One of the first milk-carton missing kids' case may be solved 33 years later

A New Jersey man looks to have implicated himself in the 1979 disappearance and death of Etan Patz, whose case helped launch the movement to put missing children's photos on milk cartons:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/24/police-may-have-cracked-33-year-old-etan-patz-case/

More details to come out later today, apparently.

 

This story is one of the saddest that I have ever heard.
My heart goes out to these parents. Cannot imagine what the last 33 yrs have been like for them...

Whatever became of the baby-sitter's boyfriend angle?
Wasn't he some creeper that had pictures of blonde haired kids in his backpack or something?

 

They still live in the same house.
That is striking to me.

Hope this is solved and this doesn't turn out to be a John Mark Karr situation.

 

Made me immediately think of the infamous "Boy in the Box" unsolved crime in Philadelphia from the 1950's. [Go to americasunknownchild.net for one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American history. Some eerie similarities...]

 

I read that they never moved so that he would know where to find them if he ever came back. Heartbreaking.

 

Damn, that is awful.

September 5 will be the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of a newspaper carrier in my hometown. Kid was 12 at the time and was last seen on the corner about a half-block from his house. About two years later another paper carrier was kidnapped in similar circumstances on the other side of town. He's never been found either.

The first kidnapping has always stuck with me for some reason. I was in high school at the time and the spot where he was believed to have been abducted from was across the street from the home of one of my best friends.

The disappearance basically destroyed the family. Parents have been divorced for years and the mom has become a bit of nut - which is understandable I guess.

 

Did you grow up in Phoenix? There were some incidents in the 80s that seemed to lead the Arizona Republic to drop youth newspaper carriers.

 

If you're going to post a link, please put a warning when there may be pictures that may be considered disturbing. I clicked on that page yesterday, and I couldn't get those depressing pics of that little boy out of my head for the rest of the day.

Which also goes to show, I could never be a cop or a forensics investigator.

 

I just hope this doesn't turn out to be a false confession:

 

Sorry! I didn't even think about that.
And since we are on topic of those images, if I am not mistaken, the investigators dressed the little boy in various outfits and "posed" him in life-like ways to try to get the public to recognize him. Macabre.

 

Golsch case? Mom later claimed he visited in the 1990s, but couldn't stay for some reason.

 

It'll be interesting to see if they are able to weed out a false confession as easily as they can in other cases, whether Lindbergh or Jon Benet. You at least had a body in those cases. In this case, he can tell really any story and it seems like they'd have a much tougher time checking on if it's plausible.

The famous Minnesota case like this is Jacob Wetterling, from 1989. Still never found, no idea who did it. They just dug up a farm nearby about a year ago but didn't find anything. The mom later ran for Congress against everyone's favorite, Michele Bachmann.