The man asked the boys their ages, grabbed Jacob and told the others to run into the woods or else he’d shoot, Jacob’s father has said, recounting what his other son told police. Jacob hadn’t been seen since, despite extensive searches, tens of thousands of leads and offers of a monetary reward.
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Jacob was kidnapped in October of 1989 from a rural road near his home in St. Joseph, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis.
And in 1994, Congress passed the Jacob Wetterling Act, legislation for a sex offender registry.
Sanner says the Stearns County Attorney’s Office and the United States Attorney’s Office are in the “process of reviewing and evaluating new evidence” in the Wetterling case.
Jacob, who was then 11, disappeared on a dark road in central Minnesota on the night of October 22, 1989.
Sources tell KARE 11 a “person of interest” in the Wetterling case, Danny Heinrich, led investigators to the spot where Jacob’s remains were found.
Heinrich, aged 53, was arrested at the end of past year by officers who seized 19 ring binders filled with child pornography.
The FBI stated that Heinrich’s description also matched the description given for other child sexual assault cases that occurred in the Paynesville area during the mid to late 1980s.
The abduction bore multiple similarities to one that had happened just nine months earlier in a town nearby, where 12-year-old Jared Scheierl was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, then released on the condition that he would not look back, “or he would be shot”, the Star Tribune reports.
Authorities arrested – and questioned – Danny Heinrich, but didn’t have enough evidence to formally charge him.
Authorities searched the home where Heinrich lived with his father at the time and found scanners, camouflage clothing and a picture of a boy wearing underwear.
Those influenced by the Wetterling’s abduction both as children and parents most closely are Generation Xers. Jacob’s smiling face was burned into the state’s collective psyche, appearing on countless posters and billboards seeking clues.
The Jacob Wetterling Center, which Wetterling’s parents founded in 1990 to educate the public on child abductions, posted a statement to its Facebook page Saturday morning.
A statement from the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center drives home that fact: “The Wetterlings had a choice to walk into bitterness and anger or to walk into a light of what could be, a light of hope”.
On Saturday night, many Minnesotans left their porch lights on – a symbol that’s been part of the hope surrounding Jacob’s case since he disappeared.
Another person wrote: “Minnesota loves you and your family”, in a tweet addressed to Jacob’s mother. The gunman was on foot, and no auto was in sight.
“I wish there was something we could have told them”, she said, squinting out over the fields, now covered with tall corn.
As news of the disappearance spread, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and National Guard troops descended on St. Joseph to aid in the search.
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Federal authorities declined to comment.
