By PERVAIZ SHALLWANI and SHARON ADARLO

CAMDEN, N.J.—A sister of the New Jersey man charged with killing 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979 said Monday she went to local police in the early 1980s after hearing that her brother had “confessed to killing a kid” to a prayer group.

Speaking at her home here, Norma Hernandez, 53 years old, said family members had told her Pedro Hernandez made the confession at a prayer group led by Tomas Rivera at St. Anthony of Padua, a Roman Catholic Church in Camden. She said family members were present during the prayer meeting.

Ms. Hernandez said she told Camden police about the disclosure in the early 1980s.

Ms. Hernandez told The Wall Street Journal that she believed her brother’s alleged admission.

It wasn’t clear Monday what the Camden police did with Ms. Hernandez’s contention then. Ms. Hernandez didn’t say whether she filed a police report. “I just feel angry that people who heard the confession didn’t do anything,” she said.

Camden police officials referred questions to the police chief, who was out of the office Monday. A spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office said the office would discuss Ms. Hernandez’s claim on Tuesday to see if there was a record of it. Ms. Hernandez said she has spoken with New York Police Department investigators recently about her report to Camden police and other matters regarding her brother.

Mr. Hernandez, 51, who most recently lived in nearby Maple Shade, N.J., was charged Friday with second-degree murder in connection with Etan’s death. He is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation in Bellevue Hospital Center. His attorney, Harvey Fishbein, has said Mr. Hernandez has a long history of mental illness, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Mr. Fishbein didn’t return requests for comment on Monday.

NYPD officials couldn’t be reached Monday evening about Ms. Hernandez’s claim. Investigators have interviewed several of Mr. Hernandez’s family members and those in a Roman Catholic prayer group in Camden, N.J., who say he made statements over the years that he killed a child in New York.

According to police, Mr. Hernandez has told detectives that he lured the boy into the store’s basement with a soda, killed him and left him in a trash bag. A police report from 1979 listed Mr. Hernandez as being a bodega worker in Etan’s neighborhood at the time. The bodega is now a sunglasses store.

A law-enforcement official said Monday that investigators have been combing through landfill records and analyzing building blueprints in an effort to corroborate details of Mr. Hernandez’s alleged account of what happened to Etan 33 years ago this month while the boy walked to his school bus stop in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. The case helped raise awareness about missing children and has gripped New Yorkers ever since.

Authorities announced a break in the case last week after a relative came forward telling authorities about Mr. Hernandez’s alleged claims.

As they continue to try and prove—or disprove—claims that Mr. Hernandez made during video statements last week about how he killed the boy, investigators have been “working closely with the Department of Sanitation regarding landfill records, garbage pick-up routes,” the official said. Investigators are also “looking at detailed schematics of the building from the time,” the official said.

Authorities on Thursday questioned a man they said had confessed to the murder of six-year-old Etan Patz, a 1979 case that drew national attention to the issue of missing children. WSJ’s Tamer El-Ghobashy reports. Photo: AFP/Getty Images.

The investigation could lead authorities to dig at a landfill in an effort to recover Etan’s remains, but it was unclear Monday whether police and the Manhattan district attorney’s office had reached that decision, the official said.

At Mr. Rivera’s home in Blackwood, N.J., a woman who identified herself as his wife confirmed that her husband had met Mr. Hernandez while leading a prayer group of about 50 people in 1980s. She said the group included some of Mr. Hernandez’s siblings, but didn’t specify which ones. She said Mr. Rivera, 76, was sick and didn’t want to talk.

The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Rivera met Mr. Hernandez in the early 1980s while leading a prayer group of about 50 people at St. Anthony of Padua.

Among those in the prayer group, Ms. Hernandez said, was her sister Margarita Lopez and her husband, Jose Lopez.

Mr. Lopez told the Journal on Friday that he had long known about the alleged murder. Asked if he went to police, Mr. Lopez said, “That don’t matter.”

“He did [tell] somebody, but I am not going to say [who],” Mr. Lopez said. “He said he did what he did. We heard about it before, but there was no evidence of that.”

Ms. Hernandez, said she last saw her brother about four months ago when she dropped by his home for a short visit to give him food. She said she remembers that he had come back from New York City around the time of the murder and that he always nervously looked out the window.

“He was afraid or something,” she said.

—Maura R. O’Connor contributed to this article.

A version of this article appeared May 29, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Police Told of Suspect.

By ANDREW BROWNE

SHANGHAI—If there was ever a need for business schools in China, it’s now.

Breakneck economic growth has far outstripped the supply of management talent. Meanwhile, Chinese companies in both the private and state sectors are responding to government incentives to “Go Out” and compete against the best companies in the world—while juggling fierce competition, rapidly changing technology and shifting macro-economic forces at home.

No wonder some of the world’s most prominent business schools are eyeing China as the next educational frontier.

China Europe International Business School got to China early. That gives it a head start in terms of faculty and facilities. Its new pitch: “China Depth Global Breadth,” marrying insight into how China works with an international perspective that attracts students from China and around the world.

Dean John A. Quelch, a veteran of the Harvard Business School and London Business School, insists that despite economic turmoil in Europe, the CEIBS brand in China remains untarnished. “Germany is held in very high regard,” he insists. Besides, he adds: “People in China take the long view.”

Mr. Quelch talked with Andrew Browne in Shanghai. The following interview has been edited.

WSJ: Like everybody else in China, CEIBS seems to be investing massively in infrastructure. Tell us something about your expansion plans.

Mr. Quelch: The Shanghai campus will double in size by the end of 2013. We also have a campus that we opened in Beijing in 2010 and we currently have operations in Shenzhen that may convert into a fully fledged campus within the next two to three years.

We also have an appetite for going west, and looking at that hundred million people in the Chengdu-Xian-Chongqing triangle, who will eventually want their own business school and will not necessarily want—or be able—to fly to Beijing or Shanghai.

The reason why Stanford exists is because Harvard always thought that Californians would be happy to come east to Boston, and never imagined they’d want their own Harvard, a.k.a. Stanford.

WSJ: The No. 1 complaint of foreign companies in China is lack of management talent. Isn’t that a huge opportunity for you?

Mr. Quelch: First of all, China’s pace of expansion has outrun the speed with which managers can experientially develop themselves, and so our role is to be an accelerant. We take experienced or high-potential young managers, and we accelerate the speed with which they can assume more management and leadership responsibilities.

Second, because we cannot serve everybody—obviously—the admissions criteria that we apply and the rectitude of our admissions policies is extremely important to our overall economic impact.

WSJ: What’s the mix of students between college graduates and mid-career managers?

Mr. Quelch: We focus on more senior executives even compared with a Harvard Business School. We graduate 1,000 people a year, roughly, 800 of them are executive MBAs; average age 40. The other 200 are MBAs; average age 30.

You have to have an extremely strong teaching faculty—very practical, very experienced—to be able to command the sustained attention and respect of 40-year-old business people.

We are the No.1 revenue-generating business school in executive education in Asia built around our unique ability to deliver both “China Depth and Global Breadth.”

WSJ: How do the changes in the CEIBS syllabus over the years reflect the shifting dynamics of the Chinese economy?

Mr. Quelch: Initially the focus was on functional competency [in] finance, accounting and marketing etc. Now the emphasis is on integrated general management and problem-solving across functional silos. Teamwork and leadership in fast-growth markets are stressed in our curriculum.

WSJ: Lack of integrated management is said to be one of the weaknesses of many Chinese companies? Why is that?

Mr. Quelch: The main reason is that China is run by engineers [who] typically have strong skills in finance and accounting and economics, but with less developed skills in the areas of leadership, change management, marketing, to some extent strategy as well.

So the soft skills, as we refer to them in the States, are the ones which are underdeveloped in China. The hard skills are well-developed. And so our curriculum places considerable emphasis on overlaying soft skills on the foundation of hard skills that many students bring to the classroom.

WSJ: Isn’t part of the problem that state-owned enterprises have many of the same kinds of rigid hierarchies that you have in the Communist Party?

Mr. Quelch: That may be the case. But there’s one thing that I’ve discovered in China: no-one—and I’m talking about the state sector—gets promoted for breaking the rules, but no-one gets to the top if they just follow the rules. So there is an art in China to taking new initiatives but doing so in a manner that is not destabilizing.

WSJ: But can that system generate true innovation?

Mr. Quelch: I think you can, if you throw a considerable amount of money behind it. But certainly a major challenge in the state-owned sector is to achieve innovation.

In every country the public sector is different from the private sector, whether it’s the U.K. or the U.S., there’s an approach, a culture and a style that is different, norms that are different. But in China I think that the gap is wider, certainly than it is in the States, and it’s almost a case of natural selection where people come to a fork in the road in China and either go to the state sector or to the private sector. And the mental mind-set associated with each is more substantially different than it is in the U.K. or the U.S.

The innovation in China is much more likely to be generated out of the private sector, even though the state sector is hugely well-endowed with resources that could fund innovation.

WSJ: What advice would you give to Chinese companies headed overseas?

Mr. Quelch: Chinese companies should not go abroad as Chinese companies. They should go abroad as companies with an important differentiated value offering that consumers will be happy to pay for—and the country of origin is irrelevant.

WSJ: When will we see the emergence of global Chinese brands?

Mr. Quelch: I think that Chinese companies will add value initially in the B-to-B (business-to-business) sector, not the B-to-C (business-to-consumer) sector. Many people in China are eagerly awaiting the day when the first truly global Chinese brand enters the top-10 ranking of the world’s most valuable brands. I think that’s probably at least a decade away.

But Chinese companies like Huawei, ZTE—these companies have extremely good technology and know how to invest in technology acquisitions and, increasingly, they are acquiring or hiring non-Chinese to help them become global players. Those are the companies that are likely to be at the forefront of Chinese value-added overseas. Yes, there will be a Lenovo, there’ll be a Haier, there’ll be a Geely—we’ll all, as consumers, be interested in following the fortunes of these B-to-C companies, but I think the B-to-B space is where Chinese companies are really going to excel.

You look at Sany at the moment: it’s a very promising long-term competitor to Caterpillar.

WSJ: You say that Chinese companies are increasingly hiring foreigners and becoming diverse. Can you give examples?

Mr. Quelch: If you go to the U.K. website of Huawei, you will find that it’s all about Basingstoke. It’s not about Huawei as the global brand; it’s about Huawei as a company that is in Basingstoke.

This is where the Chinese are going to move faster than the Japanese because a major brake on Japanese global expansion ended up being the shortage of talented Japanese who were interested in, or linguistically able to, operate in international markets.

But the Chinese are much more outgoing, and perhaps because they’re coming 30 years later there are many more millions of Chinese who are English-language capable.

My guess is that whereas when a Japanese company made an acquisition the foreign executives immediately hit the equivalent of a glass ceiling, in the case of foreigners in a Chinese company, it’s going to be easier for them to move up the ranks.

What will really make a difference in that regard is reciprocity. If and when, for example, Sam Su of Yum Brands becomes the first Chinese CEO of a Fortune 500 company born in China then they will accept a free flow of non-Chinese executive talent throughout their organizations.

WSJ: What was the biggest surprise for you working in China?

Mr. Quelch: The biggest surprise is that there are no weekends in China. I’ve always been a very hard-working person, but I have been amazed at the degree to which on Saturdays and Sundays I find myself involved in professional activities.

The way I explain it to my friends in the U.S. is that you cannot achieve 10% GDP growth per year by working a 35-hour week – even if you’re as smart as the Chinese.

I remember Jack Welch famously held meetings on Saturdays with his people. But I think for many Chinese this is an historic moment of opportunity – a once-in-a-lifetime, maybe a once-in-a-millennium moment in time that no one wants to waste. So many Chinese display a relentless resolution to work hard today for themselves, their families and a better China.