The suspect in the 1979 disappearance of a 6-year-old New York City boy that led to a national missing-children movement has been indicted on charges of murder and kidnapping, his lawyer said Wednesday.

Attorney Harvey Fishbein said 51-year-old Pedro Hernandez was being charged in the disappearance of Etan Patz.

Etan's photo was among the first put on milk cartons, and his case turned May 25 into National Missing Children's Day.

Hernandez was arrested this year, and investigators say he confessed.

Investigators began focusing on Hernandez after a tipster called police about comments by Hernandez's sister that she had heard Hernandez told a church prayer group in the 1980s that he killed a child in New York City.

Hernandez, now a married father, was a teenage clerk at a convenience store when Etan disappeared on his way to school. Police say Hernandez told investigators he lured the boy into the store with the promise of a soda.

He allegedly said he led the child to the basement, choked him and left his body in a bag of trash about a block away.

Fishbein has described Hernandez as bipolar and schizophrenic, with a history of hallucinations. The diagnosis could become the basis of psychiatric defense claiming that Hernandez agreed to speak to police without understanding his rights, and that the purported confession was a sick fantasy.