How DNA Helped Solve the 27-Year Search for Jacob Wetterling

It was just after dark the night of October 22, 1989, when Jacob Wetterling was biking home with his little brother, Trevor, and best friend, Aaron Larson, following a quick trip to a convenience store to rent The Naked Gun.

As the boys rode through a dark stretch of road in rural St. Joseph, Minn., an armed, masked man emerged from the shadows and demanded they get down into a roadside ditch.

The man, later identified as Danny Heinrich, then instructed Trevor, 10, and Aaron, 11, to run home and never look back. But he ordered Jacob, also 11, to stay.

Loved ones never saw the boy again.

Thus began the desperate, nearly-27-year search for the answer to the haunting question: Where is Jacob?

On September 2, 2016, the Wetterling family finally learned the truth after a stunning confession from Heinrich, when he admitted to the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of Jacob, as well as the January 1989 abduction and sexual assault of then-12-year-old Jared Scheierl, in connection with a plea agreement in an unrelated child pornography case.

As part of the deal, Heinrich led investigators to Jacob’s remains.

“I can't even begin to imagine how emotional it was for the [Wetterling] family,” Stearns County Deputy Dennis Kern, the lead detective on Jacob’s case from 2011 to 2015, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “It had to have been like going right back to the night that Jacob was abducted and brought back all those emotions.”

Jacob’s terrifying abduction shook the small-town Minnesota community from that day on.

“It caused parents to watch over their children a lot more closely,” Kern, who was around the same age as Jacob and grew up about 15 miles away from him at the time of the incident, recalls. “Kids no longer had the freedom that they once did to roam, and it put a lot of fear in people's minds and hearts.”

The fear rippled even further to Minneapolis, where Echoes in the Night: The Search for Jacob Wetterling filmmaker Chris Newberry grew up.

He was 15 when Jacob disappeared.

“The circumstances of the crime—him being out just past dark, riding through the neighborhood on his bike, going to the store to rent a videotape—that was my childhood, too,” Newberry says.

But with a mysterious predator wandering free, that carefree nature came to an abrupt halt for many Minnesotans, and the case would go on to haunt the community for decades.

Nine months before Jacob vanished, Jared was walking home alone at night in Cold Spring, Minn., when he was kidnapped, driven to a remote location and sexually assaulted in the back of Heinrich’s vehicle.

Afterward, Heinrich let Jared go, but not before threatening to kill him if he went to the authorities.

Days later, Jared picked Heinrich and another person out of a lineup as his potential assailant, but with a lack of solid evidence, Heinrich was free to go.

From the night of the attack, Jared remained traumatized and later admitted to a judge that he suffered anxiety and depression from the incident.

That October, Heinrich struck again.

Authorities first interviewed Heinrich about Jacob’s disappearance in December 1989. At the same time, he was also questioned about his suspected involvement in Jared’s abduction and sexual assault earlier that year.

“There were many similarities in the cases, but we had no concrete information [that the cases were connected]. The evidence that we had was extremely circumstantial,” Kern says.

Investigators determined a suspect description provided by Jacob’s brother, Trevor, and Jared, also mirrored each other.

“At the scene of Jacob's abduction were shoe prints and [car] tire marks that were a match for Danny Heinrich, but we couldn't be entirely exclusive of all the other shoes and tires of that same model,” Kern explains. “So having collected the shoes, the tires, the same physical matches and voice descriptions—things of that nature—all of that was circumstantial.”

Heinrich denied any wrongdoing in both cases but agreed to provide a hair sample. Carpet and seat samples from his vehicle were also obtained.

Nothing came of the evidence at the time; Heinrich was let go.

Around the 25th anniversary of Jacob’s abduction, a cold case review team, including the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI, reconvened to reevaluate the case from a fresh perspective.

“We had retained a snowmobile suit that Jared Scheierl had worn during the time of his abduction, and we periodically sent it in to the BCA over the years for DNA analysis, and around 2012, we finally got an unknown male DNA sample,” Kern says.

Investigators compared the unknown male DNA from the snowsuit to the hair sample provided by Heinrich in 1990.

“It was a match,” Kern recalls.

The DNA breakthrough gave authorities enough information to conduct a search at Heinrich’s home in Annandale, Minn., where they were hoping to find evidence of Jared and Jacob’s abductions. Instead, they discovered a plethora of child pornography and 922 VHS tapes containing “surreptitious recordings of children” in Heinrich’s neighborhood, Kern says.

Detectives went back to Heinrich to cut him a deal.

In exchange for information on Jacob and Jared’s cases, Heinrich pleaded guilty to a single federal charge of child pornography.

On that fateful night in October 1989, Heinrich admitted to handcuffing Jacob inside his vehicle, driving him to a remote area to sexually assault him and then fatally shooting him when he was spooked by the sound of police sirens.

On September 2, 2016, he led authorities to Jacob’s remains on a farm in Paynesville, Minn.

“I remember unfurling a piece of red nylon material that was consistent with the jacket that Jacob was last seen wearing when he was abducted,” Kern explains. “Once I unfurled that, and realizing we were in the right spot, things started to cascade in the right direction. We were finding bone fragments, teeth ... we found the T-shirt that Jacob was wearing that said, ‘Wetterling No. 11,' the blue mesh shirt that he had on over that.”

Authorities confirmed the remains belonged to Jacob, finally putting to bed one of the state’s most notorious cases.

When Newberry first started filming his documentary on the Jacob Wetterling case in 2015, there was no resolution.

“Everybody was very spellbound by the case and hoping to find answers,” he says.

At the time, Jacob’s case was still unsolved, and Newberry’s initial vision was to reflect on the decades-old mystery that shook up his childhood.

The film took a turn that October when authorities publicly identified Heinrich as a person of interest in Jacob’s case after connecting him to Jared’s kidnapping and sexual assault.

The Wetterlings gave Newberry behind-the-scenes access as the case unfolded in real-time.

He was there when the Wetterlings agreed they were content with law enforcement offering Heinrich a plea deal in exchange for information on Jacob’s whereabouts.

“They were stuck with this impossible choice between answers or real justice,” Newberry, who developed a close relationship with the Wetterlings, explains. “Heinrich agreed to give a confession and most importantly lead law enforcement to Jacob's remains so the Wetterlings could know with 100% certainty what happened to Jacob and give him a proper burial.”

It wasn’t exactly the ending the family was hoping for.

“There was immense grief,” Newberry says, “but also a sigh of relief in a weird way that we finally knew.”

In the days following the discovery of Jacob’s remains, Heinrich pleaded guilty to one count of child porn.

He was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

According to his plea, he confessed to the kidnapping, sexual assaulting and murdering Jacob. He also admitted to the kidnapping and sexual assault of Jared; however he was not charged in either of their crimes.

For Jared’s case, the statute of limitations had expired.

In a separate civil suit in November 2018, a judge awarded him $17 million, but it’s unlikely he will ever see any of that money.

“Justice would have been a much harsher reckoning for Heinrich,” Newberry says.

Although the cases have wrapped up, closure appears to remain seemingly out of reach.

“The idea of closure is really complicated,” Newberry speculates. “The pain and the deep frustration and anxiety that folks go through—that never quite goes away. It might shift a little bit; it might change a little bit when you when you get answers, but it's never quite gone.”

Echoes in the Night: The Search for Jacob Wetterling is playing in Minnesota theaters and will be available for streaming soon.