完整的文字记录。在黑暗中S1 E7 - 这个安静的地方

在黑暗中：S1 E7这个安静的地方

: 前情提要：在黑暗中。

: It’s a case that defied logic then and now.

: On the outskirts of his hometown of St. Joseph, a young boy’s mysterious disappearance.

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

: 各个年龄段和各行各业的人都出来保持希望，希望11岁的雅各布能够安全回家。

: I don’t know. I know we reached the point after the investigation there, we had really nothing. At that point, we let Heinrich go.

: They had all of that. None of it was new. None of it is new. Stearns County, the FBI, they’ve all had all of this. None of this was new.

: Just like, “What? We lived here the whole time. He’s just down the damn road all those years,” you know. And it’s like, “What?”

: The people that worked on that case gave truly 110% every day they were there. And I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anything we could have done differently.

: 1978年12月，在斯特恩斯县一个偏远地区的农舍里，也就是雅各布-韦特林后来被绑架的那个县，一个名叫爱丽丝-胡林的女人正在为假期做准备。爱丽丝已经离婚了，她和她的四个孩子住在一起。苏西、帕蒂、韦恩和比利。苏西是最年长的。她当时16岁，在附近镇上的一家舒适的咖啡馆做兼职服务员。

: On the night of December 14th 1978, Alice and her four kids went to bed. Alice’s bedroom was on the first floor. The kids slept upstairs. Sometime late at night, a man entered the Huling house. He cut the phone line, and then he went into Alice’s bedroom, and attacked her. He hit her with some kind of heavy object, maybe a metal club, and shot her.

: And then, the man headed upstairs. He shot and killed three of Alice’s four children in their beds. And then, the man approached 11-year-old Billy who was hiding under his covers, trying to stay as still as possible. The man fired two shots in Billy’s direction. Both hit the pillow, just inches from Billy’s head. Billy kept still, hoping the man would think he was dead. Then, the man left.

: 谋杀案震惊了胡林夫妇居住的斯蒂尔斯县农村社区，并让州犯罪调查局的调查人员和警长们困惑不解地寻找谋杀案背后的一些零星原因。没有人被逮捕，官员们对嫌疑人只字不提。

: 11年后，当雅各布-韦特林（Jacob Wetterling）在同一个县被绑架时，该案件仍未解决。

: 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.

: 雅各布被绑架后，每个人，媒体、执法部门、邻居都在谈论，在这个安静的农村地方发生这样的犯罪是多么令人惊讶。

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

: Considered to be America’s quiet and safe heartland has-

: 一个晚上，一个可怕的事件夺走了这个小镇的纯真。

: The implication was that the agency in charge of investigating Jacob’s disappearance, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, had never worked a case like this before, a case so mysterious and terrifying. But that wasn’t true. Jacob’s kidnapping wasn’t the first big case the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office had dealt with. And it wasn’t the first big case they’d failed to solve. The Jacob Wetterling case was just one in a long line of failed investigations.

: After the killer left the Huling house, the boy who survived, 11-year-old Billy Huling, ran through the snow to a neighbor’s house. He told them his family had been shot. Jim Kostreba was the first officer called to the scene.

: 我仍然记得开车到家里时，天气是多么寒冷，月亮是多么明亮。那是一个美丽的夜晚，一个美丽的夜晚。我想我最记得的是踏进门的时候，闻到了枪弹的味道。然后，我知道那所房子里发生了可怕的事情。

: 科斯特雷巴向卧室里看了看。

: 我还记得看到那三个孩子和他们的母亲一起死在床上。在这所房子里发生的四起凶杀案，至少可以说是有点令人不安。

: 科斯特雷巴将继续从事雅各布-韦特林案件的工作。在雅各布被绑架两年后，他甚至成为斯泰恩斯县的警长，并一直担任这一职务，直到2003年约翰-桑纳警长接任。但在那时，科斯特雷巴只是一名巡逻副手，而不是调查员。因此，他保护了现场，直到调查人员能够到达那里。

: Meanwhile, a young EMT named Steve Mund arrived at the Huling house. Mund later got a job as a deputy in the sheriff’s office, and he worked on the Wetterling case too. But that morning, Mund was there to take the bodies to the coroner.

: Obviously, this is a huge deal in the same quiet area in 1978. I mean, homicides are normally one person. You don’t have an entire family killed or nearly entire family killed except for Billy.

: Mund watched as the investigators arrive to collect evidence. They took photos of the inside of the house. In some of the pictures, you can see the kids’ toy cars scattered around. I’d read a statement Mund gave later about seeing investigators at the scene do a few things that seemed pretty questionable. That statement later ended up in court.

: And in it, Mund said that he saw a state investigator pick up a phone in the Huling house before he dusted it for fingerprints, and that a captain from the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office realized the mistake and, “Said something like, ‘Oh well.'” Mund wrote that at that point, he turned to his co-worker, and said, “Maybe we should wait outside until the sheriff’s office is done.”

: While they waited, Mund said he saw the sheriff come out of the house holding what looked like the flashlight he’d seen on the Huling’s kitchen table. The sheriff used it to search the woods for any sign of footprints. But that flashlight, it might not have belonged to the Huling’s. It might have been the killer’s. When I reached Steve Mund, he didn’t want to talk about any of that.

: From 1978 to now, police training and education, and crime scene processing techniques have improved a thousandfold. So, there’s no doubt in my mind that people there did the best they thought they were doing at the time. And looking back, maybe they could have done better. But I think, at that time, they’ve done the best that they think they’re doing, so.

: The murder of the Huling family terrified people in Stearns County. Newspapers reported on how parents were arming the children with shotguns, and men were taking time off work to stay home with their wives and children. People sat facing their front doors with guns ready. One man told a reporter, “All I can say is I would hate to run out of gas at 2:00 in the morning and have to knock on any of my neighbor’s doors.”

: 我和斯泰恩斯县一位名叫珍-库尔泽的女士谈起了当年社区的恐慌。

: When we moved out here in ’72, he would never lock that door, never ever. We never locked the door. But all at once, we’re locking doors because we live back here on the end of the road. Somebody could come in here, and nobody would ever know it. Actually, he started having a gun in the house, a pistol.

: Wow. Because you’re thinking like, “If this happens, I want to be…”

: They’re not getting in.

: 珍告诉我，一个警察实际上给了她一些建议，告诉她该怎么做。

: 如果你必须在外面射杀某人，就把他拖进来，因为他必须在你的房子里。

: 好的，要合法？

: 嗯哼（肯定的）。

: 好的。

: 而且在墙上打一枪警告，让他们检查一下也是个好主意。

: 谋杀案发生后不久，当时斯蒂尔斯县的警长在接受电视记者采访时似乎和其他人一样感到困惑。

: 我心中最大的疑问是，这种类型的犯罪怎么会发生在我们县的这个有点偏远的地区。而且这个人必须仔细观察，确定这种类型的犯罪动机，因为它肯定是不寻常的。

: 胡林谋杀案发生四天后，在隔壁的莱特县，一个名叫约瑟夫-图雷的人在一个卡车站停下来吃东西。

: I’m in there having breakfast, and I’m trying to get a couple of dates with a couple of the waitresses and all that. And, you know, that’s how I get most my dates is with waitress because I eat out a lot. Everywhere I eat, just eat out, you know.

: I talked with Ture on the phone, and he told me he used to go to that restaurant all the time. It was a popular place. Alice Huling used to go there sometimes for coffee. Ture was a regular. He’d been living in his car. And in the weeks leading up to the Huling murders, some of the waitresses had started complaining to their boss that Ture had been harassing them, and that, sometimes, he even followed them in his car when they drove home after their shifts late at night.

: 所以，我猜，他们打电话给警察，说这个人在骚扰他们或什么的。

: So, a deputy from the Wright County Sheriff’s Office stopped by.

: So, he comes in there, and he … I guess, he went around the parking lot, and my car was sitting right out there. And then, he comes in, and he says, “I got to talk to you outside for a minute.”

: The deputy thought the car Ture was driving might be stolen. So, he arrested him. It would later turn out that the car wasn’t actually stolen. But what caught the officer’s attention was what was inside the car, a small brown diary with a list of the names of waitresses, their addresses, and their license plate numbers, a metal club, and a little toy car, a Batmobile car, to be exact.

: Immediately, the chief deputy of the Wright County Sheriff’s Office connected it to the murder of the Huling family that had happened just four days earlier, and he contacted the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office. He told them he had a possible suspect they should interview, a man named Joseph Ture.

: Now, let the records show that we’re at the Wright County Sheriff’s Office. The time is 2:40. And Officer Kostreba and I are talking to Joseph Donald Ture. Date of birth is 2/7/51.

: I got this recording from the archives at the Stearns County Courthouse. In the interview, two officers from the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office are interrogating Joseph Ture. One of the officers is a detective named Ross Baker. He died a year later. The other is Jim Kostreba, the first officer called to the scene of the Huling murders.

: In that 1978 interrogation, the officers sat down with Joseph Ture. And out of nowhere, Ture starts saying he didn’t rape anyone. “Look,” he says “just because I have this diary with a list of waitresses doesn’t mean I took these women out and killed them.” The officers put some items from Ture’s car on the table in front of him, the toy Batmobile, the metal club. Detective Baker asked Ture about the metal club.

: 这是你做的吗？

: 不，我发现了这一点。

: And where did you find it, and we’re talking about that.

: 那么，我们从......得到了什么不同呢？

: Well, just … I don’t know.

: 那天晚上，好吧，他们有另一种，一把枪或一把猎枪。

: I don’t know. No, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s illegal to have it, but it might make a policeman a little unhappy if you step out of the car and have this thing in your hand.

: 他们还向图雷询问了玩具蝙蝠车的情况。

: 那里有一个小玩具，一个有蝙蝠侠的小东西。你拿到车的时候，车里也有这个东西吗？

: That’s mine. I have grandkids.

: Ture was just 27 years old. So, what he’s saying here that the toy Batmobile was for his grandkids didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

: 哦，你有孙子吗？

: My daughter does. I’m uncle or …

: Well, if your daughter had children, well, then, you’d be grandfather.

: 是的。

: 你多大了？

: 不，我是说，我的妹妹。

: 哦，你的...

: 叔叔，是的，叔叔。

: Ture changes his story, and says, “Okay. So, no, no, I’m not a grandfather. I’m an uncle or whatever.”

: 那么，几个玩具有什么区别呢？

: 嗯，这可能会有很大的不同。

: The officers tried to ask Ture more detailed questions about the toy Batmobile. But Ture, he wasn’t having it.

: You’d sink in a ship.

: 好吧，把我埋起来，一旦你挖个洞，把我扔到某个沟里。

: Oh, that’s because this is the first time I’ve ever even talked to you, you know, and everything was proceeding real nicely. And we mentioned this toy, and you get a take about the toy. If the toy was in the car, it belonged to your sister’s child, there’s nothing to get upset about really there.

: The officers left. Ture stayed in jail. And over the next few days, the officers did some investigating. They had the seats and door panels torn out of Ture’s car looking for a gun, but they didn’t find one. They went to the place where Ture had worked as a mechanic and looked at his time card. It didn’t give Ture an alibi for the night of the Huling murders.

: They went back and questioned Ture again and brought up the Huling murders directly. Ture responded by asking them all kinds of questions about what kind of evidence they had, whether they’d found the gun, and whether anyone had identified him as the murderer, but there was one thing the officers didn’t do.

: They didn’t take a closer look at that toy Batmobile that they’d found in Ture’s car. They didn’t bring it to Billy Huling, the boy who survived. They didn’t ask Billy if he owned a toy Batmobile like this one, and then check the house to see if it was missing. The officers didn’t do any of that. A week or so later, without any evidence to hold him, a judge let Joseph Ture go.

: Once Ture got out, he went on a murdering and raping spree that’s so complicated, I had to create a timeline just to keep track of it. He kidnapped a waitress from the side of a road in West St. Paul, drove her to a secluded area, sexually assaulted her, and killed her. He broke into a house and killed a teenage girl who was home alone.

: 他开始在深夜开车在明尼阿波利斯四处寻找外面的女人。他至少在街上抓了两个女人并强奸了她们。他还绑架并强奸了一名13岁的女孩。他还试图绑架，至少是另外两名妇女，但她们逃脱了。其中一名妇女通过将点燃的香烟砸在他的脸上而逃脱。

: Ture’s crime spree didn’t come to an end until 1980. And it wasn’t the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office that put an end to it, it was the Minneapolis Police. They arrested Terry for several rapes. And while Ture was in custody, he was charged with murdering the waitress from West St. Paul.

: 然后，一切都崩溃了，你知道。所有的狗屎都砸在了风扇上，你知道。

: 你还有一分钟的时间。

: 该死的。

: Ture received a life sentence for killing the waitress, and he’s been in prison ever since. The Huling case remained unsolved until about two decades after the murders, an agency from outside Stearns County got involved, a cold case unit from the State of Minnesota. The State Cold Case Unit took a look at the case. They went to find Billy Huling, the boy who survived the murders. He was, by that point, grown up with a family of his own.

: One of the people involved with the case told Billy there was some evidence they wanted him to look at, some evidence that might help solve the case. And Billy replied, out of nowhere, “Did you guys find my Batmobile?”

: From there, the State Cold Case Unit investigators quickly built a case based not on high-tech DNA testing or advancements in police technology, but on the exact same evidence that the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office had known about since 1978, the metal bar and the toy Batmobile. 21 years after Ture had killed four members of the Huling family; and after he’d gone on to kill, at least, two more people; and sexually assaulted, at least, three more. A jury finally convicted him of the Huling murders.

: We still don’t know exactly how many people Joseph Ture raped or killed. He’s suspected of killing another girl in Stearns County in 1979, but he hasn’t been charged with that crime.

: I talked to a woman who told me she was attacked by Ture five years before the Huling murders. Lavonne Engesether was working as a waitress in Hudson, Wisconsin back then. And one night, she served a customer who just didn’t seem right, a kind of greasy looking guy. And at the end of her shift, she left and started walking home.

: 他从一些丁香树丛中跳出来，手里拿着一个12块钱的酒瓶，他就这样挥舞着酒瓶，打在我的头边，把我打到了街上。

: 哦，我的天啊。

: And then, the next thing I knew, he was on top of me. I knew it was the customer guy. And he’s on top of me and all. I don’t know what he was doing, but I just realized that no cars were coming down Main Street, and nobody was going to save me, and I had to wrestle away.

: 是的。

: 我就莫名其妙地把他从我身上甩开，我把他甩开，然后我就跑了。

: Lavonne told me she reported it right away to the local cops in Wisconsin, but she said they didn’t take it seriously. Lavonne got married and moved away. And she didn’t think much about the attack until two decades later when she was watching a TV show about an unsolved murder. And all of a sudden, the face of the guy who tried to attack her was on the screen. And she learned his name, Joseph Ture.

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

: 我也和Lavonne谈了Huling案。

: What gets me, I guess, about it is that they didn’t go and ask Billy-

: 如果他有一个蝙蝠车玩具，我知道。我也想过这个问题，他们本来可以抓住他。而就是花了太长时间。

: 我给吉姆-科斯特雷巴（Jim Kostreba）打电话，他是1978年审讯图雷的警官，我问他这件事。

: Why didn’t you go to check with Billy Huling to see if he had a toy Batmobile?

: That’s a question that comes up in my mind many, many times. It’s something that I think about quite a bit because it’s something that should have been done, and it wasn’t. And in retrospect, it should have been.

: Over the past year, I’ve talked to a lot of law enforcement officers. Kostreba was the only one who acknowledged he’d made some mistakes.

: I don’t think it’s unusual to look back and see what could have been done differently, or what was missed, or not done properly. And certainly, in this case, because of what he did over the years, certainly, makes it much more difficult, yes. I think experience is very, very important. And you learn from every case you do. And if you aren’t willing to do that, then you shouldn’t be an investigator.

: But Kostreba said, as far as he knows, there were no changes made at the sheriff’s office to prevent this kind of mistake from happening again. In fact, as best I can tell, there was never any formal training or review at the sheriff’s office about how to learn from the Huling case.

: This kind of looking back is something we’re used to in other professions, even if it’s not always perfect. Hospitals conduct postmortems when patients die unexpectedly. Companies do a review when a new product fails. Farmers reassess after a bad year. And the reason for doing this is to try to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again.

: And it’s not as though this was a one-time problem in Stearns County, having a case they couldn’t seem to solve. One day, I went to the archive of the Stearns County History Museum to do some research on the Jacob Wetterling case. I was there to copy flyers from the early days of the search for Jacob, and to read old news clippings about the case.

: But I got distracted, and I noticed a filing cabinet with a bottom drawer labeled “crime.” I opened it and discovered file after file of unsolved murders from the 1970s and ’80s, the years leading up to Jacob Wetterling’s kidnapping, all of them in Stearns County.

: 有一份关于1976年在一个小镇邮局爆炸的炸弹的文件。爆炸导致助理邮政局长死亡，此案从未被解决。有一份关于1981年一位名叫默特尔-科尔（Myrtle Cole）的老年妇女被谋杀的文件，以及调查人员如何从她的手上提取指纹。因此，他们不得不将尸体挖出来。这起案件也从未被解决。

: There was one file in particular that caught my attention. It was labeled,”Murder, Reker, St. Cloud.” It was about the disappearance of two girls, Mary and Susanne Reker in 1974, 15 years before Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped. I went to meet up with the mother of Mary and Susanne. Her name is Rita Reker.

: It has happened so many years ago. In some ways, it’s like yesterday. But most of the time, it’s like 41 years has gone by, and it’s still unsolved.

: We sat on the couch at Rita’s neat two-story house in St. Cloud, just a few miles from St. Joseph where the Wetterlings live. Rita has lived in this house for more than 40 years. It’s where she raised six children. And one day, in September of 1974, two of Rita’s daughters, Mary and Susanne, went out to buy school supplies. They never came back.

: 我丈夫和我去了警察局，我们问是否有......我忘了术语是什么，但有一个谋杀犯小组之类的。警察局的人说，他们应该有调查谋杀案的人，而且...

: Well, shouldn’t they?

: And they just looked at me and said, “Lady, you watch too much TV.” You know, that was … Yeah that’s that. But yeah, I assume that if something serious happened to our kids that somebody would be there to investigate.

: 对。那么，人们的反应是什么呢？

: That we were just imagining too much. We should go home and wait. And when they got hungry enough, they’d be back.

: 没有执法部门的人在寻找这些女孩。因此，丽塔和她的家人就开始自己寻找。

: Everywhere that we could think of, yeah. My husband took off work. And there were days we kept the kids home from school and just looked wherever we thought, you know. I mean, there’s all kinds of … There’s ditches, and water, and that sort of thing right in St. Cloud itself, you know. And how would we even know where to look? Yeah, yeah.

: Rita and her family didn’t find anything.

: 26 days after the girls went missing, two teenage boys were walking in a quarry on the outskirts of town, and they noticed something in the brush. It was the body of Susanne Reker lying face down, covered in leaves. Officers arrived, and they found Susanne’s sister, Mary. Both girls had been stabbed to death.

: Because the bodies of Mary and Susanne had been found outside the city limits, the case passed into the hands of the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office.

: And, I guess, we expected a big time investigation to start from there on. But our case could not have happened at a worse time in history for an investigation. If you read the details over, I’m sure you’d know a little bit. You don’t know too much about that?

: 不，那是什么？

: Rita told me that her girls’ bodies were found five weeks before the sheriff’s election in November.

: So, some of those deputies on the sheriff’s force were running for the office of sheriff, which was not a time for them to do a big investigation. They were busy with the elections and all, you know, before they could really get serious about an investigation.

: The Reker case got really tangled up in the politics of the sheriff’s office. The lead investigator seemed to want to have the case, so that he could use the solving of it to get elected as sheriff. When that didn’t happen, he refused to let the sheriff even look at the case file.

: 四年后，当警长终于设法从他的首席调查员那里撬开这个案子时，调查员保留了一些证据，一副在犯罪现场发现的眼镜。他把它们放在办公桌的抽屉里。没有人发现它们，直到他在雷克女孩被杀9年后去世。

: One year, opponents of the sheriff tried to spread a rumor that the sheriff was looking to arrest someone, anyone, right before Election Day to gain political points. A man running against the sheriff leaked a strange story to the local media about a possible suspect, a goateed sketch artist who’d used a knife to sharpen pencils in a taxi in a suspicious manner. That lead didn’t pan out, but it did damage the sheriff. He lost the election. The case was a mess.

: Meanwhile, Rita Reker kept waiting to find out what had happened to her girls. 42 years later, she’s still waiting.

: It’s such a mystery to me. It’s just that there are questions unsolved. All those little details about your child are important. Those are the last things that took place in their life. And, I guess, it’s because you want to identify with your child till the last minute of their life. And somehow, you wish you could have been there to save them. Even now.

: So, there were a lot of questionable things going on in the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, but it was hard for anyone to do much about it. There just wasn’t much accountability for the sheriff. And I think part of the reason why has to do with the Office of the Sheriff itself. We talked to a former Stearns County sheriff’s detective named Lou Leland. He worked on a lot of the big cases back then. And Lou said the sheriff back then and now just has too much power.

: And they can’t fire him. You know, unlike the chief of police, he works at the pleasure of the city council. They can fire him any day they want, and they don’t even need a good reason. But, you know, the sheriff is … Oh god.

: The thing about sheriffs is, for the most part, no one’s in charge of them. And there are around 3000 sheriffs in the United States, and almost every one of them is elected. Sheriffs only answer to the people once every few years, when they come up for re-election. That’s different from how it works for a lot of other law enforcement agencies. Most police chiefs are appointed, usually by the local mayor or the city council. If the chief messes up, the mayor can fire them. Sheriffs are the exception, and that exception has given them tremendous power.

: Just look at Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona. He’s a sheriff who set up a tent city outside in a hundred-plus degree heat for inmates of his jail. He’s reinstated chain gangs, and forced inmates to wear pink underwear. And although Sheriff Arpaio has been sued, and subjected to court orders, and criticized by human rights groups, he’s still in office because he keeps winning elections. As he put it in an interview I found on YouTube-

: 我可以在粉红色的内裤上当选。

: And sheriffs are especially powerful outside of big cities. If you live in a rural county, it’s usually the sheriff who’s responsible for solving major crimes, not the police department. So, I wondered, had anyone ever, at any point, tried to do something about this, like tried to put a check on the sheriff’s power in Stearns County to try to change the way sheriffs work?

: And then we came across an old bill that had been introduced in the Minnesota Legislature in 1979, five years after the Reker girls were killed, and one year after the Huling family was murdered. It was written by a state lawmaker for the Stearns County area, a guy named Al Patton, that proposed getting rid of elections for Sheriff. Al Patton’s been retired for a while. Our producer, Samara, called him up to see if he’d be willing to talk a bit about his bill.

: What’s on your mind, kid?

: 我给你打电话是因为我们遇到了一个你提出的关于警长选举的法案。

: Framing, it takes a while. Geez, after almost 40 years, we’re going to stir up this cat again. Okay. Let’s see what we can stir up. Where do you want to meet?

: 萨马拉和我开车出去，在艾尔家附近的一家咖啡馆见到他。

: 你还好吗？

: I’m doing fantastic. If you keep up with me, we’re doing business.

: 对。

: Al told us that in the 1970s, he started hearing about problems in the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, problems with evidence handling, infighting among deputies, a lack of training, failed investigations.

: 正在发生的犯罪行为，对于担任警长职位的个人的教育和背景来说是无法解决的。

: And the way Al Patton saw it, the public wasn’t doing a very good job of scrutinizing the sheriff before deciding whether or not to vote for him. There’s just not that much information that comes out in the media during a campaign for sheriff.

: The newspaper interviews, everybody, four or five candidates on the same page. Well, that page gets flipped over. No one’s going to read that. And so, they’d read a couple of campaign ads, and that’s how you elect your sheriff.

: 因此，阿尔-巴顿想出了一个可能的解决方案。

: It got to a point that I’m going to introduce a bill. We’re going to try and flush these people out. You know, there’s a bill to abolish the sheriff’s department.

: 这就像一个大胆的举动。

: 是的。

: The bill wouldn’t have actually abolished sheriff’s offices, but it would have gotten rid of elections for sheriffs, and turned the job into an appointed position. Sheriffs would be appointed by a county board. That would be a huge change. So, it’s not a surprise what happened to Al Patton’s bill in the Minnesota legislature.

: Actually, the legislation that I introduced was not with mixed feelings, I’ll tell you. It was very straightforward. It was resisted.

: 艾尔告诉我，州警长协会的说客们很快就来拜访他了。

: 我遭到了警长协会的严重反弹。

: I tried to find someone from the Sheriffs Association who remembered this, and they said no one’s around anymore from back then. But I did talk to the general counsel for the Sheriffs Association, and he told me they’ve always opposed any effort to get rid of elections for sheriff. He said switching to a system of appointed sheriffs wouldn’t make the process any less political. And he said elections are good because that way, it’s the public who gets to decide, and they can hold the sheriff accountable directly.

: 阿尔-巴顿告诉我，当年的说客也提出了类似的论点。他们把它变成了一个关于民主和人民意志的问题。

: “You don’t want to take the power to vote away from the people do you, Al?”

: 他们有没有告诉你，比如，撤回这个法案或？

: No, they’re very … You need to understand lobbying. There’s no threats available. They’re just very nice, polite suggestions.

: 那么，他们当时的建议是什么？

: Oh, yes, definitely, they’ll look into it, and deal with it. “We’ll do that for you. We’ll do that right away.” Yup, they dealt with it, all right. Next question.

: They squished it, he said. The bill never even came up for a vote. Patton’s effort had failed.

: 这40年里有什么变化？什么都没变。因此，40年前及以后的问题今天仍然伴随着我们。但是，必须有一个元素在里面，以便有问责制。而当问责制不存在时，灾难性的事情就会发生。

: 而这整个漫长的调查失败的历史，Huling家族的谋杀，他们如何让一个连环杀手离开，Reker女孩的谋杀，警察工作的政治化，解决事情的失败努力，所有这些都在1989年雅各布-韦特林被绑架时或多或少被遗忘。当雅各布被绑架时，这一切就像没有发生过一样。

: I’ve read and watched all the old news coverage I could find, hundreds of articles, and many hours of TV reporting. And as best I could tell, no one was writing stories about how the sheriff’s office had a bad track record when it came to solving big crimes.

: There are no editorials in the papers saying, “We should be concerned that the sheriff’s office is the one in charge of this case. Just look at all these other cases, all those mysterious, violent, high-profile, unsolved crimes.” No one mentioned any of that. Instead, they said what people always say about a place like Stearns County, “What a quiet, peaceful place. These small town cops had no idea what hit them. How could this happen here?”

: 下一次是《黑暗中》。

: Headed for Cold Spring, 200 Main Street, behind Winners Bar, I’ll get there in a minute. It looks like shots are fired, officer down.

: Stearns County Sheriff’s Office has quite a reputation for horrendous investigations, false accusations, leaving families in the dark.

: 斯特恩斯县与明尼苏达州其他地区和全国其他地区相比，情况如何？

: And what’s going on down there? Why can’t anybody solve crime? I mean, why is everything such a secret?

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

: 黑暗中》由萨马拉-弗莱马克制作。副制片人是Natalie Jablonski。黑暗中》由凯瑟琳-温特编辑，并得到汉斯-布托的帮助。APM报告的主编是Chris Worthington。网络编辑是Dave Peters和Andy Kruse。摄像师是Jeff Thompson。我们的主题音乐是由Gary Meister创作的。本集由Johnny Vince Evans混音。

: 进入InTheDarkPodcast.org网站，仔细了解被定罪的凶手约瑟夫-图雷，并聆听1978年那次审讯的音频，观看丽塔-雷克谈论她如何努力寻求帮助寻找女儿的视频。

: 黑暗中》的成功，部分要归功于我们的听众。你可以在InTheDarkPodcast.org/donate网站上支持更多像这样的独立新闻工作。

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