Full Transcript: In the Dark S1 E8 - What's Going on Down There

In the Dark: S1 E8 What’s Going on Down There

: Before we get started, I just wanted to let you know that we’d planned to have this be our last episode, but we’re adding one more, and that’s next week.

: Eerder in In the Dark.

: Mijn vraag is, hoe kan dit soort misdaden gebeuren in dit afgelegen gebied?

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

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

: Ik neem aan dat als er iets ernstigs met onze kinderen zou gebeuren, dat er iemand zou zijn om het te onderzoeken.

: I’ve been in doing major cases. I think, experience is very, very important. And you learn from every case you do. And if you aren’t willing to do that, then you shouldn’t be an investigator.

: Over the past year, as I talked to law enforcement officers about the Jacob Wetterling case, there was one thing I heard all the time, “Things were different back then,” they’d say, “Nowadays, we have all this new technology, new training. If a big crime happened in Stearns County these days, it would probably be solved right away.”

: But I had a reason to be skeptical about that claim that times had changed. And that reason had to do with the crime I’d been assigned to cover in Stearns County a few years before I started reporting on the Wetterling case, a type of crime that is almost always solved, the murder of a police officer.

: I covered shootings of officers in Minnesota before, so I knew that most of the time, if someone kills a police officer, one of two things is going to happen pretty quickly. Either that person is going to be arrested, or they’re going to be killed. But that’s not what happened in this case.

: This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I’m Madeleine Baran. In this podcast, we’re trying to find out 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 today, we’re going to look into whether the problems in Stearns County stopped with Jacob. We’re going to do something that seems like it would be pretty straightforward. We’re going to look at the agency responsible for investigating Jacob’s kidnapping, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office. And we’re going to try to answer one simple question, how good are they really at solving major crimes?

: De eerste persoon in onze redactie die de schietpartij moest verslaan was Conrad Wilson.

: Here’s what happened. So, I got a call really early from the morning news editor, and she said, “Can you go to Cold Spring? There’s been a cop shooting.” I get there, and it was a strange scene to cover.

: And then, it’s just like … It seemed like it just kept getting weirder.

: Juist.

: Here’s what we know from law enforcement accounts. On the night of November 29th 2012, law enforcement in Stearns County got a call from a woman asking them to go check on her son. He lived in an apartment above a bar called Winners in the town of Cold Spring.

: Rond 10:35 's avonds reed een agent genaamd Greg Reiter erheen. En toen hij daar aankwam, belde hij een andere agent voor back-up, een 31-jarige agent genaamd Tom Decker. Toen hij aankwam, stapte agent Decker uit zijn auto, terwijl agent Reiter in zijn auto bleef. En toen, zonder waarschuwing en uit het niets, schoot iemand agent Decker in het hoofd en doodde hem.

: After the murder, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office didn’t say a whole lot about what happened next. But Conrad and I found some of the details in a leaked document from inside the sheriff’s office.

: Ik herinner me dat ik dat document kreeg. Ik kreeg het van een bron. En ik herinner me dat ik het las, en het was verbijsterend. Ik bedoel, het was dit verslag van wat gewoon leek op onbekwaamheid van de politie.

: Once Officer Decker was shot, the other officer, Greg Reiter, didn’t get out of his car and try to chase down the shooter. He didn’t run out and try to see if Officer Decker was okay. Instead, Officer Reiter stayed in his squad car. And then, he put his car in reverse, and watched as the suspect walked away.

: I mean, it’s like-

: Het is gekkenwerk.

: It makes no sense. And I even talked to like some … I talked to like a retired police chief in this tiny town in Minnesota. He had like four officers. I mean, it was a small town. And he was just … He couldn’t believe it, you know. I remember when we’re talking, he’s like, “That’s not what you do.” Like, “You go towards the suspect. You pursue.” And-

: Yeah. I mean, we were like asking people these ridiculous questions like, “Is this normal when a police officer’s shot?” And they’re like, “No. No, it’s not normal. How stupid are you, reporter?”

: De eerste persoon die agent Decker vond was een vrouw in de bar die naar buiten ging en hem op de grond zag liggen. Toen rende ze terug naar binnen, en iemand van de bar belde 911.

: Schoten afgevuurd. Agent neer. Op weg naar Cold Spring, 200 meter...

: Deputies from the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office raced to the scene. And right away, people told police they’d seen a black van with a loud muffler leaving the parking lot right around the time of the murder. While all this was happening, the man who lived above the bar, the man who Decker and Reiter had arrived to check on was fast asleep.

: I was awoke to people screaming, “Police.”

: Zijn naam is Ryan Larson.

: I’ve seen the flashlights bouncing around on the crack of my doors, my bedroom door. The door flew open, a bunch guys came in with assault rifles and flashlights. And they handcuffed me, opened up the backdoor, and led me outside. I mean, there are hundreds of squad cars, two or three helicopters. I said, “What is going on? This is crazy.”

: A few months ago, I started talking to someone who worked in the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office back then. He asked that we not use his name and that we distort his voice because he’s worried the Sheriff’s Office might retaliate against him.

: You know, I still live in Stearns County, so I don’t need them following me around looking for anything and everything to harass me and retaliate against me.

: This person told me that the night Officer Decker was killed, the lead investigators were convinced they had the right guy, that Ryan Larson was the one who did it, but that other officers who’d responded to the call weren’t so sure.

: There were other people on scene that were saying, “Hey, I think we should … You know, why don’t we get the dog, and track, and do this, that, the next thing?” That’s investigation 101. We’re going to follow up on leads, and check all avenues, make sure everything checks out. And they said, “Absolutely no. We have the right person. Why would we go any further? Why would we do any more?”

: The officers brought Ryan Larson down to the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, and put him in an interview room. Ryan said two investigators came to interrogate him, Stearns County Sheriff’s Captain Pam Jensen and State Investigator Kenneth McDonald, the same team that had interrogated Dan Rassier about the Jacob Wetterling case a few years earlier.

: Captain Jensen has came in and asked me, you know, why I did it. I’m like, “Why did I do what?” You know, I had no clue what they’re talking about. “Why did you shoot the officer?” I’m like, “What? Excuse me.” “Just admit it. Tell us why you did it. It’s okay. You know, sometimes, some people snap.” “No, I didn’t do it.”

: Ryan Larson stayed in jail while investigators tried to build a case against him. I ended up finding out about this part of the investigation from that document that was leaked to us back then. The document was a two-page written statement from the Stearns County sheriff’s Office signed by two officers. And it was created to get permission to hold Ryan in jail for a little while longer.

: The document includes Officer Greg Reiter’s accounts of what he saw that night. It’s not clear from the document whether Reiter actually saw Officer Decker get shot. What it says is that Reiter heard two loud bangs, and then saw a man standing near Officer Decker’s squad car holding a weapon, and that it was a handgun.

: And that detail about the weapon was a big deal because when officers stormed into Ryan’s apartment above the bar, right away, they saw a handgun next to him. But it turned out that wasn’t the gun that was used to kill Officer Decker because Officer Decker wasn’t killed with a handgun. He was killed with a 20-gauge shotgun.

: And after five days, investigators still couldn’t find any other evidence against Ryan that would have allowed them to charge him.

: All of a sudden, on Tuesday, one of the jailers asked me what size shoes I wear and what size pants I wear. And, you know, I told my I wear a size 11 shoe and 34 pants. And he comes back, and he said, “All I can find is size 10 shoes, and a 38 pants, and this shirt.” And I said, “Well, what’s this for?” And he said, “Well, you’re going home.” And I said, “All right then. That’ll work.” I probably would have left there naked if I had to.

: Dus, Ryan kwam uit de gevangenis. En op een gegeven moment kregen agenten een tip over een andere man, een 31-jarige man genaamd Eric Thomes, een man die een donker busje bezat dat voldeed aan de beschrijving van het busje dat mensen die avond hadden gezien. Ze gingen naar buiten en ondervroegen hem een paar keer.

: And then one day, a little more than a month after the murder, investigators went to Eric’s house to question him again. But this time, Eric fled and ran into a metal outbuilding close by. He refused to come out. And after a few hours, officers finally decided to go inside and found Eric dead. He had hanged himself.

: De autoriteiten hielden een persconferentie om uit te leggen wat er was gebeurd. Ze zeiden dat nadat Eric zichzelf had gedood, ze een pistool hadden gevonden op een terrein waar Eric toegang toe had, een 20-gauge jachtgeweer. Ze hebben het getest en zeiden dat ze geloven dat het pistool gebruikt is om agent Decker te doden. Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner zei een paar woorden, vooral lof voor het onderzoek.

: This was a real good example of how the community and law enforcement worked together to get to the point that we’re at today. We had a tipster call in based on the information that we were asking for. It actually couldn’t have worked even better. Thank you.

: A few months later in August of 2013, a spokesperson for the State Crime Bureau told reporters that if Eric hadn’t killed himself, he would have been arrested for the murder, and that Ryan Larson was no longer a suspect in the case. But it wasn’t the State Crime Bureau that was in charge of the case, it was a Stearns County Sheriff’s Office. And the Sheriff, John Sanner, has decided to keep the case open. When I went to see Sheriff Sanner a few months ago, I asked him why.

: Because we’re still hopeful that new information will come in. I have considered closing the case if it stays inactive for a period of time. If no new information comes in, that certainly is something we would consider.

: Keeping the case open means the public can’t look at the files. It means that none of us can see exactly what happened in the investigation into Officer Decker’s shooting. And it means that the sheriff doesn’t have to clear Ryan Larson even three years after the State Crime Bureau, known as the BCA, ruled Ryan out as a suspect.

: I don’t know if he was involved or not. I can’t say that.

: So, you’re not prepared to say like, “He definitely didn’t do it.”

: Oh, absoluut niet.

: Oh okay because the BCA has said that. Like the spokesperson, at least, said he’s no longer a suspect.

: Oké.

: Op dit punt haalde Sanner zijn schouders op, en hij leverde geen bewijs dat Ryan Larson iets te maken had met de schietpartij.

: Ryan Larson vertrouwde de politie. Toen hij opgroeide, woonde hij maar een paar straten van Jacob Wetterling, vlak bij de doodlopende weg. Ryan was even oud als Jacob. Hun verjaardagen lagen slechts drie maanden uit elkaar. Ryan herinnert zich nog steeds de nacht dat Jacob werd ontvoerd.

: Ik werd net voor middernacht wakker door zoeklichten in mijn slaapkamerraam. Ik stond op om overal politievoertuigen en helikopters te zien.

: Investigators even came in to Ryan’s house that night and looked around.

: Kasten controleren. Ik geloof dat ze de keuken hebben doorzocht, badkamers, badkuipen, overal waar een kind verborgen kon zijn, denk ik.

: And as an 11-year-old kid, Ryan was impressed by all the searching for Jacob. And it was what he expected from the cops because growing up, Ryan really looked up to law enforcement. By the time I met Ryan, that trust he’d felt in law enforcement was gone.

: When I went over to his basement apartment a few months ago, Ryan showed me his laptop. The screen was filled with files from his own investigation of the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office. Ryan told me he tried to figure out what really happened the night Officer Decker was killed. He’d even called up Greg Reiter, he left the force after the murder, and asked him what he saw.

: Ryan said there was one thing in particular that really didn’t make any sense to him. And that was how Greg Reiter could have seen a handgun, the same kind of gun Ryan had, when really the crime was committed with a very different kind of gun, a shotgun. It was a difference that should be obvious to anyone with any experience with guns, and especially to a cop.

: And Ryan said Greg Reiter told him that despite what was written in the statement that was used to hold Ryan in jail, he actually didn’t see much at all that night. And that matches what I heard from my law enforcement source who told me that inside the sheriff’s office, investigators were saying pretty much the same thing.

: But when Ryan tried to get Greg Reiter to come forward and tell the public what he really saw or didn’t see that night, Greg Reiter hesitated. Ryan showed me texts they exchanged, including one he said was Greg Reiter’s last message to him, sent on July 1st 2013, about seven months after the murder.

: It said, “I talked with my attorney and Captain Jensen last week. I did give them, again, the details that you and I talked about. They, then, told me that if I said anything that I would be interfering with the investigation, and would be sued and/or charged. They also said that we are not to have any more communication.”

: Ryan said he hasn’t heard from Greg Reiter since. I couldn’t reach Reiter either. I tried to ask Sheriff Sanner about this and Captain Pam Jensen, who since left the sheriff’s office, but they didn’t respond.

: All of this has really damaged Ryan Larson’s life. He said even today, four years after the murder, people still look at him differently.

: Weet je, de rechtshandhaving heeft mijn naam aan de haak geslagen voor de media. Maar het publiek, de mensen, weet je, waar ik elke dag tussen loop, weet je, sommige van de opmerkingen die ze zeiden suggereerden om de galgen te bouwen en alles terug, breng publieke executies terug, weet je, maak de lynch mob klaar.

: Did anyone at the sheriff’s office ever apologize?

: No. No. And that’s, you know, probably the things I have the biggest problem with. I mean, you publicly accuse somebody of one of the most heinous crimes that a person could be accused of, you know, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to go away. It will always be there.

: Ryan ging naar een therapeut. Hij werd gediagnosticeerd met PTSD.

: I haven’t actually gone out with my friends since 2012. I spent a lot of time at home.

: Ryan dropped out of school for a while and almost stopped leaving his apartment entirely. He started spending hours and hours late at night reading about other cases the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office had failed to solve.

: It’s more than me that have a similar story to tell. The Stearns Sheriff’s Office has quite a reputation for horrendous investigations, false accusations, leaving families in the dark. I mean, why can’t anybody solve crimes? I mean, why is everything such a secret? I mean, what’s going on down there? People of Stearns County just need to realize that something needs to change. You know, it might not affect them right now, but it’s going to someday if something doesn’t change now.

: Ryan Larson had become a part of a kind of sad fraternity, a loose brotherhood of people who felt wronged by the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, people like Dan Rassier, the man who was named a person of interest in the Jacob Wetterling case, and the boys in Paynesville who were attacked by a strange man in the ’80s, people without a lot of money or community support, people who are just out there on their own trying to figure out what happened, trying to solve their own crimes, or clear their own names.

: And out of all of these people I talked to, no one seemed more alone than a man named Brian Guimond, whose son, Josh, had gone missing in 2002, 13 years after Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped. I went to meet up with Brian Guimond at his house. He’s a landscaper and lives alone. He has boxes full of his own research into his son’s disappearance.

: All kinds of stuff in here. I haven’t looked at these forever.

: Like what’s in this notebook?

: Wat er die keer ook gebeurde.

: Notebooks, each one numbered. Some of them had a copy of a missing person’s flyer for Josh taped to the front. And inside were all his notes about phone calls with detectives, interviews with the media, and possible leads to check out.

: It’s the only way you can remember. There’s a lot of things I got in here and times, you know.

: In November of 2002, Brian’s son, Josh, was a 20-year-old student at St. John’s University in Stearns County. And one night, Josh was at a small party at a friend’s apartment on campus. His friends said there was a little drinking but not much.

: And at some point, Josh left. He was never seen again. Authorities found his car still on campus. None of his stuff had been disturbed. He didn’t leave any kind of note behind. He just vanished. Brian said, right away, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office had a theory about what had happened to his son.

: Right off the bat, we are told he’s in Stump Lake. Pretty much, that was the end of the story as far as the Sheriff Department is concerned.

: Stump Lake is right on campus. Josh would have passed it if he’d walked back to his dorm room that night. A dog that investigators brought in the next day appeared to track Josh’s scent to an area near the lake or maybe to the bridge that crosses it.

: Onderzoekers hebben het meer doorzocht. En de familie heeft zelfs betaald voor een aparte zoektocht door een particulier bedrijf dat gespecialiseerd is in dit soort zaken. Maar geen van hen vond enig teken van Josh. Brian zei dat de onderzoekers met een verklaring kwamen waarom Josh nog in het gebied kon zijn maar niet gevonden kon worden. Die verklaring, drijfzand.

: Okay. I went and got a hold of the soil and water guy for Stearns County. No, we don’t have any quicksand around here. So, that’s impossible. I got papers on it from him proving no, this can’t happen.

: Brian liet me de brief van de bodemdeskundige van de overheid zien.

: Ik heb die brief hier.

: Oh, dit is de brief.

: And no. As far as the soil expert knows, there’s no such thing as quicksand just lying out there in Stearns County. Brian told the sheriff’s office about the letter. He says that investigators came up with a new reason why Josh’s body wasn’t found.

: Schildpadden aten hem op.

: Klapschildpadden.

: That was just one of their excuses. Now, he’s in that swampy area, you know. And, now, you can’t find anything. Well, let’s see. They ain’t going to eat the skull. They ain’t going to eat the clothes.

: We checked this out and talked to not one but two experts in snapping turtles. Both of them told us the same thing. No, a snapping turtle won’t eat a whole human being like that. I brought these two theories, the quicksand and the turtles, to Sheriff, John Sanner. Sanner became the sheriff a few months after Josh disappeared. And Sheriff Sanner told me he still does think it’s possible that Josh was sucked into some kind of mud and ended up completely submerged in it.

: Did he have too much to drink maybe and wander off into an area that’s very boggy and swampy? And then, of course, if you lay down, and become tired, or else, you get stuck. And you simply pass out because of the amount of alcohol you’ve consumed. These are just theories and possibilities.

: En toen kwam ik bij de schildpadden.

: And then, the other explanation he said that he got from the sheriff’s office was that perhaps, like, Josh’s body was consumed by turtles, snapping turtles.

: I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine that happening.

: Oké.

: That didn’t come from me.

: Have you heard that before? Because that’s what he’s saying he heard from the sheriff’s office.

: Dat heb ik. Ik denk dat het jaren geleden in de St. Cloud Times is gepubliceerd.

: Oké.

: Kwam het van iemand van de politie? Mogelijk.

: I asked Sheriff Sanner if he ever tried to figure out whether anyone in his office was the one who told Josh’s dad that snapping turtles could have eaten his son.

: Wat maakt het nu nog uit?

: Josh Gimound is still missing. The case hasn’t been solved. You can probably find one or two stories like this of unsolved cases in any sheriff’s office in the country. So, the question is, does the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office have more than just these few cases? Do they have a bigger problem when it comes to solving crime? And to help me figure that out, I brought in Will Craft, our data reporter.

: Hoi Will.

: Hallo.

: Will begon met het bekijken van één nummer in het bijzonder.

: So, there’s this thing called the clearance rate.

: Clearance rates aren’t quite what you might think.

: So, a clearance rate is not actually a measurement of how many crimes are solved. A crime is cleared when an agency arrests someone for a crime and charges them for the crime. There are a few strange things such as if they find out who committed a crime, but that person is dead, or they’re overseas and can’t be extradited. But, in general, a crime is cleared when an agency makes an arrest and charges them.

: So, they don’t actually have to convict the person?

: Nee.

: Wow. Oké. Dus, goed. Is er een andere ... iets anders dat we kunnen gebruiken dan? Zoals, is er een opgeloste koers?

: No. Even though clearance rates are problematic, they’re the best thing we have for measuring how effective an agency is.

: Dus, Will wil kijken naar de opsporingscijfers van Stearns County. Hij vond ze in een kantoor van het Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, ook bekend als de BCA.

: Ik moest naar de BCA.

: So, that’s a state agency.

: Ja. Dus, het staatsagentschap, ze bewaren maar één kopie van deze misdaadverslagen.

: Wat? Zoals een echt exemplaar?

: Ja, ze hebben een exemplaar.

: But, so, do they hand it to you? Do they bring it to you and say like, “No water”?

: Nou, ik moest wel in een kamer zitten met een ander persoon terwijl ze toekeken hoe ik die misdaadverslagen doorlas en met mijn telefoon scans maakte van alle relevante pagina's.

: Oké.

: Dus, ik moest gaan, en ik moest elke pagina scannen. Dus nam ik mijn scans mee. Ik bracht ze terug en kopieerde ze met de hand in een computer. Ik ging een week lang zitten en schreef misdaadverslagen uit.

: Will kijkt naar één groep misdrijven, de grote misdrijven, ook bekend als deel 1 misdrijven.

: In technische terminologie zijn dit deel 1 misdrijven. En dat zijn moord, verkrachting, beroving, zware mishandeling, inbraak, diefstal, autodiefstal en brandstichting.

: So, we’re not looking at like DWI, or my mailbox has been vandalized, or there’s graffiti at the school?

: Nee.

: Will keek naar meer dan 40 jaar aan ophelderingspercentages voor deze deel 1 misdrijven in Stearns County.

: Dus, ik keek van 1971 tot 2014.

: Oké.

: Dus...

: And you’ve got a graph there of all this?

: Ja, ik heb een grafiek.

: Will showed me the graph he made. It’s just one line. It goes from 1971 to 2014. And it’s the percentage of Part 1 crimes the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office has cleared. The line goes up and down a lot. It starts out in the 1970s. Well, some years, barely above single digits. And then, it starts to go up in the 1980s. It reaches its highest point in 1984, five years before Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped.

: In 1984, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office cleared 38% of Part 1 crimes. They haven’t had a better year since. Under the current sheriff in the past 10 years or so, the line mostly bounces around in the teens. And for some years, the clearance rates are so low, the line is almost touching zero.

: In 2000 bedroeg het goedkeuringspercentage voor deel 1 slechts 8%.

: 8%?

: Het was 8%. En de tweede laagste was in 1978 toen ze slechts 9% van hun deel 1 misdaden vrijgaven.

: Wat kan dit verklaren?

: Ik heb geen idee.

: In 2014, Stearns County cleared 16% of its Part 1 crimes. And I want you to think about that for a moment because what it means is that if you were the victim of a major crime that year in Stearns County, it’s way more likely than not that your crime wouldn’t be solved.

: I wanted to know how that number, 16%, compared with the rest of the sheriff’s offices in Minnesota that year. So, I asked Will to figure that out. And he found that there was a wide range of clearance rates from 98% all the way to 0%. But Stearns County’s rate was definitely low. It was in the bottom third for the entire state.

: Ik wilde deze cijfers door een expert laten bekijken, dus belde ik een onderzoeker in Pennsylvania genaamd Gary Cordner. Hij heeft veel tijd besteed aan criminaliteit op het platteland.

: Way back in the day, I was a police officer and a police chief in two different departments. I’m actually retired from about 30 plus years of teaching at two different universities.

: I told Gary Cordner what we’d found out about clearance rates in the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office.

: So, in the ’70s, in the mid ’70s, it dropped as low as 9%.

: Wow.

: Ja, wat opmerkelijk laag is. Ik bedoel...

: Dat is zo.

: Gary Cordner was vooral verbaasd over de lage cijfers, omdat Stearns County voornamelijk op het platteland ligt.

: In het algemeen lossen politiediensten in niet-stedelijke gebieden een hoger percentage misdrijven op dan in steden.

: What Gary Cordner is saying here that rural areas are usually better than big cities when it comes to solving major crimes, I think that’s the opposite of what a lot of people assume. When you think about our culture, we have these two main images of law enforcement, and we see them all the time on TV shows and in movies. There’s a small town bumbling cop who has no clue what he’s doing. And then, there’s the big city detective with all the fancy CSI gear who could solve almost anything. So, why would it be the opposite? Why are rural areas usually better at solving crime?

: Since my background is in small and somewhat rural policing, I’d like to say, you know, it’s because of, you know, the smarter and more savvy police that we have out there, but-

: Juist.

: But I don’t think that’s actually the main reason. I think police departments in more rural areas, first of all, all-in-all, are less busy. So, they might actually spend more time investigating crimes.

: Oké.

: That’s one reason, but I don’t think that’s the whole story either. I think, in general, solving crimes is easier in rural areas, in small towns than it is in cities. If you got to witness, the witness would be more likely to have literally recognized the person, maybe even know their name, you know, tell you where they live, which is not as likely to be true in a city.

: Juist.

: And then, you know, if it’s a burglary, let’s say, in a small town or a rural area, police are right away going to have several suspects in mind. You know, it may be even just one suspect just because of the local knowledge that you tend to have an in a more rural area.

: Right. You know, like a short list of, like, this kind of crime, that’s either like John, Steve, or Joe. That’s like a classic Steve crime.

: Precies.

: But these are all just guesses. The reality is there’s just not that much research on why one place does a better or worse job than another when it comes to solving crime. We just don’t know. In fact, there’s a whole lot we don’t know about law enforcement. The federal government doesn’t even know how many police departments there are in this country.

: Een deskundige die ik sprak zei dat de beste schatting ergens tussen de 12.000 en 18.000 ligt. Het hele systeem is zo gedecentraliseerd, verdeeld over politie departementen, sheriff kantoren, staat misdaad bureaus, elk met hun eigen gegevens en hun eigen procedures. Maar zelfs het verkrijgen van de meest elementaire feiten kan echt moeilijk zijn.

: And this is surprising when you think about it. In this country, we’re obsessed with crime rates. It seems we always want to know whether crime is going up or down. But once the crimes happen, plenty of us don’t seem to be all that interested in whether or not law enforcement actually solves them.

: I was talking about this with a guy named Thomas Hargrove. He used to be an investigative reporter. Now, he runs a nonprofit called the Murder Accountability Project. The group collects information on murder clearance rates from across the country, and posts it on its website, so the public can be better informed. And one of the most striking things about Hargrove’s website is just how wide the range is. Some places clear almost every murder. Other places clear almost none.

: We were a little concerned about making this data available because if you wanted to kill someone, you would be well advised to go to our site. You’d find the many cities in America quite easily where it is statistically unlikely that you’ll get caught for murder.

: So, you actually … You have that as a legitimate concern like, “I’m providing the data to…

: Ja. Ja. Uiteindelijk besloten we dat de enige manier om verbeteringen aan te brengen was om deze informatie beschikbaar te maken. De mensen hebben het recht dit te weten. Ik bedoel, dat hebben ze gewoon, en ze moeten politici verantwoordelijk houden.

: En Thomas Hargrove vertelde me nog iets wat ik interessant vond.

: In the case of a well-performing department, you ask the police chief what his clearance rate is, he knows to the decimal point and can cite those statistics year after year. He’s watching very carefully. In those underperforming police departments, it’s common for the chief to say, “I don’t know.” And he genuinely may not know. After all, why would you want to study things that don’t make you look good? So, they don’t.

: So, I went to the sheriff of Stearns County, Sheriff John Sanner, and I asked him Hargrove’s question, “Do you know what the clearance rate is?”.

: Nu, vandaag, niet uit mijn hoofd.

: Oké.

: Je weet duidelijk wat het is.

: Ik wel. Dus, daar kan ik gewoon naartoe springen.

: Ik liet de sheriff de grafiek zien die Will had gemaakt, de grafiek met de ophelderingspercentages in Stearns County voor zware misdrijven, de misdrijven die bekend staan als deel 1 misdrijven.

: Oké. Dus, we keken naar deel 1 misdaden. En we gingen terug van 1971 tot 2014. Het was het laatste jaar dat we hadden. Dit is ons diagram.

: Sheriff Sanner nam het vel papier in zijn handen en staarde ernaar.

: So, this is the percentages of the clearance rate. So, highest in the ’80s, 38% in ’84. And then, kind of 20s, 30s. And then, as low in 2000 as 8%. And then, 16% in 2014. These seem very low to me. Like, is this an acceptable clearance rate?

: I don’t think anything under under 100% is. I want to clear everything that we get involved in.

: Sure, but you’re not going to be able to clear 100%. So, it’s like-

: Nee, maar ik zou...

: … what’s the threshold of, you know? Is there a bar that’s, you know, every year, let’s aim to clear 60% or let’s aim to-

: Eigenlijk willen we ze allemaal wegwerken.

: Waarom is er dan zo'n kloof tussen als-

: I don’t know. I have no idea why there is. And again, I’m not satisfied unless it’s 100%. I shouldn’t be satisfied unless it’s 100%.

: Ik bedoel, hoe kunnen de mensen in Stearns County erop vertrouwen dat de politie misdaden oplost?

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

: I ask Sheriff Sanner what he thought could be done to improve his office’s clearance rate.

: I suppose what you’re thinking about in answering that question is more training, that type of thing.

: I actually don’t know.

: Sheriff Sanner vertelde me dat veel van het oplossen van misdaden neerkomt op één belangrijke factor.

: De enige factor die in elk onderzoek een rol speelt, is dat je een zekere mate van geluk moet incalculeren.

: Luck, and Sanner said, sometimes, you get lucky, and sometimes you don’t.

: We haven’t had a lot of luck in some of these big cases that we’re working on; although, it doesn’t deter us from continuing to work as hard as we possibly can and do everything we possibly can to get them resolved.

: But if you’re looking at specifics as to how do we improve this, the first thing that would pop into somebody’s head is we need to do a better job of training our investigative staff or we maybe need to do a better job of collecting and preserving evidence, so it can be used. Those are the easy things. It’s the intangibles, that luck thing I’m talking about, that’s hard to gauge. And sometimes, just good old fashioned police work and a little bit of luck go a long way.

: About two months after I talked with Sheriff Sanner, as we were putting this episode together, the State of Minnesota released the latest Part 1 clearance rates, the ones for 2015. The Stearns County Sheriff’s Office rate had dropped from 16% to 12%.

: I also wanted to ask Sheriff Sanner about what he thinks of the investigation of the Jacob Wetterling case. At the time I talked to him, it was still a few weeks before Danny Heinrich confessed to the crime and led officers to Jacob’s remains.

: When I first started looking to this case, it was always described as like this giant mystery that, you know, Jacob just vanished, it’s dark, and there is like nothing that could have been done differently to solve it.

: Maar toen ik het begon te onderzoeken, is de manier waarop ik ernaar keek veranderd, en vooral sommige van de fouten van de politie 101 dingen, zoals niet kloppen op alle deuren die nacht, niet non-stop zoeken, weet je, het afblazen van de zoektocht in het midden van de nacht. En dan, weet je, de beslissing om Dan Rassier te noemen als een persoon van belang. Al deze dingen lijken me fouten in het onderzoek of dingen die het onderzoek negatief kunnen beïnvloeden. En ik wil u de kans geven om daarop te reageren.

: Of course, if things weren’t done in the right order, if things weren’t done at all early on, looking backwards more than 25 years ago, I can’t do anything to change that. No. So, I’m not going to get wrapped around the axle about things that law enforcement did or didn’t do. Do I wish some things would have been done differently? Sure. Can I talk about that in this particular case? No.

: I just wonder about like to the people in Stearns County whether it would make sense to say, “You know what, we really messed up some things in this. And we’re going to tell you that we’re … This is what we did that we wouldn’t do again.” Is there some accountability to the public that’s needed?

: You know, I guess, I’ve never really looked at it like that. When I’ve looked back and looked at things that, “Boy, I wish we would have done this,” or “I wish this would have been done,” again, that’s all we can do is wish about that, but I can’t go backwards and change time. Nobody can.

: So, this is what we settled on in this country as the best way to handle solving major crimes, to leave it up to people like Sheriff John Sanner, sheriffs who don’t know their clearance rates, have no clear plan about how to improve them, and who refuse to look back and see what they could have done differently.

: And Stearns County isn’t the only place with a crime solving problem. There are all kinds of places all across the country with Part 1 clearance rates in the single digits or not much higher. Farmington, New Mexico, your average clearance rate from 2005 to 2014 is 13%. Chicago, Indiana, your clearance rate is 9%. Honolulu, your clearance rate is 6%. Assumption Parish, Louisiana, your clearance rate is 12%. King County, Washington, your clearance rate is 5%.

: The way our country handles law enforcement with complete local control and no oversight means that you could live in a place that hasn’t solved a single crime in 50 years and nothing would happen. Your sheriff’s office could have a zero percent clearance rate, and no one from the government will step in and say, “That’s unacceptable. Here’s what has to happen,” or even just ask the question, ‘What’s going on down there?”

: And what this all means is that you are stuck with the law enforcement you’ve got. If you or someone in your family is murdered, you just have to hope that the place where you live has a law enforcement agency with a good track record of solving crime. And if your case is never solved, nothing will happen. No one will come in and take over the investigation. And eventually, your name will be forgotten. Thomas Hargrove put it to me this way.

: Je verdwijnt in wezen van de radar. Je naam staat bij geen enkele centrale instantie geregistreerd. Er is werkelijk niemand die is aangewezen om na te gaan wat er met je zaak is gebeurd, en of er meer gedaan moet worden, of zelfs wie je was. Weet je, je wordt anoniem. Niemand kan een lijst samenstellen met de namen van die 216.000 Amerikanen die zijn omgekomen bij onopgeloste moorden. En dat is echt een nationale tragedie.

: And in Stearns County, what this means is that no one can intervene when the sheriff’s office took nearly 27 years to find out that Jacob Wetterling had been killed and buried about a mile from the home of a man they all suspected had abducted a kid before, a man whose car a witness saw that night, a man whose name had been in the Wetterling case file since almost the beginning, a man who investigators had sat face-to-face with, a man named Danny Hiner. Everyone just had to wait and hope that somehow the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office would managed to solve the Wetterling case.

: So, this is where the story was supposed to end with the sheriff’s office that doesn’t get held accountable in a case that took nearly 27 years to solve. This was supposed to be the last episode of In the Dark, but over the past six weeks, as we’ve been airing this podcast, we’ve kept reporting, and we found out some things about the Jacob Wetterling case and about Danny Heinrich, the man who confessed to Jacob’s kidnapping, that we want to tell you about. And so, we’re releasing one more episode. That’s next week on In the Dark.

: In the Dark is geproduceerd door Samara Freemark. De geassocieerde producent is Natalie Jablonski. Belangrijke aanvullende verslaggeving voor deze aflevering door Will Craft. In the Dark is geredigeerd door Catherine Winter, met hulp van Hans Buetow. De hoofdredacteur van APM Reports is Chris Worthington, webredacteuren zijn Dave Peters en Andy Kruse. De videograaf is Jeff Thompson. Onze themamuziek is gecomponeerd door Gary Meister. Deze aflevering is gemixt door Johnny Vince Evans.

: Ga naar InTheDarkPodcast.org voor meer informatie over de zaak van agent Tom Decker en de zaak van Josh Guimond, en voor meer informatie over ophelderingspercentages, en voor een link naar het ophelderingspercentage voor moorden waar u woont.

: In the Dark wordt mede mogelijk gemaakt door onze luisteraars. U kunt meer onafhankelijke journalistiek zoals deze steunen op InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate.

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