Pedro Hernandez, 51, told investigators this week he lured the little boy into the shop with the promise of a soda, then led him to the basement, choked him and put his body in a bag with some trash about a block away, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. Investigators hadn’t determined any motive, he said.

Kelly said there is no physical evidence. But authorities say they have a detailed, signed confession, as well as accounts of incriminating remarks Hernandez made to others.

Hernandez didn’t yet have a lawyer, police said. An arraignment was expected Friday afternoon.

While the arrest marked only the start of what could be a complex court case, it was a stunning turn in one of the nation’s most tortuous and baffling missing-children cases. Police had been aware of Hernandez, as the shop was in Etan’s neighborhood, but had never before eyed the married father as a suspect. Another man had long been the prime suspect, and investigators questioned yet a third man as recently as last month.

All the while, Stan and Julie Patz have stayed in same downtown Manhattan apartment, never even changing their phone number in case their vanished son tried to call.

“We can only hope,” Kelly said, “that these developments bring some measure of peace to the family.”

The Patzes and a lawyer for them didn’t immediately return calls Thursday.

At Hernandez’ home in Maple Shade, N.J., no one answered the door Thursday night. Neighbors said they were surprised at his arrest.

“I knew the guy. He was not a problem. His family was great people,” said Dan Wollick, 71, who rents an apartment in Hernandez’ home. “He didn’t bother anybody.”

The arrest — the first ever in the case — was a long-sought grail for authorities, including Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who announced he was renewing the investigation shortly after he took office in 2010.

His office, which declined to comment Thursday, will now move on to the work of prosecuting a 33-year-old case in which no body has ever been found. Prosecutors will likely look to amass witness statements or other evidence to support Hernandez’ account.

Etan vanished on May 25, 1979, in New York’s busy SoHo neighborhood, which was edgier then than the swath of chic boutiques it is now.

Police conducted an exhaustive search amid a crush of media attention. Thousands of fliers of the sandy-haired boy with the toothy grin were plastered around the city. Buildings were canvassed and hundreds of people interviewed.

The disappearance ushered in an era of anxiety about leaving children unsupervised, and President Ronald Reagan designated the anniversary as National Missing Children’s Day in 1983.

Detectives are often inundated with hoaxes, false leads and possible sightings around the anniversary. But Kelly said they had probable cause to believe Hernandez’s story was true, because of specific details he gave to police.

Hernandez, who had worked at the convenience store for about a month and lived nearby, wasn’t questioned at the outset, Kelly said. Days after Etan vanished, Hernandez left that job and moved to New Jersey, where he had relatives, the commissioner said.

Hernandez worked in construction until he suffered a back injury in 1993 and has since received disability payments, Kelly said. He said Hernandez, who has a teenage daughter, had no criminal record.

But he told a relative and others, as far back as 1981, that he had “done something bad” and killed an unnamed child in New York City, according to Kelly. Police learned that only recently, when a tipster — not a relative — pointed police to Hernandez, after a search of a basement near Patz’ home last month hurtled the case back into the news, Kelly said.

Police took him into custody Wednesday night, and after several hours of questioning, he provided a signed confession, Kelly said.

“He was remorseful, and I think the detectives thought that it was a feeling of relief on his part,” the commissioner said.

Earlier leads had arisen and stalled, at one point taking investigators as far as Israel to track reported sightings of Etan.

For most of the past decade, the investigation focused on Jose Ramos, a convicted child molester now in prison in Pennsylvania. He had been dating Etan’s baby sitter.

A civil judge found him to be responsible for the boy’s disappearance and presumed death, largely because he refused to answer some questions under oath, but he was never criminally charged. He might be able to get the civil judgment reviewed now.

A few weeks ago, investigators excavated a basement down the street from the Patz apartment but found no human remains. They questioned a handyman who had a workspace in the cellar in 1979. But he was not named as a suspect and denied any involvement in the boy’s disappearance.

Finally, on Thursday, police told Patz’ parents they had honed in on Hernandez.

“Mr. Patz was taken aback, a little surprised, and I would say overwhelmed, to a degree,” Lt. Christopher Zimmerman said. ” … He was a little surprised, but I think after everything Mr. Patz has gone through, he handled it very well.”

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Associated Press writers Deepti Hajela, Tom Hays and Karen Matthews in New York and Geoff Mulvihill in Maple Shade, N.J., contributed to this report.

Forty-four other people were also charged with drug crimes in the dismantling of Corley’s operation, known as the Supreme Team, and another drug gang, authorities said.

Corley supplied cocaine to a second gang called the South Side Bloods, and low-level dealers grossed about $15,000 a week in drug sales, Kelly said. Burned by a wiretap before, Corley used at least eight different phones, authorities said.

“He had an uncanny ability to keep his associates in the dark. No one knew where he lived, what phone number he used, what car he drove,” Kelly said.

A call to Corley’s lawyer wasn’t immediately returned Thursday.

The case was pieced together by Detective David Leonardi, who said the dealers used a language called the “5 percenter” where every number and letter had its own word and members decoded messages about drug orders. The wiretaps also netted information on illegal guns and a possible killing in South Carolina.

Corley came of age during the crack era of the late 1980s and was an associate of the Supreme Team, which controlled housing projects and corners in Queens, the ground zero of the crack epidemic in New York. Crime was rampant; in 1990, the number of murders hit an all-time high of 2,245.

The Supreme Team was run by legendary gang leader Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, who reputedly funneled drug money into rap music label Murder Inc. He’s now serving life without parole for a pair of murders after a 2007 conviction.

It was a brutal drug gang that came out of the same Queens streets where platinum rappers 50 Cent and Ja Rule emerged years later. At its peak, the Supreme Team’s network of dealers was making $200,000 a day, authorities said.

After McGriff did jail time on a drug conviction, he was released in 1997 and aligned himself with neighborhood friend and music mogul Irv “Gotti” Lorenzo. The one-time street thugs produced one film: “Crime Partners,” a straight-to-video affair that featured Ja Rule, Snoop Dogg and Ice-T.

The Supreme Team was responsible for the shooting of NYPD Officer Edward Byrne in 1988, authorities said, but Corley wasn’t charged in that killing. He was jailed once in the 1980s on drug charges, and was later convicted of manslaughter for beating to death a man he believed to be a police informant, and served more than three years, police said.

New York Police Department Capt. James Ryan said the takedown this week finally signaled the end of the remnants of the team that had terrorized Queens for decades.

“We feel it’s pretty much dismantled now with Corley being taken out of the picture,” he said. “It remains to be seen, we’re always vigilant and we think this is the end of them.”

By Saturday, investigators had finished ripping up the basement’s concrete floor with jackhammers and saws, and were digging through the dirt in hope of finding the boy’s remains, or any other evidence.

So far, authorities haven’t given any outward sign that they’ve found anything.

“Law enforcement is always cautiously optimistic,” said Tim Flannelly, chief FBI spokesman in New York. “But this is one lead of many.”

It’s not clear what, if anything, the dig will turn up, but the investigation has reached similar highs before — only for the trail to go cold for years at a time.

Etan vanished on May 25, 1979, while walking alone to his school bus stop for the first time, two blocks from his home in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.

There was an exhaustive search by the police and a crush of media attention. The boy’s photo was one of the first of a missing child on a milk carton. Thousands of fliers were plastered around the city, buildings canvassed, hundreds of people interviewed. SoHo was not a neighborhood of swank boutiques and galleries as now, but of working-class New Yorkers rattled by the news.

“No one could understand how it could’ve happened, at that time, we all felt safe, we were a little community,” said Sandie Vega, who was Etan’s age when he disappeared. “We also thought it must’ve been someone from the outside, no one we knew could take him.”

Yukie Ohta, now 43, remembers police coming to her door to talk to her about the boy’s disappearance. Her sister had gone to a child’s play group with Etan, in the very basement police are searching. By the time he disappeared, the children’s collective had moved and the space was being used by a handyman.

“I didn’t really know anything helpful,” Ohta said.

No one knew enough. Etan’s parents, Stan and Julie, offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the boy’s whereabouts, and sightings were frequently reported, to no avail. In 1986, a child resembling Etan was spotted in Israel, which prompted detectives to circulate his photo there. Nothing came of it.

A name gradually emerged as a possible suspect: Jose Ramos, a drifter and onetime boyfriend of Etan’s baby sitter. In the early 1980s, he was arrested on theft charges, and had photos of other young, blond boys in his backpack. But there was no hard evidence linking Ramos to the crime.

Missing persons cases, like homicides, are generally considered cold after six months, but they’re never closed. And with seemingly no new leads, the case would go quiet for years. In three decades, 10 detectives have been assigned to head up the case. The FBI and police are working jointly.

“Those cases are still maintained by someone, but the attention they get diminishes over time,” said Joseph Pollini, a retired NYPD lieutenant in the cold case squad, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “There’s often nothing you can do, when you have no new leads.”

A former federal prosecutor who had worked on the case declared in 1998 that he believed Ramos was behind Etan’s disappearance and death. Ramos, now serving a prison sentence in Pennsylvania for abusing an 8-year-old boy there, has denied killing Etan.

Police investigated leads to Ramos at various points, including a 2000 search of the basement of the building where he lived in 1979. They dismantled the furnace and searched it for DNA. But they found only animal traces.

By the next year, father Stan Patz, who never moved or even changed his phone number in the hope his son would reach out, had Etan declared dead in order to sue Ramos in civil court. He was tired of waiting for justice, he said at the time.

A civil judge in 2004 found him to be responsible for the disappearance and presumed death of the boy, after he disobeyed her orders to answer deposition questions under oath for a lawyer representing Etan’s parents.

The ruling provided a tiny measure of comfort to the family. But the criminal case continues, and prosecutors lacked enough evidence to charge Ramos criminally.

The case was quiet until 2010 when new district attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said he was going to revisit it.

Ramos is scheduled to be released from prison in November. His pending freedom is one of the factors that has given new urgency to the case.

But the focus has shifted to the basement that had been used at the time as a workspace for a handyman named Othniel Miller. He was interviewed after the boy went missing. Investigators noticed at the time that the basement had a fresh concrete floor; his space was searched then but never dug up.

He gave investigators an alibi for the time of Etan’s disappearance, though they are giving his account of the day a fresh look, a person familiar with the investigation said Saturday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation

Law enforcement officials have spoken to him as recently as Wednesday, and one interview prompted them to take a closer look at the space, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing.

The 75-year-old Miller hasn’t been named a suspect, and his lawyer says he has nothing to do with the case.

The attorney, Michael C. Farkas, declined to comment Saturday.

“I couldn’t believe it, and still don’t, not yet anyway” said Cass Collins, who lived in the neighborhood at the time. “He was always around, he would work in our loft, he was near our kids all the time. It would be shocking.”

The 13-by-62-foot basement space being searched sits beneath several clothing boutiques. Investigators began by removing drywall partitions so they could get to brick walls that were exposed in 1979. The work will continue through the weekend. About 50 law enforcement agents including forensics experts and an anthropologist are on scene. While cadaver-sniffing dogs are capable of detecting scents much older than 33 years, it’s also possible the dog picked up an animal scent or was plain wrong.

The cobblestone street remained closed off and was a veritable media circus, with trucks and crews parked along the curb and gawking tourists stopping to snap photos.

The Patz family hasn’t commented or turned up near the site, though it’s visible from their home — they’ve seen the circus before.

“To the hardworking and patient media people, the answer to all your questions at this time is no comment,” read a handwritten note outside their door. “Please stop ringing our bell and calling our phone for interviews.”

“Stan Patz, 3E.”

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Associated Press writers Samantha Gross, Tom Hays and Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.

Baldwin’s publicist, Matthew Hiltzik, said, “As everyone knows, stalking is a serious issue, so we’ve turned this matter over to the New York Police Department.”

Sabourin’s attorney did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment after the arraignment.

On April 5, Sabourin showed up at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where Baldwin was hosting a screening of “Last Tango in Paris,” and she had to be removed by security, police said.

She also is believed to have turned up unannounced at his home on Long Island on March 31 and to have gone to his address in lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood while he wasn’t there, authorities say.

The two met a decade ago on the set of “The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” in which he had a cameo and she was a publicist.

According to authorities, the 54-year-old Baldwin told police that the 40-year-old Sabourin had been sending him emails for several weeks and that the notes were disturbing. She professed her love for him, begging to have his children and telling him to leave his wife, he said, according to police.

Baldwin recently became engaged to his 28-year-old girlfriend, Hilaria Thomas, a yoga instructor. Baldwin previously was married to actress Kim Basinger, and they have a daughter named Ireland.

In 2008, he published a book called “A Promise to Ourselves” about his personal experience dealing with divorce and his fight with Basinger over custody of their daughter.

Sabourin is a resident of Quebec. There was no answer to phone calls made to an address believed to be hers in a suburb outside Montreal.