The Minnesota inmate who led investigators to the remains of an 11-year-old boy missing since 1989 confessed Tuesday to killing him, police said.
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Heinrich, 53, made the confession as he was pleading guilty to separate federal child pornography charges.
The mother of an 11-year-old Minnesota boy who was murdered almost three decades ago held back tears Tuesday as she apologized to her son for the horrific way he spent his last moments alive.
In 1989, Wetterling was riding his bike with two other boys when a man in a mask approached them and kidnapped him. We got the truth.
Heinrich said he panicked later in the day and killed Wetterling. Heinrich recalled that Wetterling asked him, “What did I do wrong?”
In the years after Jacob’s disappearance, his mother, Patty, became a nationally known advocate for missing children.
The abduction of Jacob led to the federal 1994 Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, which requires states to maintain sex offender registries and guidelines.
With Patty and Jacob’s father, Jerry Wetterling, in a packed courtroom, Heinrich described donning a mask and confronting Jacob and two friends with a revolver near Jacob’s central Minnesota home of St. Joseph on October 22, 1989. He said he ordered them into a ditch and asked their names and ages. “Looked back, he was still standing”, Heinrich added.
During the assault, Heinrich told the court that Jacob said he was cold and wanted to go home, according to CBS affiliate WCCO. “I raised the revolver again and shot him again”, Heinrich told the court.
“I said I can’t take you all the way home”, Heinrich said. “He started to cry”.
Heinrich said at some point a patrol vehicle with siren and lights passing nearby caused him to panic. He said he pulled out his revolver, which had not been loaded, and put two rounds in the gun. I pulled the trigger again and it went off. The gun didn’t fire.
Heinrich recently showed law enforcement the grave site (where Jacob’s body was uncovered Friday), and then was returned to jail. After the second, Jacob fell to the ground.
In a tweet, Williams relays that Heinrich had never met Jacob Wetterling or Jared Scheierl before he abducted them.
He buried the boy about 100 yards away and camouflaged the area with leaves and twigs, the AP reported. So Heinrich took Jacob’s jacket, bones and skull, put it in a bag and transported it to the rural farm in Paynesville, just across the highway, where he buried it again.
This is the first time Patty has spoken out since Heinrich led authorities to Jacob’s remains last week in a Minnesota field. Human remains were recovered there that DNA analysis confirmed were Jacob’s over the weekend. “It’s incredibly painful to know his last days, his last hours, his last minutes”. “To us, Jacob was alive, until we found him”.
Heinrich had always been under investigators’ scrutiny.
He was testifying under oath, detailing Jacob’s abduction and death in his own words. And the same statute of limitations problems meant she couldn’t charge Heinrich with kidnapping the 11-year-old St. Joseph boy nine months after Scheierl was assaulted.
But despite intensive work and media attention, the investigation into Wetterling’s abduction became bogged down until a year ago with the arrest of a man for owning child pornography. A grand jury later indicted him for 25 counts of child pornography.
The plea deal, also means that Heinrich will not be charged for the murder of Wetterling.
Scheierl talked publicly about his case in hopes it could help investigators find his attacker and Jacob’s.
Jacob’s abduction shattered childhood innocence for many rural Minnesotans, changing the way parents let their kids roam. Jacob’s smiling face was burned into the state’s collective psyche, appearing on countless posters and billboards seeking clues.
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So Kendall called U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, hoping he would prosecute Heinrich in federal court, where child pornography sentences are tougher than in state court.
