In the Dark Podcast Transkription: Staffel 1, Folge 2

Im Dunkeln: S1 E2 Der Kreis

: If this is your first time listening to In the Dark, stop, go back, and start at the first episode. It’ll make a lot more sense. Last time on In the Dark.

: Einige ihrer Jungs gingen zu Tom Thumb, um einen Film zu kaufen. Und auf dem Rückweg wurden sie von jemandem aufgehalten.

Haben Sie sich umgedreht, als Sie weggelaufen sind?

: Ja, sobald wir ganz unten waren.

Was haben Sie gesehen?

: Nothing. He wasn’t there anymore.

Der 11-jährige Junge wird seit 1989 vermisst und ist seitdem ein Rätsel.

: Endlich wissen wir es. Wir wissen, was die Familie Wetterling und ganz Minnesota seit jener schrecklichen Nacht im Jahr 1989 zu wissen ersehnt haben. Wir kennen die Wahrheit.

: Gibt es Dinge, die Sie jetzt im Nachhinein anders gemacht hätten?

: You always think about that, but no. I think, the people that worked on that case did truly 110% every day that we’re there. And I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anything we could have done differently.

We’re here today because of the perseverance of 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 continue to press, we would eventually solve this case.

: Hören Sie. Kannst du den Klang hören? Die Herzen schlagen, auf der ganzen Welt.

: Five days after 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was abducted, radio stations across Minnesota all played one of Jacob’s favorite songs, Listen by Red Grammer, along with a message for Jacob from his mom, Patty.

: I just want Jacob to know that this song is for him to hear. The heartbeat of humanity is beating for him. I know it will give him strength. If there’s an ounce of compassion in the man who’s holding him, he will let him go safely. Listen, Jacob. Can you hear our prayers? We love you.

Mitarbeiter des Radiosenders und Passanten hielten sich an den Händen. Einige der Medienvertreter weinten sogar. Die Emotionen wachsen im Moment mit der Suche.

I’m hoping that he would know that we’re out the snow looking for him, that we didn’t give up.

: The people in the town of St. Joseph seemed driven by the belief that by brute force of will, they could bring Jacob back. They made fliers with Jacob’s photo, and put them everywhere, on telephone poles, on shop windows, on doors and parked cars. Everywhere you went, you’d see people with white ribbons pinned to their shirts to symbolize hope for Jacob. Thousands of people even lined up in a human chain shivering in the cold and crying.

Die Kette begann auf der Hauptstraße in der Nähe des Del-Win Ballroom.

: The chain stretched for three miles. 3500 schoolchildren were bussed in. Even two baseball players from the Minnesota Twins showed up, wearing blue warm-up jackets embroidered with Jacob’s initials.

Menschen jeden Alters und aus allen Gesellschaftsschichten waren gekommen, um die Hoffnung aufrechtzuerhalten, dass der 11-jährige Jacob sicher nach Hause zurückkehren wird.

: Jacob’s abduction fell neatly into two typical television news narratives, small town pulling together, and heroic investigators doing all they can.

Polizei und freiwillige Helfer in der Luft und am Boden suchen verzweifelt nach einem kleinen Jungen, der mit vorgehaltener Waffe entführt wurde.

: Innerhalb weniger Tage trafen Dutzende von Polizeibeamten in der Stadt ein.

Die Suchmannschaften durchkämmen das Gebiet westlich von St. Cloud auf der Suche nach einer Spur des 11-jährigen Jungen.

: Am Ende der Woche sind fast hundert Beamte mit dem Fall befasst. Sie kamen von überall her. Es waren Sheriffs, FBI-Agenten, staatliche Ermittler und lokale Beamte aus ganz Minnesota. Der Gouverneur forderte sogar die Nationalgarde an.

Fünf Hubschrauber suchten das 30 Quadratmeilen große Gebiet ab, während die Sucher unten zu Fuß das Gebiet durchkämmten, ohne eine Spur zu finden.

: Die Suchenden arbeiteten 18 Stunden am Tag.

Search crews, helicopters, and bloodhounds could not find any clue as to Jacob Wetterling’s whereabouts today, but his family has not given up hope.

: This search was massive. It was unlike anything Minnesota had seen before. In fact, it was one of the largest searches for any single missing person in the history of the United States. People just assumed every square inch of the region have been scoured, and every person who might have seen something had been interviewed, but that wasn’t true.

: This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. In this series, we’re looking at what went wrong in the case of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old who was kidnapped in Central Minnesota in 1989, and whose remains were found just last week.

: Today, we’re going to take a closer look at what happened the night Jacob was kidnapped. We’re going to find out how the decisions of law enforcement in this critical first few hours would allow the man who took Jacob to get away unpunished for 27 years.

: Just today, a man named Danny Heinrich appeared in a Minneapolis courtroom. I was there, along with what seemed like every other reporter in Minnesota. There were so many people, I couldn’t even get into the main courtroom, so I went into one of the two overflow rooms to watch on a video feed. And pretty soon, those rooms filled up too.

: Danny Heinrich came into the courtroom wearing a light-colored shirt and dark pants. He’s a short guy, 5’5″, stocky, with white hair. He walked up to face the judge with an attorney on either side and stood with his back to us. We all leaned in to make sure we heard what happened next. The federal prosecutor asked the question, “On October 22nd 1989, did you kidnap, sexually assault, and murder Jacob Wetterling?” “Yes I did,” Heinrich said. A loud gasp went through the courtroom, so loud it was picked up on the video feed. Finally, there would be answers to the most notorious crime in Minnesota history.

: Über die Entführung des 11-jährigen Jacob Wetterling wurde immer als eine Art episches Mysterium gesprochen, als eine heldenhafte Anstrengung der Strafverfolgungsbehörden, denen der Mann, der Jacob entführt hat, irgendwie durch die Lappen gegangen ist. Es gab nichts, was sie hätten tun können. Jacob ist einfach verschwunden.

: And then, Danny Heinrich began to describe what actually happened. He seemed resigned to it, like he was forcing himself to get through it. He sighed a lot. Heinrich told the judge that on the night of October 22nd, 1989, for reasons he didn’t explain, he got in his car, a blue 1982 Ford EXP, and drove half an hour from his apartment in the small town of Paynesville to St. Joseph. Inside his car was a scanner he used to pick up police dispatch and a .38 revolver.

: Sometime after 8:00 p.m., Heinrich turned onto the dead-end road that led to the Wetterling’s house. He saw three kids biking up toward town. He parked his blue Ford in a long gravel driveway across from a cornfield. And then, he waited.

: When the boys biked back, Heinrich got out of his car, put on a mask, and walked onto the road. He ordered the boys into the ditch and grabbed Jacob. Heinrich took Jacob back to his car, handcuffed him, and put him in the front passenger seat. Heinrich said, “Jacob asked him a question, ‘What did I do wrong?'” Heinrich drove Jacob around for a while, long enough that he started to hear police activity on a scanner. He told Jacob to lean forward in the seat and duck down, so no one would see him. Once they made it out of the town of St. Joseph, Heinrich told Jacob he could sit back up.

: He kept driving around for a long time. Eventually, he took Jacob back to his own town, Paynesville, about 25 miles from where he’d kidnapped Jacob. He pulled off onto a side road near a gravel pit. Heinrich took the handcuffs off Jacob, and walked him over to a row of trees. He told Jacob to take off his clothes. Heinrich also undressed. He touched Jacob and had Jacob touch him. Then, he told Jacob to masturbate in front of him.

: The assault went on for about 20 minutes. And then, Jacob told Heinrich that he was cold, so Heinrich told him he could get dressed. Jacob asked Heinrich to take him home, and Heinrich said he couldn’t. Jacob started to cry. Heinrich told him to stop.

: I noticed that Heinrich’s seemed to have trouble telling this part of the story in the courtroom. It sounded like he had trouble breathing, like it was hard to get the words out. Heinrich said he saw a patrol car come down the road, and he panicked. He loaded his gun, and shot, and killed Jacob. Then, Heinrich got in his blue car, left Jacob’s body, and drove home.

: He spent a couple of hours at his apartment. Then, he headed back out on foot carrying a shovel, and walked a little over a mile back to where Jacob’s body was. He started digging a hole, but the shovel was too small. So, he walked over to a construction company close by and stole a Bobcat. He started it up, and turned the lights on, and drove it back to the site.

: By then, it was sometime after midnight, at least three hours since Jacob had been kidnapped. Heinrich used the Bobcat to dig the grave, and he put Jacob in it, and filled it in. Heinrich returned the Bobcat, and then came back to the grave, and tried to cover it up a bit more with grass and brush. Then, he realized he’d forgotten to bury Jacob’s shoes. So, he walked for a few minutes down the road, and threw them into a ravine. And then, Heinrich walked home.

: It was one of the worst stories I’ve ever heard told in a courtroom. Even some veteran reporters were crying. Heinrich’s story was awful, but it wasn’t just his brutality that shocked me. This did not seem like a perfect crime, not by a long shot. It involved hours of driving, of walking down a main road carrying a shovel, stealing a Bobcat in the middle of the night with the lights on to dig a grave. All of this in the first few critical hours of what had always been described as a massive and thorough investigation.

: I wanted to know what law enforcement should have been doing in those critical first few hours. To find out, I needed to start with the basics, Policing 101. So, I reached out to a guy named Patrick Zirpoli to help me understand how an investigation like this is supposed to go. Zirpoli is one of the top consultants in the country on child abduction cases. He used to coordinate the Amber Alert program in Pennsylvania. Zirpoli told me there are two things you need to do right away when you arrive at a crime scene. They’re both pretty basic. First, secure the scene, then — and this is the one he stressed the most — talk to the neighbors.

: Wir sagen also immer: Fangen Sie in der Nähe an und arbeiten Sie sich vor. Fangen Sie bei sich zu Hause an, machen Sie Interviews, klopfen Sie an Türen. Und wir sagen den Leuten immer, dass sie immer und immer wieder Interviews führen sollen. Ihr solltet die Leute mehrmals befragen, nicht nur einmal. Wenn sich ein Fall über mehr als einen Tag hinzieht und am zweiten oder dritten Tag wieder auftaucht, sollten Sie alle noch einmal befragen.

: I called a couple of other experts to confirm that this immediate repeated interviewing of neighbors is standard procedure. I talked to a man named Vernon Geberth. He trains law enforcement officers all over the country. He’s one of the best known trainers in the US. He’s also worked in the New York Police Department as a lieutenant in a homicide unit in the Bronx.

: Seit 1980 habe ich über 72.000 Menschen in der Kunst und Wissenschaft der Tötungsdelikte unterrichtet. Autor von "Practical Homicide Investigation", das als Bibel gilt, Autor von "Sex-Related Homicide and Death Investigation", Autor von "Autoerotic Death Investigation", Autor von "Checklist and Field Guide Second and Third ... First and Second Edition", und so weiter, was beweist, dass ich kein Leben habe.

: Geberth didn’t want to comment specifically on this case because he hasn’t seen the investigative file, but he told me it’s hard to overstate how important it is to talk to the neighbors.

: I can tell you that every major case that I was in charge of in the City of New York that resulted in a successful conclusion was based on a good neighborhood canvass, where people were asked to report anything. Even though they didn’t think it was important, it turned out to be important.

: Geberth says these people who don’t realize they’ve seen something important are called unknowing witnesses.

: Yeah, the unwilling witnesses is a term that we use when we do a canvass of the area where the event is taking place. And you never ask someone, “Did you see anything strange?” You ask them, “Did you see anything?” “Okay. I see a guy sticking a mic in my mouth right now.” Okay. That unknowing witness, that piece of information could be paramount to the investigation.

: And like, what would be an example of something that people just don’t pick up on as important?

: Jemand geht die Straße entlang und parkt ein Auto. Warum sollte das wichtig sein? Nun, es wäre wichtig, wenn dieses Auto später zur gleichen Zeit geparkt wurde, als der Mord stattfand.

: Richtig. Wann fangen Sie an, mit anderen Menschen zu sprechen?

: Immediately. Immediately because time is your biggest enemy in an 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. You have to reconstruct the time and the events going back, the dynamics of what was taking place in that area at the time.

: Seit wann sind den Strafverfolgungsbehörden die grundlegenden Techniken zur Lösung von Fällen bekannt?

: Wahrscheinlich für immer. Sherlock Holmes. Ja, okay.

: So, knock on doors, talk to everyone, and do it right away. Basic stuff. And the agency that was responsible for doing this in the Jacob Wetterling case was the Stearnes County Sheriff’s Office. Here’s how the investigation worked. The Stearnes County Sheriff was in charge. It was sheriff’s deputies who were on the scene that night. They were the ones at the Wetterling’s house and the ones who organized all that searching that night.

: The sheriff did ask for help from the FBI and other agencies, and they arrived the next morning, but the sheriff stayed in charge of the investigation. So, I started calling some of the investigators from back then to ask them whether the sheriff and his deputies had done this policing 101 stuff, knocking on doors, asking people what they saw. And everyone was kind of dismissive when I asked them about this like, “Of course, we did that.” Here’s retired FBI agent Al Garber.

: I’m not sure, but I would assume yes. Detectives ask those questions.

: Und Jeff Jamal, ebenfalls vom FBI.

: Ich denke, wenn die Nachbarschaft sehr schnell und sehr breit betrachtet würde.

: Und der ehemalige Stearnes County Detective Steve Mund.

: I’m sure I did. I’m just going through the logical steps for doing investigation.

: But no one I talked to actually remembered going around and knocking on doors that night. That seemed a little odd. So, I asked another reporter I worked with, Curtis Gilbert, to call everyone he could find who’d lived on the dead-end road that Jacob, Trevor, and Aaron would have biked along the night of October 22nd 1989, and ask them a simple question, “When did law enforcement first talk to you?”

: Curtis.

: Wir nehmen auf?

Ja.

: Na gut.

: So, you’re here to give me the latest?

: Ich kann Ihnen die Aufschlüsselung geben. Ich habe sogar ein kleines Diagramm erstellt.

: Curtis gelang es, in einem örtlichen Archiv einige alte Stadtverzeichnisse auszugraben, anhand derer er herausfand, wer in der Sackgasse wohnte, die die Jungen am 22. Oktober 1989 mit dem Fahrrad entlangfuhren. Es waren fast einhundert Menschen. Einige von ihnen sind inzwischen verstorben, aber Curtis versuchte, so viele wie möglich zu finden. Es gelang ihm, 26 zu erreichen.

: Ich rufe mal meine Tabelle auf. Ich nenne den Zeitpunkt, an dem sie zum ersten Mal von der Polizei befragt wurden.

: Haben die Strafverfolgungsbehörden in dieser Nacht mit allen Bewohnern des Viertels gesprochen?

: That night, no way. Did you want to … I brought a little tape because I thought there’s a few interesting things.

: Yeah, that’d be great.

: Curtis played me some audio from the people he talked to. And keep in mind, it’s been 27 years, so some people’s memories aren’t great.

No, we didn’t hear anything, you know. Isn’t that weird? But they didn’t really … They didn’t come to the door that night, but they-

Oh, etwa zwei oder drei Wochen später kam das FBI herein. Sie klopften an die Tür.

Aber es dauerte ein paar Wochen, und sie führten ein Vorstellungsgespräch.

: Hat die Polizei jemals an Ihre Tür geklopft, seit Sie in der Nachbarschaft wohnen? Mussten Sie jemals mit der Polizei darüber sprechen oder?

Nein.

: Nein?

Das haben sie nie getan.

: Das haben sie nie getan? Ja.

: Okay. Also, Leute, die sich sicher sind, dass sie in der Nacht des 26. angesprochen wurden, zwei. Zwei Personen waren sich sicher, dass sie in dieser Nacht angesprochen wurden.

: Remember, we’re not talking about everyone on the dead-end road, just the 26 people Curtis was able to reach.

: Vier Personen dachten, dass sie am nächsten Tag oder vielleicht in der Nacht angesprochen wurden.

: So, two people for sure that night. And then, another four people who think they were talked to the next day, but say it’s possible it was really the first night. So, giving law enforcement the benefit of the doubt that six people on the dead-end road who were talked to by law enforcement that night out of the people Curtis talked to. As for the rest of the people, some of them said they weren’t interviewed at all. Some said they were talked to the next day. Others say they were eventually interviewed a few days or even a few weeks later, but not by local law enforcement. They remember being interviewed by the FBI because it kind of creeped them out.

: It was two agents. Everyone said they were talked to by two agents. Multiple people described those interviews this way, “There’s two. There’s two agents there. One of them asked you the questions, and the other one just watches you, watches your facial expressions.” That’s multiple people-

: Interessant.

: ... der genau so beschrieben wurde.

: So, did law enforcement talk to everyone in the neighborhood that night? No. Did they go back to all the people they did interview, and talk to them over and over, like the experts say you should? No. And this failure to canvass the neighborhood thoroughly that night was a big deal. It meant that law enforcement didn’t get all the information right away when it was most important in those critical first few hours. Those hours matter because, most of the time, if a child is going to be killed by an abductor, it happens in the first five hours. You can’t go back the next day, and just redo the investigation. Most of the time, it’s too late.

: When I had pictured the kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling, I focused on the isolation that it didn’t matter if anyone talked to the neighbors because no one in the neighborhood saw anything anyway. The boys were alone on that bike ride home. The street was deserted. It was just the three boys, Jacob, Aaron, and Trevor, and the abductor waiting for them in the dark. But that’s not at all what was going on that night. It turns out that the whole way people have been picturing this crime is just wrong.

: Das haben viele Leute gesehen.

: Warten Sie. Was ist?

: Ja, viele Leute haben sie kommen sehen. Ich meine...

: Ist das Ihr Ernst?

: Ja, ja. Die Leute waren draußen und die Kinder waren draußen. Und ich habe mit mehreren Familien gesprochen, die sie kommen und gehen sahen.

: Können Sie sich daran erinnern, wo Sie waren, als Sie zum ersten Mal von der Entführung hörten?

: Nun, eigentlich habe ich die Jungs an mir vorbeigehen hören.

: Curtis sprach mit einem Mann namens Jim Kline. Er wohnte 1989 in einer Sackgasse, etwas näher an der Stadt. Und am Abend des 22. Oktober arbeitete er in seiner Garage an einem Auto.

: Ja, sie waren gerade auf dem Weg mit ihrem ... Sie kamen vom Supermarkt zurück und gingen direkt vor meine Garage. Ich ging zufällig nach draußen, als sie vorbeigingen, und erkannte, wer es war, aber das war alles.

: Verrückt. Du hast sie wahrscheinlich so gegen 21 Uhr gesehen oder so, oder?

: Ja, er hilft mir im Haushalt.

: You’re probably like one of the last people to see him.

: Ja, möglicherweise.

: Wow.

: Jim Klein says he wasn’t talked to by law enforcement until a week or two later, and he, actually, wasn’t the last person to see the boys that night.

: Wir waren draußen, und er und ich waren die Einzigen dort. Vielleicht waren die anderen Kinder schon reingegangen.

: Yeah, because that’s how the lady got in.

: Und wir haben nur kurz mit ihnen gesprochen.

: I talked to a brother and sister named Adam and Erica Sundquist who lived very close to the abduction site, about a two-minute walk down the road. They were 12 and 9 at the time. And that night, they were out playing what everyone on the block just called “night games.”

: Ich habe die Dose getreten. Das kommt auf den Friedhof. Nur seltsame Spiele, die wir uns ausgedacht haben.

: Ja, ja.

: Ich erinnere mich, dass "Kick the Can" am wahrscheinlichsten war.

: Wissen Sie noch, was wir gemacht haben?

: We’re throwing corn in there, where they kick of-

: Sie haben was?

: We had corn. We had corn from the field. We’re shelling it, and throwing it in the air.

: Adam und Erica sind also draußen im Garten und werfen Mais, als sie Jacob, Trevor und Aaron auf dem Rückweg vom Däumling sehen. Sie sagten, die Jungs seien ziemlich langsam unterwegs. Sie haben ihnen sogar aus Spaß ein paar Maiskörner zugeworfen.

: Es dauerte buchstäblich nur eine Minute, bis sie mit dem Fahrrad an unserem Haus vorbeikamen und den Hügel hinaufgefahren waren. Es war innerhalb einer Minute, weil es nur etwa eine Minute dauert, diese Strecke mit dem Fahrrad zurückzulegen, richtig?

: Ja, ein oder zwei Minuten, was irgendwie gruselig war.

: Einige Minuten, nachdem die Jungen an ihrem Haus vorbeigefahren waren, sahen Erica und Adam ein weinrotes Auto mit einem aufgebockten Heck, das auf der Straße in Richtung Süden in dieselbe Richtung wie die Jungen fuhr.

: It’s going up the hill towards where they went, pass us. So, I don’t know. I mean, there is no road to turn off of. If you’re going to get down the hill, there’s two cul de sacs. And then, you had to come back through.

: Ja, es gab keinen Ausgang in dieser Richtung. Man musste an unserem Haus vorbeikommen, um wieder rauszukommen, weißt du, von dort hinten.

: Richtig.

: Then, we went in the house. We’ve never seen anyone drive back through.

: Erica and Adam say they don’t remember any law enforcement officers knocking on their door that night. They don’t remember ever talking to investigators, but they assume they must have, at some point. I do know their story matches what they were saying back then because they found a 15-second interview they did with a local TV news reporter back in 1989, just a day or so after Jacob was abducted.

: Sie fuhren in diese Richtung. Und dann sehen wir dieses Auto, das wirklich schnell fährt, hier vorbeifahren, und er fuhr in die gleiche Richtung.

: I wasn’t sure how seriously investigators would take this kind of information from a couple of kids. Is this the sort of thing that you’d elevate or just shrug off because, you know, 10-year-olds. But Patrick Zirpoli, the child abduction expert, told me that not only should you take these kinds of stories seriously, you should actually seek them out because kids notice things adults don’t.

: I’ve always said you want to look for that person who, not the parents think is odd, but other children in the neighborhood may say that this person is odd. “You know, he has been at the school bus before, the school bus stop before. He has talked to us in the park.” Those are those individuals that you want to start looking for immediately because, you know, if they’re in that area, you know, you want to identify them, identify their whereabouts as soon as you can.

: Einige der Nachbarn, die am nächsten am Entführungsort wohnten, hatten damals den Verdacht, dass bei den Ermittlungen etwas nicht stimmte. Und einige der Gründe, warum sie so dachten, sind bemerkenswert. Und offen gesagt, in einigen Fällen auch ein wenig seltsam. Ich möchte Ihnen von einer Familie namens Klaphakes erzählen. Sie lebten in einer Sackgasse. Und ihre Geschichte, wie sie den Ermittlern zum ersten Mal begegneten, beginnt auf eine seltsame und etwas düstere Weise. Curtis spielte mir einen Teil des Gesprächs vor, das er mit Jerry Klaphake, dem Vater der Familie, führte.

: Die Klaphakes hatten am Tag der Entführung Verwandte in den Twin Cities besucht. Sie kamen zurück. Ihr Auto hatte eine halbe Stunde außerhalb der Stadt eine Panne. Sie mussten es reparieren lassen. Sie fuhren nach Hause. Sie gingen zu Bett. Am nächsten Tag wimmelte es in der Nachbarschaft von Polizeiautos und Medien, und ihr Hund wurde von einem Auto angefahren. Er hatte also ... Jerry Klaphake hatte also seinen Nachbarn dabei, und er beschrieb, wie er den Hund in ihrem Garten vergrub.

: And my neighbor, my next-door neighbor, was with me. I had just tilled up my garden, and I thought that’s probably a good place to bury the dog. And so, I remember, at night, we’re out there, and digging this hole, putting my dog in it, and then covering it up. Yeah, I told my neighbor. I said. “You’re my witness. This is my dog down here,” because I was convinced that, you know, it’s a fresh grave. Basically, you know, dirt dug up. And they just had a ton of people doing a search in the woods behind our house. They were within probably 15 feet off my garden. And I was all surprised that they didn’t catch that. And if they miss that, you know, what else did they miss. You know, that’s what I thought at that time.

: Jerry Klaphake sagte zu Curtis, dass die Person, mit der er wirklich sprechen sollte, sein Sohn Adam ist.

: Could you just introduce yourself or say your name, so I can make sure you’re being recorded okay?

: Ja, das stimmt. Mein Name ist Adam Klaphake.

: Und wie alt bist du, Adam?

: Ich bin jetzt 41 Jahre alt.

: Back in 1989, Adam was 14. He was friends with Jacob Wetterling. He would go over to the Wetterlings’ house for sleepovers. And people in the neighborhood would even talk about how the boys looked alike. Adam said, first of all, there were other weird things that had happened on that dead-end road, including this one thing that happened about five or six years before Jacob was kidnapped.

: Ich war wahrscheinlich 9 oder 8, 9 oder 10 Jahre alt, irgendwo in dieser Zeit.

: Adam und einige andere Kinder spielten draußen im Hof Kickball. Es war in der Dämmerung.

: And somebody kicked the ball over the hedge, and it had gone over the road, gone in the ditch. So, I jumped. I remember jumping to the hedge, running across the road to go grab the ball. I grabbed the ball. And as I’m grabbing it, somebody picked me up. I couldn’t see the face after that. You know, I had my back to him. He had me like in a bear hug, or a bear hold, or whatever. And the person had glasses. I remember that, and kind of a dark, raspy voice. And then, as he’s holding me up, he holds me pretty tight. My sister had opened the door and yelled for us that I needed to come in. And the guy says to me, ‘You’re lucky your sister called you,” and he threw me down. And I never saw him.

: Adam told Curtis he remembers telling his dad, but they didn’t call the police. A few years pass, and then another strange thing happens to Adam on that same dead-end road in 1989, just a month or two before Jacob was kidnapped.

: Ein paar Monate vor der Entführung waren er und sein Freund Brandon auf dem Rückweg vom Däumling.

: Zu der Zeit war ich 14. Brandon war 12. Wir gingen praktisch jeden Abend in den Tom Thumb. Das haben wir in jenem Sommer ziemlich oft gemacht. Und es war dunkel. Es war nach 10:00 Uhr abends.

: Und sie wurden von einem Auto gejagt...

: Wow.

: ... auf demselben Weg.

: Die Sackgasse, in der nur ein oder zwei Monate später ein Mann Jacob packen und in sein Auto setzen würde.

: Und so sprangen sie in den Graben.

: Er hatte recht ... Er war ganz nah dran, direkt hinter uns. Und so fuhren wir in den Graben. Und dann war er genau da.

: Oh mein Gott.

: And very freaked out, and they ran to Brandon’s house, which is like three doors down from the Klaphakes.

: The boys ran in to Brandon’s parents garage.

: Also fuhren wir so schnell wie möglich in seine Garage. Das Auto fuhr in seine Einfahrt und fuhr dann rückwärts. Dann stellte er den Wagen auf Parken und bremste. Und er starrte uns einfach an.

: Und sie sagen, dass sie dieses Auto und den Mann im Auto ein paar Minuten lang angestarrt haben, wie Adam sagt.

: Wie?

: Und dann rannten sie hinein.

: Haben sie gesehen, wer die Person im Auto war?

: Ja.

: Haben sie ihn erkannt?

: Nein.

: Und was glaubten sie, was diese Person tat?

: Unheimlich sein.

: Okay, aber um zurückzukommen...

: Aber trotzdem...

: ... dazu. Was für ein Auto war es denn?

: Es war ein blaues Auto.

: Ein blaues Auto.

: Ja.

: Nicht nur irgendein blaues Auto.

: My friend’s mother had a Pontiac 6000. And we compared it to that. I think, they said it was a blue car that looks similar to a Pontiac 6000.

: A blue Pontiac 6000. Here’s what stopped me short about that, the car that Danny Heinrich was driving the night he kidnapped Jacob was a blue Ford EXP, but that car, that blue Ford looks a whole lot like a Pontiac 6000. Both are kind of boxy, low to the ground, would be easy to mistake one car for the other.

: Adam and his dad say no one came and knocked on their door the night Jacob was kidnapped. No one came by that night to ask if they’d seen anything. No one asked Adam that night if he’d ever seen anyone creepy in the neighborhood.

: I remember waking up the next morning because we didn’t even know what had happened that night. And the dogs were barking in my bedroom window, and, you know, the police going through our yard and everything like that. That’s how I woke up.

: Adam sagte, dass immer noch niemand von den Strafverfolgungsbehörden zu ihm kam und fragte, ob er etwas gesehen habe. Also bat er seinen Vater, sie ein paar Tage später zur Kommandozentrale zu fahren. Und Adam sagte, dass sowohl er als auch sein Freund Brandon den Ermittlern das Auto beschrieben haben. Adam sagte, er habe dem FBI ein paar Tage später dieselbe Geschichte erzählt.

: Nachdem das FBI bei uns zu Hause war, haben die Behörden nie wieder mit mir gesprochen, und ich habe die Sache sozusagen vergessen.

: He’s never asked to look at any pictures or?

: You know, I kind of thought that maybe they would press me a little more and maybe, you know, ask me some more questions about it. Who knows. Maybe even try to hypnotize me or something like that. But, you know, I said I’d do anything to help, and they don’t want to have anything to do with it.

: Years past, but Adam couldn’t get the story out of his mind. Maybe the guy in the car was the same guy who’d kidnapped Jacob. It, certainly, seems similar, same road, a couple of kids, Adam even looked like Jacob.

: Okay. So, in 2004, Adam Klaphake takes the day off of work to go talk to the sheriff again. He wants to tell the story again. You know, he doesn’t remember it nearly as well. You know, it’s what?

: 15 Jahre später.

: 15 years later. And he offers to take them on a drive through the neighborhood. “I’ll show you where this happened, and where we were chased from, and the route we would always take to go to the Tom Thumb.” And he said that the police did not seem or the sheriff detective, who is the same detective who had interviewed him 15 years earlier, he didn’t seem interested.

: I remember leaving out of there just so angry because they weren’t listening to anything that I had to say.

: Adam said, for a long time, he figured the reason that investigators didn’t seem interested was because maybe his details back then weren’t great. Maybe his account was totally different from his friend, Brandon’s. Maybe the whole thing was so vague that it was just useless. But about a year ago, Adam got curious, and asked a sheriff’s deputy if he could look at his old statement, that statement he gave to law enforcement as a kid.

: When I got the transcripts, my jaw dropped because I don’t remember being able to identify the guy. That blew me away. Again, I thought my friend and I had disagreed upon the color of car, and that’s why it was never brought up again. But that wasn’t the case. We did agree on the color of the car, and we did agree on the description of the man, shorter hair, kind of a stocky build. There were probably a few other details that I don’t remember, but we both said that we could identify him in a lineup.

: And, you know, of course, like, then, you wonder, you know, “Okay, lineups aren’t great,” but you do wonder if they had put a bunch of photos in front of these two kids in separate rooms in October of 1989, what they would have said.

: Yeah, we’ll never know.

: In the whole time, you know, you got two guys, a quarter of a mile from the abduction site that could possibly have identified him and no one ever asked. You know, like it totally slipped through the cracks. And now, it’s too late. Now, it’s too late, you know.

: And here’s the thing, Adam wasn’t the first person to tell law enforcement about a creepy man in a blue car. Nine months before Jacob was kidnapped, there was another kid in the same county who was walking on a road one night when a man pulled up in a blue car and grabbed him.

: Das nächste Mal bei In the Dark.

New evidence tonight leaves the FBI to believe that Jacob Wetterling’s kidnapper may have struck before.

Wie viele psychopathische Pädophile dieser Art kann es in einem Radius von 15 bis 20 Meilen geben? Ich meine, war es mehr als einer? War da etwas Größeres im Gange?

If they ever come close to finding me, I’ll find you and kill you. Yeah.

There was a fear of God that was put into all of us, and that worry, and that fear, and that stress, or that … It just kind of festered and grew like a sliver. If you get a sliver in your finger, if you don’t remove the sliver, it festers, and it grows, and then just infects the wound.

Nobody’s ever asked me a single question about this or any of you guys. I’ve never been interviewed by police. I’ve never been talked to by any law enforcement ever, not one person.

: In the Dark wird von Samara Freemark produziert. Die stellvertretende Produzentin ist Natalie Jablonski. Diese Folge wurde mit maßgeblicher Hilfe des Reporters Curtis Gilbert erstellt. In the Dark wird von Catherine Winter mit Unterstützung von Hans Buetow bearbeitet. Der Chefredakteur von APM Reports ist Chris Worthington. Webredakteure sind Dave Peters und Andy Kruse. Der Videofilmer ist Jeff Thompson. Weitere Berichte stammen von Jennifer Vogel, Will Craft, Emily Haavik und Tom Scheck. Unsere Titelmusik wurde von Gary Meister komponiert.

: Go to InTheDarkPodcast.org to read more about Danny Heinrich, and to watch a video of Patty Wetterling talking about the search for Jacob, and to listen to audio from Curtis’s interviews with the neighbors. And keep checking in, we’ll be posting more information each week.

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