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Ramos, a drifter whose girlfriend was Etan's sometime baby sitter, has been publicly floated as a possible culprit since the 1980s. Now 68, he is serving a 10-to-20-year sentence in Dallas, Pa., after pleading guilty to abusing an 8-year-old boy at a campground there. He is due to be released in November. Efforts to reach lawyers who have represented him were unsuccessful Friday. A former federal prosecutor who had worked on the case, Stuart GraBois, declared in 1998 that he believed Ramos was behind Etan's disappearance and death; efforts to reach GraBois on Friday were unsuccessful. A Manhattan civil court judge held Ramos responsible in 2004, saying that his refusal to answer some questions amounted to not responding to the suit. The judge ordered him to pay $2 million to Patz' father, Stan. Police investigated leads to Ramos at various points, including a 2000 search of the basement of the building where he lived in 1979. But the Manhattan district attorney's office concluded there wasn't enough evidence to charge him, or anyone else. Former DA Robert Morgenthau, who led the office from 1975 to 2009, declined to comment Friday. Current DA Cyrus R. Vance Jr. spent time with Stanley Patz while running for office in 2009 and pledged to reopen the case if elected. After the investigation resumed in 2010, authorities considered if they should take a fresh look elsewhere since decades of eying Ramos had never yielded anything conclusive, according to another person familiar with the investigation, who also spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its workings. The basement Miller had used "started to seem more and more like at least a viable place to start," the person said.
Should the new direction lead to a new suspect, that wouldn't automatically negate the civil court's finding against Ramos. But he might be able to get a court to reconsider it, legal experts said. "This would be such a colossal change from what was thought to be the case at the time, I think the courts would probably, to be just, find some kind" of avenue to reopen the case, said Annemarie McAvoy, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at the Fordham University School of Law.
[Associated
Press;
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