Twenty minutes later, they passed him again, so Heinrich got out of his vehicle, put on a mask, reached for a revolver and confronted them. “We tried to get him to talk”.
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As a result, the 53-year-old is now facing a mountain of child pornography charges, but nothing officially related the Wettering case. As part of the plea deal, another 24 child porn charges were dropped; Heinrich also escapes prosecution for Jacob’s murder. But he led authorities to the boy’s remains last week, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing case.
It was there, Heinrich said, that he removed the handcuffs and Jacob’s clothes, and molested him. He moved them to an unspecified site nearby.
Heinrich is “a volatile and unpredictable person, and we knew he could change his mind at any time”, Luger said. “He would not plead guilty to a murder we could not prove …”
Jacob Wetterling was abducted by a masked gunman in 1989 cycling home from a video store with his brother and a friend in the city of St Joseph.
Heinrich told a packed courtroom that he handcuffed Jacob’s arms behind his back after telling his brother, Trevor, and friend Aaron Larson to run and not look back or he would shoot.
The defendant described how he then handcuffed Jacob and put him in the passenger seat of his vehicle.
Heinrich, 53, admitted Tuesday that he abducted, sexually assaulted and shot Jacob to death in 1989, then buried the boy’s body in a field in rural central Minnesota. “I pulled the revolver out of my pocket”, the newspaper reported him as saying. He shot the boy twice. He then spotted a Bobcat digger with keys in it and used the machine to dig a large grave for Jacob. He gathered the human remains and reburied them at a farm.
He pleaded guilty Tuesday to one of the 25 charges against him. They first questioned him shortly after Jacob’s abduction, but he maintained his innocence and they never had enough evidence to charge him. Danny Heinrich, of Annandale, is arrested on unrelated child pornography charges. That discovery evidently created the legal opening the US attorney’s office needed to compel Heinrich to talk as part of a plea deal.
He confessed and detailed where he buried the body, Luger said.
Within two days, after re-interviewing Heinrich at length, they located bones, teeth and a T-shirt with the name “Wetterling” stenciled on it.
Authorities dug and uncovered a fragment of a red Saint Cloud hockey jacket that matched what Jacob was wearing when he disappeared.
The FBI took custody of Danny Heinrich on Wednesday, August 30, and were directed to a remote area outside of Paynesville where crews began excavating an alleged burial site.
2015: New analysis of DNA evidence links Heinrich to the abduction of Jared Scheierl, a 12-year-old Cold Spring boy kidnapped and sexually assaulted nine months before Wetterling’s disappearance.
Heinrich also confesses to sexually assaulting Jared Scheierl. He could not be charged for assaulting Scheierl because the statute of limitations in place at the time of the crime had expired.
Investigators believed Heinrich was still responsible for what happened to Jacob as well. “I told Jacob to turn around”. “It’s incredibly painful to know his last days, last hours, last minutes”, said Patty Wetterling, Jacob’s mother. “For us, Jacob was alive until we found him”.
“Our hearts are hurting”.
On a day that would have brought most human beings to their knees, Patty Wetterling summoned the strength and dignity to step before a crowd of reporters, standing by the side of Luger and others who have been instrumental in obtaining a confession from the man who killed her son.
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MINNEAPOLIS – Danny Heinrich, the man who led authorities to the remains of Jacob Wetterling, is expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis at 1 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 6. “We need to heal”.
