The abandonment of the investigation into Leonard Patz was a consequential narrowing of the inquiry into Ben Rifkin’s murder: once Jacob Barber was selected for indictment, investigators stopped seriously pursuing another suspect whom the available evidence had not excluded. At trial, the defense used the decision to challenge both the completeness of the investigation and the confident story the prosecution told the jury about motive and guilt.

Background and decision

The record presented at trial established that the Patz investigation had not been ruled out by evidence. Lieutenant Paul Duffy agreed that there was no evidence at the time that excluded Leonard Patz as a suspect, and no evidence had subsequently emerged that directly cleared him. The distinction mattered: the investigation was not dropped because a definitive finding had eliminated Patz.

Duffy testified that the inquiry into Patz was stopped once the decision was made to indict Jacob. He identified District Attorney Lynn Canavan as the person who made that decision and said she had been advised by Neal Logiudice. Asked whether Logiudice had pushed for dropping the Patz angle in a discussion among investigators, the district attorney, and Logiudice, Duffy ultimately acknowledged that he had. The sequence connected the investigative turn to a prosecutorial choice: the alternative was set aside as the case against Jacob advanced.

The alternative suspect and the defense challenge

The defense’s questioning made the unpursued lead relevant to more than procedural history. Duffy agreed that Andy Barber continued to believe Patz was the real killer, and that this belief was unsurprising given the limited information available at the time. He also confirmed that he himself had first brought Patz to Andy’s attention. The line of inquiry therefore exposed a tension between the early breadth of the investigation and its later concentration on Jacob.

The questioning did not establish that Patz committed the murder. Instead, it established the narrower but important fact that investigators had neither excluded him nor produced evidence directly clearing him, while the investigation was no longer seriously pursuing him. Duffy’s account located the choice to stop within a group discussion but also identified Logiudice’s advocacy as part of how that choice was made. The abandoned lead thus became a question about investigative judgment and the limits of what the prosecution could claim to have resolved.

Competing stories of the crime

That unresolved alternative stood against the prosecution’s effort to supply the jury with a coherent motive. In his opening, Logiudice framed the case around a fourteen-year-old victim, Ben Rifkin, and argued that Jacob had a lethal temper that finally “snapped” after ordinary teasing. He acknowledged that Ben had teased Jacob and that the jury would hear unflattering things about the victim, while insisting that Ben was an ordinary boy whose imperfections did not make his death deserved.

Logiudice’s own account revealed the gap the defense could press: he described the trigger as something the prosecution might never know, then offered possibilities—an insult, a push, a threat, or bullying—rather than a demonstrated cause. The narration observes that a jury wants to understand why, and that a crime without a clear motive is difficult to prove. The abandoned Patz inquiry sharpened that uncertainty. The prosecution presented a story in which Jacob’s temper turned teasing into murder, while the investigation had left an alternative suspect uncleared and the motive itself partly conjectural.

Significance and unresolved consequences

The Patz decision illustrates how the definition of a case can change as investigators and prosecutors settle on a defendant. Logiudice’s opening argument treats the jury’s task as one of story-making: facts must be arranged into an account of what the case is about. The later testimony about Patz unsettles that account, not by proving an alternative culprit, but by showing that an investigative possibility had been dropped before evidence resolved it.

The book preserves the difference between legal accusation and certainty. Andy’s continuing belief in Patz is reported alongside Duffy’s testimony that Jacob had not been the object of Andy’s suspicions, while the trial record establishes no direct proof that Patz was responsible. The investigation’s abandonment therefore remains consequential without becoming a solution: it exposes a choice made under uncertainty and leaves the reader with the distance between a persuasive courtroom narrative and a fully settled truth.