After two months of testimony comes a milestone in the trial of the man accused of killing little Etan Patz. Lawyers for the prosecution and defense present their closing arguments on Monday. NY1's Michael Herzenberg filed this report.
It has been nearly 36 years—a half a lifetime—since six-year-old Etan Patz vanished while heading to school.
Now the case that once transfixed the city and the nation is reaching an end.
The man on trial for Patz's murder: Pedro Hernandez.
In court, prosecutors played Hernandez's four taped confessions to authorities. The defendant said he strangled Etan in the basement of the SoHo bodega where he worked, stuffed his body in a bag and a box and even showed cops the alley where he said he dumped it.
He also confessed to five people, months and years after Etan vanished. Those confidants testified Hernandez tearfully divulged what amounts to different details of a killing.
The defense argues that makes sense because Hernandez is seriously mentally ill, made up the attack and believed it actually happened.
Legal expert Lisa Smith thinks the jury might have a hard time believing that.
"I don't think there is anything about his everyday life that leads you to belive that he is so psychotic that he would hallucinate killing the child," Smith says.
The defense isn't just trying to portray the defendant as mentally ill. It also wants jurors to think another man might have killed Etan, Jose Ramos.
"I never saw Etan. I never met him," Ramos said in a taped interview.
Police arrested Ramos in 1982 for trying to lure boys into the Bronx drainpipe where he lived. They learned he dated a girl who often walked Etan home from school.
The feds made him the main suspect and he got locked up for molesting other children
He has been behind bars for more than 20 years and while the evidence gathered against him wasn't enough to criminally charge him, the lead federal prosecutor wanted to.
"FBI agents and federal prosecutors believe that it's the other suspect.That may, in and of itself, really be enough," says Smith.