Mail.comNEW YORK (AP) — A man charged with killing a boy who disappeared in 1979 calmly told investigators that he strangled the child, according to a confession video played in court Monday for a judge who will decide whether the recording can be used as trial evidence.
Pedro Hernandez has pleaded not guilty to murder in the death of Etan Patz, who vanished on his way to school. In the video, Hernandez is sitting in a plain room with lots of chairs as a detective asks him about the child.
“I was nervous; my legs were jumping,” Hernandez replies. “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.”
He demonstrated with his hands around his own neck. He said the boy was still alive when he put him in a bag. Hernandez said he dumped the body and returned the next day, but it was gone. Etan became one of the first missing children to be pictured on a milk carton, and the day he disappeared, May 25, became National Missing Children’s Day.
His father watched stoically as the video was played, while the boy’s mother left the Manhattan courtroom before the video began. Hernandez’s lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, says his client falsely confessed and lacks the mental ability to understand his rights.
Hernandez had been in custody nearly eight hours when the videotape was made, Fishbein said. “We don’t have a record of what happened in that 7½ hours,” he said. Hernandez asked to go home a number of times, Fishbein said.
Fishbein also said Hernandez got details incorrect that the killer should know, like where the body was dumped. “We will show he’s wrong all the time,” the defense lawyer said. “He’s unreliable. He’s a terrible historian; he’s inconsistent.”
In 2012, police got a lead that brought them to Hernandez, who had worked at a Manhattan corner store near where Etan disappeared. After agreeing to go to a police station near his home in Maple Shade, New Jersey, he was questioned for about seven hours before detectives advised him of his rights. They then recorded him saying he lured Etan into the store with a promise of a soda, suffocated him in the basement, put the body in a bag, stuffed the bag inside a box and left it on the street, authorities have said.
The hearing, which is expected to last several weeks, will determine whether the confession can be used in court, not whether the statement itself is true. The judge will examine the timing of the Miranda warning, an often-disputed legal issue that turns partly on whether a suspect felt free to leave before the warning. But the judge also will be asked to decide whether Hernandez made an “intelligent and voluntary waiver of his rights, and what role his psychological status and very low IQ play,” Fishbein has said.
Check the faggot’s DNA.