Story highlights
- Rosemary Hernandez visited her pastor after her husband's arrest, the pastor says
- She was weeping and confused that Pedro Hernandez was accused of murder
- Police say her husband confessed to killing Etan Patz, 6, in 1979
- The pastor asks church members to pray for the Patz and Hernandez families
Rosemary Hernandez was going through hard times, coping with financial woes after recently losing her job at an insurance company, all that coming years after an accident left her husband unable to work.
Yet it was something else entirely on her mind when she and her daughter came weeping into their Moorestown, New Jersey, church Thursday, according to their pastor.
"I knew it was something bad," Marantha Christian Fellowship church Senior Pastor George Bowen told CNN on Sunday.
Hernandez told Bowen that police came to her door the previous day, saying their visit had "something to do with the Etan Patz case."
The 6-year-old boy's sudden disappearance a block from his Manhattan home on May 25, 1979, spawned a national movement to raise awareness of missing children, including the then-novel approach of putting an image of the child's face on milk cartons.
Photos: Searching for Etan Patz
Photos: Searching for Etan Patz
Searching for Etan Patz – "Inside Edition" reveals this photo of Pedro Hernandez, the suspect who reportedly confessed to killing Etan Patz 33 years ago.
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Photos: Searching for Etan Patz
Searching for Etan Patz – The 1979 disappearance of 6-year-old Etan helped trigger a national movement focusing on missing children. Here is the New York Police Department's original poster for Etan, who went missing May 25, 1979, a block from his SoHo home. He was walking to the school bus stop by himself for the first time when he disappeared.
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Photos: Searching for Etan Patz
Searching for Etan Patz – After more than 30 years, a break in the case appeared to develop in April 2012 when police closed off two blocks in New York's SoHo neighborhood and searched a basement in the area for clues. But the search came up empty.
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Photos: Searching for Etan Patz
Searching for Etan Patz – On April 20, 2012, New York police and FBI agents removed concrete slabs from a basement in search of clues in the 33-year-old disappearance of Etan. The basement is about a half-block from where the boy's family still lives.
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Photos: Searching for Etan Patz
Searching for Etan Patz – A note from Stan Patz, Etan's father, pleads for privacy from the media during renewed interest in the 33-year-old case in April 2012. The boy's parents have not commented on the new developments in the case.
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Photos: Searching for Etan Patz
Searching for Etan Patz – Etan was officially declared dead in 2001. His disappearance was the first of several high-profile cases that catapulted concern about missing children to the forefront of national consciousness.
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Who is the Etan Patz suspect? 03:40
33 years of mystery in Etan Patz case 02:15
Front Lines: Etan Patz suspect arrested 02:57
Questions remain about Patz suspect 03:17
Her husband, Pedro Hernandez, ended up leaving the family home with police -- and, with his subsequent arrest, he hasn't returned.
"She seemed absolutely shell-shocked," Bowen recalled Sunday of his conversation three days earlier with Rosemary Hernandez. "She was crying. She had an expression on her face like, 'How could this ever happen?'"
That same day, police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters that Pedro Hernandez had admitted -- as a then-19-year-old clerk in a Manhattan bodega -- to luring Etan to the store with the promise of a soda, choking him and placing his body in the trash about a block and a half away.
The Manhattan district attorney's office charged Pedro Hernandez with second-degree murder, finding his confession credible even given that authorities concede there is no physical evidence linking him and that Patz's body has never been found.
Defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein claims his client -- who is on suicide watch at New York's Bellevue Hospital, according to a law enforcement source -- has a "long psychiatric history" including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and hallucinations.
Hernandez has not entered a plea due to a pending psychiatric evaluation.
Rosemary Hernandez is Pedro Hernandez's second wife.
Bowen, the New Jersey pastor, said he got the impression Pedro Hernandez never mentioned anything about the Patz case or about killing anyone to his wife, while ceding he never posed the question directly to Rosemary Hernandez.
What he did know for certain was that the Hernandez family attended the church regularly.
The couple faithfully sat in the second row during services, the pastor said.
Rosemary Hernandez and her daughter were active in church ministries. But Pedro Hernandez, who Kelly has said had been collecting disability payments since a 1993 accident prevented him from working, was more in the background.
"He's very quiet, very shy," Bowen said, describing him as "socially awkward."
The pastor said that his interactions with the husband typically consisted of brief greetings and little else. Once, the couple came to him for counseling -- for an issue he say was not related to their marriage or a crime -- and Rosemary Hernandez "did all the talking," Bowen said.
For this Sunday's services, Rosemary Hernandez and her daughter were not in their regular spot in the second row.
But they were on Bowen's mind, as was Pedro Hernandez's alleged victim and the boy's family.
"Please pray for the Patz family, pray for Rosemary and (her daughter)," the pastor told his congregation. "Please pray for Pedro."
