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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. Hey guys, this is Samara. I'm the senior producer of In the Dark.
We're coming to you today with an update, not about the Curtis Flowers case, but about our first season. Yesterday, we got some important news about the case that we covered in that season, and we wanted to make sure to tell you guys about it as soon as we could. If you haven't listened to season one of the podcast, you can find it in our podcast feed or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for listening and enjoy the update. This is an update episode of season one of In the Dark.
In season one of this podcast, our team spent a year looking into the case of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped on October 22, 1989, in the small town of St. Joseph, Minnesota, in Stearns County. The case went unsolved for almost 27 years. And then, in September of 2016, authorities announced that a man named Danny Heinrich had confessed to kidnapping and murdering Jacob,
Heinrich led officers to Jacob's remains in a field in Painesville, Minnesota, just a little more than a mile from where Heinrich had been living back then. And so, season one of In the Dark started with a news conference. Finally, we know.
We know what the Wetterling family and all of Minnesota have longed to know since that awful night in 1989. We know the truth. In that news conference, one by one, officials from each agency, the Stearns County Sheriff's Office, the FBI, the State Crime Bureau, went up to the podium and praised each other.
for their tireless work on the case. We are here today because of the perseverance of the investigative team, the commitment to aggressively follow up on every single lead, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, and the absolute belief that if we continued to press, we would eventually solve this case. But then, just yesterday, there was a very different kind of news conference held by the new sheriff in Stearns County.
This task force was not just on the wrong path, but on the wrong freeway, and later on the Autobahn with no speed limit. In this case, too many cooks spoiled the broth, the soup, the stew, or in Minnesota, the casserole. In the first season of In the Dark, we asked a question no one else was asking about the Wetterling case. Why hadn't this case been solved right away? What went wrong in this investigation that allowed the case to drag on for nearly 27 years?
A reporting found that investigators failed to conduct some of the most basic police work in the case. They didn't talk to all the neighbors on the dead-end road where Jacob was kidnapped. They pursued all kinds of pointless leads, leads involving psychics, people in other states, all kinds of things. They turned one of their best witnesses into a top suspect. They discounted the information from children in the area who'd been attacked by a strange man in the years leading up to Jacob's kidnapping.
And they let the man who committed this crime, a man named Danny Heinrich, get away with it for 27 years. It was only solved because Heinrich decided to confess to the crime to get a better deal on some child porn charges. In the months after the first season of In the Dark came out, the sheriff of Stearns County, John Sanner, announced that he was resigning. John Sanner left in the middle of his term.
The county selected a man named Don Gudmundson to serve as the acting sheriff until the next election. Don Gudmundson had worked for years in law enforcement in Detroit and Chicago and Minnesota. In Minnesota, he'd been sheriff of several counties, and he'd served as police chief of the city of Lakeville. Gudmundson had a reputation in Minnesota as an independent thinker, an aggressive law enforcement officer who isn't afraid to call it like he sees it.
I'd first come across him about six years ago, when he filled in as a police chief of a small town in southern Minnesota and ended up authorizing a multi-state criminal investigation to take down a former teacher at a boarding school in Minnesota who'd sexually abused children at the school. Gudmundson began his new job as Stearns County Sheriff in May of 2017. And right away, one of the first things he had to deal with was what to do with the investigative file in the Wetterling case.
all those documents of police reports and notes about what investigators did when they were trying to figure out who kidnapped and murdered Jacob Wetterling. That file had been closed to the public. No one outside of law enforcement was allowed to see it, as long as the case had remained unsolved. But in Minnesota, once a case is closed, the law says that the public has a right to look at the file. And so, after Danny Heinrich confessed, I requested a copy of the file. We were one of several news organizations that put in a request.
But the Wetterling family tried to prevent parts of the file from becoming public. Their lawyer told the court that there were personal details about their family in the file that they believed shouldn't be public. Our news organization and others argued that it was important for the file to be public, for any investigative file to be public once the case is closed, because that's the only way the public can know what law enforcement actually did, whether they did their job. In the end, the judge sided with the news organizations and ordered the file to be made public.
But this didn't apply to all the documents. The documents that belonged to the FBI went back to the FBI. We filed a Freedom of Information request to get those documents, but so far the FBI hasn't released them. It took months for Stearns County to prepare their file for release. And then, just yesterday, the Stearns County Sheriff held a news conference to pass out copies of the file to reporters on flash drives.
I was flying back from Mississippi, so our producer Natalie Jablonski and our reporter Parker Yesko drove out to St. Cloud to attend it. Later that afternoon, my flight landed, and Natalie and I went into a studio, and she told me about it. We just got back from this press conference. Can you just describe what it was like today? Yeah, I guess it is amazing how intense any Wetterling-related news conference is. It felt like we were kind of back there again.
We get there, it's in the basement of the sheriff's office. We got there an hour early and it was already like a wall of cameras in the back. A ton of reporters. I'm like duct taping my mic to the podium and there's already like eight mics on the podium. Like I can barely squeeze mine in, you know, an hour before it starts. And so yeah, like the longer we sat there, just more people kept coming in and coming in. Just so many reporters. All of Minnesota news media was there, it seemed like.
So was it all reporters who were there? It was almost all reporters. There were a few other people there. Just before 10 o'clock, Jerry Wetterling walked in and sat down. He was wearing like a blue blazer and polka dot shirt. So Jacob's father? Yeah, Jacob Wetterling's dad. When I and other people asked him for a comment afterwards, he just said, like, I'm just here to listen. So, yeah, how did it get started?
So finally, after what seemed like a long time that we were waiting, Sheriff Don Goodmanson walked in. Thank you for being here for the release of the Stearns County Sheriff's Office and Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension files on the Wetterling investigation. Something that was kind of rare for a press conference, he gave a PowerPoint. Unlike most press conferences,
where a brief statement is made and then questions taken, I propose to do a PowerPoint presentation of the case focused primarily on the first few months of the investigation. After you've had a chance to digest the files on the flash drive, we believe that you will find the most important information is in the first part of the files where the investigation went off the rails.
I watched this news conference on my phone, and it was unlike anything I'd ever seen. In the past, when there would be a news conference about the Wetterling case, law enforcement would line up in a row behind the podium as a show of unity. And law enforcement would never say anything negative at those news conferences about their work on the case. This time, there was just one law enforcement officer up there, alone at the podium, just the sheriff. And he wasn't there to praise law enforcement. He was there to deliver a message.
Sheriff Gudmundsen walked the audience through an hour-long PowerPoint presentation, where he broke down in detail exactly how investigators had botched the case, ever since the night of October 22, 1989, when Jacob was kidnapped. They have, in my view, from October 22, mistaken activity for accomplishment.
They just felt like if we keep doing this and keep doing this and keep doing this, getting more and more tips and coming and coming, we'll eventually stumble onto it. They had it. And the tone of the sheriff during all this was quite raw, as though he was trying to say, look, I can't even believe this stuff myself. There were times, I will admit, that when...
We were putting together this PowerPoint. We were screaming at the flight, can't you see this? It was striking to watch as the new sheriff basically went through all of our findings from the first season about how the investigation was botched one by one, like how law enforcement didn't right away talk to all the neighbors on the dead end road where Jacob was kidnapped.
It is unclear when, on the 23rd, the survey was conducted at 10 of the homes... And how law enforcement failed to catch Danny Heinrich years earlier, when he was jumping out of bushes and attacking kids in the nearby town of Painesville. Frankly, it went off the rails with the Painesville incidents.
We should have been involved in that and solved those cases way back in 87. And how law enforcement failed to catch Danny Heinrich in January 1989, nine months before Jacob was kidnapped.
when Heinrich kidnapped another boy in the neighboring town of Cold Spring, sexually assaulted him, and let him go. I think all the information that they needed was actually available to them on January 13th and 14th, 15th and 16th of 1989 with the Cold Spring case. And how law enforcement should have been able to solve all three sets of crimes— Jacob's kidnapping, the assaults in Painesville, the kidnapping of the boy in Cold Spring—
by following evidence that strongly suggested that they'd all been committed by the same person. All across each of the three cases, he says the same types of things. His voice is described by multiple victims as deep, raspy, and very distinctive. Gudmundsson had especially tough words for the work of the FBI. He said the FBI wouldn't let other investigators work on parts of the case, that they'd started out looking too widely, without focus, that they'd failed to share information with other agencies involved in the case,
and that the FBI botched an interrogation of Heinrich in the early months of the investigation. But I don't want to get into a debate with the FBI about the truth. I have laid out, I think, in a measured, clear, concise, and precise manner the way I saw it, based on the reading of the file. If they somehow would challenge my assessment, release their files. They've got files, release them.
Sheriff Gudmundson even talked about all those psychics, all the time that was wasted pursuing leads from the worst possible sources. You know your investigation is already off the rails when you're dealing with psychics. October 24th, less than 48 hours after the abduction, there was a lot of contact with psychics in this case. They are right about precisely nothing.
Investigators are also dealing with psychics before an excellent neighborhood canvas is ever done. There are also clairvoyants, tarot cards, Indian medicine men, witching rods, Satanists, voodoo, witchcraft, hypnosis, premonitions, and dreams and repressed memory reports in the file. There are thousands of pages of unnecessary, redundant information.
detailed and ultimately meaningless reports about trivia, like the kind of pizza ordered, movies watched, or large amounts of toilet tissue ordered. Sheriff Gudmundson kept coming back to this, how baffling it was that when law enforcement had this man, Danny Heinrich, in their sights, investigators had, for some reason, decided it made more sense to investigate people who had nothing connecting them to this case. These leads were followed up on.
owns a bakery and is weird, a paraplegic, drunks, described weirdos, the mentally challenged and ill, a 350-pound man, domestic assault perpetrators, delusional loners, a small child's drawing, incest with a female, and a man with a piercing stare. As the news conference continued, the sheriff started getting into some areas of the investigation, some details that I hadn't known about before.
And a lot of these details had to do with Heinrich. It turns out that investigators had even more reasons to suspect Heinrich than I'd been aware of. Heinrich had lied a lot to the investigators, and they'd caught him in those lies. Like Heinrich had told them that he didn't wear military-style clothing in his everyday life. But investigators had found out that wasn't true. They talked to people who told them that Heinrich wore stuff like that all the time. And that was important, because some of the boys who'd been attacked in the years before Jacob
Describe the attacker as wearing military-style clothing. And then there was how Heinrich behaved when he knew the cops were watching him. Gudmundsen said that investigators trailed Heinrich for parts of three days, and that Heinrich kept trying to shake the cops. He would go in circles and double back. One time, he just turned off his lights and disappeared. His actions certainly should have set off alarm bells since an innocent man would be unlikely to take driving maneuvers to escape the surveillance scene.
And, Gudmundsson said, the FBI had even talked to a man who knew Heinrich back then, who told the FBI that Heinrich had approached him in October of 1989, the same month that Jacob was kidnapped, and asked him for advice on how to get rid of a body. But, according to Gudmundsson, as best he can tell, no one followed up. We'll be right back.
I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.
No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.
Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. One of the biggest questions I'd had, even after our reporting was done, was what investigators had done with Heinrich for the long stretch of time, the 20-some years, between the time they first investigated him after the kidnapping to a few years ago when Heinrich's name came up again.
According to the sheriff, based on his review of the file, the answer was nothing. There was not a single mention of Danny Heinrich in the investigative file for 20 years. And by June of 1990, Heinrich is essentially forgotten. They just stopped looking at Heinrich. There was nothing significant that pointed away from him. There was no stronger suspect to distract the cops. These investigators just seemed to forget about him.
I asked retired detectives, did you ever take a run at him? Why wouldn't you think of going back and taking a run at this guy? They all said no. They don't give me a good explanation for that. And obviously the FBI did not also think of taking a run at him. We certainly all have responsibility and accountability for that. It was our investigators who were there. It's our investigation. Certainly we should have.
And I will accept the responsibility, speaking for all of law enforcement in this case, I will accept the responsibility and accountability for this, that all of us failed. Sheriff Gudmundson also announced several changes he'd made in the sheriff's office to try to prevent this kind of failure from happening again. The sheriff said he'd gotten rid of their system where deputies would rotate in and out of being detectives. And he had assigned a permanent lieutenant to be in charge of investigations.
The sheriff said he'd also assigned a detective to review each unsolved case in Stearns County, including the 1974 murders of two young sisters, Mary and Suzanne Rieker. We can't change what's happened, but we can learn from it. The sheriff also took questions, so our producer Natalie asked him something.
I asked whether anyone would face any professional consequences for what had happened in the investigation, and he said no. You can't discipline someone for messing up an investigation. Shoot, they had 71 people shot in Chicago and six people murdered, and three weeks later they had one person in custody.
I mean, how's that going? But then how do you make things better? Like if you can't discipline someone for messing up. Well, I think you make things better by talking to the people who are currently working. You know, my staff has a very good understanding of this. You know, it's one of the messages for my detectives is, look, look at this. Do you want some dope like me 27 years later looking at your files? No, you don't. Do it right. Do it right the first time.
So at the end of the news conference, you know, it ends. We were there for like over an hour. And, you know, everyone's had a chance to ask their questions. Gudmundsson says, you know, thank you very much. He walks off from the podium. And then from behind me, Al Garber stands up. From the FBI. From the FBI. The former lead agent on the Wetterling case.
Right. Back in the early days. Right. Al Garber stands up and basically is like, he just needed to refute what Gudmundsen said, basically fight back against all this criticism of himself and the FBI. Yeah.
Can I use it? Yeah, go ahead. And he goes... He's crashing this news conference. He's crashing the news conference. And then Garber goes up in front of the podium and starts to sort of bash what Gudmundson has said and just really fire back against a lot of the criticisms that Gudmundson had made. He was getting up there to defend himself. I've known Don Gudmundson for many years, and we've worked together a number of times, and I have a great deal of respect for Don.
And I don't know what his motive is in this presentation, frankly, but I think that there are some important things you need to know to make this a positive experience, not to make it all negative. And I took some notes as he was speaking, and I haven't prepared this presentation, so I'll do the best I can from the notes I have.
When he began the presentation saying it went off the rails, that was a clue to me. And the clue was that he has his beliefs, he has his understanding, and he was going to make it fit the facts in this case. And I think that was wrong. Second thing, he is a very qualified law enforcement officer. He is, and I admire him.
But what's missing from his credentials is, has he ever worked a case of this magnitude with this many agencies, with this many investigators, with this much emphasis? And maybe you have, Don, but if you have, you didn't say you did. I worked mafia assassinations in Chicago as part of a task force. Obviously, some of those, you know what, Al, why don't you take it outside?
So he like starts to head outside. And of course, all the reporters are like, we got to go with him.
So we're all like following Al Garber out upstairs, out of the basement, outside where it's like drizzling. And we're standing outside in front of the sheriff's office in this like packed huddle. I was the supervisor of the investigation for all the agencies.
But there's some things I really have to say, and you have to hear these because... And, I mean, he did get into a few specifics. He said, like, you know, Gunmanson said we only surveilled Heinrich for three days. That's ridiculous. That's absolutely ridiculous. It was two weeks. Like, we surveyed him for two weeks, 24-7. We conducted a 24-7 surveillance of Heinrich for two weeks. And when I say we, you have to understand...
BCA agents, police, detectives, FBI agents were sitting in the same room hearing the same information. No one said, "You, you're such and such agency, you have to leave the room." That's outrageous. And of course, the way to clear this up would be for the FBI to release its own documents, which it is refusing to do. Right.
He was highly emotional. Like, he really seemed like he was on the defensive, but he was also, like, passionate about what he was saying. And then at some point, somebody asked him, like, whether he would call the investigation a failure or something. And he was like, like, at first he was like,
Like, no, it wasn't a failure. Like, no, it wasn't. Why was it a failure? And then he goes, fine, you want me to call it a failure? It was a failure. Like, we failed. Okay, we failed. If you want to hear me say we failed because we didn't find Jacob alive, we failed. He also said that the police... The release of the documents from the investigative file was something that another person had been waiting for for a long time. That person is Dan Rossier.
the man who lived on the dead-end road and whose driveway Jacob Wetterling was abducted from. The former sheriff, John Sanner, had told reporters that Dan was a, quote, person of interest in the case. And that statement by Sheriff Sanner, combined with the decision of journalists to publish it, ruined Dan's life. Dan is now suing Stearns County for damages. At the news conference yesterday, the new sheriff didn't say anything about Dan Rassier.
When a reporter asked the sheriff about Dan, the sheriff said he couldn't comment because of the act of litigation. As for Danny Heinrich, the man who killed Jacob Wetterling, he's still serving his prison sentence. Heinrich ended up being sent to a prison in Massachusetts. It's called the Federal Medical Center Devins. It's the same prison where Anthony Weiner is being held. Heinrich is set to be released from prison in about 15 years. His release date is March 28, 2033.
He'll be 70 years old. One of the sets of documents released yesterday was a series of transcripts of phone calls between Danny Heinrich and his brother Dave. The phone calls had been made when Heinrich was in jail in the past few years. I read these phone logs late last night, and in them, Danny Heinrich complains to his brother about how it'll be hard for him to be a known sex offender when he's released from prison.
Heinrich's brother Dave tries to console him. Dave says, quote, well, hopefully Trump does something about all the bullshit. Heinrich said, quote, I don't know. Trump is kind of, I think, against sex offenders. In the phone logs, Heinrich doesn't express any remorse for what he did. At one point, he tells his brother that he did attack some of the boys in Painesville. But he said, quote, I was involved in a couple, but not all of them. And mostly, Heinrich complains and boasts.
He says,
If I wouldn't have said anything. We're still going through the 41,787 pages of documents that were just released by Stearns County. If we find anything else significant in the rest of our review, I'll come back and tell you about it. We've also posted some of the documents on our website, inthedarkpodcast.org, so you can check them out for yourself. ♪
In the Dark is reported and produced by me, Madeline Barron, senior producer Samara Freemark, producer Natalie Jablonski, associate producer Raymond Tungakar, and reporters Parker Yesko and Will Kraft. In the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter. Web editors are Dave Mann and Andy Cruz. The editor-in-chief of APM Reports is Chris Worthington. Original music by Gary Meister and Johnny Vince Evans. 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 mouth-watering 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. Join me, Laleh Arakoglu, every week for more adventures on Women Who Travel, wherever you listen. From PR.