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Filed Under:Anthony Curtin, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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