Transcription complète : In the Dark - S1 E4 Le Cirque

Transcription complète : In the Dark : S1 E4 The Circus

: Précédemment dans In the Dark.

: Danny Heinrich n'est plus une personne d'intérêt. Il est le meurtrier avoué 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.

: Selon les enquêteurs, l'enlèvement qui s'est produit ici, à Cold Spring, vient juste d'être mis en lumière en raison du nombre impressionnant de pistes.

: Le nombre écrasant de pistes. Dans chaque grande enquête criminelle, les forces de l'ordre doivent faire un choix : Garder l'affaire locale ou aller plus loin.

: 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.

: Alors que les jours, Patty, se sont transformés en semaines, est-ce quelque chose qui vous cause des cauchemars alors que vous essayez de trouver une raison ? Pourquoi votre garçon ? Pourquoi cette nuit-là ?

: 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.

: Pendant que tout cela se passait, Patty fixait le sol comme si elle essayait de rediriger toute sa colère loin de Geraldo et John Walsh et sur quelques centimètres de moquette du sous-sol.

: Que peuvent-ils faire, les Wetterlings ? Sont-ils, en un sens, impuissants maintenant devant le caprice, la fantaisie, l'affreux caprice de ce fou ?

: Ce serait mon avis.

: Ça a duré comme ça pendant un moment.

: 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.

: L'interview de Geraldo et toutes les autres apparitions télévisées ont été douloureuses pour les Wetterling, mais elles ont généré des pistes pour les forces de l'ordre, beaucoup de pistes.

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

: Eh bien, nous avons reçu dans la nuit, je veux dire dans les dernières 24 heures, plus de 300 appels téléphoniques et tuyaux. Différentes descriptions de véhicules, différentes descriptions de différentes personnes qui n'étaient pas censées être dans la zone.

: Avec chaque jour et chaque nouvelle, de nouvelles pistes sont arrivées. Les premières douzaines.

: Dès hier matin...

: Puis, des centaines.

: ... nous avions reçu plus de 300 appels téléphoniques.

: Puis, à la fin de la deuxième semaine, des milliers.

: Puis 500 pistes. Maintenant, plus de mille appels à cet endroit.

: Il y avait tellement de pistes que les forces de l'ordre ont dû mettre en place un centre d'appels 24 heures sur 24 pour suivre le rythme.

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

: Il y avait des pistes sur des hommes étranges repérés dans d'autres États.

: Il avait été localisé au Texas.

: Des pistes sur des voitures repérées des semaines plus tard dans d'autres parties du Minnesota...

: Une petite voiture rouge avec...

: ... conduisant suspicieusement lentement ou suspicieusement vite. Des pistes de partout aux États-Unis. Et très vite, certaines de ces pistes ont commencé à produire leurs propres pistes.

: 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.

: Très bien, Shérif, d'où viennent ces rapports sur la Chevrolet blanche ?

: 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.

: Ils l'ont toujours. Lors de ma visite il y a quelques mois, le téléphone était sur une commode dans une chambre d'amis.

: This is the kid and grandkids’room.

: Patty et Jerry ont continué à l'utiliser pendant des années.

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

: Il y avait encore une cassette à l'intérieur.

: 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.

: Bien sûr.

: They’re doing copies of-

: Il y a des centaines d'appels téléphoniques enregistrés sur ces bandes. Patty et Jerry répondaient aux appels, puis transmettaient les pistes au centre de commandement. En un sens, ils sont devenus des enquêteurs sur leur propre affaire, et la maison est devenue une sorte de centre d'appels secondaire.

: Mercredi, 4h58 du matin.

: 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.

: Les gens appelaient avec toutes sortes de pistes comme celle-ci. Parfois, c'est Patty qui répondait au téléphone, et parfois c'est Jerry.

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

: A Maplewood, c'est ça. Exact.

: Ok.

: Et puis, j'ai supposé que le garçon était entraîné parce qu'il a commencé à alerter cet homme que je les regardais fixement. Alors, j'ai essayé d'être nonchalante, et de monter, et de commander quelque chose, pour pouvoir contacter le manager et lui demander d'appeler la police. Et j'ai regardé en arrière, et ils étaient partis.

: 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?

: Ce garçon avait l'air plus lourd et pâle. J'imagine qu'il devait être à l'intérieur, et que ça fait plusieurs mois qu'il a été capturé. Il a été enlevé dans quoi ?

: Le 22 octobre, donc c'était à peu près neuf semaines.

: 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.

: Bonjour, bonsoir.

: Bonjour. Est-ce que c'est les Wetterlings ?

: Oui, c'est vrai.

: Comment c'était là ?

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

: Okay. I’m very sorry.

: Ainsi, les gens appelaient Patty pour lui parler de rêves qu'ils avaient ou de Jacob qu'ils avaient vu quelque part.

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

: Ok. Il était dans une ferme. C'était une ferme.

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

: Oh, d'accord.

: 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.

: Bonjour.

: Bonjour.

: Bonjour. Qui est-ce ?

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

: Ok.

: Y a-t-il quelqu'un dans votre famille, même sur le côté, qui n'a pas de jambes ?

: Pas que je sache.

: 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. Eh bien, merci.

: But your boy’s all right.

: Bien.

: Votre garçon va bien. Il est vivant.

: Les Wetterling ont supporté tout ça. Et je veux que tu penses vraiment à ça, et si quelqu'un dans ta famille était porté disparu, et qu'il y avait un téléphone dans ta cuisine qui sonnait constamment. Et à chaque fois que vous décrochez, la personne à l'autre bout du fil raconte une nouvelle histoire horrible sur ce qui s'est passé, et vous devez écouter attentivement, et tout noter au cas où cela aiderait à résoudre l'affaire. C'était devenu si difficile que, parfois, Patty et Jerry demandaient à leurs amis de répondre au téléphone.

: Dimanche, 19 h 24.

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

: Es-tu à nouveau heureux ?

: Ouais.

: Parfois, ils recevaient même des appels de personnes prétendant avoir Jacob.

: On peut lui parler ?

: Ouais. Attends une minute. Jacob.

: I’m all right. I’m all right.

: Ok. Où en es-tu maintenant, Jacob ?

: I don’t know.

: Aucun de ces appels ne s'est avéré être 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.

: Et puis, il y avait les médiums.

: Je m'appelle Ferris. Ça vous dérange de discuter de ça ou pas ?

: Pouvez-vous m'aider à le trouver ?

: Well, I’m a psychic.

: Les médiums, il s'avère qu'ils adorent ce genre de cas.

: 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.”

: Et ces médiums dans ces premiers mois, ils ont créé des problèmes pour les Wetterlings. Lorsque Jacob a disparu, les Wetterlings étaient cette équipe unie, Patty et Jerry. Mais comme l'enquête a traîné en longueur, Patty et Jerry ont commencé à prendre des chemins séparés un peu comme ils ont chacun essayé de donner un sens à ce qui s'était passé.

: Je voulais juste parler aux flics et à l'enquête. Donnez-moi juste les faits. Je peux gérer les faits. Jerry, pendant ce temps, avait toutes ces connexions spirituelles et ces médiums. Et il était...

: C'était jusqu'à environ un mois après que j'ai commencé à faire ça.

: Bien. Alors...

: 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 folie ?

: 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.

: Midnight 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.

: Je veux dire, que s'est-il passé ?

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

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

: Oh, je pense qu'il l'a fait par peur.

: Sylvia Browne était très connue à l'époque. Elle était régulièrement invitée au Montel Williams Show et avait l'habitude de s'immiscer dans des affaires très médiatisées. Elle a écrit des livres intitulés Contacting your Spirit Guide et 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.

: Ok. Et d'où viennent ces types ?

: Illinois.

: Les deux ?

: 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.

: Ok. Intéressant, intéressant.

: 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.

: Dans les premiers jours de l'enquête sur l'enlèvement de Jacob Wetterling, les forces de l'ordre ont commencé à faire circuler des croquis, des croquis d'hommes étranges aperçus dans la région. L'une des personnes qui intéressait le plus les enquêteurs était un personnage mystérieux connu sous le nom de l'homme au regard perçant.

: 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.

: Son comportement normal consiste à fixer d'un regard perçant les clients qui ne lui adressent pas la parole. Il les suivait souvent dans le magasin, se plaçant simplement devant le magasin et les suivant des yeux dans le magasin.

: J'ai parlé à un couple qui prétendait avoir vu l'homme au regard perçant. Kevin et Marlene Gwost étaient dans un groupe appelé The Nite Owls. C'était un groupe de polka.

: Oompah, allemand.

: Oompah, polkas.

: Style Minnesota.

: Deux étapes.

: 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.

: Ils ont vu un homme debout près des glacières, la vingtaine ou la trentaine, qui surveillait la porte d'entrée.

: Tout de suite, je l'ai harcelé. Vous savez, vous pouvez dire qu'il était intense sur quelque chose d'autre. Comme s'il pensait à autre chose en même temps.

: A quoi ressemblait-il ?

: 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.”

: Ouais.

: J'ai parlé à un autre type. Il s'appelle Steve Gretsch, et il était aussi au festival de polka ce jour-là. Steve travaillait pour une station de radio appelée KASM qui l'organisait. Et il m'a dit qu'il avait aussi vu quelqu'un d'étrange.

: 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.

: Dans les semaines qui ont suivi, Steve Gretsch et Marlene Gwost ont tous deux parlé à un dessinateur des forces de l'ordre de l'homme étrange qu'ils avaient vu. Ils ont tous deux décrit un processus similaire. Ils se rappellent s'être assis avec ce livre d'images d'oreilles, de sourcils.

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

: Les yeux, le nez, oui, le menton. Le front.

: 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.

: Whoa.

: Oh wow.

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

: Ils ont l'air de deux gars différents.

: Dans l'affaire Jacob Wetterling, les forces de l'ordre ont utilisé de nombreux croquis, dont un basé sur une description de Jared Scheierl, le garçon de Cold Spring qui a été enlevé plus tôt cette année-là. Ce portrait-robot ressemble un peu à Danny Heinrich, mais il ressemble aussi à beaucoup d'autres personnes.

: Ce recours aux croquis dans une affaire criminelle est assez standard, malgré ce que dit Karen sur leur manque de fiabilité. Mais les enquêteurs de l'affaire Wetterling sont allés plus loin. Les forces de l'ordre ont pris des croquis de l'homme au regard perçant et d'autres croquis de personnes suspectes repérées dans différentes villes, et ils les ont combinés en un tout nouveau croquis.

: 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.

: Ils disent ça ?

: 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.

: Peut-être est-il allé trop loin, trop vite, au lieu de rester à proximité. Si vous passez autant de temps sur des pistes qui ne mènent nulle part, cela peut vous éloigner de la piste qui pourrait vous mener quelque part.

: 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?

: Je dirais qu'avec la plupart, vous devez être sûr.

: 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.

: Il y avait tellement de bruit. 70 000 pistes, des médiums, des camionnettes blanches, l'homme au regard perçant, des gens prétendant être Jacob. Et pendant près de 27 ans, les enquêteurs disent avoir examiné chacune de ces pistes. Ils n'ont cessé d'élargir l'enquête, demandant même, des années plus tard, au public de tous les États-Unis de les aider à résoudre cette affaire.

: D'une manière ou d'une autre, dans tout ce bruit, les forces de l'ordre n'ont pas vu ce qui se trouvait juste devant elles, l'homme qui vivait deux villes plus loin, l'homme qui figurait déjà dans leurs dossiers, l'homme qui avait avoué le crime près de 27 ans plus tard, Danny Heinrich.

: Et après des années à suivre des pistes inutiles, en 2004, un nouveau shérif a fait quelque chose de différent. Il a porté son attention sur l'une des rares personnes ayant été témoin de quelque chose la nuit de l'enlèvement de Jacob. Et au lieu de croire ce que ce témoin avait à dire, il en a fait un suspect.

: La prochaine fois dans In the Dark.

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

: In the Dark est produit par Samara Freemark. La productrice associée est Natalie Jablonski. In the Dark est édité par Catherine Winter, avec l'aide de Hans Buetow. Le rédacteur en chef d'APM Reports est Chris Worthington. Les rédacteurs web sont Dave Peters et Andy Kruse. Le vidéaste est Jeff Thompson. Reportages supplémentaires pour cet épisode par Jennifer Vogel et Will Craft. La musique de notre thème est composée par Gary Meister. Cet épisode a été mixé par Cameron Wiley et Johnny Vince Adams.

: Allez sur InTheDarkPodcast.org pour un examen plus approfondi de l'utilisation des portraits-robots de la police, y compris une vidéo sur notre expérience ; et pour lire des histoires sur l'utilisation de l'hypnose et du détecteur de mensonges, que les enquêteurs Wetterling ont également utilisé ; et pour entendre certains des appels que les Wetterling ont reçu à leur maison après l'enlèvement de Jacob.

: In the Dark est rendu possible, en partie, grâce à nos auditeurs. Vous pouvez soutenir davantage de journalisme indépendant comme celui-ci sur InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate.

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