Tam Transkript: Karanlıkta S1 E9 - Gerçek

Karanlıkta: S1 E9 Gerçek

: Daha önce Karanlıkta'da.

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

: 911 Acil Durum.

: Çocuklarından bazıları film almak için Tom Thumb'a gitmişler. Ve dönüş yolunda biri onları durdurmuş.

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

: Koşarken arkana baktın mı?

: Evet, aşağıya indiğimizde.

: Ne gördün?

: 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.

: Yani o gece kimse gelip kapınızı çalmadı mı?

: Hayır.

: Ve o gece kimse gelip evinizi aramadı mı?

: Hayır.

: Bildiğiniz kadarıyla evinizin etrafındaki çiftlik binalarını kimse aramadı mı?

: Hayır.

: 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.

: Yedi hafta önce Jared Scheierl, Danny Heinrich getirilirken mahkeme salonunda oturuyordu. Jared 27 yıldır bu anı bekliyordu; Jared henüz 12 yaşındayken yabancı bir adam onu Cold Spring kasabasında yol kenarındaki bir arabaya zorla bindirip çakıllı bir yola götürdüğünden, ona cinsel saldırıda bulunduğundan ve sonra onları kasabaya geri götürdüğünden beri.

: 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.

: Onca yıldan sonra Jared'e saldıran adam nihayet yakalanmıştı. Bu, herkesin Jared'e ne olduğu ve Jacob Wetterling'e ne olduğu hakkındaki gerçeği nihayet duyacağı andı.

: 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.

: Heinrich'in o gün mahkeme salonunda yaptığı itiraf, grafik, korkunç ve ayrıntılı, insanların beklediğinden çok daha ayrıntılıydı. Heinrich, olay örgüsü, aksiyon, ikinci tahmin, düşünme ve dinleyen herkesi dehşete düşüren diyaloglar, Jacob'ın kendisine söylediğini söylediği satırlar, Jacob'a onu öldürmeden hemen önce söylediğini söylediği şeylerle bütün bir hikayeyi ortaya koydu. Heinrich Jacob'a yaptıklarını anlatarak mahkeme salonunu büyülerken Jared sadece birkaç metre ötede oturmuş tüm bunları dinliyordu.

: Benim için mahkemedeki ayrıntıları, hayatını, son dakikalarını dinlemek, o çocuğun yerinde ben de olabilirdim. Jacob olabilirdim.

: Heinrich, Jacob'a karşı işlediği suçları itiraf etmeyi bitirdikten sonra Jared'e ne yaptığına geldi. Tüm bu ayrıntılar ve diyaloglarla hikayeyi aynı şekilde anlattı. Ve sonra, Heinrich hikayenin Jared'in daha önce hiç duymadığı bir kısmına girmeye başladı. Heinrich, Jared'i zorladığını söylediği bir seks eylemini grafik detaylarıyla anlattı.

: 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 orada sessizce oturup dinlemek zorunda kaldı. İş bittikten sonra Jared basın toplantısına gitti ve ön sıraya oturdu. ABD Savcısı Andy Luger gazetecilere hitap ederken onu dinledi.

: Sonunda biliyoruz. Gerçeği biliyoruz. Danny Heinrich artık şüpheli bir kişi değil. Jacob Wetterling'in katili olduğunu itiraf etti.

: Jared da bazı açıklamalarda bulundu.

: 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.

: Dışarıda başka kurbanlar da var mı? Yakup'tan sonra başka kurban olmadığına inanmak istiyor muyuz?

: 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.

: Sence Jacob'dan sonra hiç kurban var mıdır?

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

: Bu doğrultuda, başka çocuk kayıplarında da olası şüpheli olarak inceleniyor mu?

: Not that I’m aware of.

: Bunlar adil sorulardı ve sorulacakları da belliydi. Danny Heinrich bir değil iki çocuğu kaçırıp cinsel saldırıda bulunduğunu itiraf etmişti ve daha önce Paynesville'de birkaç çocuğa daha saldırdığından şüpheleniliyordu.

: 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.

: Gazete dağıtmak, oyun parklarında oynamak ve bisiklete binmek gibi rutin faaliyetlerde bulunan genç erkek çocuklarının düzinelerce VHS kaseti. Videoların davalı tarafından çekildiği ve bazılarının gizli bir kameradan çekildiği anlaşılıyor.

: 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.

: Ben de çocukları kaçırmaya çalışan yabancı adamlarla ilgili çözülmemiş başka vakalar aramaya başladım. Paynesville bölgesindeki eski gazetelerin mikrofilmlerini incelemesi için bir araştırmacı ve bir stajyeri Eyalet Tarih Merkezi'ne gönderdik ve bir şeyler bulduk.

: 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.

: Jacob'ın kaçırılmasından sonraki yıllarda Minnesota'daki küçük kasaba gazetelerinde buna benzer başka haberler de var; arabalı şüpheli adamların çocukları takip ettiği ve hatta kaçırmaya çalıştığına dair haberler. Bu adamlardan herhangi birinin Heinrich olup olmadığını ya da Heinrich'in gerçekten başka birini kaçırıp öldürüp öldürmediğini asla bilemeyeceğiz çünkü savunma anlaşmasının bir parçası olarak, kolluk kuvvetleri Danny Heinrich'e sadece Jacob ve Jared hakkında soru sormayı kabul etti. Heinrich'e başka suçlar hakkında soru sormamayı kabul ettiler.

: 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.

: O bize söylemeden önce inancımız vardı ama kanıtımız yoktu. Dolayısıyla, tüm bu korkunç koşullar altında ve gerçekten harika bir seçeneğim yokken benim işim iki şey yapmaktı: Onu uzun süre parmaklıklar ardında tutmak ve bu ailenin ve Minnesota Eyaleti'nin neredeyse 27 yıldır aradığı cevapları bulmak.

: 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.

: Bunu bir kişi yaptı. Bir kişi başka kimseye söylemedi. Ve kelimenin tam anlamıyla bu kadar uzun sürdü, sahip oldukları her ipucunu kesinlikle takip ettiler.

: 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.

: Ve Stearns Bölgesi Baş Yardımcısı Bruce Bechtold.

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

: Konuşmalarına bakılırsa, Heinrich mükemmel bir suç işlemiş mükemmel bir suçlu gibiydi.

: Geçtiğimiz yedi hafta boyunca, kolluk kuvvetlerinin Danny Heinrich hakkında çizdiği bu resmi incelemek için biraz zaman harcadık. Ve işe Danny Heinrich'in kim olduğu hakkında daha fazla bilgi edinmeye çalışarak başladık. Bulduğumuz kişilerden biri, Heinrich'i Paynesville'deki ilk günlerinden tanıyan Roger Fyle adında bir kamyon şoförüydü.

: 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.

: Roger, Danny Heinrich'in bir tecavüzcü ve çocuk katili olduğunu bilmesine rağmen, birlikte geçirdikleri çocukluk yıllarını hala sevgiyle hatırladığını söyledi.

: 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, Heinrich'i kararsız, gergin ve titrek bir çocuk olarak hatırlıyordu.

: Bir şeyi yapmadan önce uzun süre düşünür, üzerinde meditasyon yapardı. Yapılacak doğru şey bu mu? Yapılacak doğru şey bu mu? Bisiklete mi binmeliyim yoksa yürümeli miyim? Bilirsiniz, bu basit şeyler. Hayattaki bu basit şeylerle başı dertteydi.

: 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.

: Asla karar veremezdi, bilirsiniz. Karar vermekte zorlanırdı.

: Büyürken Roger ve Heinrich çoğunlukla geceleri kasabada koştururlardı. Ne yaptıklarına gelince-

: 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.

: Heinrich zaman içinde Buffalo Veneer And Plywood adlı bir şirkette işçi olarak çalışmaya başladı. Yaklaşık 11 yıl önce orada çalışmaya başlamış ve geçen yıl tutuklandığında hala orada çalışıyormuş.

: Bir süre onun doğrudan amiriydim, bu yüzden onunla yakın çalıştım, bilirsiniz.

: 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.

: Küçük bir şey dışında oldukça ortalama.

: 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.

: Jacob Wetterling davası için soruşturuluyor.

: 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.

: 2008 yılında, rahatsız edici davranışlarda bulunan bazı sarhoş adamlar için aramış. 2005 yılında, biri arabasının camı kırıldığı için, diğeri de evinin yakınında bağıran ve kavga eden bazı çocukları şikayet etmek için olmak üzere iki kez polisi aramış.

: 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.”

: Wetterling müfettişlerinin yıllardır evine girmek istediği bu adam, aslında bir polis memurunu içeride ne olduğuna bakmak için kendi isteğiyle içeri davet etmişti. Ancak polis raporundan anladığımız kadarıyla, memurun Heinrich'in Wetterling davasının en önemli şüphelilerinden biri olduğuna dair hiçbir fikri yoktu çünkü memur bunu herhangi bir çağrı gibi değerlendirdi.

: 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, Danny Heinrich de dahil olmak üzere kasabadaki bazı çocuklar için alkol satın alırdı. Etrafında her zaman çoğu sarhoş ya da kafası güzel bir grup çocuk olurdu. Hart'ı çocukken tanıyan başka biriyle konuştum, Brad Froelich adında bir adam. Brad bana Hart'ın kendisine ve diğer pek çok çocuğa cinsel tacizde bulunduğunu söyledi. Brad için her şey dokuz yaşındayken başlamış.

: 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 Vietnam'da görev yapmış. Orada görev yaptığı sırada Agent Orange'a maruz kaldığını söylüyor.

: 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.

: Bay Hart o tür bir pedofil değildi. Altı paket bira ya da birkaç esrar istiyordu. Yapabileceği kadar seks yaptı, tamam mı?

: Ve aslında Larry bana Hart'ın Jacob'ı kaçırabileceğini düşündüğü bazı kişilerin isimlerini bile bulmaya çalıştığını söyledi.

: Bana oradaki pedofil tanıdıklarıyla ilgili pek çok bilgi veriyordu.

: Larry notlar aldı ve Hart'ın bahsettiği herkesi not etti. Notlarının bir kopyası bende var ve 25 sayfa tutuyor.

: Bu işe karışmış olabilecek herkesin ismini vermeye çalışıyordu. Verdiği isimler arasında en dikkat çekeni Dan Heinrich'ti.

: Hatta o zamanlar en dikkate değer kişi olarak mı biliniyordu?

: Evet.

: 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, Hart'ın kendisine Heinrich ve diğer çocuklarla parti yapacağını ve hatta bir noktada Heinrich ile seks yaptığını söylediğini belirtti.

: 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, evet. Bazı büyük çocukların takıldığı bir yerdi. Dewey ve bazı arkadaşları orada çok zaman geçirirdi. Evet, oraya gider, ot içer, bira içer, ateş yakar, parti yapardınız.

: Burası için bir isimleri vardı.

: Eskiden buraya Büyük Vadi derlerdi.

: Büyük Vadi.

: 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.

: Stearns İlçesi Şerifi John Sanner'ın daha sonra Heinrich'in onları getirdiği bu bölgeden bahsetme şekli sanki her şeyden kilometrelerce uzaktaymış gibiydi.

: 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.

: Tamam. Size gösterebilirim. Tamam, buraya bakarsak. Bu 1991 hava fotoğrafı. Bu 23. Bu 33 kuzeyden geliyor.

: Tamam.

: Burası eskiden devletin çakıl ocağı olarak kullandığı ağaç korusu.

: Geçen hafta, bu podcast'in yapımcılarından Natalie Jablonski ile birlikte bölgeye doğru yola çıktık. Yolun kenarında, ağaçlarla kaplı bir tarlanın yanında durduk.

: 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.

: Bana gösterebilir misin?

: Bilirsin, sadece çakıldan buraya git.

: 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.

: Uzun yıllar boyunca uzaktan baktığım ve bir keresinde daha yakından bakana kadar merakımı uyandıran bir alanda bir çukur vardı, ancak diğer her şeyle birlikte yersiz olması dışında hiçbir şey gerçekten kaydedilmedi çünkü kayalık bir çanaktı ve diğer her şey otlar, ağaçlar veya çalılar tarafından devrilmişti. Ama burası sadece kayalık bir çanak olarak göze çarpıyordu.

: Ne kadar büyüktü? Neye benziyordu?

: Muhtemelen dört ayak çapında ya da öyle bir şeydi ve biraz dikdörtgen şeklindeydi, içinde iyi büyüklükte taşlardan başka bir şey yoktu ve tam ortasından büyük bir kaya vardı.

: 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.

: En son bunun aynısı olan bir ceket giyerken görülmüş.

: 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.

: Ve aslında, tüm bu mükemmel suç kavramı, imkansız davalar, faili meçhuller, çözülmemiş gizemler, iz bırakmadan ortadan kaybolan insanlar hakkındaki tüm bu TV şovları, kitaplar ve filmler, tüm bunlar dikkatimizi kolluk kuvvetlerinin eylemlerinden, bu suçları çözmesi gereken insanlara zor sorular sormaktan uzaklaştırdı.

: Mükemmel suç, kolluk kuvvetlerinin başarısızlıkları için bir bahane ve biz de bunu satın alıyoruz. Ama gerçekte mükemmel suç yoktur. Sadece başarısız soruşturmalar vardır. Ve gerçek şu ki Danny Heinrich gibi insanlar her zaman olacaktır. Asıl soru, onları yakalamak için ne tür bir kolluk kuvvetine sahip olacağımız?

: In the Dark'ın yapımcılığını Samara Freemark üstleniyor. Yardımcı yapımcı Natalie Jablonski'dir. In the Dark, Hans Buetow'un yardımıyla Catherine Winter tarafından düzenlenmiştir. Bu bölüm için Curtis Gilbert, Tom Scheck, Jennifer Vogel, Emily Haavik ve Jackie Renzetti tarafından önemli ek raporlar hazırlanmıştır. APM Reports'un genel yayın yönetmeni Chris Worthington'dır. Web editörleri Dave Peters ve Andy Kruse. Videograf Jeff Thompson'dır. Tema müziğimiz Gary Meister tarafından bestelenmiştir. Bu bölümün miksajı Corey Schreppel tarafından yapılmıştır. Will Craft, Stephen Smith, Johnny Vince Evans, Cameron Wiley, Steve Griffith, Eric Skramstad, Sasha Aslanian, Brita Green ve Molly Bloom'a da teşekkürler.

: Danny Heinrich hakkında daha fazla bilgi edinmek, hayatının gerçekte nasıl olduğunu, yaptığı işleri, polis raporlarını, yaşadığı yerleri öğrenmek ve e-posta listemize kaydolmak için InTheDarkPodcast.org adresine gidin, böylece bir sonraki projemize karar verdiğimizde size haber verebiliriz.

: In the Dark kısmen dinleyicilerimiz sayesinde mümkün olmaktadır. Bunun gibi daha fazla bağımsız gazeteciliği InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate adresinden destekleyebilirsiniz.

Sonix ile sesi otomatik olarak metne dönüştürün