Still to Unravel

This painful, gaping 33-year-old mystery has yet to be full solved, not until we know the motive:

A former convenience store worker confessed to luring 6-year-old Etan Patz from his school bus stop in 1979 and choking him to death in a basement, police said Thursday, ending a three-decades long investigation into one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases.

Pedro Hernandez, 51, of Maple Shade, N.J., was arrested on a murder charge after he told police he promised the boy a soda, took him to his store – just blocks from Etan's lower Manhattan home – and killed him there, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

Hernandez told police he put Etan's body in some trash about a block from the store, Kelly said, where it's possible it was picked up by sanitation crews.

...

Hernandez was questioned by police for more than three hours after he was picked up in New Jersey Wednesday, and gave police a signed confession, Kelly said. His motive was not yet clear.

Just one child? Did he really only do this once? Makes it all the more incomprehensible.

Let's just hope the really got the right guy.

Nancy Lynch

In what was my turn to take the kids to the movies, I just saw the new Nancy Drew movie and found myself in a bit of a time warp. But it wasn't the one hinted at in the advertising, the spoofy set-up of an obliviously 1950's-style title character dropped in a crass 2007 Hollywood high school (what The Brady Bunch Movie did with their 1970's-stuck leads). Instead I was drawn back to 2001 when David Lynch's Mulholland Drive hit the screens.

In the current picture, Nancy is drawn into a shadowy investigation of the death years prior of a Hollywood actress, played un-coincidentally by the beautiful Laura Elena Harring, who provided the curvaceous question mark in Lynch's picture, which itself drew upon the teen-novel literary heritage of Nancy Drew, girl detective, a series begun in the 1930's. When Nancy tracks down a young mother in a seedy Hollywood bungalow the first interior shots match a similar scene (discovering a corpse) in the Lynch picture, and the filmmakers toss in an overt reference to Lynch's Twin Peaks television series as well (Nancy visits a clinic named "Twin Palms").

The overall mood veers between Lynchian and Mean Girls to relatively entertaining effect for a grown-up doing their kid movie duty, and it definitely made me hungry to see Ms. Harring and then-unknown Naomi Watts spiral down that dark, dangerous rabbit hole again. Thinking ahead to the resultant effect on innocent young viewers exposed to this new vision of the seminal All-American female adolescent detective just made me wonder:

Is Nancy Drew be a gateway drug to David Lynch?