On Tuesday, Danny Heinrich pleaded guilty to a child porn charge in exchange for giving boy’s family the truth about what happened to their son.
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Jacob looked at Heinrich and asked, “What did I do wrong?”
For Jacob’s mother, Heinrich provided the truth she had sought for almost three decades, no matter how harsh.
“Yes I did”, he said, with Jacob’s parents, Patty and Jerry Wetterling, in the courtroom. “For us, Jacob was alive until we found him”. The 53-year-old will not be prosecuted on state murder charges as part of the plea deal. The positive match set in motion a series of events that culminated Tuesday with Heinrich’s confession. “Today, he is facing justice”.
The resource center, working with Jacob’s mother Patty Wetterling, put out a list of 11 ideas (Jacob, a big sports fan, wore No. 11) for people who wanted to commit to “a culture of kindness and compassion”.
She said she reached out to federal prosecutors with the hope a substantial prison sentence on federal child porn charges would be the best way to further Heinrich’s cooperation in the Wetterling investigation.
He recalled handcuffing the young boy and putting him in the backseat of his vehicle 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. He pulled the trigger again, shooting Wetterling in the back of the head.
The case garnered worldwide attention and was recently featured on the CNN series “The Hunt with John Walsh”. Heinrich said Jacob asked. That boy had been released. DNA testing was then in its infancy but the department continued to send in the evidence from J.S.’ case to the state crime labs as testing improved. He says he took Jacob, handcuffed him and assaulted him in a grove of trees.
2004: Patty Wetterling runs as a Democrat against Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Kennedy in Minnesota’s 6th District.
“I said, ‘I can’t take you all the way home, ‘” Heinrich said. We’re struggling with words at this time.
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Last week Heinrich led a team of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and state and county investigators to a pasture near Paynesville where he had reburied Wetterling’s skeletal remains, according to a source with direct knowledge of the search. He returned to the site a year later to discover Jacob’s jacket partially exposed.
