An excellent Dutch/French movie, “The Vanishing” (1988), deals with the disappearance of a loved one and the price the people left behind (family, friends, etc.) are willing to pay to find out exactly what happened.
The movie focuses on a young couple on a road trip who stop at a highway gas station. The young woman goes into the station convenience store and never returns.
Her fiancé is so distraught that her disappearance becomes his obsession. Years go by, but he can’t forget or move on with his life. He pays for giant billboards and makes media appearances, begging the person who abducted her to contact him.
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Eventually, the kidnapper does, but he’s only willing to tell him exactly what happened to his lover if the fiancé is willing to go through the same steps that she did. He agrees.
I thought of the movie this week when I read about the case of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling. Young Jacob was out with his brother and a friend on bikes to pick up a video when he disappeared from a town in Central Minnesota in 1989. The boys who escaped told police that on their way back from the video store, a masked man appeared in the road with a gun, took Jacob hostage, and told them to run fast and not look back. Jacob never came home.
For 27 years, his family had no idea what happened to him, until recently.
The man who committed the abduction, sexual assault, and murder of Jacob said he would confess and lead authorities to the boy’s body, on one condition — that he not be prosecuted for the crime.
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And that’s exactly what happened, with Jacob’s parent’s consent — that’s how desperate they were to find his body and solve the mystery.
Danny Heinrich, age 53, was picked up on child pornography charges after being implicated in a sexual assault of another child (Jared Scheierl) one year before Jacob’s disappearance. While Heinrich had initially been stopped and questioned on the Scheirel assault 26 years ago, DNA testing was not as fine-tuned as it is today. He was released. Recently, however, forensic investigators were able to match the same DNA to Heinrich (testing now permits matches of very small quantities of DNA as well as mixed DNA samples) and police obtained a warrant to search his home.
The statute of limitations had run for the 1988 sex assault case, but when they found child pornography in Heinrich’s home, they secured a 25-count indictment on this alone. Based on several similarities in the cases, they also believed he had something to do with Jacob’s disappearance.
According to newspaper reports, Heinrich was a volatile man. At times he expressed a willingness to speak to federal prosecutors after his arrest, at times not. Finally, his defense attorneys worked out a plea deal — Heinrich would speak truthfully about his involvement in Jacob’s murder and tell police where his remains could be found, if they agreed not to pursue murder charges against him.
The amount recommended on the pornography charges is 20 years, less than what a defendant would normally receive for the sexual assault and murder of a child, but Jacob’s parents agreed to the deal because they wanted to know what had happened to their son and where to find him.
Heinrich, in open court, gave a full recitation of his actions that night. Jacob’s parents, in the courtroom, heard how he had been handcuffed, driven to the woods, sexually assaulted, then shot after he cried to be taken home.
Heinrich buried the boy in a shallow grave, which he led police to 27 years later.
They recovered Jacob’s clothes — a t-shirt with the name Wetterling on it, a red St. Cloud hockey jacket — and human remains.
According to the DOJ press release, “Even though the ending is not what we had hoped and prayed for, Jacob is finally home.”
Small solace, but I suppose 27 years after the fact, better than nothing.
Toni Messina has been practicing criminal defense law since 1990, although during law school she spent one summer as an intern in a large Boston law firm and realized quickly it wasn’t for her. Prior to attending law school, she worked as a journalist from Rome, Italy, reporting stories of international interest for CBS News and NPR. She keeps sane by balancing her law practice with a family of three children, playing in a BossaNova band, and dancing flamenco. She can be reached by email at [email protected] or tonimessinalaw.com, and you can also follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.