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The public on Tuesday got its first glimpse of the videotaped confession of a former Soho grocery clerk who described, in graphic detail, committing one of the most infamous crimes in New York City history — the 1979 murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz.

Rapt Manhattan jurors watched as accused killer Pedro Hernandez told investigators how he lured and then killed the boy as he walked to a school bus stop alone for the first time.

Watching on a large flat-screen TV in a Manhattan courtroom, the men and women who will decide his fate saw Hernandez describe luring the boy into the basement of the bodega near his home by promising him a soda.

“I asked him if he wanted something to drink, a soda or something, and he said, ‘Yeah,’ and I told him to come down to the basement with me,” Hernandez said on the video confession, taped May 24, 2012, at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

The former bodega clerk, now 54, calmly told Assistant District Attorney Armand Durastanti how he “just couldn’t let go” once he put his hands around the little boy’s neck as he descended the stairs to the basement.

“When he went in front of me I grabbed his neck and I started to choke him. I was nervous. His legs were jerking,” Hernandez said, using his hands around his own neck to demonstrate how he strangled the child.

“When I choked him I tried to let go but my body was shaking and jumping at the same time. I wanted to just let him go but there was something that took over in me, and I squeezed him more and more and then he went like this,” Hernandez said, dropping his head to the side as though it had gone limp.

Jurors watched the video intently and several vigorously scribbled notes. Etan’s father, Stan Patz, and sister Shira watched stonefaced from the gallery — masking their emotions from reporters.

Although Etan collapsed from the surprise attack, he didn’t die and was “still gasping” for air, Hernandez said, as he mimicked the final utterances of the desperate child.

He described putting Patz’s still-wriggling body into a plastic bag, tying it, and then pushing the bagged body into a cardboard box.

“What did you think when you put him in the bag?” the prosecutor asked.

“That he would suffocate,” Hernandez replied.

“Did you want that?” Durastanti continued.

“At the time, yes, because I was afraid of what I did, so I figured that if he be alive he could put me away,” Hernandez said.

He said he put the box on his shoulder and carried it a few blocks away from the since-closed bodega on West Broadway and Prince Street where Etan caught the bus to school. He dumped it at the entrance of a narrow alleyway, he said.

Hernandez offered no motive for the gruesome crime despite being pressed by Durastanti.

“You must have been thinking about something when you approached this boy?” the prosecutor asks on the tape.

“It was just like something snapped in me,” he answered.

Hernandez told Durastanti he felt bad for what he did but showed no emotion until he began talking about his abusive, alcoholic father.

“He used to beat us with the horse’s whip, you know, the leather one, and he used to beat us with a belt buckle until we bled,” he said, weeping and sniffling.

The three-hour confession began around 2 a.m. May 24, 2012, one day before the 33rd anniversary of Etan’s disappearance. The boy’s body has never been found.

Detectives first picked up Hernandez a day earlier at his home in Maple Shade, NJ, based on a tip called in by his brother-in-law.

He was interrogated for hours in Camden, NJ, before he was driven to the Manhattan DA’s Office for the videotaped confession.

The defense has maintained that the admission was false and coerced from a man with a history of mental illness and low intelligence.

Jurors previously heard from Hernandez’s ex-wife, several church pals and an old friend who said he had admitted to them, separately, that he’d killed a man in New York.

His ex-wife Daisy Rivera, with whom he shares two children, told jurors Monday that Hernandez confessed to murdering a man in New York — several years after the child’s disappearance.

Over a year later, Rivera discovered a shoebox that contained a black-and-white image of Patz torn from one of the now-iconic missing persons posters of the child.

The defense has argued that convicted Pennsylvania child molester Jose Ramos, a longtime suspect in the case, had motive and opportunity to commit the crime.

Ramos once told authorities he was 90 percent sure he was with Etan the day the child vanished, but has since refused to cooperate with investigators.

There is no known physical evidence tying Hernandez to the tragic murder.

The trial before Justice Maxwell Wiley started Jan. 30.