Pedro Hernandez described more than a dozen ghoulish faces staring at him as he choked little Etan Patz to death in a Soho bodega basement more than 35 years ago, a noted psychiatrist testified Tuesday at his murder trial.
“There were 15 people in the room with him,”
Dr. Michael First, a defense witness, was told by Hernandez in 2012 shortly after he’d confessed to the crime.
“In addition to elderly men and women dressed in nursing home gowns there were also two little girls one boy, one man dressed in a suit and a woman in a pearl necklace with business clothes.”
Hernandez didn’t mention the eerie spectators when he initially told First he’d lured the 6-year-old boy into the basement with a soda, strangled him and disposed of his still-breathing body in a nearby alleyway. He also told cops in his confession that he had been alone.
“When he walked up the stairs carrying the boy in the bag in the box he said they all parted on the steps to let him pass by then they followed him up out of basement and left him at the bodega as he walked,” recalled First.
He interviewed Hernandez for a total of 8 hours and diagnosed him with schizotypal disorder, which he described as a “milder version of schizophrenia.”
To Hernandez, the people in the room and the confession were equally real, First testified.
On cross examination, Assistant District Attorney Penelope Brady got the doctor to admit that people with Hernandez’s disorder are capable of murder and of lying.
The shrink also told jurors that Hernandez, 54, had a raging cocaine addiction that spanned two decades starting in 1985 and that it could have exacerbated his hallucinations.
The former bodega clerk, who had worked two blocks from where Patz lived when he vanished from a SoHo street, spent as much as $300 a week on cocaine at times, First said.
He had arguments with his wife Rosemary about the expenditures.
“There were a couple of instances where things got very heated and even violent,” First said.
Patz disappeared the first time he walked alone to the school bus stop May 25 of 1979. His body was never found.
A tip led cops to Hernandez in 2012 and he allegedly confessed to the grisly crime. But his defense team has argued that the admission was false and coaxed from a man with a history of mental illness.