall performance on tests of how well he understood the rights, his decision to waive them and “his basic ability to make his way in the world over a period of almost 40 years compel this conclusion,” the judge wrote.
After decades of investigation that stretched as far as Israel, Hernandez emerged as a suspect in 2012. He’d been a stock clerk at a store in Etan’s neighborhood when the boy disappeared.
After more than six hours of questioning, he confessed on video, calmly telling investigators how he choked Etan in the store basement. He described putting the boy, who was still alive, into a plastic bag, then putting the bag inside a box and dumping it nearby.
“I was nervous; my legs were jumping,” Hernandez said on the tape. “I wanted to let go, but I just couldn’t let go. I felt like something just took over me. I don’t know what to say. Something just took over me, and I was just choking him.”
In the 1980s, Hernandez also allegedly told a prayer group and others that he’d harmed a child in New York.
The confession appears to be the key to the case. Authorities have not pointed to any physical or scientific evidence against Hernandez, and his defense has said there is none.
Jury selection is expected to start in early January, and Hernandez’ attorney, Harvey Fishbein, stressed that it would be up to the jurors to decide whether the confession was true.
“We’re looking forward to that, and we’re ready to go,” he said. “Anyone who sees these confessions will understand that when the police were finished with him, Mr. Hernandez believed that he killed Etan Patz — but that doesn’t mean that he actually did.”
Fishbein has said that Hernandez didn’t have the mental capacity to understand his right to remain silent.
Hernandez’ IQ, about 70, puts him in the bottom 2 percent of the population, a defense psychological expert testified during a weekslong hearing this fall.
Fishbein has said Hernandez’s medical records mention schizophrenia dating back years, he has long taken anti-psychotic medication and since his arrest he’s been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder. Its effects on him include “cognitive and perceptual distortions,” including hallucinations, Fishbein has said. In one of the confessions, Hernandez says he has had visions of his dead mother.
Prosecutors say the confession was real and properly obtained.
Etan’s body was never found. The day he vanished became National Missing Children’s Day.
His father, Stan Patz, declined to comment as he left court Monday.
