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He looked lean and sleek and surprisingly put together.
Were it not for the shackles at his wrists and ankles, he might have been walking onto a yacht. I noticed, as he made coffee, that his knife rack was shaped like a human body, stuck through with blades at various points. There were only two possibilities. The money had been stolen,
or it had never existed. Subscribe at newyorker.com slash dark and you'll get access to all of it, plus a free New Yorker tote bag. I must say, the very best tote bag around. That's newyorker.com slash dark. Previously on In the Dark. Danny Heinrich is no longer a person of interest.
He is the confessed murderer of Jacob Wetterling. I'm just like, what? We lived here the whole time and he's just down the damn road all those years, you know? And it's like, what? They had all of that. None of it was new. None of it is new. Stearns County, the FBI, they've all had all of this. None of this was new. Nobody's ever asked me a single question about this other than you guys. I've never been interviewed by police.
I've never been talked to by any law enforcement, ever. Not one person. I had expectations that this was hot. Like, my lead, this stuff in Painesville, you can't ignore this, guys. I mean, I went in with that mentality.
Within a few weeks of the kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling, there were close to 100 investigators working on the case. That's one of the most unusual things about this case, just how many people were assigned to it. So it was hard for me to understand why those investigators didn't do some of the basic policing 101 stuff. They didn't talk to all the neighbors who lived on the dead end road where Jacob was kidnapped. They didn't contact all the boys who were attacked by that strange man in Painesville.
And perhaps most importantly, they didn't talk to everyone they could find who could have known something about the very similar kidnapping of a boy that same year in that same county in the town of Cold Spring. They certainly had enough people to do all that, so what could explain it? I spent months trying to figure this out. And then one day, the wife of the former police chief in the town where Jacob was kidnapped handed me a dusty VHS cassette tape
It was all the TV news coverage from the early months of the Wetterling case. She'd recorded it back then and was planning to throw it out. On that video, I found a clue from a news report in December of 1989, two months after Jacob vanished. Investigators say the kidnapping that occurred here in Cold Spring is just now coming to the forefront because of the overwhelming number of leads.
The overwhelming number of leads. In every major criminal investigation, law enforcement has to make a choice. Keep the case local or go big. This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I'm Madeline Barron. Today, we're going to look at how investigators in the Jacob Wetterling case decided to go big. And it cost them.
It would end up leading them farther and farther away from the man who took Jacob. One of the first things law enforcement did in the Jacob Wetterling case is they turned to the public to ask for leads. They did it right away, even before they talked to most of the people closest to the crime, the people who could have seen something on the road, the people who had also been attacked by a strange man in a mask.
Investigators started appearing on local news and on national news. So did Jacob's parents, Jerry and Patty. I wanted everybody in the world looking for Jacob. It was like my son, you know, we're talking getting him home. We did what we had to, what we felt we had to.
The surest sign that the Jacob Wetterling case had become a big story came just three weeks after Jacob was abducted, when the case attracted the attention of the 1980s clearinghouse for human tragedy.
daytime talk show host, Geraldo Rivera. Every time it happens, it puts an entire community into a state of shock. It's like a giant punch in the gut. Because all we can do, all the police can do really, is to speculate as to the intentions of the kidnapper. And just the options are horrifying. Geraldo's TV crew showed up in St. Joseph and set up a satellite feed from the Wetterling's basement,
The camera showed Patty and Jerry sitting next to the Stearns County Sheriff and the FBI supervisor assigned to the case. On the wall behind them, there were these big sheets of paper covered in handwritten messages of hope and concern. As the days, Patty, turn to weeks, is it something that causes you nightmares as you try to pursue a reason? Why? Why your boy? Why that night?
I can't answer those questions. I choose not to think about all the horrible options you made mention of at the beginning. I just won't allow those into my mind at this point. I just want to believe that he's fine. We're going to get him home. I don't have nightmares, no. The show also featured a young, intense John Walsh as a kind of straight-talking expert. John Walsh is the guy from The Hunt and America's Most Wanted. His
His son was murdered by a stranger in 1981. I know what they're going through. They're going through the nightmare of not knowing. They're going and hoping that sometimes, in a rare incidence, a child has gotten back that's been gone for a long time. But all of the people that are sitting there today know the harsh reality that lots of kids that are taken are not taken by some caring person and taken to Disneyland. They're taken by someone who...
While all this was happening, Patty was just staring at the ground, like she was trying to redirect all her anger away from Geraldo and John Walsh and onto a few inches of basement carpet. What can...
They, the Wetterlings, do. Are they, in a sense, powerless now to the whim, the whimsy, the awful capriciousness of this madman? That would be my opinion. It went on like this for a while. And here's a song of hope. I want to thank everybody, John Walsh, you especially, all the parents, thank you. Here's a song for Jacob and for all these children.
So let's play it. He was stolen away, and we cried. The show ended with a song that had become a kind of anthem of the search for Jacob, a song called Jacob's Hope, written by a musician in Minnesota. We are Jacob's Hope.
To all our parents, to their children who are out there, our prayers to you. We love you. Come home soon. Thank everybody for being here. Thank you folks at home for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. We are Jacob.
Here's what they did. They used us. They used us. We had this sensational kidnapping, and they, you know, used us. I remember taking that mic off and throwing it and coming upstairs and throwing things off the deck. I was going to write him this scathing, how could you do this to us? And my sister told me, you get more bees with honey. You might need them down the road. So I wrote him a thank you note.
The Geraldo interview and all the other TV appearances were painful for the Wetterlings, but they did generate leads for law enforcement. Lots of them. The sheriff of Stearns County, Charles Graff. Sheriff, what's the latest on the investigation? Well, we received overnight and within the last 24 hours over 300 telephone calls and tips, different descriptions of vehicles, different descriptions of different people who were not supposed to be in the area.
With every day and every news story, more leads came in. First dozens, then hundreds, then, by the end of the second week, thousands. There were so many leads that law enforcement had to set up a 24-hour call center.
just to keep up. There were leads about strange men spotted in other states, leads about cars spotted weeks later in other parts of Minnesota, driving suspiciously slow or suspiciously fast, leads from all over the U.S. And pretty soon, some of those leads started sprouting leads of their own.
I was talking with an FBI agent who worked on the case back then, Agent Al Garber. He's now retired. And Garber told me how this would work. Investigators would get a tip, say about a white van, and they'd publicize it. And all of a sudden, people all over the state were seeing white vans everywhere and calling them in. It happened with all the cars they asked about. If you're looking for a blue Jeep, you're going to see blue Jeeps. Do an experiment.
See on your way back to wherever you're going how many blue Jeeps you see. I bet you're going to see a whole bunch of them. And I bet on the way up here you didn't see any. All right, Sheriff, where did those reports of the white Chevrolet come from? Well, they came in from anonymous tips from all over the state of Minnesota, and we've been running so many white cars down and red cars down and tan station wagons and vans and...
We've been just getting so tremendous amount of calls in here on this particular case here that it's kind of mind-boggling. People started calling leads into the Wetterling's house, too. So many people that the sheriff even gave Jerry and Patty a special phone with a built-in mini cassette recorder. Sure. It's in the back. It was sitting on our desk here for years. They still have it. Yeah.
When I visited a few months ago, the phone was on a dresser in a spare bedroom. This is the grandkids' room. Patty and Jerry kept using it for years. Yeah, this was the phone the sheriff's department gave us. There was still a tape inside. Sounds like it's getting to the end, too, but okay. So, listen. You know, you can see all the work that I've done in 20 years of history. Sure. There are hundreds of phone calls recorded on these tapes.
Patty and Jerry would field the calls and then pass along the leads to the command center. In a sense, they became investigators on their own case, and their house became a kind of secondary call center. Wednesday, 4.58 a.m. Yeah, um, we're looking for a carnival. We just did a show in Omaha, Nebraska. Suddenly, I have a feeling that he's working for a small outfit called Rainbow Amusements. People called with all kinds of leads like this.
Sometimes Patty answered the phone, and sometimes Jerry did. December 28th, and this was the McDonald's in Maplewood? Maplewood, right. Right. Okay. And then I presumed the boy was trained because he started alerting this man that I was staring at him. So I tried to be nonchalant and go up and order something so I could get a hold of the manager and him and call the police. And I looked back and they were gone. Uh-huh.
Okay. And you had, best of you could tell going by the photos, this boy didn't have a lot of similarity to Jacob. Is that what you're saying? This boy looked heavier and pale. I would imagine he would have been indoors, and it would have been several months since he was captured. He was, where was he? He was abducted in what? October 22nd, so it was about...
Maybe nine weeks. Yeah. And so I presume that he would have been indoors and eating I don't know what, but it certainly seemed reasonable to me. So that was one type of call, people calling in to report possible sightings of Jacob. But then there are these other calls. And these calls, well, I'll just play some of them. Hello, what are your names? Hi, is this the weather line? Yes, it is. Will you wake baby to me?
People would call Patty to tell her about dreams they had of seeing Jacob somewhere. Oh, okay.
And they'll often say something like, I can't sleep. I had to call. I couldn't carry this anymore. And so then they'll call and say,
It's sort of like dumping it. They'll dump it off on us so that then they can sleep. Hello? Hello? Hello, who is this? This is the Gillespie's in Missouri. I want to ask you a question right quick. Okay. Is there anybody in your family, either their side, with their legs off? Not that I know of. I see. One of the men that got your son don't have no legs. I am sick to death of seeing what this man has done to this boy.
The Wetterlings put up with all this, and I want you to really think about this.
What if someone in your family went missing, and there was a phone in your kitchen that was constantly ringing, and every time you picked it up, the person on the other end had a new, horrible story of what had happened, and you had to listen carefully and write it all down, on the off chance that it would help solve the case. It got to be so much that sometimes Patty and Jerry asked their friends to answer the phone. Sunday, 7.24 p.m.,
Sometimes they even got calls from people claiming to have Jacob. None of these calls turned out to be Jacob.
The phone is a gift and a nightmare. You know, you sit waiting for that call, and then there's this, and there's that, and there's another. But you never know. You can't not answer the phone. And that's a killer. And then there were the psychics. My name is Ferris. Do you mind discussing this or not?
Can you help me find him? Well, I'm a psychic. Psychics, it turns out, love these kinds of cases. Everybody keeps asking me, did you ever think of contacting a psychic? It's like, you don't have to. They come out of the woodworks. They do. And these psychics, in those early months, they created some trouble for the Wetterlings.
When Jacob first went missing, the Wetterlings were this united team, Patty and Jerry. But as the investigation dragged on, Patty and Jerry started to go their separate ways a bit, as they each tried to make sense of what had happened. I was just all about...
talking to the cops and the investigation, just give me the facts. I can deal with facts. Jerry, meanwhile, had all these spiritual connections and psychics, and he was... That wasn't until about a month after that I started doing that. Right. After he was at home, it's like, whatever, you know, if straight law enforcement isn't solving it, you know, maybe there's another method out there. So then I went...
down that road for a couple years of craziness. - Of craziness? - Oh, it is, it's crazy.
called it abductor hunting, and they'd tell him to go out on a county road and say something and turn around three times. He'd do it. I mean, it was like you do anything, you know. But meanwhile, I was alone because he was out abductor hunting with these crazy people. He had Midnight Margie who became—I called her Midnight Margie, or maybe you did. Midnight Margie? She'd call, and they'd talk all night long, and she was just—
You're exaggerating. I didn't talk all night long. There was always people around here. There was craziness, the investigation. Then about 11 o'clock at night, you know, things would kind of get a little quiet. I would talk with her about psychic stuff, pretty much. Leads. But it wasn't all night long. But anyway.
Because they all wanted some of Jacob's clothing. They wanted a toy. They wanted something. And I watched, and Jerry would package up his stuff and send it off. It was a desperation. And, you know, how can you not do everything, but it was so painful. You can hear that desperation on a lot of these tapes, like this one that's a recording of a phone call between Jacob's dad, Jerry, and a psychic named Sylvia Brown.
I mean, what happened? - Your son wasn't about to have this. Your son wasn't about to be victimized by this. And then unfortunately he started fighting back. And I think out of desperation or out of fear. The thing about is the fear didn't last very long because they're trying to quiet him down. They hit him in the head. - I'm being frank too. It doesn't sound like him. - Oh, I think it does out of fear.
Sylvia Brown was a pretty big deal back then. She was a regular guest on the Montel Williams show and had a habit of inserting herself into high-profile cases. She wrote books with titles like Contacting Your Spirit Guide and All Pets Go to Heaven. I've watched some old videos of Sylvia Brown from back then, and she was quite a sight. Dyed blonde hair, cheeks with so much blush that it bordered on clownish, and inch-long fingernails with bright red polish, curved like talons.
And her eyebrows, they were dark and penciled in, and she'd raised them almost conspiratorially. Like you and I were the only ones smart enough to believe all this. But I'm convinced there was another man there. I don't think there was just one male. I think there was two. Okay. And where are these guys from? Illinois. Both? Both.
See, I think it was a Chicago license plate. I don't know what the thing, but it seems to be Illinois. But I mean, it was from Chicago. All this information, all these leads from people claiming to be psychics, from people with weird dreams, from people claiming to be Jacob, it all went into the pile with everything else at the command center. And the surprising thing is, law enforcement checked out a number of these leads from psychics.
Retired FBI agent Al Garber told me sometimes it wasn't because they necessarily believed the person was really psychic, but more because you never know. What I believe about psychics is really not important. I thought maybe there were times when a person might claim to be a psychic because they didn't want us to know the source of their information.
So when psychic information came in, we looked into it carefully. There were some cases where it was just either too general or we had ruled out what the psychic was saying anyway. But we did some things. We did a search in Iowa, immense search based on psychic information, came up with nothing.
This search on a 25-mile stretch of road near Mason City, Iowa, was prompted by a vision from a New York psychic. The search took place in October of 1989, about a month after Jacob was kidnapped. It lasted two full days, and it involved the FBI, the Iowa State Patrol, local cops, and deputies from several sheriff's offices. And I want you to keep this in mind. While investigators were chasing down this psychic lead in Iowa...
They still hadn't talked to everyone who lived on the dead end road where Jacob was abducted. They still hadn't talked to one of their most likely suspects, Danny Heinrich. They still hadn't searched the area around where Heinrich lived. And yet law enforcement kept on pursuing these out there leads, these leads that seemed to have almost no chance of panning out. And when the leads didn't pan out, it's not like investigators said, "Hold on, maybe we don't want anymore of these crazy leads." In fact, they went further.
They did something that was pretty much guaranteed to bring in lots of bad leads. It involved someone law enforcement called "the man with the piercing stare." In those early days of the investigation into the abduction of Jacob Wetterling, law enforcement started to circulate sketches— sketches of strange men spotted around the area.
One of the people investigators were most interested in sketching was a mysterious character known as the Man with the Piercing Stare. The Man with the Piercing Stare was a guy a few people had seen at the Tom Thumb, the store where Jacob and two other kids had biked that night to rent a movie.
Here's how FBI agent Byron Gigler described the man in a TV interview back then. His normal demeanor would be to stare at customers with piercing eyes. He would not speak to him. He would oftentimes follow him around the store and simply position himself in front of the store and follow him around the store with his eyes. I talked to a couple who claimed to have seen the man with the piercing stare. Kevin and Marlene Guast were in a band called the Night Owls.
It was a polka band. Oompa German. Waltz's Polka. Minnesota style. Two steps. On the day Jacob was abducted, there was an all-day polka festival in town at a ballroom close to the Tom Thumb store. The Night Owls played an early set. That afternoon, after the Night Owls set was done, the Guas packed up and headed off to play another show. On their way out of town, they stopped at the Tom Thumb. They think it was around 4.30. We're going to get something to eat so we can hit the road and play another job that night.
Got a sandwich there, heated it in the microwave, and that's when we noticed. They saw a man standing by the coolers, late 20s, early 30s, watching the front door. Right away I picked him out. He was kind of, you know, you could tell he was intense upon something else, like he was thinking about something else at the same time. What did he look like? Well, he had a baseball cap on, kind of a, I want to say, a wider face. When you just looked at him, you just had a funny feeling like,
People just don't stand there staring, you know, looking over aisles the way he did. The Guas didn't know what to make of this guy. They headed to their next show, and later that night, they drove home. And on the way back, we were coming up 71, and we had the radio on, and they mentioned about this kid disappearing in St. Joel. We just kind of looked at each other like, it had to be him, you know. I remember saying, eh, we've got to call in the morning. Yeah. Yeah.
I talked to another guy. His name is Steve Gretch, and he was also at the Polka Fest that day. Steve worked for a radio station called Chasm that organized it, and he told me he also saw someone strange. There was one guy there that didn't fit. He had a beard, you know, real dark beard hair, and he had all black on. Nobody dresses like that. Go to a Polka Fest. You got your Sunday best on to go dancing.
In the weeks after, Steve Gretch and Marlene Guast both talked to a law enforcement sketch artist about the strange men they saw. They both describe a similar process. They remember sitting down with this book of images of ears, eyebrows. So you're like going through like here, all of the eyes. Nose, yes, chin, forehead. They have like different noses and stuff like that. And you just flip through them and go, that's more like it. Then they put it together on the page and then you tweak it a little and
Then you get your sketch.
I wanted to know more about this whole process of making sketches. So I called up a woman named Karen Newarth. She's an expert in sketches and eyewitness ID, and she works for an organization called the Innocence Project. The group tries to exonerate people who've been wrongly convicted of crimes. Karen told me this whole process of making sketches is far from scientific. She says, "...we have this idea that it's really easy to describe a face. We see them every day. They're the first thing we notice about a person."
But Karen says describing a face is way harder than we think. We tend to process faces holistically, right? Like we see a face as a whole as opposed to, okay, those are, you know, two almond-shaped eyes, and that is a nose that is wider than mine and shorter than my mother's, you know, or however. We don't—we're not processing separate features.
It's very difficult to capture either in words or through the composite making the actual nuances of human features and the human face. There are studies about this, about just how hard it is. And those studies found that most of the time, sketches aren't going to look much like the people we see.
I tried this myself with another reporter on our team, and we were so bad at it. We even made a video about just how bad at it we were. You can see it on our website. Whoa. Oh, wow. I don't know what I was picturing, but it wasn't that. They look like two different guys. In the Jacob Wetterling case, law enforcement used a lot of sketches, including one based on a description from Jared Shirell, the boy in Cold Spring who was abducted earlier that year. That sketch looks sort of like Danny Heinrich.
but it looked like a lot of other people, too. This reliance on sketches in a criminal case is pretty standard, despite what Karen is saying about how unreliable they are. But investigators on the Wetterling case went a step further. Law enforcement took sketches of the man with the piercing stare and other sketches of suspicious people spotted in different towns, and they combined them into a completely new sketch. Let me just say, these people from these sketches don't look at all alike.
One of the men in the sketches looks to be in his 70s. He's balding, with heavy bags under his eyes, and a sloping nose. Another man looks like he's maybe 50. Different eyes, different nose, different everything. And so when law enforcement combined all these people into a new sketch, it didn't look like any of the earlier guys. It looked like a different person entirely. A white guy, maybe in his 60s, kind of mean-looking. And it doesn't look at all like Danny Heinrich.
I couldn't find anyone who remembers making the decision to create this combined sketch. So I sent these sketches to Karen, the expert at the Innocence Project, to see what she thought. I would say this is really unusual.
I've not heard of... I'm not sure even how to respond. I think this is... It doesn't sound like there was even necessarily reason to believe that the witnesses were describing the same individual. This strikes me as a very bad idea. What law enforcement did next is they took this new combined sketch and they sent it out to the media, along with the sketch Jared helped make.
These two sketches, the combined sketch and Jared's sketch, did not look like the same person. Not at all. Law enforcement put both sketches on a flyer, and they sent it everywhere. There were thousands of copies. Flyers were taped to doors, to restaurant windows, and even onto pizza boxes. The flyer said, "'We must find these men, so Jacob can be found.'"
Investigators would point to the flyer and say, "Look closely at these faces and call us right away if you see these men." And people did. They call into the command center saying, "That guy on the flyer, I think that's my neighbor or my mailman or a guy I met on vacation four states over." And the leads poured in. By 2016, there were at least 70,000 leads in the Wetterling case.
That's more than 20 times the number of people who lived in St. Joseph back when Jacob was abducted. I went to talk to the lead investigator on the Wetterling case, Chief Deputy Bruce Bechtold, in August, about a month before the case was solved. He told me they were still getting leads. There are people that think Martians took them. Are you serious? There's all kinds of odd things that come into it. So I got a report last year that Jacob was riding on an elephant in a parade in Philadelphia last year.
Deputy Bechtel came the closest of any investigator I spoke with to saying maybe all these leads and all this publicity weren't so great after all. Perhaps it did go too big too fast instead of staying close in. If you spend so much time on leads that go nowhere, it may be taking you from the lead that might take you somewhere.
But in the end, even Deputy Bechtold wouldn't go so far as to say that trying to get so many leads from all over the country was a mistake. He just couldn't let go of the idea that one of these leads, even one of these bizarre leads, could solve the case. Was there a sense that, like, those leads have to be checked out? Like, there's no matter, like, kind of how maybe out there that you just have to check just to be sure? I would say with most, you have to be sure.
Every law enforcement officer I talked to who worked on the case said something similar to this, that they had no control over the number of leads and no choice but to check them out. To a person, they said, there's no such thing as too many leads. Information is always good. When I talked about all this with Patty and Jerry Wetterling in July, before Jacob's remains were found,
They told me that questioning the investigation, what could have or should have been done, doesn't get them anywhere. It doesn't help find their son. And they said it's not as though investigators didn't work hard. They were working nonstop on this case. But Patty and Jerry did wonder whether all those leads made the case harder to solve. I just think almost there probably was too much publicity and too much interest because there were too many leads for everything to be, you know, totally...
Looked through, I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't know. What happened was his story was out and became national quickly.
And investigatively, it's like two-thirds of the time, it's somebody who's in the region, you know, somebody who's from the area. So I think that they were forced to look at a lot of things that probably... They triaged. They had to sort, but that's a lot. That's a lot of leads. So do we have the one guy in there? Probably. But it's like Jerry was saying, it's almost like too many to...
you know, to have him stand out because it was just so much. There was so much noise. 70,000 leads. Psychics, white vans, the man with the piercing stare, people claiming to be Jacob.
And for nearly 27 years, investigators say they reviewed every single one of those leads. They kept expanding the investigation more and more. Even years later, asking the public all across the United States for help solving this case. Somehow, in all that noise, law enforcement failed to see what was right in front of them. The man who lived two towns over. The man already in their files.
The man who had confessed to the crime nearly 27 years later, Danny Heinrich. And after years of chasing down pointless leads, in 2004, a new sheriff did something different. He turned his attention to one of the few people who witnessed something the night Jacob was abducted. And instead of believing what that witness had to say, he turned him into a suspect. Next time on In the Dark. They were saying you took him.
How'd you do it? Would you just please admit that you did it and we can make this a lot easier for you. In the Dark is produced by Samara Fremark. The associate producer is Natalie Jablonski. In the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter with help from Hans Butow. The editor-in-chief of APM Reports is Chris Worthington. Web editors are Dave Peters and Andy Cruz. The videographer is Jeff Thompson.
Additional reporting for this episode by Jennifer Vogel and Will Kraft. Our theme music is composed by Gary Meister. This episode was mixed by Cameron Wiley and Johnny Vince Evans. Go to inthedarkpodcast.org for a closer look at the use of police sketches, including a video about our experiment.
and to read stories about the investigative use of hypnosis and polygraphs, which the Wetterling investigators also used, and to hear some of the calls the Wetterlings received at their house after Jacob was kidnapped. Hi, I'm Laleh Arakoglu, host of Women Who Travel. This summer, we visit a remote Danish island with strong Viking roots. So I think it was also part of the history you told yourself. We're strong women here. We're strong women. This is the culture of this island.
We've crossed the country with a baseball stadium chaser. Some games could be a day game and then you drive to your next location and take in a night game and then you turn around and try to get to a day game. And well, how can it be summer without at least one mouthwatering moment in France? I'm in a country where there's all these wonderful cheeses and fruits and I tasted a white nectarine and it was small and ugly, but it just had a sweetness and a juice that shocked me.
He killed at least 19 people during the 1980s in South Africa. Very dark times. People were desperate. We were looking for him. We couldn't find him. And nobody knew where he was. Every single one of his victims was black. He reached such a stage where he was now hunting.
From PR.
