'Monster' hid Etan's body in bodega fridge before trash dump: sources

He put Etan’s body on ice.
The man who confessed to strangling little Etan Patz was calculating enough to stash the child’s corpse in a basement walk-in refrigerator before tossing it out with the trash, sources told The Post yesterday.
Demented murder suspect Pedro Hernandez, 51, revealed to authorities that after killing the child May 25, 1979, “he put him in the walk-in box and kept him there until he took him out and put him in the garbage,” a law-enforcement source said.
It’s unclear how long Hernandez, then 19, kept the boy’s body hidden in the basement fridge at his family’s SoHo bodega, where he worked as a stock boy, after killing him. Etan’s body had been stuffed in a plastic bag and then put into a box before being stowed in the walk-in, sources said.

Stanley Patz

PUZZLE: Pedro Hernandez allegedly hid Etan Patz in a walk-in cooler below or next to the bodega where he worked in 1979. Cops are now searching the SoHo block.

Stanley Patz

Inside Edition

Pedro Hernandez

But the grisly package remained there until the coast was clear and Hernandez could sneak it out to the street that night. He told cops he wound up carrying the box to an alley down the block and dumping it in other garbage that was later hauled off by a trash truck.
The lurid detail came during Hernandez’s stunning confession to cops last week in which he admitted to luring the towheaded 6-year-old into the bodega with the promise of a cold soda. Etan had been walking to his school bus stop — just across the street from the bodega — by himself for the very first time when he was abducted.
Cops are feverishly poring over old blueprints of the building to see if they include any description of the walk-in.
A longtime resident said the bodega’s owner at the time, identified as Luis, also used the basements of two neighboring businesses for storage and illegal cockfights.
Hernandez could have brought Etan’s body to a refrigerator that was either in a common storage area used by both businesses or in a space directly below the bodega where the owner’s wife cooked.
Cops want to confirm that Hernandez’s descriptions of the basement space where the walk-in was located matches architectural drawings from that time to make sure he’s telling the truth.
They also are reviewing Sanitation Department records to try to confirm other details of his confession and to determine whether it would make sense to search for Etan’s remains in a landfill.
Sources yesterday said the child’s remains could have wound up in the now-closed Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island or the Fountain Avenue landfill in Brooklyn.
They also could have been brought to the Gansevoort incinerator on West 12th Street.
The NYPD plans to scour sanitation, landfill and incinerator log books from that time before determining whether to launch a search for the remains, Sanitation spokesman Vito Turso said.
The grisly developments came as sources told The Post that NYPD brass pressured a reluctant Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. to OK Hernandez’s arrest, despite Vance’s concerns over a lack of corroborating evidence.
The DA — still stung by criticism for busting French pol Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a Manhattan sex case, only to later drop the charges because of the alleged victim’s lack of credibility — wanted more proof before charging Hernandez with murder, said several law-enforcement sources.
“After the last headache with DSK, you don’t want another black eye,” one source told The Post.
“You only have one guy making a confession; you don’t have corroborating evidence. That’s never a way to do any case, never mind a high-profile case like this,” the source said. “The DA was not happy to rush to make this arrest. They wanted more things done.”
An FBI source suggested that Vance’s misgivings would explain why he wasn’t at the news conference where Police Commissioner Ray Kelly announced Hernandez’s arrest — even though Vance had campaigned on reopening the case.
“Hey, he’s bipolar,” the FBI source said of Hernandez. “Not that this is not the guy — it might be. But there is skepticism.”