Vollständiges Transkript: In the Dark S1 E9 - Die Wahrheit

Im Dunkeln: S1 E9 Die Wahrheit

: Zuvor bei In the Dark.

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

: 911 Notfall.

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

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

: Haben Sie sich umgedreht, als Sie weggelaufen sind?

: Ja, sobald wir ganz unten sind.

: Was haben Sie gesehen?

: 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.

: Es kam also niemand und klopfte in dieser Nacht an Ihre Tür?

: Nein.

: Und niemand kam in dieser Nacht und durchsuchte Ihr Haus?

: Nein.

: Und niemand durchsuchte, soweit Sie wissen, die Gebäude, die landwirtschaftlichen Gebäude in der Nähe Ihres Hauses?

: Nein.

: 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.

: Vor sieben Wochen saß Jared Scheierl in einem Gerichtssaal, als Danny Heinrich vorgeführt wurde. Jared hatte 27 Jahre lang auf diesen Moment gewartet, seit ein fremder Mann ihn in der Stadt Cold Spring am Straßenrand in ein Auto zwang, als Jared gerade 12 Jahre alt war, und ihn zu einer Schotterstraße fuhr, ihn sexuell missbrauchte und sie dann zurück in die Stadt fuhr.

: 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.

: Nach all den Jahren war der Mann, der Jared angegriffen hatte, endlich gefasst worden. Dies war der Moment, in dem alle endlich die Wahrheit darüber erfahren würden, was mit Jared und was mit Jacob Wetterling geschehen war.

: 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.

: Das Geständnis, das Heinrich an diesem Tag im Gerichtssaal ablegte, war anschaulich, schrecklich und detailliert, viel detaillierter, als man erwartet hatte. Heinrich erzählte eine ganze Geschichte mit Handlung, Action, Vermutungen, Überlegungen und zum Entsetzen aller Zuhörer auch Dialoge, Sätze, die Jakob ihm gesagt haben soll, Dinge, die er Jakob gesagt haben soll, kurz bevor er ihn getötet hat. Jared saß nur ein paar Meter entfernt und hörte zu, als Heinrich den Gerichtssaal mit seiner Geschichte darüber, was er Jacob angetan hatte, in Atem hielt.

: Ich meine, wenn ich mir die Details im Gericht anhöre, sein Leben, seine letzten Minuten, dann hätte ich dieses Kind sein können. Ich hätte Jacob sein können.

: Nachdem Heinrich seine Verbrechen an Jakob gestanden hatte, kam er dazu, was er Jared angetan hatte. Er erzählte die Geschichte auf dieselbe Weise, mit all den Details und Dialogen. Und dann begann Heinrich mit einem Teil der Geschichte, den Jared noch nie zuvor gehört hatte. Heinrich beschrieb in allen Einzelheiten einen sexuellen Akt, den er Jared aufgezwungen haben soll.

: 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 musste einfach schweigend dasitzen und zuhören. Danach ging Jared zur Pressekonferenz und setzte sich in die erste Reihe. Er hörte zu, wie US-Staatsanwalt Andy Luger zu den Reportern sprach.

: Endlich wissen wir es. Wir kennen die Wahrheit. Danny Heinrich ist nicht länger eine Person von Interesse. Er ist der geständige Mörder von Jacob Wetterling.

: Und auch Jared hat einige Bemerkungen gemacht.

: 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.

: Gibt es noch andere Opfer da draußen? Wissen Sie, wollen wir glauben, dass es nach Jakob keine weiteren Opfer gab?

: 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.

: Glauben Sie, dass es nach Jacob noch weitere Opfer gibt?

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

: Wird er in diesem Zusammenhang als möglicher Verdächtiger in anderen Fällen des Verschwindens von Kindern betrachtet?

: Not that I’m aware of.

: Das waren berechtigte und naheliegende Fragen. Danny Heinrich hatte zugegeben, nicht nur einen, sondern zwei Jungen entführt und sexuell missbraucht zu haben, und wird verdächtigt, zuvor mehrere andere Jungen in Paynesville angegriffen zu haben.

: 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.

: Dutzende von VHS-Kassetten, die Jungen bei Routinetätigkeiten wie Zeitungsaustragen, Spielen auf Spielplätzen und Fahrradfahren zeigen. Die Videos wurden offenbar vom Angeklagten gefilmt, und einige von ihnen scheinen mit einer versteckten Kamera aufgenommen worden zu sein.

: 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.

: Also machte ich mich auf die Suche nach anderen ungelösten Fällen, in denen fremde Männer versuchten, Kinder zu entführen. Wir schickten einen Forscher und einen Praktikanten zum State History Center, um Mikrofilme alter Zeitungen aus der Gegend von Paynesville durchzusehen, und wir wurden fündig.

: 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.

: In den Jahren nach der Entführung von Jacob gab es in den Zeitungen von Kleinstädten in ganz Minnesota weitere Berichte über verdächtige Männer in Autos, die Kinder verfolgten oder sogar versuchten, sie zu entführen. Ob es sich bei einem dieser Männer um Heinrich handelte oder ob Heinrich tatsächlich jemanden entführt und ermordet hat, werden wir vielleicht nie erfahren, denn als Teil der Vereinbarung zur Strafmilderung stimmten die Strafverfolgungsbehörden zu, Danny Heinrich nur über Jacob und Jared zu befragen. Sie erklärten sich bereit, Heinrich nicht zu anderen Verbrechen zu befragen.

: 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.

: Wir hatten Glauben, aber keine Beweise, bevor er es uns sagte. Meine Aufgabe war es also, unter all diesen schrecklichen Umständen und ohne wirklich große Möglichkeiten zwei Dinge zu tun: Ihn für eine lange Zeit hinter Gitter zu bringen und die Antworten zu bekommen, nach denen diese Familie und der Staat Minnesota seit fast 27 Jahren gesucht haben.

: 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.

: Eine Person hat dies getan. Eine Person hat es nie jemand anderem erzählt. Und es hat buchstäblich so lange gedauert, absolut jeder Spur nachzugehen, die sie hatte.

: 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.

: Und Stearns County Chief Deputy Bruce Bechtold.

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

: So wie sie darüber sprachen, war Heinrich der perfekte Verbrecher, der das perfekte Verbrechen begangen hatte.

: In den vergangenen sieben Wochen haben wir einige Zeit damit verbracht, das Bild, das die Strafverfolgungsbehörden von Danny Heinrich gezeichnet hatten, zu untersuchen. Und wir begannen damit, mehr darüber herauszufinden, wer Danny Heinrich war. Eine der Personen, die wir ausfindig machten, war ein Trucker namens Roger Fyle, der Heinrich noch aus seiner Anfangszeit in Paynesville kannte.

: 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.

: Und Roger sagte, dass er, obwohl er jetzt weiß, dass Danny Heinrich ein Vergewaltiger und Kindermörder ist, immer noch gerne an ihre gemeinsame Kindheit zurückdenkt.

: 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 erinnerte sich an Heinrich als ein nervöses, zittriges und unentschlossenes Kind.

: Er dachte lange über etwas nach, bevor er es tat, meditierte darüber. Ist es das Richtige, dies zu tun? Ist es das Richtige, das zu tun? Soll ich mit dem Fahrrad fahren oder zu Fuß gehen? Sie wissen schon, diese einfachen Dinge. Mit diesen einfachen Dingen des Lebens hatte er Probleme.

: 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.

: Er konnte nie Entscheidungen treffen, wissen Sie. Es fiel ihm schwer, Entscheidungen zu treffen.

: Als sie aufwuchsen, liefen Roger und Heinrich oft durch die Stadt, meistens nachts. Und was sie gemacht haben...

: 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.

: Mit der Zeit fand Heinrich eine Anstellung als Arbeiter bei einer Firma namens Buffalo Veneer And Plywood. Er begann dort vor etwa 11 Jahren zu arbeiten und war zum Zeitpunkt seiner Verhaftung im vergangenen Jahr immer noch dort tätig.

: Ich war eine ganze Weile sein direkter Vorgesetzter und habe daher eng mit ihm zusammengearbeitet, wissen Sie.

: 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.

: Ziemlich durchschnittlich, bis auf eine Kleinigkeit.

: 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.

: Es wird wegen des Falls Jacob Wetterling ermittelt.

: 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.

: Im Jahr 2008 rief er wegen einiger betrunkener Typen an, die ihn belästigten. Im Jahr 2005 rief er zweimal die Polizei, einmal, weil seine Autoscheibe eingeschlagen worden war, und ein anderes Mal, weil er sich über einige Kinder beschwerte, die in der Nähe seines Hauses schrien und stritten.

: 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.”

: Dieser Mann, in dessen Wohnung die Wetterling-Ermittler seit Jahren eindringen wollten, hatte tatsächlich einen Polizeibeamten freiwillig hereingebeten, um sich umzusehen. Aber soweit wir aus dem Polizeibericht entnehmen können, hatte der Beamte keine Ahnung, dass Heinrich einer der Hauptverdächtigen im Fall Wetterling war, denn der Beamte behandelte den Fall wie jeden anderen Anruf.

: 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 kaufte Alkohol für einige der Jungs in der Stadt, darunter auch Danny Heinrich. Und er schien immer eine Gruppe von Jungs um sich zu haben, viele von ihnen betrunken oder high. Ich sprach mit einer anderen Person, die Hart als Kind kannte, einem Mann namens Brad Froelich. Und Brad erzählte mir, dass Hart ihn und viele andere Kinder sexuell missbraucht hat. Für Brad begann es, als er etwa neun Jahre alt war.

: 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 hat in Vietnam gedient. Er sagt, dass er während seines Dienstes in Vietnam Agent Orange ausgesetzt war.

: 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.

: Mr. Hart war nicht diese Art von Pädophile. Er war für den Wunsch nach einem Sixpack Bier oder ein paar Joints Marihuana. Er hatte so viel Sex, wie er wollte, okay.

: Und Larry erzählte mir, dass Hart sogar versucht hatte, einige Namen von Leuten zu nennen, die er kannte und von denen er glaubte, dass sie in der Lage sein könnten, Jacob zu entführen.

: Er versorgte mich mit vielen Informationen über seine bekannten pädophilen Bekannten sozusagen dort oben.

: Larry machte sich Notizen und erwähnte alle Personen, die Hart erwähnte. Ich habe eine Kopie seiner Notizen, und sie umfassen 25 Seiten.

: Er versuchte, die Namen aller Personen zu nennen, die möglicherweise beteiligt sein könnten. Und Dan Heinrich war der bemerkenswerteste, den er nannte.

: Er war damals sogar als der bedeutendste unter ihnen bekannt?

: Ja, 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 sagte, Hart habe ihm auch erzählt, dass er mit Heinrich und anderen Jungen feiern würde und dass er sogar irgendwann Sex mit Heinrich hatte.

: 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.

: Oh ja. Es war ein Treffpunkt für einige der älteren Kinder. Dewey verbrachte viel Zeit dort unten und einige ihrer Freunde. Ja, man ging dorthin, um Gras zu rauchen, Bier zu trinken, Foxfire, Party zu machen.

: Sie hatten einen Namen für diesen Ort.

: Früher nannte man es das Große Tal.

: Das große Tal.

: 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.

: Der Sheriff von Stearns County, John Sanner, sprach später über das Gebiet, in das Heinrich sie gebracht hatte, als wäre es meilenweit von allem entfernt.

: 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. Also, ich kann es dir zeigen. Also, okay, wenn wir hier schauen. Also, das ist eine Luftaufnahme von 1991. Das ist 23. Das ist die 33, die nach Norden führt.

: Ja.

: Das ist die Baumgruppe, die früher einmal eine staatliche Kiesgrube war, genau hier.

: Letzte Woche bin ich zusammen mit Natalie Jablonski, einer Produzentin dieses Podcasts, zu der Baustelle gefahren. Wir hielten am Straßenrand an, neben einem von Bäumen gesäumten Feld.

: 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.

: Können Sie es mir zeigen?

: Gehen Sie einfach vom Schotter hierher.

: 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.

: Es gab ein Loch in einem Gebiet, das einfach fehl am Platz aussah und mich viele Jahre lang neugierig machte. Ich betrachtete es aus der Ferne, bis ich es mir einmal näher ansah, aber es fiel mir nicht wirklich auf, außer dass es nicht zu allem anderen passte, weil es eine felsige Schale war und alles andere von Gras, Bäumen oder Gestrüpp überwuchert war. Aber dieser Ort stach einfach als eine felsige Schale hervor.

: Wie groß war sie? Wie sah es aus?

: Wahrscheinlich hat er einen Durchmesser von einem Meter oder so und ist ein wenig länglich mit lauter Steinen guter Größe und einem großen Stein in der Mitte.

: 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.

: Er wurde zuletzt mit einer Jacke gesehen, die mit dieser identisch ist.

: 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.

: Und diese ganze Vorstellung vom perfekten Verbrechen, all diese Fernsehsendungen, Bücher und Filme über unmögliche Fälle, ungeklärte Fälle, ungelöste Rätsel, Menschen, die spurlos verschwunden sind, all das lenkt unsere Aufmerksamkeit von den Maßnahmen der Strafverfolgungsbehörden ab und davon, den Leuten, die diese Verbrechen aufklären sollen, harte Fragen zu stellen.

: Das perfekte Verbrechen ist nur eine Ausrede für das Versagen der Strafverfolgungsbehörden, und wir kaufen es ab. Aber in Wirklichkeit gibt es keine perfekten Verbrechen. Es gibt nur gescheiterte Ermittlungen. Und die Wahrheit ist, dass es immer Leute wie Danny Heinrich geben wird. Die Frage ist nur, welche Art von Strafverfolgung wir haben werden, um sie zu fangen.

: 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. Wesentliche zusätzliche Beiträge für diese Folge stammen von Curtis Gilbert, Tom Scheck, Jennifer Vogel, Emily Haavik und Jackie Renzetti. Der Chefredakteur von APM Reports ist Chris Worthington. Webredakteure sind Dave Peters und Andy Kruse. Der Videofilmer ist Jeff Thompson. Unsere Titelmusik wurde von Gary Meister komponiert. Diese Folge wurde von Corey Schreppel gemischt. Vielen Dank auch an Will Craft, Stephen Smith, Johnny Vince Evans, Cameron Wiley, Steve Griffith, Eric Skramstad, Sasha Aslanian, Brita Green und Molly Bloom.

: Gehen Sie zu InTheDarkPodcast.org, um mehr über Danny Heinrich zu erfahren, über sein Leben, seine Berufe, die Polizeiberichte, die Orte, an denen er lebte, und um sich in unsere E-Mail-Liste einzutragen, damit wir Sie informieren können, wenn wir uns für unser nächstes Projekt entscheiden.

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

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