Answers are finally emerging about the abduction of an 11-year-old boy in Minnesota in 1989, as Danny Heinrich has admitted kidnapping and killing Jacob Wetterling.
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Heinrich admitted that he kidnapped, sexually assaulted and killed Wetterling as part of a plea deal for 25 child pornography charges.
In the Strib, Pam Louwagie and Jennifer Brooks write, “Heinrich described the 11-year-old’s final, terrified hours in graphic and heartbreaking detail before a crowded courtroom in Minneapolis”.
In court, the judge recommended Heinrich serve the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
For almost 27 years, the kidnapping of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling remained an open and active investigation – his family never giving up hope that the truth would one day be uncovered. I turned my head and it clicked once. “The Wetterling family can bring him home, and it’s time for all of us to have the closure and the peace that we’re hoping can come next”, Luger added.
In exchange for pleading guilty to one count of receipt of child pornography, all remaining counts in the indictment will be dismissed at Heinrich’s sentencing.
The mother of Jacob Wetterling says it is “incredibly painful” to learn of her son’s last hours and minutes of life.
His remains were found and officially identified by dental records on Saturday.
Heinrich made the statements as part of a plea deal related to child pornography charges, on which he was indicted last December.
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.
Accordingly, the family of Wetterling was asked about the plea agreement and they have approved of it. “Looked back, he was still standing”, Heinrich said, according to the newspaper. In federal court in Minneapolis yesterday, Heinrich then described how he took Jacob to a gravel pit just outside Paynesville, molested him and then shot him when he heard on a police scanner that officers were on the way. The remains of Wetterling were found earlier this week at a farm in Minnesota. “For the family and everybody to have to sit and listen to him, what he did to Jacob …”
In 1994, the federal Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act led to the creation of a national sex-offender registry. Heinrich – wearing a mask and carrying a gun – takes Jacob.
Ms Wetterling said she had never given up hope her son would be found alive.
Heinrich led authorities to Jacob’s body last week after initially denying involvement in his death.
Jacob Wetterling was riding his bike on a rural Minnesota road with his brother and a friend when he was abducted in October 1989. A federal prosecutor detailed the results of a search warrant that ended in the discovery of explicit images of children on the hard drive of Heinrich’s computer.
Tuesday afternoon’s hearing is listed as a status conference in Heinrich’s child pornography case. “For us, Jacob was alive, until they found him”.
Investigators long believed the two cases might be connected, due to the description of the suspect in each case, and Heinrich was tied by circumstantial evidence to the Cold Spring attack as early as February 1990.
Jacob’s abduction shattered childhood innocence for many rural Minnesotans, changing the way parents let their kids roam.
Heinrich would be 73 after serving a 20-year sentence.
“From the beginning, finding Jacob Wetterling was the point of this investigation”.
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Also as part of the plea agreement, last month Heinrich took authorities to the site in Paynesville where he buried Jacob in 1989.
