Investigative files with tens of thousands of pages of documents detailing the nearly three-decade search for Jacob Wetterling will be released June 5, Stearns County authorities said Monday.
The contents, stashed in boxes in the basement of the Stearns County Law Enforcement Center in St. Cloud, will be available for public viewing online at www.co.stearns.mn.us.
Jacob Wetterling was 11 when he was abducted by a masked man with a gun on an October night in 1989 as he and his brother, Trevor, and best friend, Aaron Larson, rode their bicycles home from a convenience store in St. Joseph, Minn., where they had rented a video.
His fate remained a mystery for 27 years until Danny Heinrich, an early suspect in the kidnapping who had been arrested in 2015 on child pornography charges, confessed last fall to Jacob's abduction and murder and led investigators to his remains.
Heinrich was sentenced to 20 years in prison as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors.
Shortly after Heinrich confessed, teams of 5 to 14 people began gathering in the "Wetterling Room" in the basement of the Stearns County Law Enforcement Center, combing through tens of thousands of pages of tips, interrogation sheets and dead-end leads in the case in preparation for releasing the information to the public.
The teams scrutinized every box, every page and every line, blotting out things like Social Security numbers, private medical data and children's names. They also reviewed and transcribed taped interviews, inspected stacks of photographs and physical evidence, read newspaper clippings and dissected folders crammed with the roughly 80,000 tips that poured in from every corner of the globe between October 1989 and September 2016, when Heinrich, now 53, led investigators to the rural field in Paynesville, Minn., where he assaulted, shot and buried Jacob.
Staff from the Stearns County Attorney's office, the Stearns County Sheriff's Office and the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation also read through the investigative reports several times.
Much of what is in the files could be sensitive. Investigators have said that in the frantic aftermath of Jacob's abduction, people aired their worst suspicions and shared the darkest chapters in their family histories. The files contain names of neighbors who phoned in tips about neighbors and family members who suspected relatives.
"There's stuff that could probably damage relationships," Stearns County Chief Deputy Bruce Bechtold told the Star Tribune in November.
David Chanen • 612-673-4465
