“What did I do wrong?”
That was the question Jacob Wetterling asked his abductor after he handcuffed him. I choke up, tears in my eyes, every time I think of those heart-rending words.
Jacob was a happy boy who enjoyed playing hockey, soccer and football. He also loved dogs, told hilarious jokes and believed life should be fair for everyone – that kindness should prevail.
Fond memories of Jacob pop up throughout “Dear Jacob: A Mother’s Journey of Hope,” the recently published book by Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker.
It is a disturbing book that conveys in excruciating details the anguish, agony, terror and endless lonesome sorrow of what the Wetterling family endured night-and-day for years on end.
But the book also recounts the enduring hope (“Jacob’s Hope”) the family and many others clung to year after year. Theirs was a slender but very deep-and-abiding thread of hope.
One moonless October evening in 1989, Jacob, 11, was abducted by a gunman on a road leading back to his home after he, his brother and a friend were biking home from a convenience store.
The Wetterlings’ slender thread of hope snapped when Jacob’s body was found nearly 27 years later, in 2016, after his abductor/killer (finally caught) led authorities to the burial site near Paynesville. The family’s hopes had been shattered.
“Dear Jacob” is vividly written with a breathtaking immediacy, placing readers right there at every scene. The book is a harrowing-heartbreaking memoir of the long search for the missing boy. It delivers unflinching glimpses of the stresses and strains endured by the parents, Jerry and Patty, and their other three young children: Amy, Trevor and Carmen.
Imagine being suspected of complicity in the murder of your own child. That assertion hounded Jerry for years because some claimed he did not show enough emotion during interviews. Aching with grief for his missing son, even Jerry had to undergo three polygraph tests.
Clouds of suspicion also gathered over another St. Joseph man, Dan Rassier. A music teacher in Cold Spring, he lived with his parents on their farm less than a mile from the Wetterlings. The abduction happened on the rural road just at the end of the Rassiers’ long gravel driveway. Dan, a suspect, was interrogated. Years later, digging equipment showed up at the farm, and a search began. Rassier had nothing to do with the crime.
“Dear Jacob” is also an absorbing account of how Patty and Jerry met, their courtship, marriage and their later move to St. Joseph where Jerry opened a chiropractic business and where Patty, former math teacher, became for a time a stay-at-home mom.
An upbeat theme woven throughout the book is the extraordinary research and work Patty did (and still does) on behalf of missing children. She, Jerry and others founded the St. Joseph-based Jacob Wetterling Foundation. It has since “morphed” into the statewide Jacob Wetterling Resource Center in St. Paul. Its mission is to end all forms of child maltreatment through education, training and prevention.
Patty has given many hundreds (if not thousands) of speeches and other presentations; she has met many times with families of missing, abused or murdered children; and she has shared her extensive expertise on the subject with law enforcement, safety experts and legislators – all the while keeping hope alive far and wide, for which she is justly admired. She ran twice for a seat in the U.S House.
One of Patty’s many accomplishments is the Jacob Wetterling Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1994. It requires sex offenders to register with law enforcement.
“Dear Jacob” is so-named because of the letters Patty wrote to her son throughout the years, hoping when he somehow someday returned home, he would read them all and know how deeply he was loved and missed.
Patty ended a letter written in 1994 this way:
We love you, Jake. We’ll never give up on our search to find you and to bring you home.
Hugs and kisses,
Mom
“Dear Jacob” is garnering rave reviews, rightly so. It’s available at Barnes & Noble, Target and via Amazon.
