Transcripción completa: In the Dark - S1 E4 The Circus

Transcripción completa: In the Dark: S1 E4 The Circus

: Anteriormente en En la oscuridad.

: Danny Heinrich ya no es una persona de interés. Es el asesino confeso de 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.

: Los investigadores dicen que el secuestro ocurrido aquí, en Cold Spring, está saliendo a la luz ahora debido al abrumador número de pistas.

: El abrumador número de pistas. En todas las investigaciones criminales importantes, las fuerzas del orden tienen que tomar una decisión: Mantener el caso local o ir a lo grande.

: 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.

: A medida que los días, Patty, se convierten en semanas, ¿es algo que te provoca pesadillas mientras intentas buscar un motivo? ¿Por qué tu chico? ¿Por qué esa noche?

: 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.

: Mientras todo esto ocurría, Patty se limitaba a mirar al suelo como si intentara redirigir toda su ira lejos de Geraldo y John Walsh y hacia unos pocos centímetros de la alfombra del sótano.

: ¿Qué pueden hacer ellos, los Wetterlings? ¿Son, en cierto modo, impotentes ahora ante el capricho, el antojo, la horrible caprichosa de este loco?

: Esa sería mi opinión.

: La cosa siguió así durante un tiempo.

: 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.

: La entrevista con Geraldo y todas las demás apariciones en televisión fueron dolorosas para los Wetterlings, pero generaron pistas para las fuerzas del orden, muchas de ellas.

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

: Bueno, hemos recibido durante la noche, es decir, en las últimas 24 horas, más de 300 llamadas telefónicas y pistas. Diferentes descripciones de vehículos, diferentes descripciones de diferentes personas que no debían estar en la zona.

: Con cada día y cada noticia, llegaban más pistas. Las primeras docenas.

: Ya ayer por la mañana...

: Entonces, cientos.

: ... habíamos recibido más de 300 consejos telefónicos.

: Luego, al final de la segunda semana, miles.

: Luego, 500 pistas. Ahora, más de mil llamadas a este lugar.

: Había tantas pistas que las fuerzas del orden tuvieron que crear un centro de llamadas de 24 horas sólo para mantenerse al día.

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

: Hubo pistas sobre hombres extraños vistos en otros estados.

: Había sido localizado en Texas.

: Las pistas sobre los coches que se han visto semanas después en otras partes de Minnesota...

: Un pequeño coche rojo con...

: ...conduciendo sospechosamente lento o sospechosamente rápido. Y muy pronto, algunas de esas pistas empezaron a dar sus propias pistas.

: 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.

: Muy bien, sheriff, ¿de dónde vienen esos informes sobre el Chevrolet blanco?

: 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.

: Todavía lo tienen. Cuando lo visité hace unos meses, el teléfono estaba en una cómoda en una habitación libre.

: This is the kid and grandkids’room.

: Patty y Jerry siguieron usándolo durante años.

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

: Todavía había una cinta dentro.

: 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.

: Claro que sí.

: They’re doing copies of-

: Hay cientos de llamadas telefónicas grabadas en estas cintas. Patty y Jerry llenaban las llamadas y luego pasaban las pistas al centro de mando. En cierto sentido, se convirtieron en investigadores de su propio caso, y la casa se convirtió en una especie de centro de llamadas secundario.

: Miércoles, 4:58 a.m.

: 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.

: La gente llamaba con todo tipo de pistas como ésta. A veces, Patty contestaba al teléfono, y otras veces lo hacía Jerry.

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

: En Maplewood, claro. Sí.

: De acuerdo.

: Y entonces, supuse que el chico estaba entrenado porque empezó a alertar a este hombre de que los estaba mirando. Así que traté de ser indiferente, y subir, y pedir algo, para poder llamar al gerente y que llamara a la policía. Y miré hacia atrás, y se habían ido.

: 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?

: Este chico parecía más pesado y pálido. Me imagino que habría estado en el interior, y que habrían pasado varios meses desde que fue capturado. ¿Fue secuestrado en qué?

: El 22 de octubre, así que fueron unas nueve semanas.

: 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.

: Hola, buenas tardes.

: Hola. ¿Son los Wetterlings?

: Sí, lo es.

: ¿Cómo ha estado allí?

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

: Okay. I’m very sorry.

: Entonces, la gente llamaba a Patty para contarle los sueños que tenían o que habían visto a Jacob en algún lugar.

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

: Bien. Estaba en una granja. Era una granja.

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

: Oh, de acuerdo.

: 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.

: Hola.

: Hola.

: Hola. ¿Quién es?

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

: De acuerdo.

: ¿Hay alguien en su familia, incluso en el lado, con las piernas fuera?

: No que yo sepa.

: 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.

: Bien. Bien, gracias.

: But your boy’s all right.

: Bien.

: Su hijo está bien. Está vivo.

: Los Wetterlings soportaron todo esto. Y quiero que pienses realmente en esto, qué pasaría si alguien de tu familia desapareciera, y hubiera un teléfono en tu cocina que estuviera sonando constantemente. Y cada vez que lo coges, la persona al otro lado tiene una nueva y horrible historia de lo que ha pasado, y tienes que escuchar con atención, y escribirlo todo con la posibilidad de que ayude a resolver el caso. Llegó a ser tanto que, a veces, Patty y Jerry pedían a sus amigos que contestaran al teléfono.

: Domingo, 7:24 p.m.

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

: ¿Eres feliz de nuevo?

: Sí.

: A veces, incluso recibían llamadas de personas que decían tener a Jacob.

: ¿Podemos hablar con él?

: Sí. Espera un minuto. Jacob.

: I’m all right. I’m all right.

: De acuerdo. ¿Dónde estás ahora, Jacob?

: I don’t know.

: Ninguna de estas llamadas resultó ser de 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.

: Y luego, estaban los videntes.

: Me llamo Ferris. ¿Te importa discutir esto o no?

: ¿Puede ayudarme a encontrarlo?

: Well, I’m a psychic.

: Resulta que a los psíquicos les encantan este tipo de casos.

: 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.”

: Y estos psíquicos en esos primeros meses, crearon algunos problemas para los Wetterlings. Cuando Jacob desapareció por primera vez, los Wetterlings eran un equipo unido, Patty y Jerry. Pero a medida que la investigación se prolongaba, Patty y Jerry empezaron a separarse un poco al tratar cada uno de dar sentido a lo que había sucedido.

: Yo sólo quería hablar con la policía y la investigación. Sólo dame los hechos. Puedo lidiar con los hechos. Jerry, mientras tanto, tenía todas esas conexiones espirituales y psíquicas. Y él era...

: Eso fue hasta un mes después de haber empezado a hacerlo.

: Sí, claro. Así que...

: 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.

: ¿La locura?

: 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.

: ¿Medianoche 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.

: Quiero decir, ¿qué ha pasado?

: 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.

: Creo que lo hizo por miedo.

: Sylvia Browne era muy importante en aquel entonces. Era una invitada habitual en el programa de Montel Williams y tenía la costumbre de meterse en casos de gran repercusión. Escribió libros con títulos como Contacting your Spirit Guide y 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.

: De acuerdo. ¿Y de dónde son estos tipos?

: Illinois.

: ¿Ambos?

: 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.

: Vale. Interesante, interesante.

: 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.

: En aquellos primeros días de la investigación sobre el secuestro de Jacob Wetterling, las fuerzas del orden empezaron a hacer circular bocetos, croquis de hombres extraños avistados por la zona. Una de las personas que más interesaba a los investigadores era un misterioso personaje conocido como el hombre de la mirada penetrante.

: 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.

: Su comportamiento normal era mirar fijamente con ojos penetrantes a los clientes que no le hablaban. A menudo los seguía por la tienda, y simplemente se colocaba delante de ella, y los seguía con la mirada.

: Hablé con una pareja que decía haber visto al hombre de la mirada penetrante. Kevin y Marlene Gwost estaban en una banda llamada The Nite Owls. Era una banda de polka.

: Oompah, alemán.

: Oompah, polkas.

: Al estilo de Minnesota.

: Dos pasos.

: 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.

: Vieron a un hombre de pie junto a las neveras, de unos 20 o 30 años, vigilando la puerta principal.

: De inmediato, me metí con él. Ya sabes, podías decir que era intenso en otra cosa. Como si estuviera pensando en otra cosa al mismo tiempo.

: ¿Qué aspecto tenía?

: 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.”

: Sí.

: Hablé con otro tipo. Su nombre es Steve Gretsch, y también estaba en el festival de polca ese día. Steve trabajaba para una emisora de radio llamada KASM que lo organizaba. Y me dijo que también vio a alguien extraño.

: 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.

: En las semanas posteriores, Steve Gretsch y Marlene Gwost hablaron con un dibujante de las fuerzas del orden sobre el extraño hombre que vieron. Ambos describieron un proceso similar. Recuerdan haberse sentado con este libro de imágenes de orejas, cejas.

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

: Ojos, nariz, sí, barbilla. Frente.

: 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.

: Vaya.

: Oh, vaya.

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

: Parecen dos tipos diferentes.

: En el caso de Jacob Wetterling, las fuerzas del orden utilizaron muchos bocetos, incluido uno basado en una descripción de Jared Scheierl, el chico de Cold Spring que fue secuestrado a principios de ese año. Ese boceto se parece a Danny Heinrich, pero también se parece a muchas otras personas.

: Esta confianza en los bocetos en un caso criminal es bastante estándar, a pesar de lo que Karen dice sobre lo poco fiables que son. Pero los investigadores del caso Wetterling fueron un paso más allá. Las fuerzas del orden tomaron bocetos del hombre de mirada penetrante y otros bocetos de personas sospechosas vistas en diferentes ciudades, y los combinaron en un boceto completamente nuevo.

: 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.

: ¿Dicen esto?

: 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.

: Tal vez haya crecido demasiado rápido en lugar de mantenerse cerca. Si pasa tanto tiempo en pistas que no van a ninguna parte, puede que le esté apartando de la pista que puede llevarle a alguna parte.

: 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?

: Yo diría que con la mayoría, hay que estar seguro.

: 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.

: Había mucho ruido. 70.000 pistas, psíquicos, furgonetas blancas, el hombre de la mirada penetrante, personas que decían ser Jacob. Y durante casi 27 años, los investigadores dicen que revisaron cada una de esas pistas. Siguió ampliando la investigación más y más, incluso años después pidiendo al público de todo Estados Unidos ayuda para resolver este caso.

: De alguna manera, con todo ese ruido, las fuerzas del orden no vieron lo que tenían delante, el hombre que vivía dos pueblos más allá, el hombre que ya estaba en sus archivos, el hombre que había confesado el crimen casi 27 años después, Danny Heinrich.

: Y después de años de perseguir pistas inútiles, en 2004, un nuevo sheriff hizo algo diferente. Dirigió su atención a una de las pocas personas que fueron testigos de algo la noche en que Jacob fue secuestrado. Y en lugar de creer lo que ese testigo tenía que decir, lo convirtió en sospechoso.

: La próxima vez en En la oscuridad.

: 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?

: En la oscuridad está producida por Samara Freemark. La productora asociada es Natalie Jablonski. En la oscuridad está editado por Catherine Winter, con la ayuda de Hans Buetow. El editor jefe de APM Reports es Chris Worthington. Los editores de la web o Dave Peters y Andy Kruse. El videógrafo es Jeff Thompson. La información adicional para este episodio es de Jennifer Vogel y Will Craft. Nuestro tema musical está compuesto por Gary Meister. Este episodio fue mezclado por Cameron Wiley y Johnny Vince Adams.

: Visita InTheDarkPodcast.org para conocer más de cerca el uso de los bocetos policiales, incluyendo un vídeo sobre nuestro experimento; y para leer historias sobre el uso de la hipnosis y el polígrafo en la investigación, que los investigadores de los Wetterling también utilizaron; y para escuchar algunas de las llamadas que los Wetterling recibieron en su casa tras el secuestro de Jacob.

: In the Dark es posible, en parte, gracias a nuestros oyentes. Puedes apoyar más periodismo independiente como este en InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate.

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