WARNING: Disturbing content
A MINNESOTA man has confessed to abducting and killing 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling nearly 27 years ago, putting to rest a mystery that had haunted the state and led to changes in national sex offender laws.
Danny Heinrich made the admission as he pleaded guilty to federal child pornography charges that could put him behind bars for decades.
Asked whether he abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered Jacob, Heinrich said: “Yes I did.†Heinrich, 53, of Annandale, led authorities to Jacob’s buried remains in a central Minnesota field last week, according to a law enforcement official. The Stearns County Sheriff’s Office said Jacob’s remains were identified on Saturday.
Appearing in court, he admitted abducting Jacob from a road near the boy’s home in the central Minnesota community of St. Joseph on Oct. 22, 1989. Authorities named him as a person of interest in Jacob’s disappearance last October when they announced the child pornography charges.
The 53-year-old described donning a mask and confronting three children with a revolver near Jacob’s central Minnesota home.
Heinrich said he was driving on a dead-end road when he saw Jacob, his younger brother and his best friend.
The three boys were on their bikes and shining flashlights to light their way.
Heinrich confronted the boys, told Jacob’s brother and friend to run and forced Jacob into the car.
“What did I do wrong?†Jacob asked Heinrich.
Heinrich handcuffed the boy in the front seat and said he had a police scanner so when he heard officers were searching for Jacob, he told the child to duck down.
He then drove Jacob to a gravel pit where he undressed the boy and molested him.
“I’m cold,†Jacob told Heinrich.
Heinrich then said Jacob could put his clothes back on. Jacob then asked Heinrich if he could go home.
Jacob started to cry when Heinrich said he couldn’t take him all the way home.
“I panicked. I pulled the revolver out of my pocket ... I loaded it with two rounds. I told Jacob to turn around.â€
“I told him I had to go to the bathroom. 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 told the court.
Heinrich initially fled the scene but returned later to bury the boy’s body.
At first, Heinrich used a Bobcat to bury Jacobs body, he said. But when he later returned to the site and saw a part of the boy’s jacket sticking out he exhumed the body.
Heinrich put Jacob’s body in a bag and drove it across the highway to just outside Paynesville, where he left it until it was recovered by police last week.
Heinrich had long been under investigators’ scrutiny. They first questioned him shortly after Jacob’s abduction, but he maintained his innocence and they never had enough evidence to charge him. They turned a renewed spotlight on him as part of a fresh look into Jacob’s abduction around its 25th anniversary.
As part of that effort, investigators took another look at the sexual assault of 12-year-old Jared Scheierl, of Cold Spring, nine months before Jacob’s disappearance. Investigators had long suspected the two cases were connected.
Using technology that wasn’t available in 1989, investigators found Heinrich’s DNA on Scheierl’s sweatshirt, and used that evidence to get a search warrant for Heinrich’s home, where they found a large collection of child pornography.
The statute of limitations had expired for charging him in the assault on Scheierl, but a grand jury indicted him on 25 child pornography counts.
Media outlets don’t often identify victims of sexual assault, but Scheierl has spoken publicly for years about his case, saying it helped him cope with the trauma and that he hoped it could help investigators find his attacker and Jacob’s kidnapper.
Jacob’s abduction shattered childhood innocence for many rural Minnesotans, changing the way parents let their kids roam. His smiling face was burned into Minnesota’s psyche, appearing on countless posters and billboards over the years.
His mother, Patty Wetterling, always kept hope her son would be found alive. She became a national advocate for missing children, and with her husband, Jerry Wetterling, founded the Jacob Wetterling Resource Centre, which works to help communities and families prevent child exploitation. In 1994, Congress passed a law named after Jacob that requires states to establish sex offender registries.