The judge in the Etan Patz murder case declared a mistrial and dismissed the jurors Friday afternoon.

For the third time, a jury said it could not reach a unanimous decision on the fate of Pedro Hernandez, who confessed multiple times to killing the six-year-old boy back in 1979.

The judge sent them home, thanking them for their service.

The news came on the 18th day of deliberations. The jury had been working since April 15.

Eleven of the 12 jurors voted to convict Hernandez, but there was one holdout.

Speaking with the media for the first time Friday, many jurors said Hernandez's previous confessions and descriptions of the crime scene were enough to convince them he was guilty.

"We felt that we were very comfortable in our position, rendering a guilty verdict," said one juror.

"He also knew, which came from his confession, facts that only he could know," said another.

However, the one juror who voted not guilty said the prosecution's evidence was too circumstantial.

"For me, his confession was very bizarre, and no matter how many times it happened, it got more and more bizarre," that juror said. "And I feel that the initial confession, there were lots of issues surrounding custody, surrounding Miranda rights, surrounding the fact that it wasn't videoed for six or seven hours."

The jurors said as frustrating as it was, they managed to keep things respectful.

The mistrial was hard to swallow for Etan's father, Stan, who said his whole family agreed that Hernandez was the killer.

"Everybody wanted to hear what the case against Hernandez was. We all listened, we debated it, and we came to, unanimously, to the same conclusion," Stan Patz said.

"I'm sure the Patz family is very interested in a resolution in this case. I'm sure the city of New York is interested in a resolution of this case," said Harvey Fishbein, Hernandez's attorney. "I would say that there's only a resolution if the correct man is held responsible, and we firmly believe that Pedro Hernandez is not the right man."

The judge set the next court date, a control date, for June 10 to discuss whether Hernandez will be re-tried.

May 25 will mark 36 years since Etan's disappearance.

The young boy vanished on May 25, 1979, as he walked two blocks from his parents loft in SoHo to his school bus stop.

His body has never been found.

Hernandez was arrested 33 years later, in 2012, after a family member told police Hernandez spoke of having killed a child in New York in the late 1970s.

Prosecutors argued that Hernandez lured Etan to the basement of a bodega, tried to sexually assault him, strangled him, put his body in a bag and a box and dumped it blocks away in an alley.

Their case was built around the defendant's own words - jurors heard four videotaped confessions he gave to authorities, and the testimony of five people who said he confessed to them that he killed someone. However, defense attorneys have noted inconsistencies in the details between confessions. They said Hernandez suffers from serious mental illness and made up his alleged attack.

The defense said convicted pedophile Jose Ramos might be the actual killer. In 1982, police investigators discovered he had a relationship with a woman who frequently walked Etan home from school. Ramos had long been a suspect in the case, but was never charged due to a lack of evidence.

The disappearance of Etan Patz was one of the most infamous missing-child cases in New York history. It made parents across the city and country more aware of the potential dangers facing their children.

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