Olivia Glazebrook

Suffer the parents

One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself.

issue 01 May 2010

One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself.

One morning in 1979 a six-year-old American boy, Etan Patz, set off on foot to catch the bus to school — the first time he had been allowed to walk to the bus stop by himself. He did not arrive; he vanished without a trace and was never found. In 2001, still missing, he was declared dead.

Etan’s was the case that changed the way America looked for its lost children: his search was given huge — unprecedented — media coverage, and his photograph was the first of many to be used in the ‘milk carton’ campaigns of the 1980s. Coverage of child abduction was altered for ever, and similar cases in this country still feel the influence of that disappearance.

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