Crime Junkie - PRECEDENT: Jacob Wetterling

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

When Jacob Wetterling went missing in 1989 one of the first thoughts police had, was to track down all the local violent sex offenders in the area to see if they could be potential suspects. But this was easier said than done because back then there was no centralized database for this sort of thing. Jacob’s case went unsolved for decades and his mom always wondered if her son fell through the cracks of a system without enough regulation. So, she worked to set a precedent that would require all sex offenders to be registered. Though, she would later go on to regret that work. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/precedent-jacob-wetterling/

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and this week is going to be a little different. So only about 10% of you guys follow me or the show on social media, so this might come as quite a shock to you. I gave birth to my very own mini crime junkie. Her name is Josie, and I know I'm biased, but she is perfect. Like, would debut at number one on the baby charts if that were a thing. So because I literally just pushed a baby out of my body, I need a minute, but I would also never leave you guys high and dry on a Monday. So I have something extra special for you. Our partners at Sirius and Stitcher are amazing, and they're letting me give you guys for free a series I did that was behind their paywall. The series is called precedent, and it's

actually just like a crime junkie episode, but there's a little more meat behind it because not only am I going to tell you a true crime story, I'm going to specifically tell you the stories behind the words and phrases that are integral to our true crime vocabulary. The cases that set a precedent forever changing our criminal justice system, for the better, or in some cases for the worse. This Monday, you're getting two episodes, and then me and Britt will be back. So in the meantime, let me tell you about a precedent setting case. I've covered a lot of cases involving missing kids on crime junkie. And one of the number one questions people ask in the aftermath of a disappearance or murder is, in those first few hours, did police

go talk to all the registered sex offenders in the area? It seems like a logical question. Why wouldn't we know where all the violent sexual predators live? But for many, many years, there was no registry. No way for the public to access information about the dangers lurking right there in their neighborhoods and communities. And it took one family's shocking and heartbreaking tragedy to change that. Before there was a sex offender registry, there was Jacob Wetterling. And this is his story. It was already cold and dark in St. Joseph, Minnesota, when 11 year old Jacob Wetterling and his brother Trevor and their friend Aaron set out on their bikes to go to a local convenience

store on the night of October 22nd, 1989. St. Joseph isn't a big city, so the boys rarely encountered many people on that route, one that they'd taken many times. A car here, some other kids there. The boys picked out a movie to rent and then around 9.15 hopped on their bikes and scooters and headed back to Jacob's house. According to reporting from Pat Doyle in the Star Tribune, when the boys were about halfway home and on the quiet stretch of road, they were surprised by a man who appeared out of a long, gravel driveway. He was dressed, head to toe, in black, with a pantyhose-like mask obscuring his face. But his distorted face wasn't even the thing the boys noticed first. It was the gun held in his hand. The stranger ordered

the boys off their bikes and scooters and forced them to lay down in the ditch. Then proceeded to ask them their names and ages. Jacob, 11. Aaron, 11. Trevor, 10. The man ordered Trevor and Aaron up and told them to run. Run and don't look back or he'd shoot them. And so they ran. And when they finally did have the nerve to look back, Jacob and the gunman were long gone. But Trevor kept running, all the way home to tell his parents what had happened. Right away, police were dispatched and the search for Jacob began. According to legal documents, officers zeroed in on the last place Jacob had been seen, that gravel driveway the man had emerged from. It was clear from the moment they arrived that this spot was going to be critically important to their investigation.

There, they found a number of shoe prints and tire impressions. One of the shoe prints seemed to be consistent with the size and style worn by Jacob. While the other prints were larger, and police assumed they belonged to the man who abducted him. Investigators took impressions of both the shoe prints and the tire tracks in hopes that they'd have something to match to their suspect when they found him. And at this point, a couple of hours in, everyone was confident it was when, when they found him. I mean, they had eyewitnesses who'd heard his voice, described his height and build footprints, tire prints. And this was a small town. It would be when Jacob's family had to believe that. But a day passed with no sign of Jacob or the man who kidnapped him.

Then a week, at which point, Mike Nisler reported for the St. Cloud Times that the Governor of Minnesota approved an additional 100 National Guard members to assist what was already a 200 plus strong search party for Jacob. They would be canvassing the few miles around his abduction site for a second time, looking for any clues to point them in the right direction. But they had no direction to go in. Scent Dogs couldn't lead them anywhere, and clues were few and far between. By this time, a week into the search for Jacob, police were looking into 100 potential suspects, according to Pat Doyle's coverage in the Star Tribune. And more frighteningly, the closer they looked, the more they started to see similar incidents not far from St. Joseph.

There were at least two other cases police connected to Jacob's abduction within the first week of him being taken. Mike Nisler reported that one was an attempted abduction of a 10-year-old boy. Not only was this in the same town just two months before, not only did it involve a boy about the same age as Jacob, but the attacker even asked the boy his age before trying to force him into his car. Luckily, that young boy managed to escape. But another, earlier in the year, wasn't so lucky. Just six months before that attack, and eight months before Jacob's abduction, so this would have been January of 1989, there was another attack. This one in Cold Spring, Minnesota, just 15 minutes from St. Joseph.

According to a sworn affidavit filed in October 2015, a 12-year-old boy was walking home from a cafe around 9.45 at night when he was approached by a man in a car who was asking for directions to someone's house. When he tried to respond, the man got out of the car and forced the boy in. After driving around for a while, he pulled over to a gravel road, got into the back seat of the car, and with the threat of a gun, forced the boy to remove his snowsuit, his pants, and his underwear. You know what happened next. When the man crawled back over the center console of his car and into the front seat, he took the boy's pants and underwear and made a final threat. He said the boy was lucky to be

alive, and if police ever got a lead on him, he would take the boy one day after school and shoot him. The boy covered up in his snowsuit as the man drove him back to the town he was taken from. Before he let the boy leave, he said something we've heard before. Don't look back or I'll shoot you. The man wasn't wearing a mask for either of those attacks, and so a description of our perpetrator, or at least a perpetrator, started to come together. A man in his 30s, average height, maybe five, seven-ish, with a pudgy beer belly, brown hair, brown eyes, and crooked bottom teeth. To tell you the truth, it doesn't seem like that suspect sketch got much traction until Jacob went missing some eight months later. Probably because pedophilia

was something so uncomfortable people didn't want to talk about it. But not making that horrific incident a priority to investigate was a huge mistake. Polices first, but definitely not their last huge mistake. Because little did police know at the time, they weren't just looking at two similar acts before Jacob went missing. There were many, many more. The town of Painesville, which is just 30 minutes from where Jacob was last seen, had a rash of assaults on young boys in the years leading up to Jacob's October 1989 abduction. So many assaults that in all the court documents, these incidents are referred to as the Painesville assault cluster. These were eight separate assaults on seven separate victims that happened between

1986 and 1988. And they all involved with the report calls a quote, very similar pattern. All of the victims were young boys, usually around 12 years old. They were always outside, usually walking or biking home. The unknown perp would stop them or knock them off their bikes, sometimes ask their ages, then molest them before making threats of violence if they didn't do what he said. Now, for a moment, put yourself back in small town Minnesota in the late 80s. This man was assaulting children for years, watching them picking them off. And police were doing almost nothing about it. In a Star Tribune lookback article, Pam Lowege and General Ross talked to one of those former victims. He reiterated what I think so much of us know now, the heartbreaking reality

of sexual abuse and assault, that it wasn't just that this man was touching him. He thought he was going to die that day. Like the man cut a chunk of his hair off to take as a souvenir. I mean, I hear that and I think any crime junkie hears that and we know this sick monster isn't going to ever stop. This isn't a one time offender. This is going to escalate. But that boy who by the time of his interview was a grown man said police totally brushed him off. Quote, I felt like they abandoned us. Like who cares, you know, there are a bunch of kids, they'll get over it. But to tell you the truth, we haven't end quote. But that wasn't even just the attitude of police, the whole community, the media, everyone had this attitude of like, man, they're not dead. So

everything's kind of fine. That victim went on to say, quote, I remember feeling like nobody would listen to us. Nobody was taking it seriously. It was a different time, denial and indifference prevailed. It seems to me that sexual violence against males is just now becoming okay to discuss. End quote. And he's right. That same star Tribune piece actually quoted a Painesville press article from right around the time when the first two attacks happened in Painesville. It said, quote, neither of the victims were seriously harmed. End quote. We know more today about the impact of childhood sexual abuse on victims. The trauma of those experiences stays with survivors potentially forever. And I'm not making excuses. Police should have done better for

those kids who for years lived in fear, waiting for the actual boogeyman to jump out of the shadows. Police just told the parents to keep their kids home after dark. But that's the extent of their action as far as I can tell. Apart from minimizing these kids experiences, what the police did through their inaction, what the community allowed with their silence was to clear a path for this predator to keep hurting kids. This man was very clearly not going to stop. And why would he? He was operating in a time and place when no one was going to make him stop until his actions escalated. And they did escalate. In fact, if you noticed, I said there were eight separate attacks and only seven victims. That's because one of the boys was attacked twice by the same man.

The first time was in February of 87. The boy was assaulted in the stairwell of an apartment complex where a grown man cornered him and touched him both over and underneath his clothing while threatening to kill him if he screamed. The affidavit makes note that he took the boy's wallet before leaving. And I think that's especially interesting because most 12 year old boys don't have money worth stealing. There's no official ID to learn where he lives. So to me, this was a trophy, just like the pants and underwear he would take from the cold spring boy two years later. Except he didn't wait two years to do this again. Just a couple months after costing that boy in the stairwell, the man struck again. The very same boy was riding his

bike down the street when the same man knocked him off and began to touch him. The boy screamed and told the attacker, you already got me. This must have spooked the man because he fled. But it didn't spook him for long because as we know, he didn't stop. He continued his attacks in Painesville and then started branching out further. First that attack in cold spring, which from what I can tell was the first one that involved a vehicle, then to St. Joseph, then to Jacob. This time was different because this time the victim didn't come home. This time, after weeks and months and years of searching, the victim was presumed dead. So that's when police finally take the attacks seriously, right? Wrong.

According to that Star Tribune article from 1990, mere months after Jacob was taken, the then chief of police in neighboring Painesville said that he approached the investigators on Jacob's case and told them they should look at the attacks in his town. He thought that they could be connected. He even gave investigators a name, Danny Heinrich. Now, my question is the same as your question. If the freaking chief of police has a prime suspect for eight separate attacks on young boys in this town, why hasn't this monster been taken off the streets? And I don't have an answer for that. The kids he attacked could identify him. According to the sworn affidavit, he lived less than a mile from each of those attacks.

All I can say is I keep coming back to that Painesville press quote. Neither of the victims were seriously harmed. But now someone had been harmed, at least by their definition of harm. So the chief of police in Painesville does what he thinks is the next best thing to locking up a known perpetrator, and he tries to alert the team in St. Joseph. Someone must have taken notice of this. I know because official records show that on January 12, 1990, police collect Danny Heinrich's shoes to compare to the prints on the gravel driveway found next to the ones believed to have belonged to Jacob. Three days later, on the 15th, investigators took his rear tires to compare to the tracks left at the abduction scene.

The tires were quote, consistent in size and tire tread to cast impressions, end quote. As for the shoes, quote, the examiner also found that the defendant's right shoe corresponded in size and design to an impression taken from the abduction site. Based on my experience in training, I am aware that an opinion of an exact match of such impressions would have to be based upon unique characteristics of the tire or shoe, such as a scuff, wear mark or divot in the item itself. No such unique markings were present on the tire or shoe. End quote. So basically, it's like, yep, they match, but this isn't DNA. I can say that they came from the same type of tires, the same type of shoes as Danny Heinrich's,

but I can't say beyond a reasonable doubt in court that no one else could have had the same shoes or tires. But strangely enough, I don't think that's completely accurate. Rachelle Olson and James Walsh covered a police press conference for the Star Tribune, where the current sheriff at the time stated that quote, the odds were not just slim but minuscule, that those prints and tracks belonged to someone other than Heinrich, the only person investigators identified as having Sears Superguard steel radial tires matching tracks found at the scene. End quote. To give them an ounce of credit, it's not like they just dropped Heinrich as a suspect. Well, not at that point anyway. Per the sworn affidavit, on January 24th, police served a

search warrant at his dad's house, where he was living at the time. And inside a locked trunk, they found a photograph of a male child in underwear and one of another male child coming out of the shower. Bad look for a guy who's being investigated as a potential pedophile and child abductor. But inexplicably, those items weren't confiscated. Why? Because Heinrich said that he didn't want them to be. That as the sheriff said so eloquently at the time of the press conference, the photos quote just didn't look right. End quote. There were allegedly some 20 things that should have pointed police directly at Heinrich for Jacob's abduction, but they were all missed or ignored or some combination of the two. After one final run-in

with police where they arrested Heinrich drunk at a bar and brought him into the station for a formal interrogation, they let him go, citing lack of evidence. But here's the thing. The Wetterlings didn't know about the footprints, the tire tracks, the search warrants. All they knew was that police were looking into potential suspects and ruling them out one by one. Which is why, even after a year, Patty Wetterling, who's Jacob's mom, still used when. When he comes home. She still held out hope. But being the mother of a missing child introduced her to a club no parent wants to be a part of. According to a blog by David J. Kramer on his law firm's website, before Jacob was abducted, Patty knew nothing about the victimization of children. But after,

she had to become a mother who knew the stats about how many kids are taken by strangers, how many are taken for sexual purposes, and how many will die in the first few hours. Patty told a reporter at Slate that the more she learned, the more she realized why there were no prime suspects in Jacob's case. Well, at least none she knew about in the first year. I mean, where do you even start in a stranger abduction case like this? At the time, Minnesota didn't have a registry to track people convicted of sex crimes living in their communities. A handful of states were keeping this data, but not hers. And there was no federal mandate requiring it. She immediately went into action, sharing what she'd learned, telling Jacob's story and lobbying the federal

government to make sex offender registries mandatory in all states. And she was good at it. Which is why three years later in 94, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, which mandated that all states have registries as a way to track people convicted of violent sex crimes and crimes against children. According to FBI and federal government data reported by Eli Lehrer for national affairs, in the years since the Jacob Wetterling Act was made law, there were fewer reported rapes and fewer reported cases of child sexual abuse. Of course, not all sex crimes are reported and we know that. But of the ones that were, there was a drop. It seemed to be making a difference,

but it wasn't making a difference for Jacob. Patty continued to be very involved in activism and lobbying for the protection of children. Even as more and more years passed with no resolution in her own son's case, she fought alongside other parents for their victimized children. Patty and Jerry Wetterling established the Wetterling Foundation, now known as the Jacob Wetterling Research Center. And in 2012, after 19 years as a director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Patty became chair of their board. And that was Patty's life for almost three decades. And while she never gave up hope that Jacob would one day come home, there had to be moments when Patty and her whole family thought that they might never really know what happened

to Jacob, that this could be the reality forever. And it's not that there was no movement at all in Jacob's case. In 2010, police looked hard at a man who lived near the abduction site back in 1989. They didn't talk to him in 89, of course. They didn't speak to him at all until 2010, which is when they also dug up his farm, turning up nothing. Then in 2014, things began to change. Jacob's case was featured on The Hunt with John Walsh, which caught the attention of the FBI. And according to reporting by Esme Murphy for CBS Minnesota, that led them to request a first ever cold case review. Fast forward to 2015, the world was shocked when law enforcement in Minnesota announced that they were naming a suspect in Jacob's case, an official suspect. Not the man

they looked at in 2010. A man neither the public nor the wetterlings were even aware of. A man that should have been all too familiar to police, though. Danny Heinrich. So remember that case from January 1989, the one where the boy was assaulted in the backseat of the car and left to go home in just his sweater and snowsuit? Well, police had collected that sweater back in 89. And all these years later, in 2015, used new technology to test for biological evidence. And they got a hit. According to a Star Tribune article by Pam Lowege and Jennifer Brooks, the DNA was a match to Danny Heinrich. And that match gave police enough probable cause to search his house again. The affidavit document shows that in his small one bedroom house, police found 19,

19, three ring binders filled with picture after picture after picture of young prepubescent boys posed in the nude, most of which seem to have been accessed from the internet and printed out by Heinrich. But there were another section of binders that were different, equally disturbing, but different, where he took a late 1970s yearbook from his local high school, cut out the faces of young boys and placed them on nude bodies of children or women. Police also confiscated videotapes of children riding bikes, playing sports, or delivering newspapers, all believed to have been taken by Heinrich in secret. And most concerning of all, in his basement, police found, quote, four clear tote style bins filled with boys sized athletic wear, end quote.

But during the course of their investigation into the assault in both Cold Spring and Painesville, Heinrich became a key person of interest in Jacob's case again. And it didn't take long for the new investigators to find all those old police reports about their interactions with him back in 1990. There was no question now, no one looking the other way and no letting him get away. And he knew it. So his defense team made an offer, a full confession and directions to Jacob's grave. And in return, no murder charge and no assault charges. With the blessing of the Wetterling family, authorities offered Heinrich a deal. One charge, one of the 25 counts of possession of child sex abuse material with a 20 year maximum sentence period. You heard me right, 20 years total for

murder for multiple crimes against children and for hundreds of pieces of child sex abuse material. All that 20 years. But in return, the Wetterlings, the community of St. Joseph and the world would finally put an end to this nearly three decades long mystery. In court, Heinrich said he was driving on a dead end road when he noticed three kids on bicycles with flashlights. After the boys passed him, he turned around, pulled into a driveway and waited. The boys were on their way back from the convenience store when he stopped them and forced them into the ditch, just like Trevor and Aaron told police all those years ago. But now, finally, everyone would know what happened next. Pam Lowege and Jennifer Books recounted the story he told in court of how he

handcuffed Jacob and put him in the backseat of his car and drove toward his hometown of Painesville while they listened to a police scanner along the way. The only thing Jacob asked, what did I do wrong? Eventually, Heinrich pulled off in a secluded area he was familiar with and forced Jacob to get out of the car and undress with him before he sexually assaulted him. Jacob said he was cold and asked if he could put his clothes back on. He asked to go home. That's when Heinrich said he saw a police cruiser go by, and in that moment, he decided he could never take Jacob home. And that's when Jacob began to cry. Heinrich testified that, quote, I panicked and pulled the revolver out of my pocket. It was never loaded until that point. I loaded it with two rounds and

told the victim to turn around. I had to go to the bathroom. He didn't know what I was doing, end quote. Heinrich left him there and came back a couple of hours later to bury him, though that wasn't Jacob's final resting place. A full year later, he returned and found Jacob's red jacket poking out of the ground. So he dug up as much as he could and relocated Jacob to a two foot deep hole across the highway. And that's where Jacob's body would wait for 26 years to be reunited with his family. By the time Heinrich confessed at court in front of a judge, the Wetterling family and the world, Patty had already realized that the sex offender registry that she had worked so hard to lobby for had ballooned into something she didn't even recognize anymore.

It wasn't actually helping all that much. If anything, sometimes it was making things worse. It's a strange bit of irony to me because the intention of the Jacob Wetterling Act was to make it possible for police to quickly find those violent offenders, the ones that would otherwise be a stranger to the victim, in the first few hours after they go missing. Heinrich fit perfectly into this bucket. He didn't know Jacob and based on reporting from Slate, his victim profile made Heinrich among the most likely to re-offend. The problem is, even if there was a registration was a registry back in 1989, he wouldn't have been on it. Because despite being a suspect in attacks in a neighboring town, despite police finding abuse materials in his house, he'd never

been charged before. He wasn't a convicted sex offender. In the years since 1994, when the Jacob Wetterling Act became law, the sex offender registry changed. New laws were added to strengthen the legislation and keep kids safer in their communities. In 1996, Megan's law made public reporting a requirement, meaning communities were notified when a sex offender moved into their neighborhood. According to Dara Lynn's reporting for Vox, in 2006, the Adam Walsh Act set a minimum requirement for how long an offender had to stay on a registry. And now, because of ballooning legislation, sex offender registries don't just include violent offenders and child predators anymore. They now include sex workers, teens engaging in consenting sex with other teens,

accounts of indecent exposure. Not only is this flooding a list that was intended to be a starting point for investigators in a stranger abduction or missing person's case, it's causing serious harm to people who find themselves on this list absent any violent crime or crimes against children, not to mention the consequences to families and communities. Patti Wetterling told Slate, quote, these registries were a well-intentioned tool to help law enforcement find children more quickly. But the world has changed since then, end quote. The Jacob Wetterling Act was a well-intentioned piece of legislation, one designed to protect children and sexual predators and make communities safer. The laws that came after, they were well-intentioned too. But even the most well-intentioned

laws have consequences. Consequences that can be hard to see when laws are created in the wake of a tragedy, while a community, a whole country, is angry and emotional. I'll tell you more about some of those consequences on the next precedent crime junkie episode about Megan Kenca, which you can listen to right now. To find all the source material for this episode, you can go to our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast, and we'll be back on Monday with a regularly scheduled episode. Crime junkie is an audio chuck production. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?