Transcrição completa: In the Dark S1 E9 - A Verdade

Na Escuridão: S1 E9 A Verdade

: Anteriormente em In the Dark.

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

: 911 Emergência.

: Alguns dos seus rapazes desceram ao Tom Thumb para ir buscar um filme. E no seu regresso, alguém os deteve.

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

: Quando correu, olhou para trás?

: Sim, assim que lá chegarmos.

: O que é que viu?

: 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.

: Então, ninguém veio e bateu à sua porta naquela noite?

: Não.

: E ninguém veio e revistou a sua casa naquela noite?

: Não.

: E ninguém procurou em nenhum dos edifícios, tanto quanto sabe, os edifícios, os edifícios agrícolas à volta da sua casa?

: Não.

: 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.

: Há sete semanas, Jared Scheierl estava sentado numa sala de audiências quando Danny Heinrich foi trazido para cá. Jared esperava por este momento há 27 anos, desde que um homem estranho o obrigou a entrar num carro fora da berma da estrada na cidade de Cold Spring, quando Jared tinha apenas 12 anos, e levou-o a uma estrada de cascalho, agrediu-o sexualmente, e depois conduziu-o de volta à cidade.

: 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.

: Após todos estes anos, o homem que agrediu Jared tinha finalmente sido apanhado. Este era o momento em que todos iriam finalmente ouvir a verdade sobre o que tinha acontecido a Jared e o que tinha acontecido a Jacob Wetterling.

: This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I’m Madeleine Baran. In this podcast, we’re looking at what went wrong in the case of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped in a small town in Central Minnesota in 1989.

: And in this final episode, we’re going to take a closer look at the story Danny Heinrich told in court, and the story law enforcement told us about him, about why he was so hard to catch because those stories don’t exactly hold up.

: As part of the plea deal, Danny Heinrich had cut with prosecutors. He would not be charged with Jacob’s murder, and prosecutors would drop all but one count of child pornography against him. Heinrich could be sent to prison for 17 to 20 years, and he would finally have to publicly admit what he’d done.

: A confissão que Heinrich fez no tribunal naquele dia foi gráfica, horrível e detalhada, muito mais detalhada do que as pessoas esperavam. Heinrich apresentou toda uma história com enredo, acção, segunda suposição, reflexão, e muito do horror de todos os que ouviram, diálogo, linhas que ele disse que Jacob lhe contou, coisas que ele disse ter contado a Jacob pouco antes de o matar. Jared estava sentado a poucos metros de distância a ouvir tudo isto enquanto Heinrich transfixava a sala de audiências com uma história do que tinha feito a Jacob.

: Quero dizer, para mim, ouvir os pormenores em tribunal, a sua vida, os seus últimos minutos, poderia ter sido essa criança. Podia ter sido o Jacob.

: Uma vez que Heinrich terminou de confessar os seus crimes contra Jacob, ele chegou ao que tinha feito a Jared. Apresentou a história da mesma forma, com todos estes pormenores e diálogo. E então, Heinrich começou a entrar numa parte da história que Jared nunca tinha ouvido antes. Heinrich descreveu em pormenor gráfico um acto sexual que ele disse ter forçado a Jared.

: And then, he said that as he did it, he told Jared, “If you throw up, I’ll kill you.” The line was so specific. Jared told me that when he heard it, he started to feel sick to his stomach because as far as Jared remembered it, this line that Heinrich’s said, with this really specific threat, it never happened. It just wasn’t true. Jared was sure of it.

: You can look at the dozens of other statements that I’ve given law enforcement. I never once stated this. And it may seem like a small detail in some people’s eyes, but same time, to me, you know, it’s putting truth on the table.

: I’ve read all the public law enforcement documents relating to Jared’s abduction and all the statements Jared gave at the time and in the years after. And I’ve talked with Jared for hours, and I’d never heard that phrase either. Jared told me that he just sat there in the courtroom as Heinrich went on and on, captivating everyone with this graphic story, and Jared started to get pretty angry.

: I personally took it as a shot at me, you know, directly. It was kind of, you know, here’s my account of what happened that night. And that’s the moment where I just kind of want to stand and say, “You don’t you have a right to tell your accounts. You know, I’ll tell you my accounts.”

: Jared apenas teve de se sentar ali em silêncio e ouvir. Depois de ter sido feito, Jared foi à conferência de imprensa, e sentou-se na primeira fila. Escutou como o advogado Andy Luger dirigiu-se aos repórteres.

: Finalmente, nós sabemos. Sabemos a verdade. Danny Heinrich já não é uma pessoa de interesse. É o assassino confesso de Jacob Wetterling.

: E Jared também fez algumas observações.

: 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.

: Existem outras vítimas lá fora? Será que queremos acreditar que não houve outras vítimas depois de Jacob?

: I also had that same question. Did Heinrich really stop with Jacob? The way US Attorney Andy Luger talked about it at the news conference after Heinrich confessed was as though this whole question of whether Heinrich harmed any other kids wasn’t something we’re saying much about.

: Acha que há vítimas depois de Jacob?

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

: Será que ele está a ser considerado como possível suspeito em qualquer outro desaparecimento de crianças?

: Not that I’m aware of.

: Estas eram perguntas justas e óbvias a fazer. Danny Heinrich admitiu ter raptado e agredido sexualmente não um mas dois rapazes, e é suspeito de ter atacado vários outros rapazes em Paynesville antes disso.

: 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.

: Dezenas de cassetes VHS de jovens rapazes envolvidos em actividades de rotina como entregar jornais, brincar nos parques infantis, e andar de bicicleta. Os vídeos parecem ter sido filmados pelo arguido, e alguns deles parecem ter sido filmados a partir de uma câmara escondida.

: 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.

: Assim, fui à procura de outros casos não resolvidos de homens estranhos a tentar raptar crianças. Enviámos um investigador e um estagiário ao Centro de História do Estado para analisar microfilmes de jornais antigos da área de Paynesville, e encontrámos algo.

: In February of 1991, about a year and a half after Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped, a notice appeared in the Paynesville press. “Be on the alert,” it said. It warned that in the past three weeks, there had been three calls to police about a suspicious man spotted by school children in the Paynesville area watching them and trying to approach them. A man described as medium sized, a man who drove a blue car.

: And then, about a month later, the Paynesville Police called the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office because they’d been getting reports of a car following paper boys on their morning routes. An officer from the sheriff’s office showed up, and found the car. It was following a paper boy. He ran the plates, and realized the man was Danny Heinrich. But Heinrich wasn’t breaking any traffic laws, so the officer didn’t pull him over.

: Há outros relatórios como este nos jornais de pequenas cidades de todo o Minnesota nos anos após o rapto de Jacob, relatos de homens suspeitos em carros a seguirem as crianças ou mesmo a tentar raptá-las. Se algum desses homens era Heinrich ou se Heinrich realmente raptou e assassinou mais alguém, talvez nunca saibamos porque, como parte do acordo de defesa, as autoridades policiais concordaram em perguntar apenas a Danny Heinrich sobre Jacob e Jared. Eles concordaram em não perguntar a Heinrich sobre quaisquer outros 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.

: Tínhamos crenças mas não provas antes de ele nos dizer. Assim, o meu trabalho em todas estas circunstâncias terríveis, sem grandes escolhas, era fazer duas coisas: colocá-lo atrás das grades durante muito tempo e obter as respostas que esta família e o Estado do Minnesota têm procurado durante quase 27 anos.

: 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.

: Uma pessoa fez isto. Uma pessoa nunca o disse a mais ninguém. E demorou literalmente tanto tempo, seguindo absolutamente todas as pistas que tinham.

: 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.

: E o Deputado Chefe do Condado de Stearns, Bruce Bechtold.

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

: A forma como falavam sobre isso, era como se Heinrich fosse o criminoso perfeito que tinha cometido o crime perfeito.

: Nas últimas sete semanas, passámos algum tempo a analisar este quadro pintado por Danny Heinrich pelas forças da lei. E começámos por tentar descobrir mais sobre quem era Danny Heinrich. Uma das pessoas que encontrámos foi um camionista chamado Roger Fyle que conhecia Heinrich desde os seus primeiros dias em 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.

: E Roger disse que embora ele, agora, saiba que Danny Heinrich é um violador e assassino de crianças, ele ainda olha para trás com carinho para a infância deles juntos.

: No, I do cherish the times that we did have because we had a lot of, you know. A lot of laughs. We laughed a lot together. But I don’t want to know if he’s fucking just, you know, got the dick, you know.

: Roger lembrou-se de Heinrich como uma espécie de miúdo nervoso e vacilante, indeciso.

: Ele pensaria em algo durante muito tempo antes de o fazer, meditaria sobre isso. Será isto a coisa certa a fazer? Será esta a coisa certa a fazer? Devo andar na minha bicicleta ou devo caminhar? Sabe, estas coisas simples. Estas coisas simples na vida, teve problemas com elas.

: 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.

: Ele nunca pôde tomar decisões, sabe. Tinha dificuldade em tomar decisões.

: Ao crescerem, Roger e Heinrich corriam muito pela cidade, na sua maioria à noite. Quanto ao que eles faziam...

: 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.

: Com o passar do tempo, Heinrich instalou-se como operário numa empresa chamada Buffalo Veneer And Plywood. Começou a trabalhar lá há cerca de 11 anos e ainda lá trabalhava na altura da sua prisão no ano passado.

: Fui seu supervisor directo durante bastante tempo, por isso trabalhei de perto com ele, sabe.

: Heinrich’s boss, Derrick Bloom, said Heinrich didn’t really stand out

: Pretty much a standard paid employee. You know, he’d come to work, did his job, and it didn’t really have a whole lot of problems with him.

: Bastante média, excepto por uma pequena coisa.

: 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.

: A ser investigado para o caso 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.

: Em 2008, telefonou por causa de alguns tipos bêbados que estavam a ser chatos. Em 2005, telefonou duas vezes à polícia, uma vez pela janela do seu carro ter sido esmagada, outra vez para se queixar de alguns miúdos que estavam a gritar e a lutar lá fora perto da sua casa.

: In 2003, he called police in the small town of Benson, where he was living at the time, to report a burglary at his house. When the officer showed up to investigate, Heinrich invited him in. And as the officer looked around, he didn’t find much evidence of a burglary. As he put it in his report, “Mr. Heinrich had many items of value located on both levels of his home including televisions, VCR, DVD players, computers, collectibles, including Diecast model cars, knives, swords, and an extensive collection of DVDs and VHS tapes, all of which was easily accessible and not taken.”

: Este homem, em cuja casa os investigadores Wetterling tinham querido entrar durante anos, tinha de facto convidado um agente da polícia a entrar, ele próprio, voluntariamente para olhar à sua volta para ver o que lá estava. Mas, tanto quanto podemos ver pelo relatório da polícia, o agente não fazia ideia de que Heinrich era um dos principais suspeitos no caso Wetterling porque o agente apenas o tratava como qualquer outra chamada.

: 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 compraria álcool para alguns dos rapazes da cidade, incluindo Danny Heinrich. E ele parecia ter sempre um grupo de rapazes à sua volta, muitos deles bêbados ou pedrados. Falei com outra pessoa que conhecia Hart em criança, um rapaz chamado Brad Froelich. E Brad disse-me que Hart abusou sexualmente dele e de muitas outras crianças. Para Brad, tudo começou quando ele tinha cerca de nove anos.

: 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 serviu no Vietname. Diz ter sido exposto ao Agente Orange enquanto lá servia.

: 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.

: O Sr. Hart não era esse tipo de pedófilo. Ele era para a procura de um pacote de seis cervejas ou um par de charros de marijuana. Ele tinha todo o sexo que conseguia aguentar.

: E, de facto, Larry disse-me que Hart tinha até tentado arranjar alguns nomes de pessoas que ele sabia que poderiam ter sido capazes de raptar Jacob.

: Ele estava a fornecer-me muitas informações sobre os seus conhecidos conhecidos pedófilos, por assim dizer, lá em cima.

: Larry tomou notas e todas as pessoas que Hart mencionou. Eu tenho uma cópia das suas notas, e elas duram 25 páginas.

: Ele estava a tentar dar nomes de todas as pessoas que possivelmente poderiam estar envolvidas. E Dan Heinrich foi o mais notável que ele forneceu.

: Era mesmo conhecido como o mais notável na altura?

: Sim.

: 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 disse, Hart também lhe disse que iria festejar com Heinrich e outros rapazes, e que ele até faria sexo com Heinrich em algum momento.

: And here’s the really interesting thing about Dewey Hart, he had a spot he liked to go to, a place where Brad Froelick has said Hart would take him and other boys to get them drunk and sexually abuse them; a spot where you think the investigators on the Wetterling case would have searched, especially because both Hart and Heinrich were top suspects in the Wetterling case; a little place out by a field near a gravel pit just outside of downtown Paynesville right off the main road into town; a place where Roger Fyle, Heinrich’s childhood friend, said Hart and Heinrich’s older brother Dave would go to party. Roger said Danny Heinrich could have been brought there by his older brother.

: Ah, sim. Era um lugar de convívio para algumas das crianças mais velhas. Dewey passou muito tempo lá em baixo e alguns dos seus amigos. Sim, vai-se lá e fuma-se erva, sabes, uma bebida de cerveja, foxfire, festa.

: Eles tinham um nome para este lugar.

: Costumavam chamar-lhe O Grande Vale.

: O Grande Vale.

: 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.

: A forma como o Xerife do Condado de Stearns, John Sanner, falou mais tarde sobre esta área onde Heinrich os trouxe foi como se estivesse a milhas de distância de qualquer coisa.

: 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.

: Está bem, então posso mostrar-vos. Portanto, Ok, se olharmos para aqui. Então, isto é fotografia aérea de 1991. Isto é 23. Isto é 33 a chegar ao norte.

: Está bem.

: Este é o bosque de árvores que costumava ser um poço de cascalho estatal ali mesmo.

: Na semana passada, dirigi-me ao local com Natalie Jablonski, uma produtora deste podcast. Encostámos à berma da estrada, junto a um campo forrado de árvores.

: 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.

: Pode mostrar-me?

: Basta ir aqui do cascalho.

: 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.

: Havia um buraco numa área que apenas olhava para fora do lugar e apenas tinha a minha curiosidade durante muitos anos de olhar para ele à distância e até que uma vez o olhei mais de perto, mas nada realmente registado a não ser que estava fora do lugar com tudo o resto porque era uma tigela rochosa, e tudo o resto foi derrubado pela relva, ou árvores, ou pincel. Mas este lugar destacava-se como uma tigela rochosa.

: Qual era o seu tamanho? Qual era o seu aspecto?

: Provavelmente com quatro pés de diâmetro ou algo parecido, e com um pequeno oblongo em forma de nada além de pedras de bom tamanho, com uma grande rocha mesmo à saída do centro.

: Bob told Curtis he wishes someone would have come and asked him back then if he’d seen anything strange because, now, he wonders whether this hole was where Jacob was buried. That would have been nice to let the people that owned the property in the area that kind of keep an eye out on. And if they see anything that stands out, maybe this thing could have gotten brought out a lot sooner or a lot better.

: As far as we know, investigators still haven’t dug up the Big Valley, the site where Heinrich says he sexually assaulted and murdered Jacob Wetterling, the main crime scene. Instead they focused on another site, the place across the street where Heinrich said he took Jacob’s remains about a year later and buried them in a hole about a foot or two deep.

: A few weeks ago authorities showed up with shovels to excavate the site. Today, it’s a cow pasture owned by a farmer named Doug Voss.

: Throughout the day, then, we made sure that the cattle weren’t interfering with their work, and keeping them occupied, and seeing to it they could do what they needed to do.

: The investigators plan was to use a metal detector to try to get a reading on the metal buttons from Jacob’s red jacket that he’d worn that night. Jacob’s red jacket was the most recognizable detail that people had been told to look for. Everyone in this part of Minnesota knew what the jacket looked like because after the kidnapping, the sheriff had a replica made of the jacket, and a lieutenant held it up to the cameras, and told everyone to be on the lookout for it.

: Foi visto pela última vez com um casaco idêntico a este.

: 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.

: E, de facto, toda esta noção de crime perfeito, todos estes programas de televisão, livros e filmes sobre casos impossíveis, casos frios, mistérios não resolvidos, pessoas que desapareceram sem deixar rasto, tudo isso desviou a nossa atenção das acções das forças da lei, longe de fazer perguntas difíceis às pessoas que supostamente deveriam estar a resolver estes crimes.

: O crime perfeito é apenas uma desculpa para as falhas da aplicação da lei, e nós compramo-lo. Mas na realidade não há crimes perfeitos. Há apenas investigações falhadas. E a verdade é que haverá sempre pessoas como Danny Heinrich. A questão é, que tipo de aplicação da lei teremos de apanhá-los?

: In the Dark é produzido por Samara Freemark. A produtora associada é Natalie Jablonski. In the Dark é editada por Catherine Winter, com a ajuda de Hans Buetow. Reportagem adicional significativa para este episódio por Curtis Gilbert, Tom Scheck, Jennifer Vogel, Emily Haavik, e Jackie Renzetti. O chefe de redacção da APM Reports é Chris Worthington. Os editores da Web são Dave Peters e Andy Kruse. O videógrafo é Jeff Thompson. A nossa música temática é composta por Gary Meister. Este episódio foi misturado por Corey Schreppel. Graças também a Will Craft, Stephen Smith, Johnny Vince Evans, Cameron Wiley, Steve Griffith, Eric Skramstad, Sasha Aslanian, Brita Green, e Molly Bloom.

: Vá a InTheDarkPodcast.org para saber mais sobre Danny Heinrich, sobre como era realmente a sua vida, os empregos que tinha, os relatórios policiais, os lugares onde vivia, e para se inscrever na nossa lista de e-mail, para que possamos informá-lo quando decidirmos sobre o nosso próximo projecto.

: Na Escuridão é possível em parte, graças aos nossos ouvintes. Pode apoiar um jornalismo mais independente como este no InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate.

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