Metro

Etan ‘killer’ may walk

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(Stanley K. Patz)

TRY ME: The lawyer for suspect Pedro Hernandez (right) is pushing for a trial date in the 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz (left). (
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Worried that the man who confessed to killing Etan Patz will go free, the NYPD is desperately looking for fresh clues — to no avail, sources said.

Though Pedro Hernandez came forward dramatically last year admitting the notorious killing, his lawyer disputes the confession, and there is no other evidence linking him to the crime.

“They go down to Camden almost every day to interview anyone who knows Hernandez. Family, friends, the church people, anyone,” said a law-enforcement source.

A team of cops from the NYPD’s Missing Person Squad — a sergeant and about four detectives — continue to investigate, the source said.

“They’ve interviewed these people over and over and over again. Some of them five to 10 times. This has been going on for over a year. It’s exhausting.”

Hernandez, 52, was arrested in May 2012 in Maple Shade, NJ, a Camden suburb, after cops were tipped that he confessed to family members and even his church group to killing a child in New York City.

Hernandez allegedly confessed to cops that he used a soda to lure the 6-year-old Patz to the bodega where he worked as a stock clerk and then strangled him in the basement.

Neither the boy’s body, which Hernandez claimed he put out with the trash, nor the book bag he said he stashed in a freezer, has ever been recovered. Police never recovered any physical evidence — blood, DNA, fiber — tying him to the crime, despite numerous searches over the past 34 years, sources said.

“They’re trying to find some piece of evidence to support the confession,” the law-enforcement source said.

No witnesses who saw the two together have ever surfaced either.

During his videotaped confession to police, Hernandez asked cops to kneel and pray alongside him, which they did — something his lawyer Harvey Fishbein called “manipulative.”

Meanwhile, prosecutors have their own doubts that Hernandez killed Patz, who disappeared from a Soho street on May 25, 1979, sparking the nationwide missing-child movement, sources said.

“There’s a consensus among prosecutors there that this case cannot be won,” a former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office told The Post.

The Manhattan DA’s Office declined to comment.

Fishbein said his client is bipolar, schizophrenic and has a low IQ, rendering all of his confessions unreliable.

“We are not admitting in any sense that he committed this crime. This is not a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity — ‘I did it but I was crazy,’ ” Fishbein told The Post. “He didn’t do it. He confessed to it, and it’s the reliability of that confession that’s the issue here.”

Experts said the case is eminently winnable — for the defense.

“It’s a much tougher case to get a conviction without physical evidence, because the prosecution is relying solely on witness testimony — not even witness to the crime, but witnesses to a supposed confession,” said prominent defense attorney Jeffrey Lichtman.

“If there is a claim that he is owning up to abducting and killing the boy, it’s possible that someone with these sorts of mental issues could have fabricated such a story — assuming that he even said it. And even if he did say it, he’s crazy — so how can you trust his confession?” Lichtman said.

At a court appearance last week, Hernandez, a father of a college-aged daughter, cast a childlike figure in an orange jumpsuit, staring straight ahead as his lawyer argued for a trial date, noting that his client has been jailed for over a year.

The defense has received more than 10,000 pages of evidence in the case, and more is expected to come in the coming months, prosecutors said. The prosecution is headed by Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, who drew criticism over the failed sexual-assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

State Supreme Court Justice Maxwell Wiley said a trial could be scheduled sometime in the spring.