Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk, had confessed years after the 1979 crime to luring Etan Patz, 6, into a basement in SoHo. The case shook New York City.

A New York federal appeals court ruled Monday to overturn the guilty verdict for the man convicted in the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz, the Jewish 6-year-old whose kidnapping and presumed murder changed America’s approach to missing-child cases.

A federal appeals court overturned the guilty verdict in one of the nation’s most notorious missing child cases.