Before Chief Judge John Tunheim accepted the plea, he had Heinrich sworn in and questioned to make sure he was competent to make a decision with such gravity.
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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.
For the men and women who investigated the case since the first 911 call in 1989, Danny Heinrich’s court confession that he’d abducted, molested and murdered Jacob Wetterling was an emotional final chapter. As part of a plea deal, Heinrich was required to provide a “specific geographic location” to prosecutors to conduct a search for evidence for the abduction and murder of Wetterling, court documents filed in a Minneapolis federal court show. He faces 20 years on the child pornography count.
“Finally, we know. We know the truth”.
A team of investigators and prosecutors prepared a potential plea agreement that the Wetterlings reviewed.
Jacob’s parents Patricia and Jerry Wetterling became tireless advocates for missing children after his disappearance.
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.
The 53-year-old described donning a mask and confronting three children with a revolver near Jacob’s central Minnesota home. He went on to describe how he had spotted Wetterling, his younger brother, and a friend riding their bikes while he drove on a dead-end road, according to The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and soon ordered the other two to run before forcing Wetterling into his vehicle.
At one point, Heinrich said, Jacob asked him: “What did I do wrong?”
Afterward, he shot Jacob and later buried him in a gravel pit, and reburied him a year later. Jacob then started to cry.
“I will never forget that moment”, Luger said about receiving the message.
The Pioneer Press reports on June 2 that a new court document details why investigators consider Heinrich a “person of interest” in Jacob’s abduction.
He said he pulled out his revolver, which had not been loaded, and put two rounds in the gun.
Heinrich handcuffed the boy in the front seat and said he had a police scanner so when he heard officers were searching for Jacob, he told the child to duck down. But when he later returned to the site and saw a part of the boy’s jacket sticking out he exhumed the body. He then put the bones, skull and clothing in a bag and buried it in a 2-foot hole he dug in a field across the highway.
Danny Heinrich admitted abducting, sexually assaulting and shooting Jacob on October 22, 1989, in a crime that horrified and mystified Minnesotans for more than a quarter-century. The Stearns County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the boy’s remains were found.
Besides the fact that the people who cared about Wetterling and those who worked for decades to determine what happened to him no longer have to agonize over the possibility of never knowing his fate, perhaps the one truly positive aspect of Heinrich’s confession and near-certain impending decades-long incarceration is that he’ll be locked away, far from the children he once admittedly terrorized.
Investigators thought it likely that the same man had abducted both Jacob and Jared, based on the crimes’ similarities, and saw Heinrich as “a likely suspect”, Al Garber, the FBI investigator who supervised the Wetterling case, said last October, at the time of Heinrich’s arrest.
Heinrich’s attorneys walked quickly by the media without comment. It was following that arrest that he was officially named a person of interest in Jacob’s disappearance.
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Investigators had long targeted Heinrich for the boy’s kidnapping but were unable to find evidence. He opened the door for Jacob, removed the handcuffs, and made him undress.
