The biggest missing-persons investigations in city history could have led to Etan Patz’s alleged killer decades ago if not for some big mistakes, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
Hundreds of police chasing down thousands of tips and red herrings, detectives looking for personal glory, a lack of a centralized database and the emergence of a perfect suspect led investigators to overlook the man now charged in the murder.
“The bigger the investigation, the more people that are involved, the more difficult the coordination is,” said a retired senior law-enforcement official. “There can be mistakes.”
And there were doozies in the Patz case. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said that while Pedro Hernandez’s name was known to investigators soon after Etan’s disappearance, they never interviewed him.
A law-enforcement source noted that with up to 500 officers assigned to the case at one point, the detectives involved might have assumed that somebody else would have spoken to Hernandez.
The flood of tips from the concerned public also pointed away from the blocks where Etan had disappeared — to as far away as Israel — and all the leads had to be chased down.
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Robert Shaw, one of the lead investigators in the original case, declined comment yesterday.
In a 1991 magazine interview, Shaw said the investigation had been hampered by cops who acted like they were competing against each other.
“Everybody wanted to solve the case for the glory,” he told Vanity Fair.
“Detectives stabbed each other in the back. When a cop gets some information, he’s supposed to type it up in a ‘D.D. 5’ follow-up report, but let me tell you, detectives on the Patz case would forget to do that so other guys wouldn’t know what they were up to.”
It’s unclear if that’s what happened in this instance. Hernandez’s relatives said he spoke to police and was dismissed as a nut, but the NYPD says there’s no record of that.
Another investigator who was involved in the case in the 1990s said he’d never even heard Hernandez’s name before his arrest Thursday.
“Normal procedure is you would talk to him. The fact that nobody ever talked to him, that’s very curious to me,” the detective said. “Maybe someone gave his name to the cops and he wasn’t working there anymore and no one followed up.”
“We do miss things. We are human.”
Another investigator said that when he was involved in the 1990s, the investigation was focused solely on convicted pedophile Jose Ramos, a drifter who had dated one of the Patzes’ baby sitters.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona