Well, from what they've released..... I just don't know.
The guy confessed to having done this at the age of 18, at a time when he spent about a month working in the neighborhood (sounds like at a convenience store or the 1979 equivalent - "the corner store"). He says he lured him into the store with the promise of a soda and then somehow down to the basement and strangled him and dumped the body in a garbage bag, carried the bag a few blocks away and left it out with some other trash.
So far, he's given no motive - I'm sure if it was sexual the police would've said so. He's also got no material evidence, the shop has been sold and now sells glasses, and the only corroboration seems to be that he's told people for years that he's got a deep dark secret and was involved in a horrible killing in the past.
Things I'd need to see clarified before I'd believe all this:
He's a Latino teenager and working in a neighborhood bodega for about a month and the owners left him alone to watch the store? This is NYC. Rather far-fetched. Most bodega owners won't leave their cash register in the hands of even a family member, much less someone they'd only hired a few weeks earlier. I'd like to know if he was working for relatives or what the owners say about leaving their store and their cash to a casual worker.
Who watched the store while he was killing, bagging the body, walking a couple of blocks to dump it and then returned to the store. This is, ... what? A fifteen or twenty minute timeline? No one leaves a store unattended in ANY neighborhood of NYC for any amount of time. There's something major missing here.
Motive?
I'm not saying that this is a crock, but I'm sure thinking there's a lot missing in his narrative. Uppermost would be the motive. The boy had never walked that block alone before so this would've had to have been a spur of the moment thing. Do you finish taking the returned bottles down to the basement and then say to yourself, "Hmmm, I think I'll murder someone, now"? And the fact that he says he "lured" him with the promise of a soda? That says that while it was spur of the moment, he at least had the time to think up a plan. All in the time it takes a six-year-old to walk past your store? Something's missing, here.
The D.A. always looks for motive and opportunity. I'm not even sure I see an actual opportunity. By 1979 that are was not deserted in the mornings around that time. There was activity, quite a bit of it. And I most definitely don't see a motive until he gives us one.
I'm not totally sold on this. I can only hope there's a lot more in the police file than they're giving us, but rather than saying "we can't discuss right now if he offered other evidence", essentially they're saying, "No, all we've got is his confession, his apparent remorse and some conversations he had with people over the years."
And as to those conversations? One was reported as him having said that he was "involved in" a horrible crime when he was younger. Maybe just a way of wording it, or maybe there was someone else involved? If they only started questioning him on Wednesday (per the news reports), why the rush to arrest him and publicize it without first digging a lot deeper into his version of events?
