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Accused Etan Patz Killer Sane, Had Sexual Motive, Prosecutor Says

 The owner of restaurants Olea and Allswell testified in the Etan Patz murder trial Monday.
Etan Patz Trial
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MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — Sexual desires drove former bodega worker Pedro Hernandez to kill 6-year-old Etan Patz in a SoHo bodega basement 35 years ago, the Manhattan District Attorney's office claimed in closing arguments Tuesday.

Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon argued there was nothing delusional about Hernandez, as defense lawyers had said, and it was truth, not mental illness, that supported his confessions.

“There was no mental disease, no mental infirmity,” she told jurors in Manhattan Supreme Court, as she described Hernandez, who confessed to police in 2012 that he strangled the small boy in the basement of a SoHo bodega on May 25, 1979 — the first day his parents allowed him to walk alone less than two blocks to the school bus.

Illuzzi-Orbon tried to hammer away one last time at the defense’s argument that Hernandez, who has a low IQ, suffered from hallucinations and was unable to tell fact from fiction.

Instead, she portrayed him as more calculating, someone who killed the little boy he had seen numerous times at the bodega, snatched him into the basement for his own sexual desires, then killed him and dumped his body in a trash heap a couple of blocks away, to hide what he had done.

“The quickest and easiest way to shut him up and shut him up permanently was to choke him to death,” she said. "What was the precipitation of this event — this event was sexual in nature, “

“[Hernandez] saw this beautiful little boy, day after day,” she said later. “One day he acted on an impulse.”

In several hours of taped confessions with police, Hernandez says several times that he didn’t know why he killed the boy, and denied touching him, something Illuzzi-Orbon argues is a lie.

She walked jurors through the other confessions he gave to a friend, his ex-wife and his fellow church members over the years since Patz went missing.

Though there are inconsistencies in the accounts of how he killed Patz, prosecutors argue that there are enough similarities to conclude Hernandez is indeed the killer.

Illuzzi-Orbon said one confession in particular, in which he told to church members that he’d abused a child is the most accurate. In that confession, Hernandez said he “abused a child” and that he strangled and cut him up, though he doesn’t speak of any sexual abuse in particular.

“This is the defendant’s confession to God,” and thus likely his most truthful, Illuzzi-Orbon asserted.

The prosecutor also tried to tear apart what she said is the completely false defense argument that long-time Patz suspect, and convicted child molester Jose Ramos, was the actual killer.

Illuzzi-Orbon vehemently denied that Ramos was the murderer, saying there was never any evidence to link him to Patz, and worked to discredit defense witnesses, including prison informants and a federal prosecutor who worked on the case, and who was convinced Ramos was the killer.

Throughout the more than three hours of closings, Illuzzi-Orbon played several clips of the prosecution's most powerful evidence: tapes of Hernandez confessing to police that he killed the boy.

At the end, jurors were left with one last image of Hernandez on the video.

“I was afraid of what I did. If he was alive, he was going to put me away,” he tells a prosecutor in the video recorded in May 2012.

“My legs were jumping, I was nervous. I did it, I’m sorry I did it. I wish I could do something to take it back,” he said

Hernandez’s defense lawyers argue that he suffers from delusions and hallucinations, and that his confessions to police were coerced and unreliable.

Hernandez is the only witness against himself,” lead attorney Harvey Fishbien said in his summation Monday. “The stories he told against him…are the only evidence. Yet he is inconsistent and unreliable.”

Patz’s body was never found, and after 35 years of searching, there has been no other physical evidence discovered that would link any suspect, including Hernandez, to the case.

Jurors are slated to begin deliberations Wednesday.

Patz's disappearance was a story that gripped the nation. Along with other children, his case helped galvanize the national missing children’s movement. The day he vanished,  May 25, has been named National Missing Children’s Day.