Jailed child molester found responsible for 1979 slaying
NEW YORK -- A judge has ruled that an imprisoned child molester is responsible for the disappearance and presumed death of Etan Patz, the 6-year-old boy whose parents' desperate search pushed the issue of child disappearances to the forefront of national consciousness nearly 25 years ago.
The judge said she declared Jose R. Ramos responsible for the boy's death because he disobeyed her orders to answer deposition questions under oath for a lawyer representing Etan's parents.
Ramos, a former mental patient serving a 20-year sentence in Pennsylvania for sexually abusing an 8-year-old boy, was interviewed in April 2003.
Etan was the subject of one of the most extensive missing child searches ever after he vanished in lower Manhattan on May 25, 1979, while walking alone for the first time to his school bus. His face was among the first missing child's to be put on the side of a milk carton, and the date of his disappearance became National Missing Children's Day.
In a court hearing in 2002, Etan's court-appointed guardian said Ramos once told a cellmate: ''Etan is dead. There is no body, and there will never be a body." 