Transcription complète : In the Dark S1 E9 - La Vérité

In the Dark : S1 E9 La Vérité

: Précédemment dans In the Dark.

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

: Urgence 911.

: Certains de leurs garçons sont allés au Tom Thumb pour acheter un film. Et sur le chemin du retour, quelqu'un les a arrêtés.

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

: Quand tu courais, tu regardais derrière toi ?

: Oui, une fois qu'on sera en bas.

: Qu'avez-vous vu ?

: 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.

: Donc, personne n'est venu frapper à votre porte cette nuit-là ?

: Non.

: Et personne n'est venu fouiller votre maison cette nuit-là ?

: Non.

: Et personne n'a fouillé, à votre connaissance, les bâtiments, les bâtiments de la ferme juste autour de votre maison ?

: Non.

: 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.

: Il y a sept semaines, Jared Scheierl était assis dans une salle d'audience pendant que Danny Heinrich était amené. Jared attendait ce moment depuis 27 ans, depuis qu'un homme étrange l'a fait monter de force dans une voiture sur le bord de la route dans la ville de Cold Spring, alors que Jared n'avait que 12 ans, et l'a conduit jusqu'à une route de gravier, l'a agressé sexuellement, puis les a ramenés en ville.

: 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.

: Après toutes ces années, l'homme qui a agressé Jared a finalement été attrapé. C'était le moment où tout le monde allait enfin entendre la vérité sur ce qui était arrivé à Jared et ce qui était arrivé à 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.

: Les aveux qu'Heinrich fait ce jour-là dans la salle d'audience sont graphiques, horribles et détaillés, bien plus détaillés que ce à quoi on s'attendait. Heinrich a raconté toute une histoire avec une intrigue, de l'action, de la réflexion et, à la grande horreur de tous ceux qui l'ont écouté, des dialogues, des répliques que Jacob lui aurait dites, des choses qu'il aurait dites à Jacob juste avant de le tuer. Jared était assis à quelques mètres de là et écoutait tout cela tandis qu'Heinrich fascinait la salle d'audience avec l'histoire de ce qu'il avait fait à Jacob.

: Je veux dire, pour moi, à écouter les détails au tribunal, vous savez, sa vie, ses dernières minutes, vous savez, j'aurais pu être cet enfant. J'aurais pu être Jacob.

: Une fois qu'Heinrich a fini de confesser ses crimes contre Jacob, il en vient à ce qu'il a fait à Jared. Il a raconté l'histoire de la même façon, avec tous ces détails et ces dialogues. Puis, Heinrich commence à raconter une partie de l'histoire que Jared n'avait jamais entendue auparavant. Heinrich décrit avec force détails un acte sexuel qu'il dit avoir imposé à 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 n'avait qu'à s'asseoir là en silence et écouter. Une fois l'affaire terminée, Jared est allé à la conférence de presse, et s'est assis au premier rang. Il a écouté le procureur Andy Luger s'adresser aux journalistes.

: Enfin, nous savons. Nous connaissons la vérité. Danny Heinrich n'est plus une personne d'intérêt. Il est le meurtrier avoué de Jacob Wetterling.

: Et Jared a également fait quelques remarques.

: 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.

: Y a-t-il d'autres victimes là-bas ? Vous savez, voulons-nous croire qu'il n'y a pas eu d'autres victimes après 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.

: Vous pensez qu'il y a des victimes après Jacob ?

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

: Dans le même ordre d'idées, est-il considéré comme un suspect possible dans d'autres disparitions d'enfants ?

: Not that I’m aware of.

: C'était des questions justes et évidentes à poser. Danny Heinrich a admis avoir kidnappé et agressé sexuellement non pas un mais deux garçons, et est soupçonné d'avoir attaqué plusieurs autres garçons à Paynesville avant cela.

: 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.

: Des dizaines de cassettes VHS montrant de jeunes garçons s'adonnant à des activités de routine comme la livraison de journaux, les jeux sur les terrains de jeux et les promenades à bicyclette. Les vidéos semblent avoir été filmées par le défendeur, et certaines d'entre elles semblent avoir été tournées à partir d'une caméra cachée.

: 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.

: Je me suis donc mis à la recherche d'autres cas non résolus d'hommes étranges essayant d'enlever des enfants. Nous avons envoyé un chercheur et un stagiaire au State History Center pour parcourir les microfilms de vieux journaux de la région de Paynesville, et nous avons trouvé quelque chose.

: 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.

: D'autres rapports comme celui-ci ont été publiés dans les journaux des petites villes du Minnesota dans les années qui ont suivi l'enlèvement de Jacob, des rapports sur des hommes suspects dans des voitures qui suivaient des enfants ou essayaient même de les kidnapper. Nous ne saurons peut-être jamais si l'un de ces hommes était Heinrich ou si Heinrich a effectivement kidnappé et tué quelqu'un d'autre, car dans le cadre de l'accord sur le plaidoyer, les forces de l'ordre ont accepté de n'interroger Danny Heinrich que sur Jacob et Jared. Ils ont accepté de ne pas interroger Heinrich sur d'autres crimes.

: 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.

: Nous avions la conviction mais pas de preuves avant qu'il ne nous le dise. Donc, mon travail, dans ces circonstances terribles et sans grand choix, était de faire deux choses : Le mettre derrière les barreaux pour un long moment et obtenir les réponses que cette famille et l'Etat du Minnesota recherchent depuis presque 27 ans.

: 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.

: Une personne a fait ça. Une personne n'en a jamais parlé à personne d'autre. Et ça a littéralement pris ce temps, en suivant absolument toutes les pistes qu'ils avaient.

: 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.

: Et le député en chef du comté de Stearns, Bruce Bechtold.

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

: La façon dont ils en parlaient, c'était comme si Heinrich était le criminel parfait qui avait commis le crime parfait.

: Au cours des sept dernières semaines, nous avons passé du temps à examiner le portrait que les forces de l'ordre ont dressé de Danny Heinrich. Et nous avons commencé par essayer d'en savoir plus sur l'identité de Danny Heinrich. L'une des personnes que nous avons trouvées est un camionneur nommé Roger Fyle qui connaissait Heinrich depuis ses débuts à 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.

: Et Roger a déclaré que même s'il sait maintenant que Danny Heinrich est un violeur et un meurtrier d'enfants, il se souvient avec tendresse de leur enfance commune.

: 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 se souvenait de Heinrich comme d'un gamin nerveux et tremblant, indécis.

: Il pensait à quelque chose pendant longtemps avant de le faire, il méditait dessus. Est-ce que c'est la bonne chose à faire ? Est-ce que c'est la bonne chose à faire ? Dois-je prendre mon vélo ou marcher ? Vous savez, ces choses simples. Ces choses simples dans la vie, il avait du mal avec.

: 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.

: Il n'a jamais pu prendre de décisions, vous savez. Il avait du mal à prendre des décisions.

: En grandissant, Roger et Heinrich couraient beaucoup en ville, surtout la nuit. Quant à ce qu'ils faisaient...

: 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.

: Au fil du temps, Heinrich s'est installé comme ouvrier dans une entreprise appelée Buffalo Veneer And Plywood. Il a commencé à y travailler il y a environ 11 ans et y travaillait toujours au moment de son arrestation l'année dernière.

: J'ai été son superviseur direct pendant un certain temps, alors j'ai travaillé en étroite collaboration avec lui, vous savez.

: 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.

: Plutôt moyen, sauf pour une petite chose.

: 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.

: On enquête sur l'affaire 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, il a appelé pour se plaindre de gars ivres qui étaient agaçants. En 2005, il a appelé la police deux fois, une fois pour une vitre de sa voiture qui avait été brisée, une autre fois pour se plaindre de jeunes qui criaient et se battaient près de chez lui.

: 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.”

: Cet homme dont les enquêteurs de Wetterling voulaient pénétrer dans la maison depuis des années avait en fait invité un officier de police à l'intérieur, lui-même, volontairement pour regarder autour de lui et voir ce qu'il y avait. Mais d'après le rapport de police, l'officier n'avait aucune idée que Heinrich était l'un des principaux suspects dans l'affaire Wetterling parce que l'officier a traité cet appel comme n'importe quel autre.

: 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 achetait de l'alcool pour certains garçons de la ville, dont Danny Heinrich. Et il semblait toujours avoir un groupe de garçons autour de lui, dont beaucoup étaient ivres ou défoncés. J'ai parlé à une autre personne qui a connu Hart quand il était enfant, un gars nommé Brad Froelich. Et Brad m'a dit que Hart avait abusé sexuellement de lui et de beaucoup d'autres enfants. Pour Brad, ça a commencé quand il avait environ neuf ans.

: 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 a servi au Vietnam. Il dit qu'il a été exposé à l'Agent Orange pendant qu'il servait là-bas.

: 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.

: M. Hart n'était pas ce genre de pédophile. Il était pour l'envie d'un pack de six bières ou de quelques joints de marijuana. Il avait tout le sexe qu'il pouvait supporter, ok.

: Et, en fait, Larry m'a dit que Hart avait même essayé de trouver des noms de personnes qu'il connaissait et qui, selon lui, auraient pu être capables de kidnapper Jacob.

: Il me fournissait beaucoup d'informations sur ses connaissances pédophiles connues, pour ainsi dire, là-haut.

: Larry a pris des notes et toutes les personnes que Hart a mentionnées. J'ai une copie de ses notes, et elles font 25 pages.

: Il essayait de donner les noms de tous ceux qui pouvaient être impliqués. Et Dan Heinrich était le plus notable qu'il ait fourni.

: Il était même connu comme le plus notable à l'époque ?

: Ouais.

: 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.

: Selon Larry, Hart lui a également dit qu'il faisait la fête avec Heinrich et d'autres garçons, et qu'il a même eu des relations sexuelles avec Heinrich à un moment donné.

: 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 oui. C'était un lieu de rencontre pour certains des enfants les plus âgés. Dewey passait beaucoup de temps là-bas et certains de leurs amis. Ouais, tu vas là-bas et tu fumes de l'herbe, tu sais, tu bois de la bière, tu fais des feux de joie, tu fais la fête.

: Ils avaient un nom pour cet endroit.

: Ils avaient l'habitude de l'appeler la Grande Vallée.

: La Grande Vallée.

: 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 façon dont le shérif du comté de Stearns, John Sanner, a parlé plus tard de cette zone où Heinrich les a amenés, c'est comme si elle était à des kilomètres de tout.

: 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.

: Ok. Donc, je peux vous montrer. Donc, Ok, si on regarde ici. Donc, c'est la photographie aérienne de 1991. Voici le 23. Là, c'est le 33 qui remonte vers le nord.

: Ok.

: C'est le bosquet d'arbres qui était une gravière de l'État, juste là.

: La semaine dernière, je me suis rendu sur le site avec Natalie Jablonski, une productrice de ce podcast. Nous nous sommes arrêtés sur le côté de la route, près d'un champ bordé d'arbres.

: 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.

: Tu peux me montrer ?

: Tu sais, il suffit d'aller ici depuis le gravier.

: 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.

: Il y avait un trou dans une zone qui ne semblait pas à sa place et qui a éveillé ma curiosité pendant de nombreuses années, je l'ai regardé de loin et jusqu'à ce qu'une fois je l'ai regardé de plus près, mais rien n'a vraiment été enregistré, à part le fait qu'il n'était pas à sa place avec tout le reste parce que c'était une cuvette rocheuse, et que tout le reste était envahi par l'herbe, les arbres ou les broussailles. Mais cet endroit se démarquait simplement comme une cuvette rocheuse.

: Quelle était sa taille ? A quoi ressemblait-il ?

: Probablement un mètre de diamètre ou quelque chose comme ça, et une petite forme oblongue avec rien d'autre que des pierres de bonne taille à l'intérieur et une grosse pierre juste au centre.

: 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.

: Il a été vu pour la dernière fois portant une veste identique à celle-ci.

: 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.

: Et, en fait, toute cette notion de crime parfait, toutes ces émissions de télévision, ces livres et ces films sur des affaires impossibles, des affaires classées, des mystères non résolus, des personnes qui ont disparu sans laisser de trace, tout cela détourne notre attention des actions des forces de l'ordre, nous empêche de poser des questions difficiles aux personnes qui sont censées résoudre ces crimes.

: Le crime parfait n'est qu'une excuse pour les échecs des forces de l'ordre, et nous l'acceptons. Mais en réalité, il n'y a pas de crime parfait. Il n'y a que des enquêtes qui échouent. Et la vérité est qu'il y aura toujours des gens comme Danny Heinrich. La question est de savoir quel type d'application de la loi nous aurons pour les attraper.

: 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. Des reportages supplémentaires importants pour cet épisode ont été réalisés par Curtis Gilbert, Tom Scheck, Jennifer Vogel, Emily Haavik et Jackie Renzetti. Le rédacteur en chef d'APM Reports est Chris Worthington. Les rédacteurs web sont Dave Peters et Andy Kruse. Le vidéographe est Jeff Thompson. La musique de notre thème est composée par Gary Meister. Cet épisode a été mixé par Corey Schreppel. Merci également à Will Craft, Stephen Smith, Johnny Vince Evans, Cameron Wiley, Steve Griffith, Eric Skramstad, Sasha Aslanian, Brita Green et Molly Bloom.

: Rendez-vous sur InTheDarkPodcast.org pour en savoir plus sur Danny Heinrich, sur ce qu'était réellement sa vie, les emplois qu'il a occupés, les rapports de police, les endroits où il a vécu, et pour vous inscrire sur notre liste de diffusion, afin que nous puissions vous informer lorsque nous déciderons de notre prochain projet.

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