Giovanni Colon-Gonzalez is just 5 years old and has been missing since last August. But that's not the only bizarre mystery that surrounds him.

In a case that's drawing worldwide attention, the man last seen with him - his own father - claims he brutally murdered the boy and cut up his body, hiding the pieces so police couldn't find them.

So why isn't Ernesto Gonzalez Jr. charged with homicide?

Cops don't believe the 36-year-old meatpacker from Lynn, Massachusetts actually did it, despite his graphic confession.

Instead, they're convinced his story is part of an elaborate and cruel ruse to hide the child from his mother, after the couple's bitter break-up.

The story actually began three years ago, when the youngster was only 2, and Daisy Colon claims Gonzalez swung a chair at her in the apartment the unmarried couple shared together. She ended the relationship but the dad sought and won court appointed visitation with his son on weekends.

Everything was fine until that mid-August weekend when Colon came to get her boy and her knock on her ex-boyfriend's door went unanswered. Cops arrested Gonzalez and demanded to know where the child was. He sat in jail silent for months, before finally coming out with his terrible tale in November 2008.

He claims the little boy was misbehaving in his apartment and that he picked up a knife and started stabbing the tot in an uncontrollable rage. "It happened fast," he told the Boston Globe. "I was upset. It happened in a moment."

He claims he then cut up the body in the bathtub, put the pieces in garbage bags and scattered them in bins throughout the city to avoid detection, all the while feeling terrible remorse for killing the son he says he loved so much. He insists he used bleach to remove any signs of the blood that was shed in the commission of the awful act.

But when forensic experts went to his apartment to check on his story, they instantly became suspicious. The only blood traces they found were on a mop - and an analysis showed the red liquid belonged to the dad, not the missing boy.

They concluded it couldn't have happened where and in the way the confession explained it.

So where is little Giovanni? Police theorize the father may have left the child with someone else and fabricated the murder story to torture the mother and lead them astray. Searches have been conducted across the U.S., including Florida and Puerto Rico, where both parents have family.

But so far, nothing has turned up.

Tellingly, Gonzalez has not been charged with murder. Instead, Massachusetts authorities accuse him of parental kidnapping and misleading police. The latter charge stems not from the killing story but the fact that he originally told police he hadn't seen the youngster that weekend.

The case has taken on international significance but Gonzalez is sticking to his story about a crime of passion. And while he sits in jail, Giovanni's mother waits, worries and wonders where her son is right now.

She believes it's her ex's revenge and is pleading with whoever has her boy to bring him to a police station and drop him off so he can go back to the life he knew - and she can end her agony of not knowing the truth.

See Giovanni's poster at the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children