Fuld udskrift: In the Dark S1 E9 - The Truth

I mørket: S1 E9 The Truth

: Tidligere på In the Dark.

: Today, October 12th, I’m five feet tall. My whole name is Jacob Erwin Wetterling.

: 911 nødsituation.

: Nogle af deres drenge gik ned til Tom Thumb for at købe en film. Og på vej tilbage stoppede nogen dem.

: What they called an abduction of a child. Well, my initial thought was you don’t think that happens here.

: Kiggede du dig tilbage, da du løb?

: Ja, når vi først er nået langt derned.

: Hvad så du?

: 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 investigation. People have short memories. They don’t remember everything correctly. You got to get out there, and talk to people, and find out what the hell is going on.

: Så ingen kom og bankede på din dør den aften?

: Nej.

: Og ingen kom og gennemsøgte dit hus den aften?

: Nej.

: Og ingen gennemsøgte, så vidt du ved, bygningerne, gårdens bygninger lige omkring dit hus?

: Nej.

: I had expectation that this was hot, like, “My lead, this stuff in Paynesville, 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.

: For syv uger siden sad Jared Scheierl i en retssal, da Danny Heinrich blev ført ind i retten. Jared havde ventet på dette øjeblik i 27 år, lige siden en fremmed mand tvang ham ind i en bil i vejkanten i byen Cold Spring, da Jared kun var 12 år gammel, og kørte ham ud til en grusvej, overfaldt ham seksuelt og kørte dem derefter tilbage til byen.

: You know, this guy, he took a part of me that night that left me to try to understand a lot of things. And that’s, I guess, as a victim, that would be … You know, I want to 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 discovered a whole separate string of assaults in the town of Paynesville, 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.

: Efter alle disse år var den mand, der havde overfaldet Jared, endelig blevet fanget. Dette var det øjeblik, hvor alle endelig ville få sandheden at vide om, hvad der var sket med Jared, og hvad der var sket med Jacob Wetterling.

: This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I’m Madeleine Baran. 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 could be sent to prison for 17 to 20 years, and he would finally have to publicly admit what he’d done.

: Den tilståelse, som Heinrich aflagde i retssalen den dag, var grafisk og forfærdelig og detaljeret, meget mere detaljeret end folk havde forventet. Heinrich lagde en hel historie ud med plot, handling, tvivl, refleksioner og til stor skræk for alle, der lyttede, dialog, replikker, som han sagde, at Jacob havde fortalt ham, ting, som han sagde, at han havde fortalt Jacob, lige før han dræbte ham. Jared sad kun få meter væk og lyttede til alt dette, mens Heinrich tryllebandt retssalen med en historie om, hvad han havde gjort ved Jacob.

: Jeg mener, for mig, at lytte til detaljerne i retten, du ved, hans liv, hans sidste minutter, du ved, jeg kunne have været det barn. Jeg kunne have været Jacob.

: Da Heinrich var færdig med at tilstå sine forbrydelser mod Jakob, kom han til det, han havde gjort mod Jared. Han lagde historien op på samme måde med alle disse detaljer og dialoger. Og så begyndte Heinrich at gå ind på en del af historien, som Jared aldrig havde hørt før. Heinrich beskrev i grafiske detaljer en seksuel handling, som han sagde, at han havde tvunget Jared til.

: And then, he said that as he did it, he told Jared, “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’s 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 never once stated this. And it may seem like a small detail in some people’s eyes, but same time, to me, 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, you know, here’s my account of what happened that night. And that’s the moment where I just kind of want to stand and say, “You don’t you have a right to tell your accounts. You know, I’ll tell you my accounts.”

: Jared måtte bare sidde der i stilhed og lytte. Da det var overstået, gik Jared til pressekonferencen og satte sig på første række. Han lyttede, mens statsadvokat Andy Luger talte til journalisterne.

: Endelig ved vi det. Vi kender sandheden. Danny Heinrich er ikke længere en person af interesse. Han er den tilståede morder af Jacob Wetterling.

: Og Jared fremsatte også nogle bemærkninger.

: 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.

: Er der andre ofre derude? Vil vi tro, at der ikke var andre ofre efter Jakob?

: I also had that same question. Did Heinrich really stop with Jacob? The way US Attorney Andy Luger talked about it at the news conference after Heinrich confessed was as though this whole question of whether Heinrich harmed any other kids wasn’t something we’re saying much about.

: Tror du, at der er nogen ofre efter Jacob?

: We’re not aware of any. Yes? We got somebody over here. Yes?

: I den forbindelse: Bliver han undersøgt som mulig mistænkt i forbindelse med andre børneforsvindinger?

: Not that I’m aware of.

: Det var rimelige spørgsmål, og det var nærmest indlysende at stille dem. Danny Heinrich havde indrømmet at have kidnappet og seksuelt misbrugt ikke bare én, men to drenge, og han er mistænkt for at have overfaldet flere andre drenge i Paynesville før det.

: 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 US Attorney Andy Luger described the videos this way in a news conference last year.

: Snesevis af VHS-bånd med unge drenge, der er optaget af rutineaktiviteter som at bringe aviser ud, lege på legepladserne og cykle. Videoerne ser ud til at være blevet filmet af sagsøgte, og nogle af dem ser ud til at være optaget fra et skjult kamera.

: Some of the videos had a kind of elaborate setup. And 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.

: Så jeg gik på jagt efter andre uopklarede sager om fremmede mænd, der forsøgte at kidnappe børn. Vi sendte en forsker og en praktikant til State History Center for at gennemgå mikrofilm af gamle aviser fra Paynesville-området, og vi fandt noget.

: In February of 1991, about a year and a half after Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped, a notice appeared in the Paynesville 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 school children in the Paynesville 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 Paynesville Police called the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office because they’d been getting reports of a car following paper boys on their morning routes. An officer from the sheriff’s office showed up, and found the car. It was following a paper boy. 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.

: Der er andre lignende rapporter i småbyaviser i hele Minnesota i årene efter Jacobs kidnapning, rapporter om mistænkelige mænd i biler, der følger efter børn eller endda forsøger at kidnappe dem. Om nogen af disse mænd var Heinrich, eller om Heinrich rent faktisk kidnappede og myrdede andre, får vi måske aldrig at vide, for som en del af den aftale, der blev indgået, indvilligede de retshåndhævende myndigheder i kun at spørge Danny Heinrich om Jacob og Jared. De indvilligede i ikke at spørge Heinrich om andre forbrydelser.

: 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, US Attorney Andy Luger, told me they agreed to it because they just didn’t have a better option.

: Vi havde troen, men ikke beviser, før han fortalte os det. Så min opgave var under alle disse forfærdelige omstændigheder og uden nogen rigtig gode valgmuligheder at gøre to ting: At sætte ham bag tremmer i lang tid og få de svar, som denne familie og staten Minnesota har ledt efter i næsten 27 år.

: 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.

: En person gjorde dette. En person har aldrig fortalt det til andre. Og det tog bogstaveligt talt så lang tid at følge op på absolut alle de spor, de havde.

: You know, we 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.

: Og Stearns County-chefvikar Bruce Bechtold.

: That’s the bogeyman, the monster that your parents warned you about growing up.

: Den måde, de talte om det på, var som om Heinrich var den perfekte forbryder, der havde begået den perfekte forbrydelse.

: I løbet af de sidste syv uger har vi brugt en del tid på at undersøge det billede, som de retshåndhævende myndigheder har tegnet af Danny Heinrich. Og vi startede med at forsøge at finde ud af mere om, hvem Danny Heinrich var. En af de personer, vi fandt, var en lastbilchauffør ved navn Roger Fyle, som kendte Heinrich fra hans tidlige dage i Paynesville.

: Oh man. We were in Mr. 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.

: Og Roger sagde, at selv om han nu ved, at Danny Heinrich er voldtægtsforbryder og børnemorder, ser han stadig med glæde tilbage på deres fælles barndom.

: No, I do cherish the times that we did have because we had a lot of, you know. A lot of laughs. We laughed a lot together. But I don’t want to know if he’s fucking just, you know, got the dick, you know.

: Roger huskede Heinrich som en nervøs og usikker dreng, der var ubeslutsom.

: Han tænkte over noget i lang tid, før han gjorde det, han mediterede over det. Er det den rigtige ting at gøre? Er det den rigtige ting at gøre? Skal jeg cykle, eller skal jeg gå? Du ved, disse enkle ting. Disse enkle ting i livet havde han problemer med.

: 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.

: Han kunne aldrig træffe beslutninger, du ved. Han havde svært ved at træffe beslutninger.

: Da Roger og Heinrich voksede op, løb de meget rundt i byen, mest om natten. Hvad de lavede...

: I really don’t want to say it. Yeah, we were naughty little boys, you know. There’s some good-looking girls out there, you know. And they were probably in their house, you know, and we were running out the backyard. But I got to see a few of them.

: Basically they would go around at night looking in girls’ windows. As Roger put it, peeping tom stuff.

: They were 18-year olds, you know. We we’re like, “Wow, I got to go.” “Hey, she is over.” Go a little bit over there, so we’d run over there and over here. He were curious, you know. He’s always Curious George.

: Roger remembers Heinrich is 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 Paynesville 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, “Heiny.” We called him Heiny. 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.

: I asked him if I could get a piece of granite for one of my table tops. The glass had broke, and he said, “Sure.” He gave me one, and that’s the last time I saw him. We never got together again after that.

: Med tiden fik Heinrich et job som arbejdsmand i et firma ved navn Buffalo Veneer And Plywood. Han begyndte at arbejde der for ca. 11 år siden og arbejdede stadig der, da han blev anholdt sidste år.

: Jeg var hans direkte chef i et godt stykke tid, så jeg arbejdede tæt sammen med ham, du ved.

: Heinrich’s boss, Derrick Bloom, said Heinrich didn’t really stand out

: Pretty much a standard paid employee. You know, he’d come to work, did his job, and it didn’t really have a whole lot of problems with him.

: Ret gennemsnitlig, bortset fra en lille ting.

: You know, like I say, when he was here, he’s pretty normal person, other than the fact that he did openly talk about being investigated.

: Efterforskes i forbindelse med Jacob Wetterling-sagen.

: He openly talked about being investigated on that abduction the whole time he worked here. I ,mean it started probably the day, or, you know, shortly after the day he started, he openly talked about being investigated on it. So, I got …. You know, I don’t know that it was real, real big shock to anybody that, you know, there may have been more to it.

: 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 they can tell, he was kind of a chatty guy, awkward but chatty.

: Still, there was one group of people that 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.

: I 2008 ringede han om nogle fulde fyre, der var irriterende. I 2005 ringede han til politiet to gange, en gang fordi hans bilrude var blevet smadret, og en anden gang for at klage over nogle unge, der råbte og sloges udenfor i nærheden af hans hus.

: 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 officer 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, “Mr. Heinrich had many items of value located on both levels of his home including televisions, VCR, DVD players, computers, collectibles, including Diecast model cars, knives, swords, and an extensive collection of DVDs and VHS tapes, all of which was easily accessible and not taken.”

: Denne mand, hvis hjem Wetterling-efterforskerne i årevis havde ønsket at komme ind i, havde faktisk selv inviteret en politibetjent indenfor, frivilligt, for at se sig omkring for at se, hvad der var der. Men så vidt vi kan se af politirapporten, havde betjenten ingen anelse om, at Heinrich var en af de hovedmistænkte i Wetterling-sagen, fordi betjenten behandlede det som et hvilket som helst andet opkald.

: I want to tell you about another person Danny Heinrich’s 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, as 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 really freaked them out.

: But I remember him telling Danny stories when he was 12 years old about things he did and did not, you know. I mean, it’s so scary that you couldn’t sleep at night. But when he came around, there was something that came with him. There was a darkness that came with him and you could feel that. Yeah, you could feel the darkness.

: Hart købte alkohol til nogle af drengene i byen, bl.a. Danny Heinrich. Han havde altid en gruppe drenge omkring sig, og mange af dem var fulde eller skæve. Jeg talte med en anden person, der kendte Hart som dreng, en fyr ved navn Brad Froelich. Og Brad fortalte mig, at Hart misbrugte ham og mange andre børn seksuelt. For Brad begyndte det, da han var omkring ni år.

: When it first started, you know, he’d offer us money, a $50 bill. You know, a $50 bill, I’ve 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’re 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 all twisted and confused, you know. We didn’t know what was right and what was wrong.

: In 1990, Brad came forward and reported hard 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 tjente i Vietnam. Han siger, at han blev udsat for Agent Orange, mens han gjorde tjeneste der.

: 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 had 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.

: Hr. Hart var ikke den type pædofil. Han var for at få en sixpack øl eller et par joints marihuana. Han havde al den sex, han kunne klare, okay.

: Og Larry fortalte mig faktisk, at Hart endda havde forsøgt at komme med nogle navne på folk, som han kendte, og som han mente kunne have været i stand til at kidnappe Jacob.

: Han gav mig en masse oplysninger om sine kendte pædofile bekendtskaber, så at sige, deroppe.

: Larry tog noter og alle de personer, som Hart nævnte. Jeg har en kopi af hans noter, og de fylder 25 sider.

: Han forsøgte at give navne på alle, der kunne være involveret. Og Dan Heinrich var den mest bemærkelsesværdige af dem, han gav.

: Han var endda kendt som den mest bemærkelsesværdige dengang?

: Ja.

: So notable that Larry even drew a circle around Heinrich’s name, and put an asterisks 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 he wore military fatigues. He has all the scanners in the car and drove that kind of car.

: Larry sagde, at Hart også fortalte ham, at han ville feste med Heinrich og andre drenge, og at han endda havde sex med Heinrich på et tidspunkt.

: And here’s the really interesting thing about Dewey Hart, he had a spot he liked to go to, a place where Brad Froelick has said Hart would take him and other boys to get them drunk and sexually abuse them; a spot where you 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 Paynesville right off the main road into town; a place where Roger Fyle, Heinrich’s childhood friend, said Hart and Heinrich’s older brother Dave would go to party. Roger said Danny Heinrich could have been brought there by his older brother.

: Åh ja. Det var et samlingssted for nogle af de ældre børn. Dewey tilbragte meget tid dernede og nogle af deres venner. Ja, man gik derned og røg hash, du ved, drak øl, fyraftensbrænde, festede.

: De havde et navn for dette sted.

: De plejede at kalde det The Big Valley.

: Den store dal.

: 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 22nd 1989, sexually assaulted him, killed him, and buried his body.

: Den måde, som sheriffen i Stearns County, John Sanner, senere talte om dette område, hvor Heinrich bragte dem hen, var som om det lå milevidt fra alting.

: This 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 the spot was. All he knew was the general description that Heinrich gave when he confessed to the crime in court. So, I asked a reporter I worked with, Curtis Gilbert, to try to find it. Curtis pieced it together by looking at old property records, plot maps, and by talking to people in the area. He showed it to me on a map.

: Okay. Så jeg kan vise dig det. Okay, hvis vi kigger her. Dette er et luftfoto fra 1991. Dette er 23. Dette er 33, der kommer nordpå.

: Okay.

: Det er den træbevoksning, der tidligere var en statslig grusgrav lige der.

: I sidste uge kørte jeg ud til stedet sammen med Natalie Jablonski, der er producer på denne podcast. Vi holdt ind til siden af vejen ved siden af en mark omgivet af træer.

: 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 Paynesville, 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.

: Kan du vise mig det?

: Du ved, bare gå herfra fra gruset.

: And Bob told Curtis that he would sometimes go wandering around on to 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.

: Der var et hul i et område, som bare så malplaceret ud, og det har gjort mig nysgerrig i mange år, hvor jeg har kigget på det på afstand, og indtil jeg en gang kiggede nærmere på det, men der var ikke rigtig noget, jeg kunne registrere, andet end at det ikke passede sammen med alt andet, fordi det var en klippeskål, og alt andet var overvokset af græs, træer eller buske. Men dette sted skilte sig bare ud som en klippeskål.

: Hvor stor var den? Hvordan så den ud?

: Sikkert en diameter på omkring en halv meter eller noget i den retning, og lidt aflangt formet med kun sten af god størrelse og en stor sten lige i midten.

: 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. That would have been nice to let the people that owned the property in the area that kind of keep an eye out on. And if they see anything that stands out, maybe this thing could have gotten brought out a lot sooner or 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 investigators 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.

: Han blev sidst set iført en jakke, der var identisk med denne.

: 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’ 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 iin a place with the 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.

: Og faktisk har hele denne forestilling om den perfekte forbrydelse, alle disse tv-serier, bøger og film om umulige sager, kolde sager, uopklarede mysterier, mennesker, der er forsvundet sporløst, alt dette har vendt vores opmærksomhed væk fra de retshåndhævende myndigheders handlinger, væk fra at stille svære spørgsmål til de mennesker, der formodes at opklare disse forbrydelser.

: Den perfekte forbrydelse er blot en undskyldning for retshåndhævelsens svigt, og vi køber den. Men i virkeligheden findes der ingen perfekte forbrydelser. Der findes kun mislykkede efterforskninger. Og sandheden er, at der altid vil være folk som Danny Heinrich. Spørgsmålet er, hvilken form for retshåndhævelse vi vil have til at fange dem.

: In the Dark er produceret af Samara Freemark. Den associerede producent er Natalie Jablonski. In the Dark er redigeret af Catherine Winter med hjælp fra Hans Buetow. Yderligere reportager til dette afsnit er Curtis Gilbert, Tom Scheck, Jennifer Vogel, Emily Haavik og Jackie Renzetti. Chefredaktør for APM Reports er Chris Worthington. Webredaktører er Dave Peters og Andy Kruse. Videografen er Jeff Thompson. Vores temamusik er komponeret af Gary Meister. Denne episode blev mixet af Corey Schreppel. Tak også til Will Craft, Stephen Smith, Johnny Vince Evans, Cameron Wiley, Steve Griffith, Eric Skramstad, Sasha Aslanian, Brita Green og Molly Bloom.

: Gå til InTheDarkPodcast.org for at lære mere om Danny Heinrich, om hvordan hans liv virkelig var, om de job han havde, politirapporterne, de steder han boede, og for at tilmelde dig vores e-mail-liste, så vi kan give dig besked, når vi beslutter os for vores næste projekt.

: In the Dark er til dels muliggjort takket være vores lyttere. Du kan støtte mere uafhængig journalistik som denne på InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate.

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