Investigators have found the remains of Jacob Wetterling, the 11-year-old Minnesota boy who went missing 27 years ago.
Sources tell KSTP News the boy’s remains were found after pedophile Danny Heinrich, right, led investigators to the site where his body was buried.
“Our hearts are broken,” Jacob’s mother Patty Wetterling texted to the Star Tribune Saturday morning. “We have no words.”
On the evening of Oct. 22, 1989, Wetterling, his 10-year-old brother, Trevor, and his best friend, Aaron Larson, 11, rode their bicycles to a convenience store to rent a movie in St. Joseph, Minnesota.
On their way back home with the video, the boys were stopped on a gravel road by a masked man who pointed a gun at them.
The man ordered all three boys off their bicycles and told them to lie facedown in a ditch. After asking each boy his age, the man told Trevor and Aaron to run into the woods.
He warned them he would shoot if they looked back.
The boys looked back but they didn’t see Jacob or the masked man.
Every parent’s nightmare would change Minnesota forever.
A massive search for Jacob was soon underway, as news trucks and journalists descended upon rural St. Joseph, MN.
Tips from the public led the FBI to the doorstep of Daniel Heinrich, a known pedophile, who said he couldn’t recall where he was 2 months earlier when Jacob went missing.
In 1990, Heinrich came to the attention of the FBI again.
He was a person of interest in the case of 12-year-old Jared Scheierl, who was abducted and sexually assaulted in Cold Spring, MN, 9 months before Jacob went missing.
Heinrich, then 26, matched the description of the raspy voiced, husky man who groped dozens of boys around town.
But Scheierl couldn’t identify him from a lineup.
In 2014 Heinrich was named a person of interest in Jacob’s cold case after the FBI re-tested the DNA found on clothes that Scheierl, now 39, had worn in 1989.
Heinrich’s DNA was a match, but the statute of limitations had already run out.
In 2015, the FBI served a warrant at Heinrich’s Annandale, MN home.
They found 100 pictures of suspected child porn0graphy, as well as 19 three-ring binders full of pictures of naked boys. They found even more child p0rn on his computer hard drive.
Additionally, authorities found “hours of videos” that Heinrich recorded of young boys riding their bikes, delivering newspapers, and playing on a playground.
The FBI also found old newspaper articles about Jacob, but nothing to tie him to Jacob’s disappearance.
Heinrich was arrested on child pornography charges and held in jail for nearly a year awaiting trial.
In August, the 52-year-old finally admitted his involvement in Jacob Wetterling’s case. He led the FBI to the boy’s remains.
Every year, around the anniversary of Jacob’s death, Minnesotans leave their porch lights burning. The porch lights became the symbol of the search for Jacob, in the hopes that the lights would lead Jacob home.
