A Blogger Solved The Cold Case of Jacob Wetterling
By: Megan Ashley Medium.com July 27, 2020
In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was abducted while on a bike ride. In 2013 Joy Baker began documenting her investigation into the cold case.
Jacob was eleven years old in 1989. He was from St. Joseph, Minnesota, and on October 22nd, he was abducted. He had been out biking with this younger brother, and his friend Aaron Larson at around nine pm. They had gone to a corner store, only four blocks from their home, to rent a movie.
Their parents were at a dinner party, and the Wetterling boys called their mother to ask her permission to ride their bikes to the store. She adamantly said no because it was after dark, and cars wouldn’t be able to see them.
When they hung up the phone, they revised their plan and spoke to their father, telling him they would have flashlights and wear reflective vests. Their father felt it was a well thought out plan, and since there were three of them, he said it was fine.
On their way back, on a particularly dark stretch of road, a man dressed in dark clothing and a mask jumped out of a driveway. He had a revolver, and he ordered the boys to throw their bikes into the ditch and lie face down on the ground.
The boys complied, then the masked man asked each boy to give him their ages. Jacob’s younger brother was told to run to a nearby wooded area, not turn around, or be shot. He next demanded the remaining boys to show him their faces, then told Aaron to run into the woods and not look back. Then he grabbed Jacob by the elbow and began dragging him to a wooded area.
The other two boys sprinted home. They called their parents, and 911 was contacted. Within six minutes of the 911 call, a sheriff’s deputy was on the scene. He found the boys bikes and immediately called for backup. Additionally, the FBI was alerted.
Throughout the night, Jacob was searched for. It was a massive search with tons of media attention, but with each passing day, without any leads or evidence, the search went cold.
Joy Baker had been twenty-two when Jacob had been abducted. She remembered the missing posters, the ongoing theories, and the pleads of Jacob’s mother to bring him home and haunted her. She often thought back on it as she raised her children. Two decades had passed since Jacob’s abduction when a new lead was presented to the media. The FBI had begun excavation on a farm near where Jacob had been abducted. A person of interest was identified, but he was later released.
She got in her car, and stopped at the abduction site, then on to the corner store the boys had gone too. She retraced the steps taken that night. Asking herself if she would allow her sons to take that route, acknowledging that things were different before Jacob’s abduction.
She wanted answers. She wanted to give Jacob’s parents answers. She started an investigation, which took her six years to achieve her mission.
Joy started her investigation with Google. She learned that in 2003 a man came forward and told police that he had heard about the abduction from a police scanner and arrived on the scene before law enforcement. It was his fresh tire treads that police assumed that the suspect left in a vehicle. This changed the entire direction of the investigation, knowing now that the suspect had likely escaped on foot.
In 2004 a man came forward with a story that was eerily similar to Jacob’s abduction. Jared Scheierl had been twelve when while walking home from a local café in Cold Spring, Minnesota (only twelve miles from St. Joseph). A man in a car slowed down, and a man asked him for directions. When Jared had stopped walking to point, the man grabbed him and pulled him inside his vehicle.
He was driven to a remote area and sexually assaulted. The man drove him back into town and asked him if he recognized him. When Jared said no, he let him out of the vehicle and told him to run and if he looked back, he would be shot.
This traumatic incident had happened nine months before Jacob’s abduction, and the parallels made Joy think the attacks were connected.
Investigators were convinced they were unrelated. The crimes had taken place in two different counties, and the departments seemed unwilling to work together.
Baker pursued every lead available to her, and then some. She reached out to Jared, and the two began to piece the evidence together, and they found more unsolved sexual assaults involving young boys in the area.
Each boy said the same thing about the man; he had told them “to run or I’ll blow your head off”, or some other reference to gun violence. Baker alerted the Stearns County Sheriff’s office, who had told them they had never heard of these other assaults but didn’t believe they were connected to Jacob.
Joy and Jared spend hundreds of hours searching for other victims to get their stories. They relentlessly harassed the County Sheriff’s office, they involved Jacob’s mother, and they did interviews with local media. They had a hard time getting law enforcement to take their research seriously.
Jacob’s story was featured on John Walsh’s CNN tv show “The Hunt.” The episode included Jared’s assault and compared the two cases. This was the final media push that was needed to get the FBI to reopen the investigation.
DNA evidence collected from Jared’s sexual assault was retested in 2015, and it hit a match, Danny James Heinrich. Although the statute of limitations was up, he couldn’t be charged with Jared’s assault. However, a search warrant was granted, and the search yielded a discovery of child pornography.
Photo: Danny James Heinrich (Sherburne County Sheriff’s Office)
Heinrich had initially been a suspect but was released when witnesses couldn’t positively identify him. He had also been a suspect in Jared’s assault but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict. Heinrich was a known child predator in the area and he had been investigated for multiple crimes involving children.
Heinrich was offered a plea deal, and part of the agreement was to confess to murdering Jacob and revealing the location of his body. He accepted, and on September 1st, 2016, he led investigators to the burial site. On September 3rd, an announcement was made that Jacob’s body had been identified.
The plea bargain meant that Heinrich would only be charged for child pornography possession. He would serve a maximum sentence of twenty years in a Federal Medical Center in Massachusetts.
Without Joy Baker’s investment into the case and her blog, the FBI may never have looked into connecting Jared and Jacob’s abductions. Jacob’s mother, Patty Wetterling, publicly thanked Joy and Jared for their dedication to seeing this crime through to the end.
