Nation/World

Minnesota man admits he abducted and killed Jacob Wetterling, ending a 27-year-old mystery

MINNEAPOLIS — The man who kidnapped Jacob Wetterling finally gave his family the answers they'd waited almost 27 years to hear, confessing to abducting and killing the 11-year-old boy in October 1989.

In exchange for his confession and agreement to a plea deal involving child pornography charges against him, however, Danny James Heinrich, 53, will not be prosecuted for Jacob's murder.

"State officials have agreed that there will be no state prosecution for the crimes committed in 1989," U.S. District Judge John Tunheim said before a packed federal courtroom in Minneapolis on Tuesday.

Heinrich described Jacob's final night in heartbreaking detail, with Jacob's parents, Patty and Jerry Wetterling, in the front row of the courtroom wearing pins with Jacob's face on them.

"What did I do wrong?" Heinrich said Jacob asked, after he was grabbed and forced into the man's car that night.

Heinrich said, "I was driving on a dead-end road" outside St. Joseph on the evening of Oct. 22, 1989, when he saw three young boys on their bikes with a flashlight. He confronted the boys, and told two of them — Jacob's younger brother, Trevor, and best friend, Aaron Larson — to run, and took Jacob into his car, handcuffing him in the front passenger seat.

In his car, he had a scanner and heard police responding to the abduction. He told Jacob to duck down.

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He drove a bit, then pulled his vehicle into an area near a gravel pit.

He said he walked Jacob to a stand of trees, took off his handcuffs and clothes and molested him.

"I'm cold," Jacob told him.

Heinrich said he replied "OK, you can get dressed."

Jacob asked to go home, but Heinrich told him he couldn't take him all the way home.

Jacob started to cry.

"I panicked. I pulled the revolver out of my pocket … I loaded it with two rounds. I told Jacob to turn around," Heinrich said.

"I told him I had to go to the bathroom," Heinrich said. "I raised the revolver to his head. I turned my head and it clicked once. I pulled the trigger again and it went off. Looked back, he was still standing.

"I raised the revolver again and shot him again."

Heinrich said he left the scene but went back later to bury the body.

Heinrich led authorities to Jacob's remains on a Paynesville farm last week.

Heinrich, who appeared to have trouble breathing while describing what happened, said in court Tuesday that the farm was not the first place he tried to bury or hide the body.

Initially, he said, he used a Bobcat to dig a hole and bury Jacob and camouflage the area with grass and twigs.

But, he said, he went back to the site around midnight and noticed the grave was partly uncovered and Jacob's jacket could be seen above the ground.

Heinrich gathered up Jacob's body, put it in a bag and transported it across the highway to where he buried it for a final time just outside Paynesville.

Heinrich said he acted alone in Jacob's abduction.

He also said that he did not know Jacob, or another boy — Jared Scheierl — who he molested nine months earlier, in Cold Spring.

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As part of his confession, Heinrich also detailed the assault on Scheierl, who was 12 at the time he was abducted and molested.

Heinrich, who was indicted last year on 25 child pornography counts, had been scheduled to go to trial next month on the charges before he led investigators to Jacob's remains.

He pleaded guilty Tuesday to one of the 25 charges against him. In exchange for his plea and confession, the other counts were dismissed.

Heinrich, who had as many as 150 pornographic images of children in his home and computer, including minors under age 12, admitted to downloading image of naked minor females on March 1, 2014, as well collecting other images.

Tunheim said the sentence recommendation will be the statutory maximum of 240 months — 20 years — in prison.

Jacob vanished 27 years ago, after he was abducted by a masked gunman while riding his bike on Oct. 22, 1989. His fate remained one of Minnesota's most haunting mysteries until last week.

Friends and supporters began arriving at the courthouse late Tuesday morning in anticipation of Heinrich's plea, exchanging hugs.

"We have been banging on this door forever and now it is opening," said Alison Feigh, program manager for the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center and one of Jacob's middle school classmates.

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Heinrich's attorneys walked quickly by the media without comment. On Monday, a spokesperson for the Wetterlings said the family likely will meet with media in the coming days to talk about the case that shocked and saddened a generation of Minnesotans.

Authorities said over the weekend that they expect to provide more details on what led them to Wetterling's remains.

Heinrich, 53, was an early suspect interviewed after Wetterling's 1989 disappearance.

When first announcing the federal child porn charges against Heinrich last year, federal authorities named him a person of interest in Wetterling's abduction.

At the time of Wetterling's abduction, Heinrich lived in Paynesville, about 30 miles southwest of St. Joseph, with his father.

Although Heinrich was named a person of interest in the Wetterling kidnapping last October, there were warning signs linking him to disturbing attacks on young boys long before that — and months before Jacob was taken.

In the late 1980s, Heinrich was living in an old apartment building in the heart of downtown Paynesville. At the same time, Paynesville police were responding to a series of attacks against boys as they walked or biked around town. All of the attacks took place within blocks of his apartment.

Nine months before Jacob hopped on his bike for a quick trip to the video store, a 12-year-old boy in Cold Spring — Jared Scheierl — was walking home from the Side Cafe when a man forced him into the back seat of his car and sexually assaulted him.

Scheierl told police his attacker wore camouflage and army boots and had a "walkie-talkie" type of device in the car. Three days afterward, a Stearns County deputy identified Heinrich as a possible suspect, according to court records.

Documents depict 1989 as a year of change for Heinrich. His car was repossessed in March. Heinrich's mother remarried in May. His last day of work at Fingerhut Corp. was Oct. 8, leaving him unemployed.

Two weeks after Heinrich lost his job, on a warm night in St. Joseph, Jacob, his younger brother, Trevor, and best friend, Aaron, rode their bikes to the local Tom Thumb store to rent a video. As they headed home, a masked man with a gun forced them off their bikes, then told Trevor and Aaron to run, and not look back, or he would shoot them. When they looked back, Jacob and the masked man were gone.

Investigators thought it likely that the same man had abducted both Jacob and Jared, based on the crimes' similarities, and saw Heinrich as "a likely suspect," Al Garber, the FBI investigator who supervised the Wetterling case, said last October, at the time of Heinrich's arrest. "So we investigated with everything that we could."

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In February 1990, they arrested Heinrich in the kidnapping and assault of Scheierl "based on this very circumstantial evidence," Garber said. "We tried to get him to talk."

Heinrich "stated emphatically he was not guilty, that he was being framed, and that he was not going to talk to the interviewing agents," court documents say. He was released.

After Paynesville police heard reports in 1991 that a tan vehicle was following paperboys on their morning routes, they asked a Stearns County deputy to help with surveillance. The deputy saw a tan car in the same area as a paperboy, according to an offense report. The car was registered to Heinrich.

But authorities did not apprehend him: "I did not have occasion to stop the vehicle," the deputy reported.

Decades later, it is unclear what prompted Heinrich to drop his denials and lead authorities to Jacob's remains.

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