A childhood friend and the ex-wife of the man police say confessed to slaying New York City boy Etan Patz 35 years ago both recounted Pedro Hernandez telling them he killed someone as they took the stand to testify in his Manhattan murder trial Monday.  

Mike Pike and Daisy Rivera testified before jurors in the trial for Hernandez, the SoHo neighborhood shop worker accused of killing Patz in 1979 in a case that shaped the nation's approach to missing children. Hernandez, a mentally ill man with low IQ, allegedly confessed to kidnapping and killing Patz, whose body was never found after he disappeared while walking to a bus stop.

Pike was the first witness called to the stand Monday morning. He recalled Hernandez confessing to the killing in 1980 outside his family's home in Camden, New Jersey.

"He told me a young boy threw a ball at his throat," Pike said. "He lost it and retaliated and strangled him."

Pike said that Hernandez said that after killing, he put Patz's body in a bag and dumped it in an alley.

Pike said he didn't call police after the confession because he didn't believe Hernandez at the time.

After Pike's testimony, Hernandez' ex-wife, Daisy Rivera, was called to the stand. She told jurors Hernandez confessed to her in their living room in 1982, before they were married, that he had killed someone, though he never identified that "someone."

"He said it was a young man. Muchacho. A white guy," Rivera testified. "He said this person approached him and he felt violated. It had gotten out of hand and he put his hands around the person's neck and he had strangled him."

When Rivera asked Hernandez what he did with the body, she said Hernandez told her he put it in a Dumpster and covered it with plastic bags.

"He was emotional. He cried," Rivera testified. "I believed something terrible had happened."

Rivera told jurors she had threatened to go to police once or twice. One time, she found a cut-out photo of Patz in a little box where Hernandez kept his keepsakes.

Rivera said she thought her husband had had a child with someone else when she first saw the picture. When she asked him about the photo, she said Hernandez got angry at her for going through his things.

"He became nervous," Rivera testified. "Again, I asked him why he had that poster. Then he explained to me that child had disappeared within the area where he worked at."

"He said they had put posters all around because the child was missing," Rivera continued. "He said he just took it because he knew the family; he was familiar with them."

Defense lawyers argued Rivera was a welfare cheat who made up the confession story to get more child support.

"They want everything to be a confession," said Hernandez's lawyer Harvey Fishbein. "What it is is constant stories my client would tell." 

The testimony from Pike and Rivera comes days after Patz's mother took the stand and testified about the last time she saw her then 6-year-old son. She recounted watching the boy walk to school alone for the first time the day he was killed.

Patz was last seen alive walking to the bus stop. His disappearance ushered in a new protectiveness into American parenting. He became one of the first missing children featured on milk cartons. His parents advocated for legislation that created a nationwide law-enforcement framework to address such cases. The anniversary of his disappearance is now National Missing Children's Day.

Investigators jotted down Hernandez's name in 2012 during a feverish search for Patz, but it wasn't until 2012 that he emerged as a suspect. The apparent breakthrough in the case was based on a tip and a videotaped confession that prosecutors say was foreshadowed by remarks he made to friends and relatives in the 1980s.

His defense hinges on convincing jurors that the confession is false, along with suggesting that the real killer may be a convicted Pennsylvania child molester who was a prime suspect for years.

The trial is expected to continue for as much as three months.