Murder trial begins in 1979 case of Etan Patz, 6

NEW YORK - Thirty-five years after the disappearance of a 6-year-old boy in Manhattan ushered in an era of protectiveness for America's children, trial began Friday for a mentally ill man with a low IQ who confessed to his murder and kidnapping.

Etan Patz was a "tiny man with a big heart" whose life was snuffed out by a worker in the corner candy store on the first day he was allowed to walk alone to catch his bus to school, a prosecutor said.

"You will see and hear his chilling confession," Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon told jurors.

The defense of Pedro Hernandez, 54, of Maple Shade, N.J., depends on convincing jurors his confession was false.

"He has visions. He hears voices," defense lawyer Harvey Fishbein said. "He cannot distinguish between what is real and what is not."

Etan was last seen alive walking to the bus stop in 1979. His body has never been found, and memories can falter with the passage of time.

But the prosecutor told jurors that Hernandez, a teenager at the time of the crime, implicated himself long before police questioned him:

Hernandez, without naming the boy, told friends, relatives, and his prayer group in the 1980s that he had killed a child.

Hernandez told one of those religious acquaintances that he had sexually abused a boy before killing him.

Hernandez's ex-wife, years ago, said she found a cut-out photo of Etan in a little box where the man stored keepsakes.

Hernandez's brother-in-law Jose Lopez tried to alert authorities for years, the prosecutor said, calling America's Most Wanted, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and the NYPD's missing-persons squad. No one got back to him until 2012, when he called again after seeing news of a failed effort to dig for clues in a neighborhood basement.

As the seven-man, five-woman jury was chosen from a pool of about 700 people, some of the prospects wondered whether memories can be reliable after so many years.

The prosecutor seemed to acknowledge this by evoking a scene from "a stone age where the Internet didn't exist."

Hernandez is "a person who committed a horrible, unthinkable act, and then covered his tracks and lived the rest of his life ... always waiting and wondering when the day would come that his dark secret was out," Illuzzi-Orbon said. "Today is that day."