S1 E9: The Truth
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What they called an abduction of a child. Well, my initial thought was, you don't think that happens here. When you ran, did you look back? Yeah, once we got way down there. What did you see? Nothing. He wasn't there anymore.

It was just like, what do you say? What's going on? I was so confused. Time's your biggest enemy in an investigation. People have short memories. They don't remember everything correctly. You've got to get out there and talk to people and find out what the hell's going on. So no one came and knocked on your door that night? No. And nobody came and searched your house that night? No. And nobody searched any of, as far as you know, the buildings, the farm buildings right around your house? No. No.

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. 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.

We haven't had a lot of luck in some of these big cases that we're working on. And sometimes just good old-fashioned police work and a little bit of luck go a long way. Seven weeks ago, Jared Shirell was sitting in a courtroom as Danny Heinrich was brought in. Jared had been waiting for this moment for 27 years.

Ever since, a strange man forced him into a car off the side of the road in the town of Cold Spring when Jared was just 12 and drove him to a gravel road, sexually assaulted him, and then drove him back to town. You know, this guy, he took a part of me that night that left me to try to understand a lot of things differently.

And that's, I guess, as a victim, that would be, you know, I want to hear him say it or have an opportunity to talk to him directly. For years, Jared had done everything he could think of to try to find the man who had done this to him. He'd gone through lineups and told detectives over and over exactly what the man had done to him.

As an adult, Jared had tried to find other victims of this man and had discovered a whole separate string of assaults in the town of Painesville and met all these other victims, other men like him, and realized that all of these crimes could have been done by the same man. After all those years, the man who assaulted Jared had finally been caught.

This was the moment when everyone would finally get to hear the truth about what happened to Jared and what had happened to Jacob Wetterling. This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I'm Madeline Barron. In this podcast, we're looking at what went wrong in the case of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped in a small town in central Minnesota in 1989.

And in this final episode, we're going to take a closer look at the story Danny Heinrich told in court and the story law enforcement told us about him, about why he was so hard to catch, because those stories don't exactly hold up. As part of the plea deal Danny Heinrich had cut with prosecutors, he would not be charged with Jacob's murder, and prosecutors would drop all but one count of child pornography against him.

Heinrich would be sent to prison for 17 to 20 years, and he would finally have to publicly admit what he'd done. The confession that Heinrich made in the courtroom that day was graphic and horrible and detailed, much more detailed than people expected. Heinrich laid out a whole story with plot, action, second-guessing, reflection, and, much to the horror of everyone who listened, dialogue.

Lines he said Jacob told him. Things he said he told Jacob, just before he killed him. Jared was sitting just a few feet away, listening to all this, as Heinrich transfixed the courtroom with a story of what he did to Jacob. I mean, for me to listen to the details in court, you know, his life, his final minutes. You know, I could have been that child. I could have been Jacob. Once Heinrich was done confessing to his crimes against Jacob, he was able to

he got to what he had done to Jared. He laid out the story the same way, with all this detail and dialogue. And then Heinrich started going into a part of the story that Jared had never heard before. Heinrich described in graphic detail a sex act he said he forced on Jared. And then he said that as he did it, he told Jared, quote, "If you throw up, I'll kill you." The line was so specific,

Jared told me that when he heard it, he started to feel sick to his stomach. Because, as far as Jared remembered it, this line that Heinrich said, with this really specific threat, it never happened. It just wasn't true. Jared was sure of it. You can look at the dozens of other statements that I've given law enforcement. I've never once stated this. And

It may seem like a small detail in some people's eyes, but at the same time, to me, it is, you know, it's putting truth on the table. I've read all the public law enforcement documents relating to Jared's abduction and all the statements Jared gave at the time and in the years after. And I've talked with Jared for hours, and I'd never heard that phrase either.

Jared told me that he just sat there in the courtroom as Heinrich went on and on, captivating everyone with this graphic story. And Jared started to get pretty angry. I personally took it as a shot at me, you know, directly. It was kind of a, you know, here's my account of what happened that night.

And that's the moment where I just kind of want to stand up and say, you don't have a right to tell your accounts. I'll tell you my accounts. Jared just had to sit there in silence and listen. After it was done, Jared went to the news conference and sat in the front row. He listened as U.S. Attorney Andy Lugar addressed reporters. Finally, we know. We know the truth.

Danny Heinrich is no longer a person of interest. He is the confessed murderer of Jacob Wetterling. And Jared delivered some remarks as well. We're willing to create something positive out of all of this tragic news. And I promised Patty three years ago when I got involved that I was going to try to keep it positive.

But when I went out to see Jared at his home a few weeks after the press conference, he told me he couldn't stop thinking about what Heinrich had said, and that one line in particular. I keep going back to those details lately, and I know you can't understand the level of questions I have in my own head. Jared said he'd started to think that maybe there was another reason that Heinrich said that line.

Maybe, he thought, Heinrich got him mixed up with someone else. Maybe there was another kid. Are there other victims out there? Did we want to believe that there was no other victims after Jacob? I also had that same question. Did Heinrich really stop with Jacob? The way U.S. Attorney Andy Lugar talked about it at the news conference after Heinrich confessed was as though this whole question of whether Heinrich harmed any other kids was

wasn't something we're saying much about. Do you think there are any victims after Jacob? We're not aware of any. Yes, somebody over here. Yes. Along those lines, is he being looked at as a possible suspect in any other child disappearances? Not that I'm aware of. These were fair questions and kind of obvious ones to ask.

Danny Heinrich had admitted to kidnapping and sexually assaulting not one, but two boys. Anne is suspected of attacking several other boys in Painesville before then. And when authorities searched Heinrich's home in 2015, they didn't just find child pornography. They also found four bins of boys' clothing in the basement and a set of handcuffs in a drawer in the kitchen next to a roll of duct tape.

And they found hours and hours of videos spanning more than a decade. The U.S. attorney, Andy Lugar, described the videos this way in a news conference last year. Dozens of VHS tapes of young boys engaged in routine activities like delivering newspapers, playing on the playgrounds, and riding bicycles. The videos appear to have been filmed by the defendant, and some of them appear to have been shot from a hidden camera.

Some of the videos had a kind of elaborate setup. In several of them, Heinrich would drop a coin on a set of stairs in an apartment building and secretly record as a paper boy would come up the stairs, see the coin, and then bend over to pick it up.

Heinrich also recorded a video that's kind of an informal tour of his home. In the video, at one point, Heinrich opens the door of a safe and focuses in on a loaded pistol. So we went looking for other unsolved cases of strange men trying to kidnap children. We sent a researcher and an intern to the State History Center to go through microfilm of old newspapers from the Painesville area. And we found something.

In February of 1991, about a year and a half after Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped, a notice appeared in the Painesville Press. "Be on the alert," it said. It warned that in the past three weeks, there had been three calls to police about a suspicious man spotted by schoolchildren in the Painesville area, watching them and trying to approach them. A man described as medium-sized,

A man who drove a blue car. And then, about a month later, the Painesville police called the Stearns County Sheriff's Office because they'd been getting reports of a car following paperboys on their morning routes. An officer from the Sheriff's Office showed up and found the car. It was following a paperboy. He ran the plates and realized the man was Danny Heinrich. But Heinrich wasn't breaking any traffic laws, so the officer didn't pull him over.

There are other reports like this in small-town papers all across Minnesota in the years after Jacob was kidnapped. Reports of suspicious men in cars following around kids or even trying to kidnap them. Whether any of those men was Heinrich or whether Heinrich actually did kidnap or murder anyone else, we may never know.

Because as part of the plea deal, law enforcement agreed to only ask Danny Heinrich about Jacob and Jared. They agreed not to ask Heinrich about any other crimes. So how did law enforcement get to this point? To this point of accepting a plea deal with Heinrich. A deal that meant they couldn't ask about any other crimes. A deal that meant that Heinrich would never be charged with the abduction and murder of Jacob Wetterling.

and would get out of prison in 17 to 20 years. The prosecutor who agreed to the deal, U.S. Attorney Andy Lugar, told me they agreed to it because they just didn't have a better option. We had belief, but not evidence, before he told us. So my job, under all of these awful circumstances, with no really great choices, was to do two things. Put him behind bars for a long time,

and get the answers that this family and the state of Minnesota have been looking for for almost 27 years. So it's the best deal that could have been made? In my view, it's the best deal that was available. And to hear law enforcement talk about it in interviews with reporters in the days and weeks after, the reason they didn't have any options wasn't because of anything the investigators did or didn't do.

It was because Danny Heinrich was just uncatchable. He was that rarest of rare criminals, the kind of murderer who hides the body in a place so remote and so random that no one would ever find it, the kind of killer who didn't have any friends, who never talked to anyone, not about his crime, and not about anything really.

So it was almost impossible to find out what kind of person Heinrich was, how he made decisions, where he liked to go for fun, the little things that can help investigators piece together what a person might have done and how they might have done it. Here's Stearns County Attorney Janelle Kendall. One person did this. One person never told anyone else. And it literally took this long, following up absolutely every lead they had.

He knew he didn't have the proof in the case. When you're a lone actor and you never tell anybody what happened, and we have no reason to believe that he ever told anyone, you're making a deal with the devil here. There is evil in the world. And Stearns County Chief Deputy Bruce Bechtold. That's the boogeyman, the monster that your parents warned you about growing up. The way they talked about it, it was like Heinrich was the perfect criminal.

who had committed the perfect crime. Over the past seven weeks, we spent some time looking into this picture that law enforcement had painted of Danny Heinrich. And we started by trying to find out more about who Danny Heinrich was. One of the people we found was a trucker named Roger Feil, who knew Heinrich from his early days in Painesville. Oh, man, we were in Miss Snyder's third grade class.

He and I were both in the same class then already, so, you know, I've known him that long, you know. And Rogers said that even though he now knows that Danny Heinrich is a rapist and child murderer, he still looks back fondly on their childhood together. No, I do cherish the times that we did have together because we had a lot of fun, you know, a lot of laughs. We laughed a lot together. But I don't want to know him if he's fucking just, you know, that's sick, you know.

Roger remembered Heinrich as a kind of nervous and shaky kid, indecisive. He would think about something for a long time before doing it, meditate on it. If this is the right thing to do, if it's not the right thing to do, should I ride my bike or should I walk? You know, just simple things, just simple things in life he had trouble with.

Roger says Heinrich was so indecisive that he wasn't surprised when he heard that Heinrich had gone back to the burial site a year later and moved Jacob's remains. He never could really make decisions, you know? Had a hard time making decisions. Growing up, Roger and Heinrich would just run around town a lot, mostly at night. As for what they did... I really don't want to say. And we were jolly little boys, you know?

Basically, they would go around at night, looking in girls' windows. As Roger put it, peeping Tom's stuff. He was curious, you know, he was a little curious George.

Roger remembers Heinrich as not the most popular guy by any stretch, but not a recluse either. He said, as an adult, Heinrich was the kind of guy who you'd go out for beers with. Roger ran into Heinrich in Painesville in the early 90s, a few years after Jacob had been kidnapped.

Heinrich was working for a granite company at the time. I saw him getting out of his pickup, so I hollered at him, Heine! We called him Heine. And we chatted for a while. He invited me inside. We had a beer. The scene Roger described was oddly domestic. Roger said Heinrich's apartment was very clean and that Heinrich even gave him a gift, something he had lying around from his job at the granite company.

Over time, Heinrich settled into a job as a laborer at a company called Buffalo Veneer and Plywood. He started working there about 11 years ago and was still working there at the time of his arrest last year.

I was his direct supervisor for quite a while, so I worked closely with him, you know. Heinrich's boss, Derek Bloom, said Heinrich didn't really stand out. Pretty much a standard-type employee, you know. He'd come to work, did his job, and didn't really have a whole lot of problems with him. Pretty average, except for one little thing. You know, like I say, when he was here, he was a pretty normal person.

Being investigated for the Jacob Wetterling case.

Heinrich was not exactly a loner. He had other friends besides Roger. He had a drinking buddy. He had co-workers. He even liked to talk about the Wetterling case.

But it's not clear whether law enforcement knew any of this. Because when we asked all these people, the people who said they knew Heinrich pretty well, his friends, his boss, whether they had ever been contacted by law enforcement, they all said the same thing: No. Not back in 1989, right after Jacob was kidnapped. Not in 1990, when authorities brought in Heinrich for questioning. And not even in the past year.

when Heinrich was sitting in jail on child porn charges, and authorities were hoping he would confess to the Jacob Wetterling kidnapping. So Danny Heinrich wasn't exactly hiding out. He talked to his neighbors, talked to his friends, invite people over. He lived with his brother. As best I can tell, he was kind of a chatty guy. Awkward, but chatty.

Still, there was one group of people I was expecting Heinrich, the guy who'd gotten away with the most notorious crime in Minnesota, would really not want to talk to. A group of people it would be downright reckless to talk to. Law enforcement. But when we requested records from small-town police departments and sheriff's offices in central Minnesota, we found out that actually, Heinrich called the cops for all kinds of things.

In 2008, he called about some drunk guys who were being annoying. In 2005, he called police twice, once for his car window getting smashed, and another time to complain about some kids who were yelling and fighting outside near his house. In 2003, he called police in the small town of Benson, where he was living at the time, to report a burglary at his house. When the officers showed up to investigate, Heinrich invited him in.

And as the officer looked around, he didn't find much evidence of a burglary. As he put it in his report, quote,

including televisions, VCRs, DVD players, computers, collectibles, including die-cast model cars, knives, swords, and an extensive collection of DVDs and VHS tapes, all of which was easily accessible and not taken. This man, whose home the Wetterling investigators had wanted to get into for years, had actually invited a police officer inside, himself, voluntarily,

to look around to see what was there. But as far as we can tell from the police report, the officer had no idea that Heinrich was one of the top suspects in the Wetterling case. So the officer just treated it like any other call. I want to tell you about another person Danny Heinrich spent time with growing up, a man named Duane Hart. Heinrich was just a kid when he met Hart for the first time. Everyone I talked to described Duane Hart, or Dewey as he was known,

is a kind of psychopath. Someone who would talk about setting people on fire and tying people to trees without using any rope. Roger, Danny Heinrich's childhood friend, said the kinds of things that Dewey Hart would talk about would really freak them out. But I remember him telling Danny and I stories when we were 11, 12 years old about things he did in Vietnam, you know? I mean, it's so scary that you couldn't sleep at night.

Hart would buy alcohol for some of the boys in town, including Danny Heinrich. And he always seemed to have a group of boys around him, a lot of them drunk or high. I talked to another person who knew Hart as a kid.

a guy named Brad Frolic. And Brad told me that Hart sexually abused him and lots of other kids. For Brad, it started when he was about nine. When it first started, you know, he'd offer us money, a $50 bill, you know, a $50 bill. I'd never seen one of them probably in my life. But he started with the money, and then it was the booze, and then it was pot,

You know, getting us high, you know, drinking when we were nine years old. And then, you know, you're a little kid, so you think, "Wow, I'm getting high, I'm getting drunk. I mean, this is what we're meant to do." He had us so twisted and confused, you know, we didn't know what was right or what was wrong.

In 1990, Brad came forward and reported Hart to police. Hart pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting four boys. He's now being held at a secure sex offender treatment facility. He's there because he was committed as a sexual psychopath. He didn't respond to my request for an interview. But I did talk to someone a few months ago who'd spent a fair amount of time talking to Dewey Hart.

My name is Larry Peart. I'm a licensed private investigator in the state of Minnesota. License number is 549. Larry Peart served in Vietnam. He says he was exposed to Agent Orange while he was serving there. And that's why my voice sounds this way. Back in 1990, Larry was hired by a defense attorney to go talk to one of his clients.

a guy named Dewey Hart, who'd been charged with sexually assaulting Brad and several other boys. The attorney was concerned because he knew Hart was on a short list of suspects in the Jacob Wetterling case. So he wanted Larry to go talk to Hart to get a sense of how concerned he should be. Larry told me he talked to Hart for 60 hours or so, and he came away convinced that Hart wasn't the one who took Jacob. Mr. Hart was not that type of pedophile.

He was, for the want of a six-pack of beer or a couple of joints of marijuana, he had all the sex he could handle. And in fact, Larry told me that Hart had even tried to come up with some names of people he knew who he thought could have been capable of kidnapping Jacob. He was providing me with a lot of information on his known pedophile acquaintances, so to speak, up there.

Larry took notes on all the people Hart mentioned. I have a copy of his notes, and they run for 25 pages. He was trying to give names of everybody that possibly could be involved. And Dan Heinrich was the most notable one that he provided. He was even the most notable one back then? Yeah. So notable that Larry even drew a circle around Heinrich's name and put an asterisk by it.

Larry can't remember exactly why he thought Heinrich was such a good suspect, but his best guess now is that it probably had to do with certain things Hart was telling him about Heinrich, things that matched pretty exactly what law enforcement had told the public about the person who kidnapped Jacob and Jared. This is how Hart described Heinrich. This guy has a raspy voice when he's excited or angry, and where military fatigues he has...

Larry said Hart also told him he would party with Heinrich and other boys, and that he'd even had sex with Heinrich at some point. And here's the really interesting thing about Dewey Hart. He had a spot he liked to go to, a place where Brad Frolic has said Hart would take him and other boys to get them drunk and sexually abuse them, a spot where you'd think the investigators on the Wetterling case would have searched.

especially because both Hart and Heinrich were top suspects in the Wetterling case. A little place out by a field near a gravel pit just outside of downtown Painesville, right off the main road into town. A place where Roger Feil, Heinrich's childhood friend, said Hart and Heinrich's older brother Dave would go to party.

Rogers said Danny Heinrich could have been brought there by his older brother. Oh yeah, it was a hangout place for some of the older kids. Dewey spent a lot of time down there and some of their friends. Yeah, they'd go down there and smoke weed, you know, and drink beer, and box bar, party. They had a name for this place. They used to call that the Big Valley. The Big Valley. One day in late August of this year,

investigators went and got Danny Heinrich out of jail. They put him in handcuffs and loaded him into a car, and Heinrich brought them to the area near where he'd taken Jacob Wetterling on the night of October 22, 1989, sexually assaulted him, killed him, and buried his body. The way the sheriff of Stearns County, John Sanner, later talked about this area where Heinrich brought them

was as if it was miles away from anything. The specific area, I'm not sure if it was ever searched. It was on private property. It was very remote. Someplace so remote that it would have been impossible to find if Heinrich hadn't shown them the way, a place that had no connection to anything. But no one in law enforcement would say exactly where this spot was. All we knew was the general description that Heinrich gave when he confessed to the crime in court.

So I asked a reporter I work with, Curtis Gilbert, to try to find it. Curtis pieced it together by looking at old property records, plat maps, and by talking to people in the area. He showed it to me on a map. Okay, so I can show you. So, okay, if we look here, so this is 1991 aerial photography. This is 23-1991.

This is 33 coming up north. This is the grove of trees that used to be a state gravel pit. Right there. Last week, I drove out to the site with Natalie Jablonski, a producer on this podcast. We pulled over to the side of the road, next to a field lined with trees. It's like this is just off the main road that leads into the town where Heinrich lives.

It's like right there. The site where Danny Heinrich killed Jacob Wetterling was just outside of downtown Painesville, right off the main road into town, out in a field near a gravel pit. Not a random location, not a remote area. This was a spot Danny Heinrich knew well, a place he'd almost certainly been to before, a place that investigators might have searched on their own if they had talked to Heinrich's friends from back then.

a place they should have paid attention to, because this place had a name. It was called the Big Valley. We tried to find out who owned the Big Valley back when Jacob was kidnapped. In 1989, the land was in the process of being sold because the elderly couple who owned it had died.

We found the person who bought it, but we weren't able to reach him. So Curtis found someone else, a guy named Bob Meyer, who bought some land right next to the big valley in 1997, eight years after Jacob was kidnapped. Can you show me? This is kind of, you know, just dipped out here from the gravel. And Bob told Curtis that he would sometimes go wandering around onto his neighbor's property,

Right in the area that we now know is where Heinrich killed Jacob, an area that Bob said back then was almost entirely covered by grass, trees, and brush. But Bob said there was one small section that stood out, a little patch of dirt that always struck him as strange. There was a hole in an area that just looked out of place and just had my curiosity up. For many years that I looked at it and...

from a distance until one time I looked at it closer but nothing really registered other than it was out of place with everything else because it was a rocky bowl and everything else was overgrown by grass or trees or brush but this place just stood out as a rocky bowl. How big was it? What did it look like? It was probably...

four foot in diameter or something, and a little oblong shape with nothing but good-sized stones in there with one big rock just off-center. Bob told Curtis he wishes someone would have come and asked him back then if he'd seen anything strange, because now he wonders whether this hole was where Jacob was buried. It would have been nice to let the people that own property in the area to kind of keep an eye out on

on if they see anything that stands out. Maybe this thing could have gotten brought out a lot sooner and a lot better. As far as we know, investigators still haven't dug up the Big Valley, the site where Heinrich says he sexually assaulted and murdered Jacob Wetterling, the main crime scene. Instead, they focused on another site, the place across the street.

where Heinrich said he took Jacob's remains about a year later and buried them in a hole about a foot or two deep. A few weeks ago, authorities showed up with shovels to excavate the site. Today, it's a cow pasture owned by a farmer named Doug Voss. Throughout the day, then we made sure that the cattle weren't interfering with their work and keeping them occupied and seeing to it they could do what they needed to do.

The investigator's plan was to use a metal detector to try to get a reading on the metal buttons from Jacob's red jacket that he'd worn that night. Jacob's red jacket was the most recognizable detail that people had been told to look for. Everyone in this part of Minnesota knew what the jacket looked like because after the kidnapping, the sheriff had a replica made of the jacket and a lieutenant held it up to the cameras and told everyone to be on the lookout for it.

Boy was last seen wearing a jacket identical to this one. So this red jacket would be the most obvious sign of Jacob. It was what everyone had been looking for for nearly 27 years. And out in the pasture that day, as they got closer, an investigator noticed something poking out of the dirt, a piece of red fabric. It was the jacket, right there, sticking out of the mud, in Doug Voss's cow pasture.

right across from the big valley, just out there for anyone to see. Danny Heinrich was not the perfect criminal, and he didn't commit the perfect crime. He just got lucky. Lucky that he committed his crime in a place with a sheriff's office with a bad track record when it comes to solving crime. Lucky that the investigators assigned to handle the case didn't canvass the neighborhood that night, didn't talk to all the people who knew him,

didn't stay focused on the most likely suspects and didn't listen to what the kids were telling them. And in fact, this whole notion of the perfect crime, all these TV shows, books and movies about impossible cases, cold cases, unsolved mysteries, people who vanished without a trace, all that has turned our attention away from the actions of law enforcement.

away from asking tough questions of the people who are supposed to be solving these crimes. The perfect crime is just an excuse for the failures of law enforcement. And we buy it. But really, there are no perfect crimes. There are only failed investigations. And the truth is, there will always be people like Danny Heinrich. The question is, what kind of law enforcement will we have to catch them?

The editor-in-chief of APM Reports is Chris Worthington.

Web editors are Dave Peters and Andy Cruz. The videographer is Jeff Thompson. Our theme music is composed by Gary Meister. This episode was mixed by Corey Streppel. Thanks also to Will Kraft, Stephen Smith, Johnny Vince Evans, Cameron Wiley, Steve Griffith, Eric Stromstad, Sasha Zlanian, Brita Green, and Molly Bloom.

Go to inthedarkpodcast.org to learn more about Danny Heinrich, about what his life was really like, the jobs he held, the police reports, the places he lived, and to sign up for our email list so we can let you know when we decide on our next project.

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. World of Secrets from the BBC World Service. Season 3, The Apartheid Killer. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts. ♪

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