Transcripción completa: In the Dark S1 E9 - The Truth

En la oscuridad: S1 E9 La verdad

: Anteriormente en En la oscuridad.

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

: Emergencia 911.

: Algunos de sus chicos fueron a Tom Thumb a recoger una película. Y en su camino de regreso, alguien los detuvo.

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

: Cuando corrió, ¿miró hacia atrás?

: Sí, una vez que lleguemos allí abajo.

: ¿Qué has visto?

: 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.

: Entonces, ¿nadie vino a llamar a tu puerta esa noche?

: No.

: ¿Y nadie vino a registrar su casa esa noche?

: No.

: ¿Y nadie registró, por lo que usted sabe, los edificios, los edificios de la granja alrededor de su casa?

: No.

: 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.

: Hace siete semanas, Jared Scheierl estaba sentado en un tribunal mientras Danny Heinrich era llevado a juicio. Jared había estado esperando este momento durante 27 años, desde que un hombre extraño le obligó a subir a un coche en el arcén de la carretera en la ciudad de Cold Spring, cuando Jared tenía sólo 12 años, y le llevó a un camino de grava, le agredió sexualmente y luego les llevó de vuelta a la ciudad.

: 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.

: Después de todos esos años, el hombre que agredió a Jared había sido finalmente atrapado. Era el momento en el que todo el mundo iba a escuchar por fin la verdad sobre lo que le había pasado a Jared y lo que le había pasado a Jacob Wetterling.

: 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.

: La confesión que Heinrich hizo ese día en la sala del tribunal fue gráfica, horrible y detallada, mucho más detallada de lo que la gente esperaba. Heinrich expuso toda una historia con trama, acción, segundas intenciones, reflexión y, para horror de todos los que escucharon, diálogos, frases que dijo que le dijo Jacob, cosas que dijo que le dijo a Jacob justo antes de matarlo. Jared estaba sentado a pocos metros de distancia escuchando todo esto mientras Heinrich paralizaba la sala con la historia de lo que le hizo a Jacob.

: Quiero decir, para mí, escuchar los detalles en el tribunal, ya sabes, su vida, sus últimos minutos, ya sabes, yo podría haber sido ese niño. Podría haber sido Jacob.

: Una vez que Heinrich terminó de confesar sus crímenes contra Jacob, llegó a lo que le había hecho a Jared. La historia la contó de la misma manera, con todos los detalles y diálogos. Y entonces, Heinrich empezó a entrar en una parte de la historia que Jared nunca había oído antes. Heinrich describió con todo lujo de detalles un acto sexual que dijo haber forzado a Jared.

: 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 sólo tuvo que sentarse en silencio y escuchar. Cuando terminó, Jared fue a la rueda de prensa y se sentó en primera fila. Escuchó como el fiscal Andy Luger se dirigía a los periodistas.

: Finalmente, lo sabemos. Sabemos la verdad. Danny Heinrich ya no es una persona de interés. Es el asesino confeso de Jacob Wetterling.

: Y Jared también hizo algunos comentarios.

: 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.

: ¿Hay otras víctimas por ahí? ¿Queremos creer que no hubo otras víctimas después de Jacob?

: 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.

: ¿Crees que hay víctimas después de Jacob?

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

: Siguiendo esta línea, ¿se le está buscando como posible sospechoso en alguna otra desaparición de niños?

: Not that I’m aware of.

: Eran preguntas justas y bastante obvias. Danny Heinrich había admitido haber secuestrado y agredido sexualmente no a uno, sino a dos niños, y es sospechoso de haber atacado a varios otros niños en Paynesville antes de eso.

: 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.

: Decenas de cintas VHS de chicos jóvenes realizando actividades rutinarias como repartir periódicos, jugar en los parques infantiles y montar en bicicleta. Los vídeos parecen haber sido filmados por el acusado, y algunos de ellos parecen haber sido grabados desde una cámara oculta.

: 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.

: Así que me puse a buscar otros casos sin resolver de hombres extraños que intentaban secuestrar niños. Enviamos a un investigador y a un becario al Centro de Historia del Estado para que revisaran los microfilmes de los periódicos antiguos de la zona de Paynesville, y encontramos algo.

: 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.

: Hay otros informes como éste en los periódicos de pueblos pequeños de todo Minnesota en los años posteriores al secuestro de Jacob, informes de hombres sospechosos en coches que siguen a los niños o incluso intentan secuestrarlos. Si alguno de esos hombres era Heinrich o si Heinrich realmente secuestró y asesinó a alguien más, es posible que nunca lo sepamos porque, como parte del acuerdo de culpabilidad, las fuerzas del orden acordaron sólo preguntar a Danny Heinrich sobre Jacob y Jared. Acordaron no preguntar a Heinrich sobre ningún otro crimen.

: 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.

: Teníamos la creencia pero no la evidencia antes de que nos lo dijera. Así que, mi trabajo es bajo todas estas horribles circunstancias sin grandes opciones era hacer dos cosas: Ponerlo tras las rejas por un largo tiempo y obtener las respuestas que esta familia y el Estado de Minnesota han estado buscando por casi 27 años.

: 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.

: Una persona hizo esto. Una persona nunca se lo dijo a nadie más. Y, literalmente, tomó todo este tiempo, siguiendo absolutamente todas las pistas que tenían.

: 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.

: Y el ayudante jefe del condado de Stearns, Bruce Bechtold.

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

: Por la forma en que hablaban de él, era como si Heinrich fuera el criminal perfecto que había cometido el crimen perfecto.

: Durante las últimas siete semanas, hemos dedicado algo de tiempo a investigar la imagen que las fuerzas del orden habían pintado de Danny Heinrich. Y empezamos tratando de averiguar más sobre quién era Danny Heinrich. Una de las personas que encontramos fue un camionero llamado Roger Fyle que conocía a Heinrich desde sus primeros días en Paynesville.

: 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.

: Y Roger dijo que, aunque ahora sabe que Danny Heinrich es un violador y asesino de niños, sigue recordando con cariño su infancia juntos.

: 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 recordaba a Heinrich como un chico nervioso y tembloroso, indeciso.

: Pensaba en algo durante mucho tiempo antes de hacerlo, lo meditaba. ¿Es esto lo que hay que hacer? ¿Es esto lo correcto? ¿Debo ir en bicicleta o debo caminar? Ya sabes, estas cosas sencillas. Estas cosas sencillas de la vida, le costaban.

: 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.

: Nunca pudo tomar decisiones, ya sabes. Le costaba mucho tomar decisiones.

: Al crecer, Roger y Heinrich corrían mucho por la ciudad, sobre todo por la noche. En cuanto a lo que hacían...

: 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.

: Con el tiempo, Heinrich se estableció en un trabajo como obrero en una empresa llamada Buffalo Veneer And Plywood. Empezó a trabajar allí hace unos 11 años y seguía trabajando allí en el momento de su detención el año pasado.

: Fui su supervisor directo durante bastante tiempo, así que trabajé estrechamente con él.

: 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.

: Bastante normal, excepto por una pequeña cosa.

: 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.

: Se está investigando el caso de Jacob Wetterling.

: 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.

: En 2008, llamó por unos tipos borrachos que estaban molestando. En 2005, llamó a la policía dos veces, una por la rotura de la ventanilla de su coche y otra para quejarse de unos chicos que gritaban y se peleaban cerca de su casa.

: 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.”

: Este hombre, en cuya casa los investigadores de Wetterling llevaban años queriendo entrar, invitó voluntariamente a un agente de policía a entrar para ver qué había allí. Pero, por lo que se desprende del informe policial, el agente no tenía ni idea de que Heinrich era uno de los principales sospechosos del caso Wetterling, porque el agente se limitó a tratar la llamada como cualquier otra.

: 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 compraba alcohol para algunos de los chicos del pueblo, incluido Danny Heinrich. Y siempre parecía tener un grupo de chicos a su alrededor, muchos de ellos borrachos o drogados. Hablé con otra persona que conoció a Hart de niño, un tipo llamado Brad Froelich. Y Brad me dijo que Hart abusó sexualmente de él y de muchos otros niños. Para Brad, empezó cuando tenía unos nueve años.

: 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 sirvió en Vietnam. Dice que estuvo expuesto al Agente Naranja mientras servía allí.

: 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.

: El Sr. Hart no era ese tipo de pedófilo. Lo era a falta de un paquete de seis cervezas o un par de porros de marihuana. Tenía todo el sexo que podía manejar, de acuerdo.

: Y, de hecho, Larry me dijo que Hart incluso había intentado dar algunos nombres de personas que conocía y que creía que podían ser capaces de secuestrar a Jacob.

: Me estaba proporcionando mucha información sobre sus conocidos pedófilos, por así decirlo, allá arriba.

: Larry tomó notas y toda la gente que Hart mencionó. Tengo una copia de sus notas, y tienen 25 páginas.

: Intentaba dar nombres de todos los que podrían estar involucrados. Y Dan Heinrich fue el más notable que proporcionó.

: ¿Incluso se le conocía como el más notable de la época?

: Sí.

: 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.

: Según Larry, Hart también le dijo que se iba de fiesta con Heinrich y otros chicos, y que incluso tuvo relaciones sexuales con Heinrich en algún momento.

: 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, sí. Era un lugar de reunión para algunos de los niños mayores. Dewey pasaba mucho tiempo allí y algunos de sus amigos. Sí, vas allí y fumas hierba, ya sabes, bebes cerveza, foxfire, fiesta.

: Tenían un nombre para este lugar.

: Solían llamarlo El Gran Valle.

: El Gran Valle.

: 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.

: La forma en que el sheriff del condado de Stearns, John Sanner, habló más tarde de esta zona a la que Heinrich les llevó era como si estuviera a kilómetros de distancia de todo.

: 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.

: Bien. Entonces, puedo mostrarte. Así que, vale, si miramos aquí. Esta es una fotografía aérea de 1991. Esta es la 23. Este es el 33 viniendo hacia el norte.

: De acuerdo.

: Esta es la arboleda que solía ser una gravera estatal justo ahí.

: La semana pasada, me dirigí al lugar con Natalie Jablonski, productora de este podcast. Nos detuvimos a un lado de la carretera, junto a un campo bordeado de árboles.

: 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.

: ¿Puedes mostrarme?

: Ya sabes, sólo tienes que ir aquí desde la grava.

: 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.

: Había un agujero en una zona que parecía fuera de lugar y que despertó mi curiosidad durante muchos años en los que lo miré de lejos y hasta que una vez lo miré más de cerca, pero nada me llamó la atención aparte de que estaba fuera de lugar con todo lo demás porque era un cuenco rocoso, y todo lo demás estaba cubierto de hierba, o árboles, o maleza. Pero este lugar simplemente destacaba como un cuenco rocoso.

: ¿Qué tamaño tenía? ¿Qué aspecto tenía?

: Probablemente cuatro pies de diámetro o algo así, y un poco en forma oblonga con nada más que piedras de buen tamaño allí con una gran roca justo en el centro.

: 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.

: Fue visto por última vez con una chaqueta idéntica a esta.

: 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.

: Y, de hecho, toda esta noción del crimen perfecto, todos estos programas de televisión, libros y películas sobre casos imposibles, casos fríos, misterios sin resolver, personas que desaparecieron sin dejar rastro, todo eso ha desviado nuestra atención de las acciones de las fuerzas del orden, lejos de hacer preguntas difíciles a las personas que se supone que están resolviendo estos crímenes.

: El crimen perfecto es sólo una excusa para los fallos de las fuerzas del orden, y nos lo creemos. Pero en realidad no hay crímenes perfectos. Sólo hay investigaciones fallidas. Y la verdad es que siempre habrá gente como Danny Heinrich. La pregunta es, ¿qué tipo de aplicación de la ley tendremos para atraparlos?

: En la oscuridad está producida por Samara Freemark. La productora asociada es Natalie Jablonski. La edición de En la oscuridad corre a cargo de Catherine Winter, con la ayuda de Hans Buetow. Para este episodio se contó con la colaboración de Curtis Gilbert, Tom Scheck, Jennifer Vogel, Emily Haavik y Jackie Renzetti. El editor jefe de APM Reports es Chris Worthington. Los editores 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 Corey Schreppel. Gracias también a Will Craft, Stephen Smith, Johnny Vince Evans, Cameron Wiley, Steve Griffith, Eric Skramstad, Sasha Aslanian, Brita Green y Molly Bloom.

: Vaya a InTheDarkPodcast.org para saber más sobre Danny Heinrich, sobre cómo fue realmente su vida, los trabajos que desempeñó, los informes policiales, los lugares en los que vivió, y para inscribirse en nuestra lista de correo electrónico, para que podamos avisarle cuando decidamos nuestro próximo proyecto.

: 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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