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Filed Under:Etan Patz, Harvey Fishbein, Irene Cornell, Pedro Hernandez
Pedro Hernandez is charged with killing 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979. (credit: CBS News)Pedro Hernandez is charged with killing 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979. (credit: CBS News)

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — The man accused of killing 6-year-old Etan Patz did not seem delusional when he confessed to the decades-old slaying, a police detective told jurors Thursday.

The lawyer defending Pedro Hernandez cross-examined Detective Anthony Curtin about the man’s videotaped confession to the 1979 killing, WCBS 880’s Irene Cornell reported.

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Defense attorney Harvey Fishbein focused on the feelings Hernandez describes in the video after he admitted to strangling Etan in the basement of the SoHo bodega where he worked, dumping a box with the boy, still alive, in a nearby alleyway and then returning to work.

“I felt I had done something wrong, but I really wasn’t thinking right,” Hernandez says in the 2012 video. “I felt half bad and half not bad.”

Curtin testified that Hernandez did not seem confused or delusional to him.

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Fishbein asked, “Does your definition of ‘delusional’ include having beliefs that are not real?”

“That’s possible,” the detective said.

Defense lawyers say Hernandez’s confession is fiction, dreamed up by a mentally ill man with a low IQ and a history of hallucinations and fueled by more than six hours of police questioning before Hernandez was read his rights.

Etan’s disappearance ushered in a new protectiveness into American parenting.

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He became one of the first missing children featured on milk cartons. His parents advocated for legislation that created a nationwide law-enforcement framework to address such cases.