Lisa R. Cohen
Author of After Etan: The Missing Child Case that Held America Captive
S: What inspired you to write a book about Etan?
LC: Well, I was a network’s news producer for more than 20 years, I've written stories for ABC News and for CBS’s “60 Minutes”, and I've kept doing stories for TV. It was something I started in 1990, and then I did it again 10 years later, and then I did it again 15 years later. So, by that time, I knew all the different people who were involved. I knew the former federal prosecutor, who has been very instrumental on the case, and I have a very close working relationship with him. And the former prosecutor was interested in writing a book, and we talked about it a lot, and he said "I would like you to write it". We collaborated a lot on it together. So at a certain point it felt like I had all this information and off course I was very moved by the family and by the prosecutor, who had spent decades working on the case. And no one had ever written a book on the case before, there are a lot of reasons to that, but I was given the opportunity and I took it.
S: Where there any difficulties/challenges in developing the story?
LC: Sure, there were a lot of difficulties. First of all, I thought I had done all the research with the TV stories I did that I had drawn from years of hard work. And there are lots of people who had information or collaborating information that did not want to cooperate because a lot of the stuff was confidential. So the parts that I made sure was that I had all my facts right and it was a case that had taken place over a period of thirty years, so people's memory of events were very iffy, and I would talk to four different people who were in a room when something happened, and I would get four different versions of the story. I had to keep together all these different visions and then with whatever I could use documentation or newspapers. And I learned about how hard it is to count on journalism, because a lot of the times I would find out that something that had been reported in the newspaper or T.V. and it just was not right. So, yeah it was hard. And I did not have any money, I had to sell the book, and that took a long time. At that time the book gave me some money to use to support myself while I was doing it.
S: Why do you think the Etan case, specifically, was the one that brought people to pay attention to missing children?
LC: There were half a dozen reasons. One was that it never ended. It was not as though this boy went missing, they found his body, and it was over. Or that they found the guy who did it and then it was over. His case was always an ongoing investigation, so whenever anything new was happening, the story would just continue. Now we are on thirty years, and it is still going on. Last year, it was a huge case. Another reason was that I think really it is the parents worse nightmare: the idea that it could happen to you, if it happened to this boy. His parents were very, very articulate. They did really articulate interviews, when they did talk, and after a while they stopped talking to the press. They became kind off of mysterious and would not talk to people about it. And the father of Etan, a man named Stanley, is a photographer. He's a really good photographer, and his studio was in the bottom of the apartment he lived in. He used to spent time setting up the shot that he was filming or photographing. And the model would not be there yet, because that would have been a lot of money for the model, so his son, who really liked getting his picture taken, would sit in while he did the lighting. So there are these really beautiful photos of the boy, who is very beautiful to begin with. He is blond, with blue eyes, and he's white, and the father photographed him gorgeously. So when people were looking at the photograph, they were very very touching, so I think that I was something that just got to people more than the typical missing child story, where you do not get those types of images. So there were a lot of reasons. The other thing is, that at that time, there really were not a lot of resources for tracking kids who had gone missing, computers were not around, databases were terrible, people did not talk to each other specifically. This case happened and then years later, this little boy named Adam Walsh, from Florida, and his body was found, so that case kind off got resolved, but his father as a whole was a very passionate about the cause of finding missing kids. So he went on to have America's Most Wanted, so that was a very big thing. The two cases put together, plus there was another one in Atlanta, were boys went missing and later found killed. It just kind off galvanized people's interest in this area that had not had a lot of attention taken before.
S: Why do people consider Etan to be the first kid on the milk carton when he was not the first?
LC: Yeah that is actually not true, Etan was not the first. It's a myth. Someone said it once and then someone else said it and it makes a very great tail so it got spread around, but no he his case happened in 1979 and the Milk Carton Campaign did not really start till the mid 80's, I think 1985, 1986 were the first ones and they were in the mid west. He was in the milk cartons, he just was not the first one.
S: Why are there no pictures of Etan on the milk carton on the internet?
LC: I actually did find a picture, just this year because his father had given me a prototype that they had sent him from one of the milk companies, where it was the drawing of the milk carton, but it was not the actual milk carton. And then last year when the story got a lot of play again. This guy confessed and there were a lot of people talking about it. They were digging up this basement a couple of blocks away and people started showing up, to bring flowers or cards, and somebody was there with a milk carton in their hand. A photographer took a picture of it in this persons hand, it is just a close up of a peace of the milk carton, you do not actually see the whole milk carton, you just see his face on the side of what is clearly a milk carton.
S: What was the public's and the police's first reaction to Etan's case?
LC: The police started up that night and there were hundreds of them on the streets, they were towing the streets. An extraordinary police presence right from the beginning. The public, especially in New York, it was a huge story and there were tons and tons of people out looking for him. They put up posters and flyers with pictures of him. The community in lower Manhattan, where he lived, was absolutely galvanized, there were people looking everywhere, for days, weeks, and months took time off of their jobs, it was really extraordinary. And then because there were all these pictures all over the city, the whole rest of the city became very involved and it became some what symbolic of this terrible thing that had happened to New Yorkers. And then it went beyond there, it became an international story, people in other countries heard about it. There were missing posters that were sent all over the world. And at one point there was this idea that he might have ended up in Israel, so there was a lot of attention to his case in Israel at one point. So right from the beginning it was a very big story, and it is come and gone, come and gone, and come and gone.
S: What to you think of the Milk Carton Campaign? Do you think it help spread awareness about missing children?
LC: Oh, yes absolutely. I think absolutely it did. I think, you know, now I teach journalism, and I tell my students that when you get people's attention it is always going to raise people's awareness, it is always going to make people care. This was not the typical human face, but it face of this beautiful little child. And it made people talk about it a lot, they testified in front of congress, they were involved in different communities, in action groups, and they joined forces with other people, and they provided support of other missing parents missing kids. So it was a little like a snowball effect that got the movement going.
S: Is there anything else that you think we should know?
LC: The only other thing that I think you girls should know and that is important for you to know is that what I think had happened with this case and some of the other cases is that there became this perception that missing children in their country's numbering them to the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and that is actually a wrong statistic. So I think there is a whole other side to this, I think a really good thing came out of it because now there are kids who come home, that did not come home before that get found. But I also think that the actual number of children who are kidnapped by strangers, the way Etan Patz and Adam Walsh were, the number is really small, the number is in the low hundreds. The numbers are not as high as people perceive them to be.
LC: Well, I was a network’s news producer for more than 20 years, I've written stories for ABC News and for CBS’s “60 Minutes”, and I've kept doing stories for TV. It was something I started in 1990, and then I did it again 10 years later, and then I did it again 15 years later. So, by that time, I knew all the different people who were involved. I knew the former federal prosecutor, who has been very instrumental on the case, and I have a very close working relationship with him. And the former prosecutor was interested in writing a book, and we talked about it a lot, and he said "I would like you to write it". We collaborated a lot on it together. So at a certain point it felt like I had all this information and off course I was very moved by the family and by the prosecutor, who had spent decades working on the case. And no one had ever written a book on the case before, there are a lot of reasons to that, but I was given the opportunity and I took it.
S: Where there any difficulties/challenges in developing the story?
LC: Sure, there were a lot of difficulties. First of all, I thought I had done all the research with the TV stories I did that I had drawn from years of hard work. And there are lots of people who had information or collaborating information that did not want to cooperate because a lot of the stuff was confidential. So the parts that I made sure was that I had all my facts right and it was a case that had taken place over a period of thirty years, so people's memory of events were very iffy, and I would talk to four different people who were in a room when something happened, and I would get four different versions of the story. I had to keep together all these different visions and then with whatever I could use documentation or newspapers. And I learned about how hard it is to count on journalism, because a lot of the times I would find out that something that had been reported in the newspaper or T.V. and it just was not right. So, yeah it was hard. And I did not have any money, I had to sell the book, and that took a long time. At that time the book gave me some money to use to support myself while I was doing it.
S: Why do you think the Etan case, specifically, was the one that brought people to pay attention to missing children?
LC: There were half a dozen reasons. One was that it never ended. It was not as though this boy went missing, they found his body, and it was over. Or that they found the guy who did it and then it was over. His case was always an ongoing investigation, so whenever anything new was happening, the story would just continue. Now we are on thirty years, and it is still going on. Last year, it was a huge case. Another reason was that I think really it is the parents worse nightmare: the idea that it could happen to you, if it happened to this boy. His parents were very, very articulate. They did really articulate interviews, when they did talk, and after a while they stopped talking to the press. They became kind off of mysterious and would not talk to people about it. And the father of Etan, a man named Stanley, is a photographer. He's a really good photographer, and his studio was in the bottom of the apartment he lived in. He used to spent time setting up the shot that he was filming or photographing. And the model would not be there yet, because that would have been a lot of money for the model, so his son, who really liked getting his picture taken, would sit in while he did the lighting. So there are these really beautiful photos of the boy, who is very beautiful to begin with. He is blond, with blue eyes, and he's white, and the father photographed him gorgeously. So when people were looking at the photograph, they were very very touching, so I think that I was something that just got to people more than the typical missing child story, where you do not get those types of images. So there were a lot of reasons. The other thing is, that at that time, there really were not a lot of resources for tracking kids who had gone missing, computers were not around, databases were terrible, people did not talk to each other specifically. This case happened and then years later, this little boy named Adam Walsh, from Florida, and his body was found, so that case kind off got resolved, but his father as a whole was a very passionate about the cause of finding missing kids. So he went on to have America's Most Wanted, so that was a very big thing. The two cases put together, plus there was another one in Atlanta, were boys went missing and later found killed. It just kind off galvanized people's interest in this area that had not had a lot of attention taken before.
S: Why do people consider Etan to be the first kid on the milk carton when he was not the first?
LC: Yeah that is actually not true, Etan was not the first. It's a myth. Someone said it once and then someone else said it and it makes a very great tail so it got spread around, but no he his case happened in 1979 and the Milk Carton Campaign did not really start till the mid 80's, I think 1985, 1986 were the first ones and they were in the mid west. He was in the milk cartons, he just was not the first one.
S: Why are there no pictures of Etan on the milk carton on the internet?
LC: I actually did find a picture, just this year because his father had given me a prototype that they had sent him from one of the milk companies, where it was the drawing of the milk carton, but it was not the actual milk carton. And then last year when the story got a lot of play again. This guy confessed and there were a lot of people talking about it. They were digging up this basement a couple of blocks away and people started showing up, to bring flowers or cards, and somebody was there with a milk carton in their hand. A photographer took a picture of it in this persons hand, it is just a close up of a peace of the milk carton, you do not actually see the whole milk carton, you just see his face on the side of what is clearly a milk carton.
S: What was the public's and the police's first reaction to Etan's case?
LC: The police started up that night and there were hundreds of them on the streets, they were towing the streets. An extraordinary police presence right from the beginning. The public, especially in New York, it was a huge story and there were tons and tons of people out looking for him. They put up posters and flyers with pictures of him. The community in lower Manhattan, where he lived, was absolutely galvanized, there were people looking everywhere, for days, weeks, and months took time off of their jobs, it was really extraordinary. And then because there were all these pictures all over the city, the whole rest of the city became very involved and it became some what symbolic of this terrible thing that had happened to New Yorkers. And then it went beyond there, it became an international story, people in other countries heard about it. There were missing posters that were sent all over the world. And at one point there was this idea that he might have ended up in Israel, so there was a lot of attention to his case in Israel at one point. So right from the beginning it was a very big story, and it is come and gone, come and gone, and come and gone.
S: What to you think of the Milk Carton Campaign? Do you think it help spread awareness about missing children?
LC: Oh, yes absolutely. I think absolutely it did. I think, you know, now I teach journalism, and I tell my students that when you get people's attention it is always going to raise people's awareness, it is always going to make people care. This was not the typical human face, but it face of this beautiful little child. And it made people talk about it a lot, they testified in front of congress, they were involved in different communities, in action groups, and they joined forces with other people, and they provided support of other missing parents missing kids. So it was a little like a snowball effect that got the movement going.
S: Is there anything else that you think we should know?
LC: The only other thing that I think you girls should know and that is important for you to know is that what I think had happened with this case and some of the other cases is that there became this perception that missing children in their country's numbering them to the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and that is actually a wrong statistic. So I think there is a whole other side to this, I think a really good thing came out of it because now there are kids who come home, that did not come home before that get found. But I also think that the actual number of children who are kidnapped by strangers, the way Etan Patz and Adam Walsh were, the number is really small, the number is in the low hundreds. The numbers are not as high as people perceive them to be.