Vollständiges Transkript: Im Dunkeln - S1 E4 Der Zirkus

Vollständiges Transcript: Im Dunkeln: S1 E4 Der Zirkus

: Zuvor bei In the Dark.

: Danny Heinrich ist nicht länger eine Person von Interesse. Er ist der geständige Mörder von Jacob Wetterling.

: Just like, “What? We lived here the whole time, and he’s just down the damn road all those years?” you know. And it’s like, “What?”

: They had all of that. None of it was new. None of it is new. Stearns County, the FBI, they’ve all had all of this. None of this was new.

: Nobody’s ever asked me a single question about this other than you guys. I’ve never been interviewed by police. I’ve never talked to by any law enforcement ever. Not one person.

: I had expectations 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.

: Within a few weeks of the kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling, there were close to a hundred investigators working on the case. That’s one of the most unusual things about this , just how many people were assigned to it.

: So, it’s hard for me to understand why those investigators didn’t do some of the basic policing 101 stuff. They didn’t talk to all the neighbors who lived on the dead-end road where Jacob was kidnapped. They didn’t contact all the boys who were attacked by that strange man in Paynesville. And, perhaps, most importantly, they didn’t talk to everyone they could find who could have known something about the very similar kidnapping of the boy that same year in that same county in the town of Cold Spring.

: They certainly had enough people to do all that. So, what could explain it? I spent months trying to figure this out. And then, one day, the wife of the former police chief in the town where Jacob was kidnapped handed me a dusty VHS cassette tape. It was all the TV news coverage from the early months of the Wetterling case. She’d recorded it back then, and was planning to throw it out. On that video, I found a clue from a news report in December of 1989, two months after Jacob vanished.

: Die Ermittler sagen, dass die Entführung, die sich hier in Cold Spring ereignet hat, aufgrund der überwältigenden Anzahl von Spuren erst jetzt in den Vordergrund rückt.

: Die überwältigende Anzahl von Hinweisen. Bei jeder größeren kriminalpolizeilichen Ermittlung müssen die Strafverfolgungsbehörden eine Entscheidung treffen: Den Fall lokal halten oder groß rauskommen.

: This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I’m Madeleine Baran. Today, we’re going to look at how investigators in the Jacob Wetterling case decided to go back, and it cost them. It would end up leading them farther and farther away from the man who took Jacob.

: One of the first things law enforcement did in the Jacob Wetterling case is they turned to the public to ask for leads. They did it right away, even before they talked to most of the people closest to the crime, the people who could have seen something on the road, the people who had also been attacked by a strange man in a mask. Investigators started appearing on local news and on national news. So did Jacob’s parents, Jerry and Patty.

: I wanted everybody in the world looking for Jacob. It was like my son, you know, we’re talking getting him home. We did what we had to, what we felt we had to.

: The surest sign that the Jacob Wetterling case had become a big story came just three weeks after Jacob was abducted. When the case attracted the attention of the 1980’s clearinghouse for human tragedy, daytime talk show host, Geraldo Rivera.

: Every time it happens, it puts an entire community into a state of shock. It’s like a giant punch in the gut because all we can do, all the police can do really is to speculate as to the intentions of the kidnapper. And just the options are horrifying.

: Geraldo’s TV crew showed up in St. Joseph and set up a satellite feed from the Wetterling’s basement. The cameras showed Patty and Jerry sitting next to the Stearns County sheriff and the FBI supervisor assigned to the case. On the wall behind them, there were these big sheets of paper covered in handwritten messages of hope and concern.

: Wenn die Tage, Patty, zu Wochen werden, ist es dann etwas, das Ihnen Alpträume bereitet, wenn Sie versuchen, einen Grund dafür zu finden? Warum dein Junge? Warum diese Nacht?

: I can’t answer those questions, and I choose not to think about all the horrible options you’ve made mention of at the beginning. I just won’t allow those into my mind at this point. I just want to believe that he’s fine. We’re going to get him home. I don’t have nightmares. No.

: The show also featured a young intense John Walsh as a kind of straight talking expert. John Walsh is the guy from the Hunt and America’s Most Wanted. His son was murdered by a stranger in 1981.

: I know what they’re going through. They’re going through the nightmare of not knowing. They’re going and hoping that, sometimes, in a rare incidence, a child has gotten back that’s been gone for a long time. But all of the people there sitting there today know the harsh reality that lots of kids that are taken are not taken by some caring person and taken to Disneyland. They’re taken by someone who is into sexually assaulting children. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find the body in a field.

: Während all dies geschah, starrte Patty nur auf den Boden, als ob sie versuchen würde, ihre ganze Wut von Geraldo und John Walsh weg auf ein paar Zentimeter Kellerteppich zu lenken.

: Was können sie, die Wetterlinge, tun? Sind sie jetzt gewissermaßen machtlos gegenüber der Laune, der Launenhaftigkeit, der furchtbaren Willkür dieses Verrückten?

: Das wäre meine Meinung.

: So ging es eine Zeit lang weiter.

: And here’s a song of hope. I want to thank everybody. John Walsh, you, especially. All the parents, thank you. Here’s a song for Jacob and for all these children. Let’s play it.

: The show ended with a song that it become a kind of anthem of the search for Jacob, a song called Jacob’s Hope, written by a musician in Minnesota.

: To all our parents, to their children who are out there, our prayers to you. We love you. Come home soon. We thank everybody for being here. Thank you, folks, at home for watching. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

: Here’s what they did, they used us. They used us. We had this sensational kidnapping, and they used us. I remember taking that mic off, and throwing it, and coming upstairs, and throwing things off the deck. I was going to write him this scathing, “How could you do this to us?” And my sister told me, “You get more bees with honey. You might need him down the road.” So, I wrote him a thank you note.

: Das Geraldo-Interview und all die anderen Fernsehauftritte waren für die Wetterlings schmerzhaft, aber sie brachten den Strafverfolgungsbehörden viele Hinweise.

: The sheriff of Stearn’s County, Charles Grafft. Sheriff, what’s the latest on the investigation?

: Nun, wir haben allein über Nacht, ich meine innerhalb der letzten 24 Stunden, über 300 Anrufe und Hinweise erhalten. Verschiedene Beschreibungen von Fahrzeugen, verschiedene Beschreibungen von verschiedenen Personen, die sich nicht in der Gegend aufhalten sollten.

: Mit jedem Tag und jeder Nachricht kamen mehr Hinweise herein. Die ersten Dutzend.

: Bereits gestern Morgen...

: Dann, Hunderte.

: ... wir hatten mehr als 300 Telefontipps erhalten.

: Am Ende der zweiten Woche sind es dann Tausende.

: Dann 500 Leads. Jetzt sind es mehr als tausend Anrufe an diesem Standort.

: Es gab so viele Hinweise, dass die Strafverfolgungsbehörden ein 24-Stunden-Callcenter einrichten mussten, um den Überblick zu behalten.

: Through the more than 14,000 tips and hundreds of suspects that have come since Jacob’s kidnapping.

: Es gab Hinweise auf seltsame Männer, die in anderen Staaten gesichtet wurden.

: Hatte sich in Texas befunden.

: Hinweise auf Autos, die Wochen später in anderen Teilen von Minnesota entdeckt wurden.

: Ein kleines rotes Auto mit...

: ... verdächtig langsam oder verdächtig schnell fahren. Hinweise aus den gesamten USA. Und schon bald begannen einige dieser Hinweise, eigene Spuren zu hinterlassen.

: I was talking with an FBI agent who worked on the case back then, Agent Al Garber. He’s now retired. And Garber told me how this would work. Investigators would get a tip, say, about a white van, and they publicized it. And all of a sudden, people all over the state were seeing white vans everywhere and calling them in. It happened with all the cars they asked about.

: If you are looking for a blue jeep, you’re going to see blue jeeps. Do an experiment. See on your way back to wherever you’re going how many blue jeeps you see. I bet you’re going to see a whole bunch of them. And I bet on the way up here, you didn’t see any.

: In Ordnung, Sheriff, woher kamen die Berichte über den weißen Chevrolet?

: Well, they came up from anonymous tips from all over the State of Minnesota. And we’ve been running so many white cars down, and red cars down, and tan station wagons, and vans. We’ve been just getting so tremendous amount of calls in here on this particular case here that it’s kind of mind boggling.

: People started calling leads into the Wetterling’s house too. So many people that the sheriff even gave Jerry and Patty a special phone with a built-in mini cassette recorder.

: Sure. It’s in the back. It was sitting on our desk here for years.

: Sie haben es immer noch. Als ich sie vor ein paar Monaten besuchte, lag das Telefon auf einer Kommode in einem Gästezimmer.

: This is the kid and grandkids’room.

: Patty und Jerry haben es jahrelang benutzt.

: Yeah, this was the phone the sheriff’s department gave us.

: Darin befand sich noch eine Kassette.

: It sounds like it’s getting to the end too, but okay. So, we’ll listen.

: You know, you can see all the work that I’ve done in 20 years of history.

: Ja, sicher.

: They’re doing copies of-

: Auf diesen Bändern sind Hunderte von Telefongesprächen aufgezeichnet. Patty und Jerry nahmen die Anrufe entgegen und leiteten die Hinweise an die Kommandozentrale weiter. In gewisser Weise wurden sie zu Ermittlern in ihrem eigenen Fall, und das Haus wurde zu einer Art zweitem Callcenter.

: Mittwoch, 4:58 Uhr.

: Yeah. I work for a carnival. We just did a show in Omaha, Nebraska. And I’ve seen a picture of this kid called Jacob Wetterling. I have a feeling that’s working for a small show called Rainbow Amusements.

: Die Leute riefen mit allen möglichen Hinweisen wie diesem an. Manchmal ging Patty ans Telefon, und manchmal Jerry.

: December 28th, and this was the McDonald’s in Maple?

: In Maplewood, richtig. Richtig.

: Ja.

: Und dann nahm ich an, dass der Junge geschult war, denn er machte den Mann darauf aufmerksam, dass ich sie anstarrte. Ich versuchte also, lässig zu sein und etwas zu bestellen, damit ich den Manager erreichen und ihn bitten konnte, die Polizei zu rufen. Und als ich mich umdrehte, waren sie weg.

: Okay. And you had the best that you could tell going by the photos, this boy did have a lot of similarities to Jacob. Is that what you’re saying?

: Dieser Junge sah schwer und blass aus. Ich könnte mir vorstellen, dass er sich in einem Haus aufhielt und dass es mehrere Monate her ist, dass er gefangen genommen wurde. In welcher Zeit wurde er entführt?

: 22. Oktober, also etwa neun Wochen.

: Yeah. And so, I presume that he would have been indoors and eating. I don’t know what, but it certainly seemed reasonable to me.

: So, that was one type of call people calling in to report possible sightings of Jacob. But then, there are these other calls. And these calls, well, I’ll just play some of them.

: Hallo, guten Abend.

: Hallo. Sind das die Wetterlinge?

: Ja, das ist sie.

: Wie ist es dort gewesen?

: Well, it’s 12:30 at night. Can you help me?

: Okay. I’m very sorry.

: Also riefen die Leute Patty an, um ihr von Träumen zu erzählen, die sie hatten oder in denen sie Jacob irgendwo gesehen hatten.

: Well, it’s all right. Just tell me what you know.

: Okay. Er war auf einem Bauernhof. Es war ein Bauernhaus.

: Yeah, we’ve received a lot of farmhouses.

: Na gut.

: And they’ll often say something like, “I can’t sleep. I had to call. You know, I couldn’t carry this anymore.” So, then, they’ll call, and it’s sort of like dumping it. They’ll dump it off on us, so that, then, they can sleep.

: Hallo.

: Hallo.

: Hallo. Mit wem spreche ich?

: This is the Gillespie’s in Missouri. I want to ask you a question real quick.

: Ja.

: Gibt es in Ihrer Familie jemanden, auch auf der Seite, der keine Beine hat?

: Nicht, dass ich wüsste.

: I see. One of the man that got your son don’t have no legs. I am sick of seeing what this man has done to this boy, the legless man. This boy was raped on the side of a school bus. It’s right there where you live.

: You can’t tell me that information without telling me where Jacob is. That doesn’t help me to know.

: Yes, yes, yes. I know I hurt you. I don’t want to do that.

: Sehr gut. Ich danke Ihnen.

: But your boy’s all right.

: Gut.

: Ihrem Jungen geht es gut. Er ist am Leben.

: Die Wetterlings haben sich mit all dem abgefunden. Und ich möchte, dass Sie wirklich darüber nachdenken: Was wäre, wenn jemand in Ihrer Familie vermisst würde und in Ihrer Küche ein Telefon ständiges Klingeln hätte. Und jedes Mal, wenn Sie den Hörer abnahmen, erzählte die Person am anderen Ende der Leitung eine neue schreckliche Geschichte über das, was passiert war, und Sie mussten aufmerksam zuhören und alles aufschreiben, in der Annahme, dass es zur Lösung des Falles beitragen würde. Das ging so weit, dass Patty und Jerry manchmal ihre Freunde baten, ans Telefon zu gehen.

: Sonntag, 19:24 Uhr.

: I just want to tell you that Jacob’s all right.

: Sind Sie wieder glücklich?

: Ja, ja.

: Manchmal erhielten sie sogar Anrufe von Leuten, die behaupteten, Jakob zu haben.

: Können wir mit ihm sprechen?

: Ja, genau. Warten Sie einen Moment. Jacob.

: I’m all right. I’m all right.

: Ja, gut. Wo stehst du jetzt, Jacob?

: I don’t know.

: Keiner dieser Anrufe entpuppte sich als Jacob.

: The phone, you know, it’s a gift and a nightmare. You know, you’d sit waiting for that call. And then, there’s this, and there’s that, and there’s another. But you never know. You can’t not answer the phone. And that’s a killer.

: Und dann waren da noch die Hellseher.

: Mein Name ist Ferris. Kannst du darüber reden oder nicht?

: Können Sie mir helfen, ihn zu finden?

: Well, I’m a psychic.

: Hellseher, so stellt sich heraus, lieben diese Art von Fällen.

: Everybody keeps asking me, “Did you ever think of contacting a psychic?” It’s like, “You don’t have to. They come out of the woodwork. They do.”

: Und diese Hellseher haben den Wetterlings in den ersten Monaten einige Schwierigkeiten bereitet. Als Jacob das erste Mal verschwand, waren die Wetterlings ein eingespieltes Team, Patty und Jerry. Aber als sich die Ermittlungen hinzogen, gingen Patty und Jerry ein wenig getrennte Wege, da jeder von ihnen versuchte, sich einen Reim auf das zu machen, was passiert war.

: Mir ging es nur um das Gespräch mit der Polizei und die Ermittlungen. Geben Sie mir einfach die Fakten. Mit Fakten kann ich umgehen. Jerry hingegen hatte all diese spirituellen Verbindungen und Hellseher. Und er war...

: Das war bis etwa einen Monat danach, als ich damit angefangen hatte.

: Richtig. Also...

: After he wasn’t home, it’s like, “Whatever, you know. If straight law enforcement isn’t solving it, you know, maybe there’s another method out there.” So then, I went down that road for a couple of years of craziness.

: Die Verrücktheit?

: Yes, it’s crazy. He called it abductor hunting. And they’d tell him to go out on a county road, and say something, and turn around three times, he’d do it. I mean, it was like you do anything, you know. But, meanwhile, I was alone because he was out abductor hunting with these crazy people. He had midnight Margie who became … I called her Midnight Margie or maybe you did.

: Mitternachts-Margie?

: She’d call, and they’d talk all night long. And she was just-

: You’re exaggerating. We didn’t talk all night long. There was always people around here, there was there was craziness, the investigation. Then, about 11:00 at night, you know, things would kind of get a little quiet. And I would talk with her about psychic stuff, pretty much, leads, but it wasn’t all night long, but anyway.

: Because they all wanted some of Jacob’s clothing. They wanted a toy. They wanted some something. And I watched, and Jerry would would package up his stuff and send it off. It was a desperation. And, you know, how can you not do everything, but it was so painful.

: You can hear that desperation on a lot of these tapes, like this one that’s a recording of a phone call between Jacob’s dad, Jerry and a psychic named Sylvia Browne.

: Ich meine, was ist passiert?

: Your son wasn’t about to have this. Your son wasn’t about to be victimized by this. And then, unfortunately, he started fighting back, and I think out of desperation or out of fear. The thing about it is it didn’t last very long because they’re trying to quiet him down, they hit him in the head.

: I’d be afraid too. There’s so much fear.

: Oh, ich glaube, er tat es aus Angst.

: Sylvia Browne war damals eine ziemlich große Nummer. Sie war regelmäßig zu Gast in der Montel Williams Show und hatte die Angewohnheit, sich in hochkarätige Fälle einzuschalten. Sie schrieb Bücher mit Titeln wie Contacting your Spirit Guide und All Pets Go to Heaven.

: I’ve watched some old videos of Sylvia Browne from back then, and she was quite a sight, dyed blonde hair, cheeks with so much blush that it bordered on clownish, an inch-long fingernails with bright red polish, curved like talons, and her eyebrows, they were dark and penciled in, and she’d raised them almost conspiratorially. Like you and I, we’re the only ones smart enough to believe all this.

: But I’m convinced there was another man there. I don’t think there was just one male. I think there was two.

: Ja. Und woher kommen diese Typen?

: Illinois.

: Beides?

: Both. See, I think it was a Chicago license plate. I don’t know what the thing, but it seems to be Illinois. But I mean, it was from Chicago.

: Okay. Interessant, interessant.

: All this information, all of these leads from people claiming to be psychics, from people with weird dreams, from people claiming to be Jacob, it all went into the pile with everything else at the command center. And the surprising thing is law enforcement checked out a number of these leads from psychics. Retired FBI agent Al Garber told me, sometimes, it wasn’t because they necessarily believed the person was really psychic, but more because you never know.

: What I believe about psychics is really not important. I thought maybe there were times when a person might claim to be a psychic because they didn’t want us to know the source of their information. So, when psychic information came in, we looked into it carefully. There were some cases where it was just either too general or we had ruled out what the psychic would say in anyway. But we did some things. We did a search in Iowa, immense search based on psychic information, and came up with nothing.

: The search on a 25-mile stretch of road near Mason City, Iowa was prompted by a vision from a New York psychic. The search took place in October of 1989, about a month after Jacob was kidnapped. It lasted two full days, and it involved the FBI, the Iowa State Patrol, local cops, and deputies from several sheriffs’ offices.

: And I want you to keep this in mind, while investigators were chasing down the psychic lead in Iowa, they still hadn’t talked to everyone who lived on the dead-end road where Jacob was abducted. They still hadn’t talked to one of their most likely suspects, Danny Heinrich. They still hadn’t searched the area around where Heinrich lived.

: And yet law enforcement kept on pursuing these out-there leads, these leads that seemed to have almost no chance of panning out. And when the leads didn’t pan out, it’s not like investigators said, “Hold on. Maybe we don’t want any more of these crazy leads.” In fact they went further. They did something that was pretty much guaranteed to bring in lots of bad leads. It involves someone law enforcement called the man with the piercing stare.

: In jenen frühen Tagen der Ermittlungen zur Entführung von Jacob Wetterling begannen die Strafverfolgungsbehörden, Skizzen in Umlauf zu bringen, Skizzen von seltsamen Männern, die in der Gegend gesichtet wurden. Eine der Personen, an deren Skizzen die Ermittler am meisten interessiert waren, war eine mysteriöse Gestalt, die als der Mann mit dem stechenden Blick bekannt war.

: The man with a piercing stare was a guy a few people had seen at the Tom Thumb, the store where Jacob and two other kids had biked that night to rent a movie. Here’s how FBI agent, Byron Gigler, described the man in a TV interview back then.

: Normalerweise starrte er Kunden, die nicht mit ihm sprachen, mit stechenden Augen an. Oftmals folgte er ihnen durch den Laden, stellte sich einfach vor den Laden und folgte ihnen mit seinen Augen durch den Laden.

: Ich sprach mit einem Ehepaar, das behauptete, den Mann mit dem stechenden Blick gesehen zu haben. Kevin und Marlene Gwost waren in einer Band namens The Nite Owls. Es war eine Polka-Band.

: Oompah, Deutsch.

: Oompah, Polkas.

: Minnesota-Stil.

: Zwei Schritte.

: On the day Jacob was abducted, there was an all-day polka festival in town at a ballroom close to the Tom Thumb store. The Nite Owls played an early set. That afternoon, after the Nite Owl’s set was done, the Gwost packed up and headed off to play another show. On their way out of town, they stopped at the Tom Thumb. They think it was around 4:30.

: We’re going to get something to eat, so we hit the road, and play another job that night.

: We had sandwich there, heated it in the microwave. And that’s when we noticed.

: Sie sahen einen Mann, der bei den Kühltaschen stand, Ende 20, Anfang 30, der die Eingangstür beobachtete.

: Ich habe sofort auf ihm herumgehackt. Man konnte sehen, dass er sich intensiv mit etwas anderem beschäftigt hat. Als ob er gleichzeitig an etwas anderes denken würde.

: Wie sah er aus?

: Well, he had a baseball cap on. Kind of, I want to say a wider face. When you just looked at him, you just had a funny feeling, like people just don’t stand there staring, you know, looking over aisles the way he did.

: The Gwost didn’t know what to make of this guy. They headed to their next show. And later that night, they drove home.

: You know, on the way back, we’re coming up 71, and we had the radio on, and they mentioned about this kid disappearing, and saying Jo.

: We just kind of looked at each other, and like, “That had to be him,” you know.

: I remember saying, “Yeah, we got a call in the morning.”

: Ja, ja.

: Ich habe mit einem anderen Mann gesprochen. Er heißt Steve Gretsch und war an diesem Tag ebenfalls auf dem Polka-Fest. Steve arbeitete für einen Radiosender namens KASM, der das Fest organisierte. Und er erzählte mir, dass er auch einen seltsamen Menschen gesehen hat.

: There was one guy in there that didn’t fit. He had a beard, you know, real dark beard here. And he had all black. Nobody dresses like that to go to a polka fest. You get your Sunday best on to go dancing.

: In den Wochen danach sprachen sowohl Steve Gretsch als auch Marlene Gwost mit einem Phantombildzeichner der Polizei über den seltsamen Mann, den sie gesehen hatten. Sie beschrieben beide einen ähnlichen Prozess. Sie erinnern sich, dass sie sich mit diesem Buch mit Bildern von Ohren und Augenbrauen hinsetzten.

: So, you’re like going through, “Here, all of those eyes.”

: Augen, Nase, ja, Kinn, Stirn.

: They have like different noses and stuff like that, and they just flip through it. And they go, “Yup, that’s more like it.” Then, they put it together in the face, and then you tweak it a little, and then you get your sketch.

: I wanted to know more about this whole process of making sketches. So, I called up a woman named Karen Newirth. She’s an expert in sketches and eyewitness ID. And she works for an organization called the Innocence Project. The group tries to exonerate people who’ve been wrongly convicted of crimes.

: Karen told me this whole process of making sketches is far from scientific. She says, “We had this idea that it’s really easy to describe a face. We see them everyday. They’re the first thing we notice about a person.” But Karen says, “Describing a face is way harder than we think.”

: We tend to process faces holistically, right. Like we see a face as a whole, as opposed to, “Okay, those are, you know, two almond-shaped eyes. And that is a nose that is wider than mine and shorter than my mother’s,” you know, or however. We don’t … We’re not processing separate features. It’s very difficult to capture either in words or through the composite making the actual nuances of human features and the human face.

: There are studies about this, about just how hard it is. And those studies found that most of the time, sketches aren’t going to look much like the people we see. I tried this myself with another reporter on our team, and we were so bad at it. We even made a video about just how bad at it we were. You can see it on our website.

: Wow.

: Oh, wow.

: I don’t know what I was picturing, but it wasn’t that.

: Sie sehen aus wie zwei verschiedene Typen.

: Im Fall Jacob Wetterling verwendeten die Strafverfolgungsbehörden viele Phantombilder, darunter eines, das auf einer Beschreibung von Jared Scheierl basierte, dem Jungen aus Cold Spring, der Anfang des Jahres entführt worden war. Dieses Phantombild sieht Danny Heinrich ähnlich, aber es sah auch vielen anderen Personen ähnlich.

: Dass man sich in einem Kriminalfall auf Phantombilder stützt, ist ziemlich normal, auch wenn Karen sagt, wie unzuverlässig sie sind. Aber im Fall Wetterling gingen die Ermittler noch einen Schritt weiter. Die Strafverfolgungsbehörden nahmen Skizzen des Mannes mit dem stechenden Blick und andere Skizzen von verdächtigen Personen, die in verschiedenen Städten gesehen wurden, und kombinierten sie zu einer völlig neuen Skizze.

: Let me just say, these people from these sketches don’t look at all alike. One of the men in the sketches looks to be in his 70s. He’s balding with heavy bags under his eyes and a sloping nose. Another man looks like he is maybe 50, different eyes, different nose, different everything.

: And so, when law enforcement combined all these people into a new sketch, it didn’t look like any of the earlier guys. It looked like a different person entirely. A white guy, maybe in his 60s, kind of mean looking, and it doesn’t look at all like Danny Heinrich. I couldn’t find anyone who remembers making the decision to create this combined sketch. So, I sent these sketches to Karen, the expert at the Innocence Project, to see what she thought.

: I would say this is really unusual. I’ve not heard of what … I’m not sure even how to respond. I think this is … It doesn’t sound like there was even necessarily reason to believe that the witnesses were describing the same individual. This strikes me as as a very bad idea.

: What law enforcement did next is they took this new combined sketch, and they sent it out to the media, along with the sketch Jared helped make. These two sketches, the combined sketch and Jared’s sketch, did not look like the same person. Not at all. Law enforcement put both sketches on a flyer, and they sent it everywhere. There are thousands of copies.

: Flyers were taped to doors, to restaurant windows, and even onto pizza boxes. The flyer said, “We must find these men, so Jacob can be found.” Investigators would point to the flyer and say, “Look closely at these faces and call us right away if you see these men,” and people did. They’d call into the command center saying, “That guy I’m flyer, I think that’s my neighbor,” or my mailman, or a guy I met on vacation four states over. And the leads poured in.

: By 2016, there were at least 70,000 leads in the Wetterling case. That’s more than 20 times the number of people who lived in St. Joseph back when Jacob was abducted. I went to talk to the lead investigator on the Wetterling case, Chief Deputy Bruce Bechtold in August, about a month before the case was solved. He told me they were still getting leads.

: There are people that think Martian’s took him.

: Sie sagen dies?

: There’s all kinds of odd things that come into us, so. I got a report last year that Jacob was riding on an elephant in a parade in Philadelphia last year.

: Deputy Bechtold came the closest of any investigator I spoke with to saying maybe all of these leads and all this publicity weren’t so great after all.

: Vielleicht ist sie zu schnell zu groß geworden, anstatt in der Nähe zu bleiben. Wenn Sie so viel Zeit mit Leads verbringen, die ins Leere laufen, könnte Sie das von dem Lead abhalten, der Sie weiterbringen könnte.

: But in the end, even Deputy Bechtold wouldn’t go so far as to say that trying to get so many leads from all over the country was a mistake. He just couldn’t let go of the idea that one of these leads, even one of these bizarre leads, could solve the case.

: Was there a sense that like those leads have to be checked out, like there’s no matter like kind of how maybe out there that you just have to check just to be sure?

: Ich würde sagen, bei den meisten muss man sich sicher sein.

: Every law enforcement officer I talked to who worked on the case said something similar to this that they had no control over the number of leads and no choice but to check them out. To a person, they said, “There’s no such thing as too many leads. Information is always good.”

: When I talked about all this with Patty and Jerry Wetterling in July before Jacob’s remains were found, they told me that questioning the investigation, what could have or should have been done, doesn’t get them anywhere. It doesn’t help find their son. And they said it’s not as though investigators didn’t work hard. They were working nonstop on this case. But Patty and Jerry did wonder whether all of those leads made the case harder to solve.

: I just think, almost, there probably was too much publicity and too much interest because there were too many leads for everything to be, you know, totally looked through. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I don’t know.

: What happened was his story was out and became national quickly. Investigatively, it’s like two-thirds of the time, it’s somebody who’s in the region. You know, somebody who’s from the area. So, I think, that they were forced to look at a lot of things that probably … They triage. They had to sort, but that’s a lot. That’s a lot of leads. So, do we have the the one guy in there? Probably. But it’s like Jerry was saying, it’s almost like too many to, you know, to have him stand out because it was just so much.

: Es war so viel Lärm. 70.000 Hinweise, Hellseher, weiße Lieferwagen, der Mann mit dem stechenden Blick, Leute, die behaupteten, Jacob zu sein. Und fast 27 Jahre lang sollen die Ermittler jeden einzelnen dieser Hinweise überprüft haben. Sie weiteten die Ermittlungen immer weiter aus und baten sogar noch Jahre später die Öffentlichkeit in den gesamten Vereinigten Staaten um Hilfe bei der Lösung dieses Falles.

: Irgendwie haben die Strafverfolgungsbehörden bei all dem Lärm übersehen, was direkt vor ihnen lag: der Mann, der zwei Städte weiter wohnte, der Mann, der bereits in ihren Akten stand, der Mann, der das Verbrechen fast 27 Jahre später gestanden hatte, Danny Heinrich.

: Und nach Jahren der sinnlosen Verfolgung von Spuren tat 2004 ein neuer Sheriff etwas anderes. Er wandte seine Aufmerksamkeit einem der wenigen Menschen zu, die in der Nacht, in der Jacob entführt wurde, etwas gesehen hatten. Und anstatt den Aussagen dieses Zeugen zu glauben, machte er ihn zum Verdächtigen.

: Das nächste Mal bei In the Dark.

: They were saying, “You took him. How did you do it? Would you just please admit that you did it, and we can make this a lot easier for you?

: In the Dark wird von Samara Freemark produziert. Assoziierte Produzentin ist Natalie Jablonski. 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 Beiträge für diese Folge stammen von Jennifer Vogel und Will Craft. Unsere Titelmusik wurde von Gary Meister komponiert. Diese Folge wurde von Cameron Wiley und Johnny Vince Adams gemischt.

: Auf InTheDarkPodcast.org finden Sie einen genaueren Blick auf die Verwendung von Polizeiskizzen, einschließlich eines Videos über unser Experiment, und Sie können Geschichten über den Einsatz von Hypnose und Lügendetektoren lesen, die die Wetterling-Ermittler ebenfalls verwendet haben, und einige der Anrufe hören, die die Wetterlings nach der Entführung von Jacob in ihrem Haus erhielten.

: In the Dark wird zum Teil durch unsere Hörer ermöglicht. Sie können unabhängigen Journalismus wie diesen unter InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate unterstützen.

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