Transcripción completa: In the Dark S1 E7 - This Quiet Place

En la oscuridad: S1 E7 This Quiet Place

: Anteriormente en En la oscuridad.

: It’s a case that defied logic then and now.

: On the outskirts of his hometown of St. Joseph, a young boy’s mysterious disappearance.

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

: Personas de todas las edades y condiciones salieron a mantener viva la esperanza, la esperanza de que Jacob, de 11 años, vuelva a casa sano y salvo.

: I don’t know. I know we reached the point after the investigation there, we had really nothing. At that point, we let Heinrich go.

: 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.

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

: The people that worked on that case gave truly 110% every day they were there. And I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anything we could have done differently.

: En diciembre de 1978, en una granja situada en una zona remota del condado de Stearns, el mismo condado en el que más tarde fue secuestrado Jacob Wetterling, una mujer llamada Alice Huling se preparaba para las fiestas. Alice estaba divorciada y vivía con sus cuatro hijos: Susie, Patti, Wayne y Billy. Susie era la mayor. Tenía 16 años y trabajaba a tiempo parcial como camarera en una acogedora cafetería de un pueblo cercano.

: On the night of December 14th 1978, Alice and her four kids went to bed. Alice’s bedroom was on the first floor. The kids slept upstairs. Sometime late at night, a man entered the Huling house. He cut the phone line, and then he went into Alice’s bedroom, and attacked her. He hit her with some kind of heavy object, maybe a metal club, and shot her.

: And then, the man headed upstairs. He shot and killed three of Alice’s four children in their beds. And then, the man approached 11-year-old Billy who was hiding under his covers, trying to stay as still as possible. The man fired two shots in Billy’s direction. Both hit the pillow, just inches from Billy’s head. Billy kept still, hoping the man would think he was dead. Then, the man left.

: Los asesinatos conmocionaron a la comunidad rural del condado de Stearns, donde vivían los Hulings, y dejaron a los investigadores de la Oficina Estatal del Crimen y a los sheriffs desconcertados buscando algún fragmento de razón detrás de los asesinatos. No se había realizado ninguna detención y las autoridades no querían decir nada sobre los sospechosos.

: El caso seguía sin resolverse 11 años después, cuando Jacob Wetterling fue secuestrado en el mismo condado.

: 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.

: Tras el secuestro de Jacob, todo el mundo, los medios de comunicación, las fuerzas del orden, los vecinos, hablaban de lo sorprendente que era que un crimen así pudiera ocurrir aquí, en este tranquilo lugar rural.

: The kind of place where you don’t expect a child to be kidnapped at gunpoint.

: Considered to be America’s quiet and safe heartland has-

: Una noche, un acontecimiento horrible ha robado a este pueblo su inocencia.

: The implication was that the agency in charge of investigating Jacob’s disappearance, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, had never worked a case like this before, a case so mysterious and terrifying. But that wasn’t true. Jacob’s kidnapping wasn’t the first big case the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office had dealt with. And it wasn’t the first big case they’d failed to solve. The Jacob Wetterling case was just one in a long line of failed investigations.

: After the killer left the Huling house, the boy who survived, 11-year-old Billy Huling, ran through the snow to a neighbor’s house. He told them his family had been shot. Jim Kostreba was the first officer called to the scene.

: Todavía recuerdo cuando llegaba a la casa el frío que hacía y lo brillante que era la luna. Era una tarde preciosa, una noche preciosa. Y creo que lo que más recuerdo al entrar por la puerta fue el olor de la pólvora. Entonces, supe que algo terrible había ocurrido en esa casa.

: Kostreba se asomó a las habitaciones.

: Y puedo recordar haber visto a esos tres niños muertos en sus camas junto con su madre. Los cuatro homicidios en la casa fueron un poco desconcertantes, por decir lo menos.

: Kostreba seguiría trabajando en el caso de Jacob Wetterling. Incluso se convirtió en el sheriff del condado de Stearns dos años después del secuestro de Jacob, y ocupó ese puesto hasta que el sheriff John Sanner asumió el cargo en 2003. Pero por aquel entonces, Kostreba era sólo un ayudante de patrulla, no un investigador. Así que aseguró la escena hasta que los investigadores pudieron llegar.

: Meanwhile, a young EMT named Steve Mund arrived at the Huling house. Mund later got a job as a deputy in the sheriff’s office, and he worked on the Wetterling case too. But that morning, Mund was there to take the bodies to the coroner.

: Obviously, this is a huge deal in the same quiet area in 1978. I mean, homicides are normally one person. You don’t have an entire family killed or nearly entire family killed except for Billy.

: Mund watched as the investigators arrive to collect evidence. They took photos of the inside of the house. In some of the pictures, you can see the kids’ toy cars scattered around. I’d read a statement Mund gave later about seeing investigators at the scene do a few things that seemed pretty questionable. That statement later ended up in court.

: And in it, Mund said that he saw a state investigator pick up a phone in the Huling house before he dusted it for fingerprints, and that a captain from the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office realized the mistake and, “Said something like, ‘Oh well.'” Mund wrote that at that point, he turned to his co-worker, and said, “Maybe we should wait outside until the sheriff’s office is done.”

: While they waited, Mund said he saw the sheriff come out of the house holding what looked like the flashlight he’d seen on the Huling’s kitchen table. The sheriff used it to search the woods for any sign of footprints. But that flashlight, it might not have belonged to the Huling’s. It might have been the killer’s. When I reached Steve Mund, he didn’t want to talk about any of that.

: From 1978 to now, police training and education, and crime scene processing techniques have improved a thousandfold. So, there’s no doubt in my mind that people there did the best they thought they were doing at the time. And looking back, maybe they could have done better. But I think, at that time, they’ve done the best that they think they’re doing, so.

: The murder of the Huling family terrified people in Stearns County. Newspapers reported on how parents were arming the children with shotguns, and men were taking time off work to stay home with their wives and children. People sat facing their front doors with guns ready. One man told a reporter, “All I can say is I would hate to run out of gas at 2:00 in the morning and have to knock on any of my neighbor’s doors.”

: Estuve hablando con una mujer del condado de Stearns, llamada Jen Kulzer, sobre el pánico que había en la comunidad en aquella época.

: When we moved out here in ’72, he would never lock that door, never ever. We never locked the door. But all at once, we’re locking doors because we live back here on the end of the road. Somebody could come in here, and nobody would ever know it. Actually, he started having a gun in the house, a pistol.

: Wow. Because you’re thinking like, “If this happens, I want to be…”

: They’re not getting in.

: Jen me dijo que un policía le dio algunos consejos sobre qué hacer.

: Si tienes que disparar a alguien fuera, arrástralo porque tenía que estar en tu casa.

: Bien, ¿para ser legal?

: Mm-hmm (afirmativo).

: De acuerdo.

: Y sería una buena idea disparar un tiro de advertencia en la pared, para que pudieran comprobarlo.

: El sheriff del condado de Stearns parecía entonces tan desconcertado como todos los demás cuando habló con un periodista de televisión poco después de los asesinatos.

: La mayor pregunta que me hago es cómo pudo ocurrir este tipo de crimen en esta zona tan remota de nuestro condado. Y este tiene que mirar de cerca para determinar un motivo para este tipo de crimen porque ciertamente es inusual.

: Cuatro días después de los asesinatos de Huling, en el siguiente condado, el de Wright, un hombre llamado Joseph Ture se detuvo en una parada de camiones para comer algo.

: I’m in there having breakfast, and I’m trying to get a couple of dates with a couple of the waitresses and all that. And, you know, that’s how I get most my dates is with waitress because I eat out a lot. Everywhere I eat, just eat out, you know.

: I talked with Ture on the phone, and he told me he used to go to that restaurant all the time. It was a popular place. Alice Huling used to go there sometimes for coffee. Ture was a regular. He’d been living in his car. And in the weeks leading up to the Huling murders, some of the waitresses had started complaining to their boss that Ture had been harassing them, and that, sometimes, he even followed them in his car when they drove home after their shifts late at night.

: Así que, supongo, llamaron a la policía y dijeron que este tipo los estaba acosando o algo así.

: So, a deputy from the Wright County Sheriff’s Office stopped by.

: So, he comes in there, and he … I guess, he went around the parking lot, and my car was sitting right out there. And then, he comes in, and he says, “I got to talk to you outside for a minute.”

: The deputy thought the car Ture was driving might be stolen. So, he arrested him. It would later turn out that the car wasn’t actually stolen. But what caught the officer’s attention was what was inside the car, a small brown diary with a list of the names of waitresses, their addresses, and their license plate numbers, a metal club, and a little toy car, a Batmobile car, to be exact.

: Immediately, the chief deputy of the Wright County Sheriff’s Office connected it to the murder of the Huling family that had happened just four days earlier, and he contacted the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office. He told them he had a possible suspect they should interview, a man named Joseph Ture.

: Now, let the records show that we’re at the Wright County Sheriff’s Office. The time is 2:40. And Officer Kostreba and I are talking to Joseph Donald Ture. Date of birth is 2/7/51.

: I got this recording from the archives at the Stearns County Courthouse. In the interview, two officers from the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office are interrogating Joseph Ture. One of the officers is a detective named Ross Baker. He died a year later. The other is Jim Kostreba, the first officer called to the scene of the Huling murders.

: In that 1978 interrogation, the officers sat down with Joseph Ture. And out of nowhere, Ture starts saying he didn’t rape anyone. “Look,” he says “just because I have this diary with a list of waitresses doesn’t mean I took these women out and killed them.” The officers put some items from Ture’s car on the table in front of him, the toy Batmobile, the metal club. Detective Baker asked Ture about the metal club.

: ¿Lo has hecho tú?

: No, lo he encontrado.

: And where did you find it, and we’re talking about that.

: Bueno, ¿qué diferencia obtuvimos de...?

: Well, just … I don’t know.

: Esa noche, bueno, tenían otro tipo, una pistola o una escopeta.

: I don’t know. No, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s illegal to have it, but it might make a policeman a little unhappy if you step out of the car and have this thing in your hand.

: Y le preguntaron a Ture por el Batmóvil de juguete.

: Y había un pequeño juguete allí, una pequeña cosa con Batman. ¿También estaba eso en el coche cuando lo recibiste?

: That’s mine. I have grandkids.

: Ture was just 27 years old. So, what he’s saying here that the toy Batmobile was for his grandkids didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

: ¿Tienes nietos?

: My daughter does. I’m uncle or …

: Well, if your daughter had children, well, then, you’d be grandfather.

: Sí.

: ¿Qué edad tienes?

: No. Me refiero a mi hermana.

: Oh su ...

: Tío, sí, tío.

: Ture changes his story, and says, “Okay. So, no, no, I’m not a grandfather. I’m an uncle or whatever.”

: Bueno, ¿qué diferencia hay entre un par de juguetes?

: Bueno, podría hacer mucha diferencia.

: The officers tried to ask Ture more detailed questions about the toy Batmobile. But Ture, he wasn’t having it.

: You’d sink in a ship.

: Bueno, entiérrame una vez que caves un hoyo y me arrojes a alguna zanja.

: Oh, that’s because this is the first time I’ve ever even talked to you, you know, and everything was proceeding real nicely. And we mentioned this toy, and you get a take about the toy. If the toy was in the car, it belonged to your sister’s child, there’s nothing to get upset about really there.

: The officers left. Ture stayed in jail. And over the next few days, the officers did some investigating. They had the seats and door panels torn out of Ture’s car looking for a gun, but they didn’t find one. They went to the place where Ture had worked as a mechanic and looked at his time card. It didn’t give Ture an alibi for the night of the Huling murders.

: They went back and questioned Ture again and brought up the Huling murders directly. Ture responded by asking them all kinds of questions about what kind of evidence they had, whether they’d found the gun, and whether anyone had identified him as the murderer, but there was one thing the officers didn’t do.

: They didn’t take a closer look at that toy Batmobile that they’d found in Ture’s car. They didn’t bring it to Billy Huling, the boy who survived. They didn’t ask Billy if he owned a toy Batmobile like this one, and then check the house to see if it was missing. The officers didn’t do any of that. A week or so later, without any evidence to hold him, a judge let Joseph Ture go.

: Once Ture got out, he went on a murdering and raping spree that’s so complicated, I had to create a timeline just to keep track of it. He kidnapped a waitress from the side of a road in West St. Paul, drove her to a secluded area, sexually assaulted her, and killed her. He broke into a house and killed a teenage girl who was home alone.

: Empezó a conducir por Minneapolis a altas horas de la noche buscando mujeres en la calle. Agarró, al menos, a dos mujeres de la calle y las violó. Y secuestró y violó a una niña de 13 años. También trató de secuestrar, al menos, a otras dos mujeres, pero se escaparon. Una de ellas escapó rompiendo un cigarrillo encendido en su cara.

: Ture’s crime spree didn’t come to an end until 1980. And it wasn’t the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office that put an end to it, it was the Minneapolis Police. They arrested Terry for several rapes. And while Ture was in custody, he was charged with murdering the waitress from West St. Paul.

: Y entonces, todo se desató, ya sabes. Toda la mierda golpea el ventilador, ya sabes.

: Te queda un minuto.

: Maldita sea.

: Ture received a life sentence for killing the waitress, and he’s been in prison ever since. The Huling case remained unsolved until about two decades after the murders, an agency from outside Stearns County got involved, a cold case unit from the State of Minnesota. The State Cold Case Unit took a look at the case. They went to find Billy Huling, the boy who survived the murders. He was, by that point, grown up with a family of his own.

: One of the people involved with the case told Billy there was some evidence they wanted him to look at, some evidence that might help solve the case. And Billy replied, out of nowhere, “Did you guys find my Batmobile?”

: From there, the State Cold Case Unit investigators quickly built a case based not on high-tech DNA testing or advancements in police technology, but on the exact same evidence that the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office had known about since 1978, the metal bar and the toy Batmobile. 21 years after Ture had killed four members of the Huling family; and after he’d gone on to kill, at least, two more people; and sexually assaulted, at least, three more. A jury finally convicted him of the Huling murders.

: We still don’t know exactly how many people Joseph Ture raped or killed. He’s suspected of killing another girl in Stearns County in 1979, but he hasn’t been charged with that crime.

: I talked to a woman who told me she was attacked by Ture five years before the Huling murders. Lavonne Engesether was working as a waitress in Hudson, Wisconsin back then. And one night, she served a customer who just didn’t seem right, a kind of greasy looking guy. And at the end of her shift, she left and started walking home.

: Salió de unos arbustos de lilas, tenía un paquete de 12 en la mano y lo levantó, me golpeó en un lado de la cabeza y me tiró a la calle.

: Oh, Dios mío.

: And then, the next thing I knew, he was on top of me. I knew it was the customer guy. And he’s on top of me and all. I don’t know what he was doing, but I just realized that no cars were coming down Main Street, and nobody was going to save me, and I had to wrestle away.

: Sí.

: Y de alguna manera lo arrojé de mí, y lo arrojé, y corrí.

: Lavonne told me she reported it right away to the local cops in Wisconsin, but she said they didn’t take it seriously. Lavonne got married and moved away. And she didn’t think much about the attack until two decades later when she was watching a TV show about an unsolved murder. And all of a sudden, the face of the guy who tried to attack her was on the screen. And she learned his name, Joseph Ture.

: The only sad part is that we couldn’t have found this out sooner, and made sure, you know, other girls didn’t have that happen to them. And, I guess, I would really stress to police, you know, pay attention, and just … And go after these guys.

: También hablé con Lavonne sobre el caso Huling.

: What gets me, I guess, about it is that they didn’t go and ask Billy-

: Si tuviera un Batmóvil de juguete, lo sé. Yo también pienso en eso, que podrían haberlo atrapado. Y simplemente tardaron demasiado.

: Llamé a Jim Kostreba, el oficial que interrogó a Ture en 1978, y le pregunté sobre esto.

: Why didn’t you go to check with Billy Huling to see if he had a toy Batmobile?

: That’s a question that comes up in my mind many, many times. It’s something that I think about quite a bit because it’s something that should have been done, and it wasn’t. And in retrospect, it should have been.

: Over the past year, I’ve talked to a lot of law enforcement officers. Kostreba was the only one who acknowledged he’d made some mistakes.

: I don’t think it’s unusual to look back and see what could have been done differently, or what was missed, or not done properly. And certainly, in this case, because of what he did over the years, certainly, makes it much more difficult, yes. I think experience is very, very important. And you learn from every case you do. And if you aren’t willing to do that, then you shouldn’t be an investigator.

: But Kostreba said, as far as he knows, there were no changes made at the sheriff’s office to prevent this kind of mistake from happening again. In fact, as best I can tell, there was never any formal training or review at the sheriff’s office about how to learn from the Huling case.

: This kind of looking back is something we’re used to in other professions, even if it’s not always perfect. Hospitals conduct postmortems when patients die unexpectedly. Companies do a review when a new product fails. Farmers reassess after a bad year. And the reason for doing this is to try to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.

: And it’s not as though this was a one-time problem in Stearns County, having a case they couldn’t seem to solve. One day, I went to the archive of the Stearns County History Museum to do some research on the Jacob Wetterling case. I was there to copy flyers from the early days of the search for Jacob, and to read old news clippings about the case.

: But I got distracted, and I noticed a filing cabinet with a bottom drawer labeled “crime.” I opened it and discovered file after file of unsolved murders from the 1970s and ’80s, the years leading up to Jacob Wetterling’s kidnapping, all of them in Stearns County.

: Hay un expediente sobre una bomba que había explotado en la oficina de correos de una pequeña ciudad en 1976. La explosión mató al ayudante del director de correos y el caso nunca se resolvió. Hay un expediente sobre el asesinato de una anciana llamada Myrtle Cole en 1981, y cómo los investigadores no pudieron tomar huellas de sus manos. Así que tuvieron que exhumar el cuerpo. Ese caso tampoco se resolvió.

: There was one file in particular that caught my attention. It was labeled,”Murder, Reker, St. Cloud.” It was about the disappearance of two girls, Mary and Susanne Reker in 1974, 15 years before Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped. I went to meet up with the mother of Mary and Susanne. Her name is Rita Reker.

: It has happened so many years ago. In some ways, it’s like yesterday. But most of the time, it’s like 41 years has gone by, and it’s still unsolved.

: We sat on the couch at Rita’s neat two-story house in St. Cloud, just a few miles from St. Joseph where the Wetterlings live. Rita has lived in this house for more than 40 years. It’s where she raised six children. And one day, in September of 1974, two of Rita’s daughters, Mary and Susanne, went out to buy school supplies. They never came back.

: Mi marido y yo fuimos al departamento de policía y preguntamos si había... no recuerdo el término, pero un escuadrón de asesinos o algo así. Y el departamento de policía, como, deberían tener gente allí que investigara los asesinatos y-

: Well, shouldn’t they?

: And they just looked at me and said, “Lady, you watch too much TV.” You know, that was … Yeah that’s that. But yeah, I assume that if something serious happened to our kids that somebody would be there to investigate.

: Sí, claro. Entonces, ¿cuál fue la reacción en su lugar?

: That we were just imagining too much. We should go home and wait. And when they got hungry enough, they’d be back.

: Nadie de las fuerzas de seguridad buscaba a las niñas. Así que Rita y su familia empezaron a buscar por su cuenta.

: Everywhere that we could think of, yeah. My husband took off work. And there were days we kept the kids home from school and just looked wherever we thought, you know. I mean, there’s all kinds of … There’s ditches, and water, and that sort of thing right in St. Cloud itself, you know. And how would we even know where to look? Yeah, yeah.

: Rita and her family didn’t find anything.

: 26 days after the girls went missing, two teenage boys were walking in a quarry on the outskirts of town, and they noticed something in the brush. It was the body of Susanne Reker lying face down, covered in leaves. Officers arrived, and they found Susanne’s sister, Mary. Both girls had been stabbed to death.

: Because the bodies of Mary and Susanne had been found outside the city limits, the case passed into the hands of the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office.

: And, I guess, we expected a big time investigation to start from there on. But our case could not have happened at a worse time in history for an investigation. If you read the details over, I’m sure you’d know a little bit. You don’t know too much about that?

: No. ¿Qué fue eso?

: Rita told me that her girls’ bodies were found five weeks before the sheriff’s election in November.

: So, some of those deputies on the sheriff’s force were running for the office of sheriff, which was not a time for them to do a big investigation. They were busy with the elections and all, you know, before they could really get serious about an investigation.

: The Reker case got really tangled up in the politics of the sheriff’s office. The lead investigator seemed to want to have the case, so that he could use the solving of it to get elected as sheriff. When that didn’t happen, he refused to let the sheriff even look at the case file.

: Y cuando, cuatro años después, el sheriff consiguió arrancarle el caso a su investigador principal, éste conservó algunas pruebas, un par de gafas que se habían encontrado en la escena del crimen. Las guardó en el cajón de su escritorio. Nadie las encontró hasta que murió nueve años después del asesinato de las niñas Reker.

: One year, opponents of the sheriff tried to spread a rumor that the sheriff was looking to arrest someone, anyone, right before Election Day to gain political points. A man running against the sheriff leaked a strange story to the local media about a possible suspect, a goateed sketch artist who’d used a knife to sharpen pencils in a taxi in a suspicious manner. That lead didn’t pan out, but it did damage the sheriff. He lost the election. The case was a mess.

: Meanwhile, Rita Reker kept waiting to find out what had happened to her girls. 42 years later, she’s still waiting.

: It’s such a mystery to me. It’s just that there are questions unsolved. All those little details about your child are important. Those are the last things that took place in their life. And, I guess, it’s because you want to identify with your child till the last minute of their life. And somehow, you wish you could have been there to save them. Even now.

: So, there were a lot of questionable things going on in the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, but it was hard for anyone to do much about it. There just wasn’t much accountability for the sheriff. And I think part of the reason why has to do with the Office of the Sheriff itself. We talked to a former Stearns County sheriff’s detective named Lou Leland. He worked on a lot of the big cases back then. And Lou said the sheriff back then and now just has too much power.

: And they can’t fire him. You know, unlike the chief of police, he works at the pleasure of the city council. They can fire him any day they want, and they don’t even need a good reason. But, you know, the sheriff is … Oh god.

: The thing about sheriffs is, for the most part, no one’s in charge of them. And there are around 3000 sheriffs in the United States, and almost every one of them is elected. Sheriffs only answer to the people once every few years, when they come up for re-election. That’s different from how it works for a lot of other law enforcement agencies. Most police chiefs are appointed, usually by the local mayor or the city council. If the chief messes up, the mayor can fire them. Sheriffs are the exception, and that exception has given them tremendous power.

: Just look at Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona. He’s a sheriff who set up a tent city outside in a hundred-plus degree heat for inmates of his jail. He’s reinstated chain gangs, and forced inmates to wear pink underwear. And although Sheriff Arpaio has been sued, and subjected to court orders, and criticized by human rights groups, he’s still in office because he keeps winning elections. As he put it in an interview I found on YouTube-

: Puedo ser elegido con ropa interior rosa.

: And sheriffs are especially powerful outside of big cities. If you live in a rural county, it’s usually the sheriff who’s responsible for solving major crimes, not the police department. So, I wondered, had anyone ever, at any point, tried to do something about this, like tried to put a check on the sheriff’s power in Stearns County to try to change the way sheriffs work?

: And then we came across an old bill that had been introduced in the Minnesota Legislature in 1979, five years after the Reker girls were killed, and one year after the Huling family was murdered. It was written by a state lawmaker for the Stearns County area, a guy named Al Patton, that proposed getting rid of elections for Sheriff. Al Patton’s been retired for a while. Our producer, Samara, called him up to see if he’d be willing to talk a bit about his bill.

: What’s on your mind, kid?

: Te llamaba porque nos encontramos con un proyecto de ley que presentaste sobre la elección del sheriff.

: Framing, it takes a while. Geez, after almost 40 years, we’re going to stir up this cat again. Okay. Let’s see what we can stir up. Where do you want to meet?

: Samara y yo fuimos a encontrarnos con Al en una cafetería cerca de su casa.

: ¿Cómo te va?

: I’m doing fantastic. If you keep up with me, we’re doing business.

: Sí.

: Al told us that in the 1970s, he started hearing about problems in the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, problems with evidence handling, infighting among deputies, a lack of training, failed investigations.

: Se están cometiendo delitos que eran irresolubles para la educación y los antecedentes de las personas que ocupan el cargo de sheriff.

: And the way Al Patton saw it, the public wasn’t doing a very good job of scrutinizing the sheriff before deciding whether or not to vote for him. There’s just not that much information that comes out in the media during a campaign for sheriff.

: The newspaper interviews, everybody, four or five candidates on the same page. Well, that page gets flipped over. No one’s going to read that. And so, they’d read a couple of campaign ads, and that’s how you elect your sheriff.

: Así, Al Patton ideó una posible solución.

: It got to a point that I’m going to introduce a bill. We’re going to try and flush these people out. You know, there’s a bill to abolish the sheriff’s department.

: Eso es como un movimiento audaz.

: Sí.

: The bill wouldn’t have actually abolished sheriff’s offices, but it would have gotten rid of elections for sheriffs, and turned the job into an appointed position. Sheriffs would be appointed by a county board. That would be a huge change. So, it’s not a surprise what happened to Al Patton’s bill in the Minnesota legislature.

: Actually, the legislation that I introduced was not with mixed feelings, I’ll tell you. It was very straightforward. It was resisted.

: Al me dijo que los grupos de presión de la Asociación Estatal de Alguaciles vinieron a visitarle rápidamente.

: La Asociación de Alguaciles me respondió con una severa reacción.

: I tried to find someone from the Sheriffs Association who remembered this, and they said no one’s around anymore from back then. But I did talk to the general counsel for the Sheriffs Association, and he told me they’ve always opposed any effort to get rid of elections for sheriff. He said switching to a system of appointed sheriffs wouldn’t make the process any less political. And he said elections are good because that way, it’s the public who gets to decide, and they can hold the sheriff accountable directly.

: Al Patton me dijo que los grupos de presión de entonces hicieron un argumento similar. Lo convirtieron en una cuestión sobre la democracia y la voluntad del pueblo.

: “You don’t want to take the power to vote away from the people do you, Al?”

: ¿Te han dicho que retires este proyecto de ley o?

: No, they’re very … You need to understand lobbying. There’s no threats available. They’re just very nice, polite suggestions.

: ¿Qué sugirieron entonces?

: Oh, yes, definitely, they’ll look into it, and deal with it. “We’ll do that for you. We’ll do that right away.” Yup, they dealt with it, all right. Next question.

: They squished it, he said. The bill never even came up for a vote. Patton’s effort had failed.

: ¿Qué ha cambiado en estos 40 años? Nada ha cambiado. Así que los problemas que había hace 40 años y más siguen con nosotros hoy. Pero tiene que haber un elemento de responsabilidad. Y cuando no hay responsabilidad, ocurren cosas desastrosas.

: Y toda esta larga historia de las investigaciones fallidas, el asesinato de la familia Huling, cómo dejaron libre a un asesino en serie, el asesinato de las niñas Reker, la politización del trabajo policial, los esfuerzos fallidos por arreglar las cosas, todo eso había sido más o menos olvidado cuando Jacob Wetterling fue secuestrado en 1989. Cuando Jacob fue secuestrado, fue como si nada de eso hubiera ocurrido.

: I’ve read and watched all the old news coverage I could find, hundreds of articles, and many hours of TV reporting. And as best I could tell, no one was writing stories about how the sheriff’s office had a bad track record when it came to solving big crimes.

: There are no editorials in the papers saying, “We should be concerned that the sheriff’s office is the one in charge of this case. Just look at all these other cases, all those mysterious, violent, high-profile, unsolved crimes.” No one mentioned any of that. Instead, they said what people always say about a place like Stearns County, “What a quiet, peaceful place. These small town cops had no idea what hit them. How could this happen here?”

: La próxima vez en En la oscuridad.

: Headed for Cold Spring, 200 Main Street, behind Winners Bar, I’ll get there in a minute. It looks like shots are fired, officer down.

: Stearns County Sheriff’s Office has quite a reputation for horrendous investigations, false accusations, leaving families in the dark.

: ¿Cómo se compara el condado de Stearns con el resto de Minnesota y el resto del país?

: And what’s going on down there? Why can’t anybody solve crime? I mean, why is everything such a secret?

: You know, what you don’t see on this are all the crimes we do solve. And I’m not trying to make excuses. I consider this unacceptable too.

: 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 son Dave Peters y Andy Kruse. El videógrafo es Jeff Thompson. Nuestro tema musical está compuesto por Gary Meister. Este episodio fue mezclado por Johnny Vince Evans.

: Vaya a InTheDarkPodcast.org para ver más de cerca al asesino convicto, Joseph Ture, y para escuchar el audio de ese interrogatorio en 1978, y para ver un video de Rita Reker hablando de cómo trató de obtener ayuda en la búsqueda de sus hijas.

: En la oscuridad es posible, en parte, gracias a nuestros oyentes. Puedes apoyar más periodismo independiente como este en InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate.

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