Jacob was riding his bicycle with his 10-year-old brother, Trevor, and a friend on October 22, 1989, when a masked gunman abducted him near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis.
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At one point, Heinrich said, Jacob asked him: “What did I do wrong?”
Heinrich made the statements as part of a plea deal related to child pornography charges, on which he was indicted last December.
He recalled handcuffing the young boy and putting him in the backseat of his auto after he stopped the 11-year-old at gunpoint as he rode his bike home along a rural road in St. Joseph, Minn., with his brother and best friend. Heinrich then took Jacob into his vehicle, where he handcuffed him to the front passenger seat.
Jacob started to cry when Heinrich said he couldn’t take him all the way home. Heinrich told the court he panicked and pulled out a revolver.
He buried the boy about 100 yards away and camouflaged the area with leaves and twigs, the AP reported. He took the machine from a nearby construction company.
“What I really to say today is about Jacob”. Law enforcement wouldn’t say exactly where Heinrich led them to Wetterling’s remains, but law enforcement activity in the last few days had focused on pasture land a mile outside of town, just beyond the trees.
As the man behind It Can’t Happen Here: The Search for Jacob Wetterling, Dudley is, however, more relieved than most over what Federal Bureau of Investigation agents uncovered over the weekend.
Heinrich is to be sentenced November 21.
Heinrich was never charged in Jacob’s death, although he was one of the first people interviewed by investigators. He was never seen again. But last summer authorities searched his house for ties to the boy’s disappearance.
Last year, authorities named Danny Heinrich, as a person of interest in the abduction.
In the late 1980s, Heinrich was living in an old apartment building in the heart of downtown Paynesville.
The 1989 abduction and murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling of St. Joseph, Minnesota, has been solved with a confession in court Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2016.
The Associated Press typically doesn’t identify victims of sexual assault, but Scheierl, now 40, has spoken publicly for years about his case, saying that talking about it helped him cope with the trauma. At right is Daniel Heinrich, who confessed to the killing 27 years later.
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. Investigators revisited the site again Friday for crime-scene purposes.
Heinrich aired disturbing details about the case during a change-of-plea hearing Tuesday that saw the 53-year-old acknowledge his crimes against Jacob and against Jared Scheierl, who was 12 when he was kidnapped months before Jacob was abducted.
Some of Jacob’s family members cried as Heinrich calmly described the crime.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that Jacob’s parents, Patty and Jerry Wetterling, sat in the front row of the courtroom wearing pins with Jacob’s face on them, as Heinrich described that fateful night “in horrifying detail”.
Authorities named Heinrich as a person of interest last October when they announced the child pornography charges.
A status conference in the child-pornography case against Heinich, 53, of Annandale, is set before Chief Judge John Tunheim. But he has pleaded not guilty to several federal child pornography charges.
Danny Heinrich, 53, provided details in court Tuesday on what took place on October 22, 1989, the day Wetterling went missing. Jacob then asked Heinrich if he could go home.
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2004: Patty Wetterling runs as a Democrat against Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Kennedy in Minnesota’s 6th District. Three days afterward, a Stearns County deputy identified Heinrich as a possible suspect, according to court records.
