‘Dots’ always pointed to Wetterling suspect Heinrich

[Editor’s note: The words and phrases noting similarities (connective “dots”) among the abduction and molestation cases in the following story have been printed in bold letters to help the readers compare them.]

by Dennis Dalman

editor@thenewsleaders.com

Hindsight is often 20/20, they say, but it’s difficult for many people to understand how Jacob Wetterling’s abductor and killer, Danny James Heinrich, slipped under the radar so often when the dots to be connected were clearly there.

Some or all of those “dots” point to the 53-year-old from Annandale.

Now that Wetterling’s remains have been found and Heinrich has confessed to the crime, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office, and others will conduct a thorough re-examination of the Wetterling case, and much of the investigation will involve how those connections were missed right after the abduction and in the nearly 27 years since.

In 1989, the year Wetterling was taken by a stranger, there was no Internet, no Amber Alert emergency-notification system, less awareness of child abductions, and all too often police and sheriff’s offices worked independently of one another in their day-to-day tasks. In addition, DNA-matching technology in criminal cases was not then widely known or available.

In Paynesville, in the late 1980s, there were eight complaints made to the police department of a sinister man who accosted young boys while riding their bikes, or walking in or near the downtown area. The man, sometimes wearing a ski mask, would usually grope the boys through their clothing on their genital areas, make threats in a raspy voice, then rush off.

At the time of the assaults in Paynesville, Heinrich was living in the city, alternating from time to time between the homes of his divorced parents. One of the dwellings, his mother’s, was a downtown Paynesville apartment.

Troy Cole

In recent days, a Paynesville resident, Troy Cole, a father of a 5-year-old daughter, was interviewed by WCCO-TV Channel 4.

Cole told about how he had been sexually assaulted one night in November of 1986 by a man with a rough voice. While riding his bicycle from a downtown pizza parlor, a man on the street grabbed him off of his bicycle and forced him under some nearby pine trees where he sexually assaulted the boy while keeping a knife held against his back. The man then used the knife to cut off a lock of hair from Cole. Cole and his father reported the incident to the Paynesville police, but he recently said there were no follow-ups at the time to the crime, which still angers him.

Cole’s case is just one of many that occurred during a three-year period from 1986 to 1988 in Paynesville, mainly right in the downtown area. In the other cases, a rather short male, usually wearing a ski mask, would accost boys riding bikes or walking, then grope their genital area through their pants. Some of them he threatened. He usually asked the boys how old they were. His voice was described by the victims as “raspy” or “a deep low whisper” or “like he had a cold.” He also threatened some of the boys, telling them to run off or saying he would shoot them if they said anything.

Cole told the TV interviewer he is sorry about the Wetteling family’s loss of Jacob.

“We were lucky,” he said of himself and other victims. “At least we got to go home.”

Jared Scheierl

On Jan. 11, 1989, nine months before Wetterling was abducted, a 12-year-old Cold Spring paper boy, Jared Scheierl, was abducted after walking from a downtown café in Cold Spring.

The incident is detailed in an Aug. 5, 2016 U.S. District Court decision regarding Heinrich and the accusations against him.

According to the information in the U.S. judges’ decision, the man asked Scheierl if he knew where someone named “Kramer” lived. As the boy came closer to the car, the man grabbed him and forced him into the back seat.

The man drove for about 15 minutes, ordered the boy to take off his snowsuit, pants and underwear. The man then forced Scheierl to perform a sexual act on him and attempted a sexual act against the boy.

The perpetrator, Scheierl said, was wearing camouflage fatigues, black Army-style boots, a military-style watch and a brown baseball cap. On Jan. 18, 1990, when law enforcement searched the home of Heinrich’s father in Payneville, where Heinrich was staying at the time, they found two brown baseball caps, a camouflage shirt and pants and lace-up black Army boots. Heinrich had been a member of the Minnesota National Guard.

He then let Scheierl put his snowsuit back on but not the pants or underwear. Scheierl was also wearing a sweatshirt the perpetrator allowed him to keep. The man drove the boy back to Cold Spring and ordered him to roll around in his snowsuit on the snow. The man told Scheierl to run and not look back or he would shoot him.

Scheierl also told police the abductor told him he’s “lucky to be alive” and that if the police ever got a “lead” about what had just happened, he would find Scheierl after school and shoot him.

Jacob Wetterling

Nine months after the assault against Scheierl, on Oct. 22, 1989, Jacob was abducted at about 9:15 p.m. while he, his brother Trevor and best friend Aaron Larson were biking home from a Tom Thumb store where they went to get a movie video.

A masked man holding a handgun appeared on the rural road and told all three boys to lie down in the ditch. He asked each boy how old he was. Then he told Trevor and Aaron to run toward nearby woods, and to not look back or he would shoot them.

When the boys looked back, near the woods, Jacob and the man were gone.

In 1990, when Heinrich was detained and questioned about the Scheierl incident and the Wetterling abduction, he denied having anything to do with either and said he couldn’t remember what he was doing on those two nights.

Investigators at the scene of Jacob’s abduction said tire marks and shoe prints in the dirt seemed to approximate those of the Ford car Heinrich drove and of a pair of shoes he owned at that time, but the matches were not good enough to be perfect matches.

Police arranged a line-up of suspects, but Scheierl could not with certainty identify which of the two men in the line-up was the perpetrator. Heinrich was then released from custody for lack of proof.

DNA testing

Earlier this year, a DNA test was taken from the sweatshirt Scheierl’s was wearing during the sexual assault. The sweatshirt had been kept in police storage as possible evidence. The DNA on the sweatshirt matched the DNA in a hair taken from Heinrich when he was detained briefly in 1990.

However, charges could not be brought because the statute of limitations in the Scheierl case had long since expired.

Joy the Curious

About six years ago, Joy Baker, a writer and blogger in New London, came across an old local newspaper from May 1987 with a front-page headline, “Local police seek help in accosting incidents.”

The mother of two daughters, Baker had been deeply troubled by the inability of law enforcement to solve the Wetterling abduction.

The story was about the assaults that had been happening in Paynesville. It was then Baker began connecting dots between those crimes and the Wetterling abduction: a rather short stocky man, wearing a ski mask, often wearing a baseball-style hat, sometimes Army-style clothing, black boots, a raspy voice, asking boys their ages or what school grade they were in, telling them to run off and threatening to shoot them if they looked back or told anybody.

Baker got together with Scheierl, the sexual-assault victim, and they both began doing investigations of their own, interviewing people (including the assault victims), researching and trying to put the pieces of an old puzzle together.

They put their findings on Baker’s blog, entitled “Joy the Curious.”

Their work, the dots they connected, gave new impetus to the ongoing official investigations and helped point the way to Heinrich’s possible guilt in all the crimes.

Danny Heinrich

There is no statute of limitations on murder cases, either federally or in Minnesota, which means Heinrich, if convicted, could spend the rest of his life in prison.

The case against Heinrich tightened when law enforcement used a search warrant to search Heinrich’s home in Annandale on July 28, 2015. They were seeking sexual “trophies,” such as articles of clothing that may have been kept by Heinrich from his possible victims. Trophies, so-called, are often kept by perpetrators of sexual assault and/or murder who derive sexual satisfaction from hoarding such objects. The searchers found no “trophies’ in Heinrich’s house, but they did discover a three-ring binder filled with pictures of boys, some of them pornographic in nature. They also found digital images of boys on his computer.

At that time, Heinrich was employed by Buffalo Plywood in Buffalo.

After his arrest, he was charged in U.S. District Court with 25 counts of possessing child pornography, a crime that could bring a long prison sentence. Heinrich filed papers, claiming the photos of the boys were illegally taken and should be suppressed in any court proceedings. He also said his Miranda rights were violated when investigators talked with him at his home, and he requested a change of venue for the trial related to the child pornography. Those requests were denied in the Aug. 5, 2015, decision by three U.S. District Court attorneys.