Rape Accusation Led to Focus of Etan Patz Search Julie Patz, Etan Patz's mother, outside her apartment in SoHo. Investigators continued searching for Etan's remains Saturday. Federal agents and the police continued to dig up a SoHo basement on Saturday in a search for the remains of Etan Patz as the reasons behind their renewed interest in the space came into sharper focus. The basement was a workshop for a handyman who is facing fresh scrutiny after investigators examined a claim by his ex-wife that he had raped a 10-year-old girl in subsequent years, according to a person briefed on the case. The building the workshop was in, at 127B Prince Street, is on the route that Etan, 6, took when he disappeared in 1979. The handyman, Othniel Miller, now 75, and his ex-wife, Phyllis, divorced in 1986, according to court records, and it was not immediately clear if the woman's claims were contained in court papers as a basis for ending the marriage. They surfaced in a affidavit in support of a search warrant for the basement that was presented in recent days to a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattann. The judge authorized the search - an excavation effort that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and city police officers began on Thursday. The affidavit was prepared by prosecutors, based on information provided by F.B.I. agents and police detectives, said several people briefed on the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. It was sworn to by Jed Salter, an F.B.I. special agent, one of them said. Since the case was reopened in 2010, a team of federal agents, prosecutors and city detectives has been reading old case files, opening new lines of conversation and trying to develop leads in what remains an open case for the New York Police Department. The efforts in the basement represent just "one lead out of many," an investigator said. After recently interviewing Mr. Miller's ex-wife, F.B.I. agents could not find the girl she said had been attacked, in an effort to corroborate the claim that she had been raped in her home in New Jersey in the mid-1980s. It was not clear on Saturday when Mr. Miller's ex-wife learned of the reputed attack or whether anyone had made a police report. Michael C. Farkas, a criminal defense lawyer hired by Mr. Miller, said on Saturday that reporters" questions about the ex-wife's claims had brought them to his attention. The claims were first reported in The New York Post. "I will be looking into it," said Mr. Farkas, who met with Mr. Miller, an immigrant from Jamaica, and his relatives for an hour on Friday in his home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Excavation work, meanwhile, continued at a deliberative pace on Saturday at Mr. Miller's old workshop. An F.B.I. survey team, in place to draw up a layout of the building's interior and exterior, helped to split the space into four quadrants. The concrete flooring from the first of those areas, along the northern wall, was removed by midday on Saturday. Officials declined to say if anything of interest was discovered. "It will be several more days," Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, said of the search being carried out by a team of 50 agents and officers. It's going to go through the weekend, certainly. Across the street from the search site on Saturday, Etan's mother, Julie, walked past a coffee shop and expressed dismay at the presence of news photographers. But a half-block east of there, at the entrance to the loft apartment where Etan's mother and father, Stan, still live, a note was affixed on the portico near the door's buzzer. "To the hardworking and patient media people: The answer to all your questions at this time is no comment," it said. Please stop ringing our bell and calling our phone for interviews. The name printed below was: "Stan Patz 3E." Randy Leonard contributed reporting.