While official sentencing doesn’t take place until November 21, the plea deal calls for Heinrich to serve 20 years in prison, the same length he would serve for the child porn charge alone. Heinrich said Jacob asked.
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As part of the plea agreement, Heinrich will not face state murder charges in Jacob’s death.
“He’s not getting away with anything”, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger said.
Prosecutors said the Wetterling family was consulted on and approved the plea agreement, which required Heinrich to give a detailed confession and tell them where to find Jacob. He then put Wetterling in the back of his auto and handcuffed him behind his back. She became a national advocate for missing children, and with her husband, Jerry Wetterling, founded the Jacob Wetterling Resource Centre, which works to help communities and families prevent child exploitation.
A 1994 federal law was named for Wetterling and require states to establish sex offender registries.
The admission is finally bringing answers to what happened to the 11-year-old boy nearly 27 years ago, whose remains were found in Stearns County last week after Heinrich led investigators to the site.
Heinrich testified that he jumped out of the vehicle wearing a mask and holding a.38 revolver.
He said he told them to get into a ditch with their bicycles and asked for their names and ages.
Heinrich said he confronted the three boys and told two of them, Jacob’s little brother and his friend, to run. Heinrich said that he handcuffed Wetterling, took him to a gravel near Paynesville and molested him. Jacob then asked whether he was taking him home. When a prosecutor asked him “For what objective?”, Heinrich responded, “Souvenir, I guess”.
“Heinrich was open for the moment to tell us what happened …”
The crying boy said he was cold and begged his attacker to let him go home, Heinrich recalled.
“I panicked. I pulled the revolver out of my pocket”. He then loaded his revolver, telling Wetterling to turn around before he shot him in the head, he said. He then pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t go off. The gun didn’t fire. More than 700 people attend an anniversary vigil less than two miles from where Jacob was taken. After the second, Jacob fell to the ground.
“Yes I did”, he said, with Jacob’s parents, Patty and Jerry Wetterling, in the courtroom.
Authorities dug and uncovered a fragment of a red Saint Cloud hockey jacket that matched what Jacob was wearing when he disappeared.
Aside from the guilty plea, Heinrich also led investigators last week to Jacob’s remains, which were buried on a Paynesville farm. Jacob’s remains were identified Saturday. According to Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner, the “willingness to make compromises” by investigators, prosecutors, and the Wetterling family led to the confession by Heinrich.
Ms Wetterling said she had never given up hope her son would be found alive.
Heinrich’s attorneys declined to comment after the hearing.
Last October, authorities named Heinrich a person of interest in the case, given the similarities between Wetterling’s abduction and a number of unsolved sexual assaults in central Minnesota dating to the 1980s. He was first questioned shortly after Jacob’s abduction, but had always maintained his innocence.
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Jared Scheierl, a Minnesota man whose own sexual assault as a 12-year-old was long suspected to be connected to Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance, spoke during a news conference Tuesday. They used that evidence to get a search warrant for Heinrich’s home, where they found a large collection of child pornography. The statute of limitations had expired for charging him in the assault on Scheierl, but a grand jury indicted him on 25 child pornography counts. His smiling face appeared on countless posters and billboards over the years. Sentencing is set for November 21.
