Full Transcript: In the Dark S1 E9 - The Truth

In the Dark: S1 E9 The Truth

: Eerder in In the Dark.

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

: 911 Noodgeval.

: Een paar van hun jongens gingen naar Tom Thumb om een film te halen. En op hun weg terug, hield iemand hen tegen.

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

: Toen je rende, keek je toen om?

: Ja, zodra we daar beneden zijn.

: Wat heb je gezien?

: 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.

: Dus, niemand kwam op je deur kloppen die nacht?

: Nee.

: En niemand kwam je huis doorzoeken die nacht?

: Nee.

: En niemand heeft, voor zover u weet, de gebouwen rond uw huis doorzocht?

: Nee.

: 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.

: Zeven weken geleden zat Jared Scheierl in de rechtszaal toen Danny Heinrich werd voorgeleid. Jared wachtte al 27 jaar op dit moment, sinds een vreemde man hem in een auto dwong langs de kant van de weg in Cold Spring, toen Jared net 12 was, en hem naar een grindweg reed, hem seksueel misbruikte en vervolgens terug naar de stad reed.

: 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.

: Na al die jaren was de man die Jared had aangerand eindelijk gepakt. Dit was het moment waarop iedereen eindelijk de waarheid zou horen over wat er met Jared en Jacob Wetterling was gebeurd.

: 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.

: De bekentenis die Heinrich die dag in de rechtszaal aflegde was grafisch, en gruwelijk, en gedetailleerd, veel gedetailleerder dan men had verwacht. Heinrich legde een heel verhaal uit met plot, actie, tweede gissingen, reflectie, en tot grote schrik van iedereen die luisterde, dialogen, zinnen die hij zei dat Jacob hem vertelde, dingen die hij zei dat hij Jacob vertelde vlak voordat hij hem vermoordde. Jared zat maar een paar meter verderop en luisterde naar dit alles terwijl Heinrich de rechtszaal in vervoering bracht met zijn verhaal over wat hij Jacob had aangedaan.

: Ik bedoel, om naar de details in de rechtbank te luisteren, zijn leven, zijn laatste minuten, weet je, ik had dat kind kunnen zijn. Ik had Jacob kunnen zijn.

: Toen Heinrich klaar was met het bekennen van zijn misdaden tegen Jacob, kwam hij bij wat hij Jared had aangedaan. Hij vertelde het verhaal op dezelfde manier, met al die details en dialogen. En toen begon Heinrich aan een deel van het verhaal dat Jared nog nooit had gehoord. Heinrich beschreef in grafisch detail een seksuele handeling die hij Jared had opgedrongen.

: 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 moest daar gewoon in stilte zitten en luisteren. Nadat het gedaan was, ging Jared naar de persconferentie, en zat op de eerste rij. Hij luisterde naar Andy Luger, die de verslaggevers toesprak.

: Eindelijk weten we het. We weten de waarheid. Danny Heinrich is niet langer een persoon van belang. Hij is de bekende moordenaar van Jacob Wetterling.

: En Jared maakte ook enkele opmerkingen.

: 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.

: Zijn er nog andere slachtoffers? Weet je, willen we geloven dat er geen andere slachtoffers waren na 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.

: Denk je dat er slachtoffers zijn na Jacob?

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

: In die zin, wordt hij bekeken als mogelijke verdachte in andere verdwijningen van kinderen?

: Not that I’m aware of.

: Dit waren eerlijke vragen en nogal voor de hand liggend om te stellen. Danny Heinrich heeft toegegeven dat hij niet één maar twee jongens heeft ontvoerd en seksueel misbruikt, en wordt verdacht van het aanvallen van verschillende andere jongens in Paynesville voor die tijd.

: 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.

: Tientallen VHS-banden van jonge jongens die bezig zijn met routineactiviteiten zoals kranten bezorgen, spelen op de speelplaats en fietsen. De video's lijken te zijn gefilmd door de verdachte, en sommige lijken te zijn opgenomen met een verborgen camera.

: 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.

: Dus ging ik op zoek naar andere onopgeloste zaken van vreemde mannen die kinderen probeerden te ontvoeren. We stuurden een onderzoeker en een stagiaire naar het State History Center om de microfilm van oude kranten uit het Paynesville gebied door te nemen, en we vonden iets.

: 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.

: In de jaren na de ontvoering van Jacob zijn er nog meer van dit soort berichten in kleine kranten in Minnesota, berichten over verdachte mannen in auto's die kinderen volgen of zelfs proberen te ontvoeren. Of een van deze mannen Heinrich was of dat Heinrich daadwerkelijk iemand anders heeft ontvoerd en vermoord, zullen we misschien nooit weten, omdat als onderdeel van de pleidooi deal, de rechtshandhaving akkoord ging om Danny Heinrich alleen te vragen over Jacob en Jared. Ze kwamen overeen Heinrich niet te vragen naar andere misdaden.

: 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.

: We hadden geloof maar geen bewijs voordat hij het ons vertelde. Dus, onder al deze vreselijke omstandigheden zonder echt goede keuzes was het mijn taak om twee dingen te doen: Hem voor lange tijd achter de tralies zetten en de antwoorden krijgen waar deze familie en de staat Minnesota al bijna 27 jaar naar zoeken.

: 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.

: Eén persoon heeft dit gedaan. Eén persoon heeft het nooit aan iemand anders verteld. En het duurde letterlijk zo lang, om elke aanwijzing die ze hadden op te volgen.

: 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.

: En Stearns County Chief Deputy Bruce Bechtold.

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

: De manier waarop ze erover spraken, was alsof Heinrich de perfecte crimineel was die de perfecte misdaad had gepleegd.

: De afgelopen zeven weken hebben we ons verdiept in het beeld dat de politie had geschetst van Danny Heinrich. En we begonnen met te proberen meer te weten te komen over wie Danny Heinrich was. Een van de mensen die we vonden was een vrachtwagenchauffeur genaamd Roger Fyle die Heinrich kende uit zijn vroege dagen in 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.

: En Roger zei dat, ook al weet hij nu dat Danny Heinrich een verkrachter en kindermoordenaar is, hij nog steeds met liefde terugkijkt op hun jeugd samen.

: 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 herinnerde zich Heinrich als een nerveus en wankel kind, besluiteloos.

: Hij dacht lang over iets na voordat hij het deed, mediteerde erover. Is dit het juiste om te doen? Is dit het juiste om te doen? Zal ik fietsen of lopen? Je weet wel, deze simpele dingen. Deze simpele dingen in het leven, daar had hij moeite mee.

: 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.

: Hij kon nooit beslissingen nemen. Kon moeilijk beslissingen nemen.

: Toen ze opgroeiden, liepen Roger en Heinrich vaak door de stad, meestal 's nachts. Wat ze deden...

: 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.

: Na verloop van tijd kreeg Heinrich een baan als arbeider bij een bedrijf genaamd Buffalo Veneer And Plywood. Hij begon daar ongeveer 11 jaar geleden te werken en werkte er nog steeds ten tijde van zijn arrestatie vorig jaar.

: Ik was een tijdje zijn directe chef, dus ik werkte nauw met hem samen.

: 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.

: Vrij gemiddeld, op één klein dingetje na.

: 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.

: Wordt onderzocht voor de Jacob Wetterling zaak.

: 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.

: In 2008 belde hij over een paar dronken kerels die vervelend deden. In 2005 belde hij twee keer de politie, een keer omdat zijn autoruit werd ingeslagen, een andere keer om te klagen over een paar kinderen die buiten bij zijn huis aan het schreeuwen en vechten waren.

: 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.”

: Deze man, wiens huis de Wetterling onderzoekers al jaren wilden betreden, had zelf vrijwillig een politieagent binnengelaten om rond te kijken. Maar voor zover we uit het politierapport kunnen opmaken, had de agent geen idee dat Heinrich een van de hoofdverdachten was in de Wetterling-zaak, omdat de agent het gewoon behandelde als elk ander telefoontje.

: 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 kocht alcohol voor sommige jongens in de stad, waaronder Danny Heinrich. En hij leek altijd een groep jongens om zich heen te hebben, waarvan velen dronken of high waren. Ik sprak met een andere persoon die Hart als kind kende, een jongen genaamd Brad Froelich. En Brad vertelde me dat Hart hem en veel andere kinderen seksueel misbruikte. Voor Brad begon het toen hij ongeveer negen was.

: 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 diende in Vietnam. Hij zegt dat hij werd blootgesteld aan Agent Orange terwijl hij daar diende.

: 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.

: Mr. Hart was niet dat type pedofiel. Hij was voor het gebrek aan een sixpack bier of een paar joints marihuana. Hij had alle seks die hij aankon, oké.

: En Larry vertelde me dat Hart zelfs had geprobeerd namen te bedenken van mensen die hij kende en waarvan hij dacht dat ze in staat waren Jacob te ontvoeren.

: Hij gaf me veel informatie over zijn bekende pedofiele kennissen daarboven.

: Larry maakte aantekeningen en alle mensen die Hart noemde. Ik heb een kopie van zijn aantekeningen, en ze beslaan 25 pagina's.

: Hij probeerde namen te geven van iedereen die erbij betrokken kon zijn. En Dan Heinrich was de meest opvallende die hij gaf.

: Hij stond toen zelfs bekend als de meest opvallende?

: Ja.

: 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.

: Larry zei dat Hart hem ook vertelde dat hij zou feesten met Heinrich en andere jongens, en dat hij op een gegeven moment zelfs seks had met Heinrich.

: 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 ja. Het was een hangplek voor sommige van de oudere kinderen. Dewey bracht daar veel tijd door en sommige van hun vrienden. Ja, je ging erheen en rookte wiet, je weet wel, bier drinken, foxfire, feesten.

: Ze hadden een naam voor deze plek.

: Ze noemden het de Grote Vallei.

: De Grote Vallei.

: 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.

: De manier waarop de sheriff van Stearns County, John Sanner, later sprak over dit gebied waar Heinrich hen naartoe bracht, was alsof het mijlenver weg was van alles.

: 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.

: Oké. Ik kan het je laten zien. Oké, als we hier kijken. Dus, dit is 1991 luchtfoto's. Dit is 23. Dit is 33 naar het noorden.

: Oké.

: Dit is het bosje bomen dat vroeger een grindgroeve was.

: Vorige week reed ik naar de site met Natalie Jablonski, een producer van deze podcast. We stopten aan de kant van de weg, naast een veld met bomen.

: 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.

: Kun je het me laten zien?

: Weet je, gewoon hierheen vanaf het grind.

: 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.

: Er was een gat in een gebied dat er gewoon niet uitzag en mijn nieuwsgierigheid prikkelde gedurende vele jaren dat ik het van een afstand bekeek en tot op een keer dat ik het van dichterbij bekeek, maar niets anders dan dat het niet paste bij al het andere omdat het een rotsachtige kom was, en al het andere was omvergeworpen door gras, of bomen, of kreupelhout. Maar deze plek viel gewoon op als een rotsachtige kom.

: Hoe groot was het? Hoe zag het eruit?

: Waarschijnlijk vier voet in diameter of zoiets, en een beetje langwerpig met alleen maar grote stenen erin met één grote steen in het midden.

: 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.

: Hij is het laatst gezien met een jasje identiek aan dit.

: 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.

: En, in feite, dit hele idee van de perfecte misdaad, al deze tv-shows, boeken en films over onmogelijke zaken, cold cases, onopgeloste mysteries, mensen die spoorloos verdwenen zijn, dat alles leidt onze aandacht af van de acties van de wetshandhaving, weg van het stellen van moeilijke vragen aan de mensen die verondersteld worden deze misdaden op te lossen.

: De perfecte misdaad is slechts een excuus voor het falen van wetshandhaving, en we geloven het. Maar er zijn geen perfecte misdaden. Er zijn alleen mislukte onderzoeken. En de waarheid is dat er altijd mensen zoals Danny Heinrich zullen zijn. De vraag is, wat voor soort rechtshandhaving zullen we hebben om ze te vangen?

: In the Dark is geproduceerd door Samara Freemark. De geassocieerde producent is Natalie Jablonski. In the Dark is geredigeerd door Catherine Winter, met hulp van Hans Buetow. Belangrijke aanvullende rapportage voor deze aflevering door Curtis Gilbert, Tom Scheck, Jennifer Vogel, Emily Haavik en Jackie Renzetti. 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 Corey Schreppel. Dank ook aan Will Craft, Stephen Smith, Johnny Vince Evans, Cameron Wiley, Steve Griffith, Eric Skramstad, Sasha Aslanian, Brita Green en Molly Bloom.

: Ga naar InTheDarkPodcast.org voor meer informatie over Danny Heinrich, over hoe zijn leven echt was, de banen die hij had, de politierapporten, de plaatsen waar hij woonde, en om u aan te melden voor onze e-maillijst, zodat we u kunnen laten weten wanneer we een besluit nemen over ons volgende project.

: 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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