The 1979 disappearance in New York of six-year-old Etan Patz – the first missing youngster featured on a milk carton – turned out to be a landmark case that created a whole new movement and forever altered law enforcement’s approach to solving abduction/kidnapping cases.Former FBI profiler Jim Clemente explains the significance of the Etan Patz abduction case in relation to how investigators now approach missing children from the start.
“It was the first milk carton missing/abducted child case. So this is the case that actually changed the way that law enforcement and the community actually looked into and investigated child abductions.”
He says that at the time Patz went missing, law enforcement didn’t have the same statistics as they do now. “That 44 percent of the kids who are abducted and murdered are killed within the first hour, 75 percent in the first three hours, and 99 percent in the first 24 hours.”
Because law enforcement didn’t have those statistics, investigators would typically wait 24 hours to find out if a child was a runaway before proceeding, Clemente said.
“If they didn’t show up after 24 hours, they typically thought that maybe there was foul play. With a child as old as Etan, they may have gotten involved a lot sooner, because he actually never showed up for school.”
Watch the full episode for more on the Etan Patz case, including an analysis of the confession by Pedro Hernandez, and the evidence against another suspect in the case, Jose Ramos.
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