Arrest at last in 1979 Etan Patz murder; suspect to appear in court today

New York’s most notorious and chilling mystery has finally been solved.

A former SoHo bodega stock boy has confessed to murdering 6-year-old Etan Patz — and will answer to the crime in court exactly 33 years after the boy disappeared while walking to a school-bus stop.

Pedro Hernandez who was charged with second-degree murder yesterday, told cops he had never seen Etan before that day — but once he spotted him, “I knew he was the one . . . [I] just felt the urge to kill,” according to a law-enforcement source.

Hernandez, 51, lured the child “with the promise of a soda, and led him to the basement of the bodega, and strangled him there,” said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Hernandez then placed Etan’s body in a bag, took it about a block and a half away and left it “with the trash,” Kelly said.

Hernandez denied sexually abusing the boy, but investigators are skeptical, sources said.

In his written confession, Hernandez stated, “I’m sorry, I shoke [sic] him,” the sources said.

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A source said Hernandez was taken to Bellevue Hospital at 5:30 a.m. because he had been off his psychiatric medication during his time in police custody.

Yesterday’s arrest of the married New Jersey dad — who was 18 when Etan was killed — brought a sense of closure to the boy’s long-suffering parents.

Stan and Julie Patz were out of the city, but cops informed them of the dramatic development. “Mr. Patz was taken aback, a little surprised and overwhelmed,” said Lt. Christopher Zimmerman, head of the NYPD’s Missing Persons Squad.

Hernandez’s name was included in a detective’s report when the case broke, but was not questioned until Wednesday.

The cancer-stricken Hernandez, a churchgoing teetotaler, was identified as a suspect in the past month by a member of his family after news broke that investigators were digging up a former handyman’s basement on Prince Street in late April.

J.B Nicholas / Splash News

Officials searched a SoHo basement last month, hoping to find clues of Etan's disappearance.

Nothing was found there, but the search prompted Hernandez’s brother-in-law, José Lopez, to call the NYPD and tell them that Hernandez had admitted killing an unnamed child shortly after Etan vanished, sources said.

Hernandez first told relatives in 1981 he “had done a bad thing and killed a child in New York,” Kelly said.

Hernandez was picked up Wednesday at his home in Maple Shade, NJ, where he lives with his college-student daughter, Becky, 20, and his second wife, Rosemary.