Pedro Hernandez, a former store clerk who told the police that he murdered Etan Patz as the boy headed to school in 1979, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison on Tuesday, bringing to a close a missing-child case that bedeviled investigators for decades and forever changed the way American parents protected their children. He did not look at Etan’s parents, Stan and Julie Patz, who were in the courtroom as he received his sentence, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Patz turned toward Mr. Hernandez and said: “Pedro Hernandez, after all these years, we finally know what dark secret you had locked in your heart. “The God you pray to will never forgive you.”

Former bodega worker Hernandez confessed in 2012 to strangling Patz to death after luring him into a SoHo basement on May 25, 1979. The lead defense lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, told the court Hernandez wanted to express deep sympathy to the Patzes but also to say “he’s an innocent man and he had nothing to do with the disappearance of Etan Patz.” 



Hernandez was a teenager working at a convenience shop in Etan’s Manhattan neighborhood when the boy vanished in 1979, on the first day he was allowed to walk alone to his school bus stop. He declined to speak, but his lawyers, Harvey Fishbein and Alice L. Fontier, rose to proclaim his innocence and vowed to appeal. A previous trial ended in a mistrial in 2015 when a single juror out of 12 refused to convict Hernandez after weeks of deliberations, prompting prosecutors to retry him.
Pedro Hernandez, convicted in February 2017 for the May 25, 1979 death of Etan Patz in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, was sentenced yesterday to 25 years to life imprisonment.