Danny Heinrich would eventually confess to murdering Jacob Wetterling and raping another young boy, but will not serve a day in prison for either crime because of a deal with prosecutors.
New details about the investigation into the 1989 disappearance of 11-year Jacob Wetterling are coming to light after the Federal Bureau of Investigation unsealed over 500 pages of documents from the case
Jacob went missing near his home in Minnesota on Oct. 22, 1989 while riding his bike with his brother and a friend. His case went unsolved until his killer, Danny Heinrch, led authorities to where he buried the boy's body on Sept, 1, 2016.
The newly-available FBI files reveal, however, that authorities not only interviewed Heinrich in 1989 after designating him a person of interest in the case, but also had evidence placing him at the scene.
A memo in these newly-unsealed documents focuses on the little bit of physical evidence available to agents investigating the case.
Agents obtained details about the tires on Heinrich's car as well as the soles of his shoes, which they then compared to tire treads and a latent print found at the site of Jacob's abduction.
The tire treads were a match, the documents in the FBI file said. While the shoe markings were not conclusive, the size did match the the latent print at the scene, according to documents found in the FBI file.
An agent said in one memo that the "suspect tire track was about five inches in width with about one inch in between grooves," then added: "it should be noted that most tires leave a track of greater than five inches."
In addition, there are multiple police sketches included of the file of the suspect, which look remarkably similar to Heinrich, a man already on the radar of local enforcement in relation to the sexual assault of another boy who lived just 10 miles from Jacob.
Despite that evidence, and the fact that Heinrich told agents in an interview two months after Jacob's disappearance that he did not have an alibi for the night Wetterling went missing, he was not arrested or charged with a crime at that time.
Jacob Wetterling's Abduction, Sexual Assault and Murder
Jacob, his younger brother Trevor, and their friend Aaron rode their bikes into town on the night of the abduction to rent Naked Gun from a local convenience store.
On the ride back home, a man suddenly emerged from the driveway waving a gun and wearing a stocking cap mask, Trevor would later tell police.
The man ordered the three boys into a ditch and asked Trevor his age. After Trevor informed the man that he was 10, the man told him to run away and not look back or else he would shoot.
Next, the man asked Aaron his age and then, after groping the child, instructed him to run away as well and not look back. Aaron would later say in court that when he did finally look back, Jacob and the man were gone,
Heinrich detailed what happened next during his federal trial on child pornography charges in 2016.
He told the judge that he drove in the car with Jacob, whom he ordered to stay down so he could not be seen in the passenger seat.
Heinrich then drove approximately 30 miles from where Jacob and his family lived in St. Joseph to Paynesville, where Heinrich had a home. He told the judge that he eventually arrived at a secluded area and got out of the car, at which time he molested Jacob and forced the boy to perform a sex act before allowing him to stop because he complained of being cold.
While walking back to the car, Heinrich said he saw a patrol car drive by with its lights on and told Jacob to turn around so he could pee. Jacob, who Heinrich said was crying at the time and begging to go home, turned around as instructed by his abductor. Heinrich said he then loaded two bullets into his gun and shot Jacob in the back of the head.
He then drove home, got a shovel, and walked back along the highway to where he left Jacob's body. That shovel proved ineffective, said Heinrich, so he stole a piece of construction equipment from a nearby site, drove the vehicle to the area, dug a hole and buried Jacob's body.
Heinrich said he forgot to bury Jacob's shoes, so he tossed them into a ravine and went home.
At no point that night did any member of law enforcement visit Heinrich's home or attempt to make contact with him, despite the fact that he was already a person of interest in another case in the same county.
Jared Scheier Abduction and Sexual Assault
Ten months before Jacob's murder, a car approached 12-year-old Jared Scheier while he walked home from a night of skating with friends on Jan. 13, 1989.
The man inside the car asked Jared for directions, then grabbed the boy and pulled him into the car.
Once inside the car, the man ordered Jared to take off his clothing and began to perform a sex act on the boy. At some point, the man stopped and ordered Jared to perform a sex act on him. The man then started to perform another sex on Jared, but eventually stopped, ordered the boy to give him his clothing, and sent him out of the vehicle wearing just his snowsuit.
He made Jared roll around in the snow and then told the boy to run home, saying before he left that he would murder the child if he spoke to police. But Jared did speak to police and described his abductor and the vehicle in which the man raped him to the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. Heinrich's car matched Jared's description in most ways, but did not have the removable luggage rack that Jared said was on the vehicle the night of his abduction.
The detective Jared spoke to would later put together a lineup of men including Heinrich, and Jared would identify Heinrich and one other man as possibly being the person who abducted him that night. That detective is the same detective who first spoke to Trevor and Aaron on the night of Jacob's disappearance.
The FBI would interview Heinrich two months later, and local authorities did arrest Heinrich and charged him with abducting Jared before being forced to let him go due to a lack of evidence.
Heinrich seemed to disappear after being released by police and may have managed to live out the rest of his life completely undetected had Jared not reached out to members of the press and asked them to look in the details of the investigation into his abduction and sexual assault.
Soon after he made those requests, law enforcement submitted evidence obtained during that investigation for DNA testing from his case,
That evidence linked Heinrich to the case, which allowed authorities to obtain a search warrant for Heinrich's home
Dany Heinrich Arrest
On July 28, 2015, a search of Heinrich's home found "19 three-ring binders, each of which contained images of children," according to a complaint obtained by Inside Edition Digital.
The complaint said that some of the images were of "fully" nude girls and boys who were under the age of 12, while morphed images of child pornography were found on Heinrich's computer.
This was enough for prosecutors to charge Heinrich with 25 counts related to his possession of child pornography.
That is when Heinrich offered up a possible plea, agreeing to admit to his abduction and rape of Jared and abduction, sexual assault and murder of Jacob if 24 of those counts were dismissed and he could have immunity, according to court documents.
Prosecutors agreed, at which point Heinrich showed authorities where he buried Jacob.
The statute of limitations had run out on Jared's case and Heinrich did not face any charges related to the murder of Jacob, so in the end a judge sentenced him to 20 years in prison for possessing child pornography.
Jared, Trevor, and Aaron all spoke at Heinrich's sentencing hearing, as did Jacob's parents.
Jacob's parents spoke of the financial strain searching for their son took on them, and how that nearly destroyed their relationship.
Jared refused to address Heinrich, and left the courtroom before he delivered his remark, saying: "I'll have him know that I personally will be walking out at that time for the fact that he should know that the words that he had spoke to me on that evening haunted me for years, and I don't chose to hear anything he wishes to say at this time."
Aaron and Trevor both spoke of the overwhelming guilt they still feel to this day.
"For 20 years I lived with a huge amount of guilt from the choices that were made from that night. I lived every day thinking I was the monster that night, I was the coward that left my friend, I was the coward that ran away," said Aaron according to a transcript from the hearing. "Every day I lived with believing that me running away was a choice. During all these years, every decision I made in life revolved around Jacob and the guilt I felt because I was still here. I was the last person who cared about Jacob to see him, to be right next to him, and I just left him."
Aaron said that for 20 years he struggled, going so far as to leave the country to avoid being associated with the case.
Trevor spoke next, saying: "On the night of Oct. 22, 1989, the life that I knew was stolen and changed forever. This terrible horrible creature who thought it was okay to just steal another human being and then murder him out of his own fear of being caught is and will always be a threat to society."
In the end, the judge assigned Heinrich the maximum sentence allowed under the guidelines for his crime.
Heinrich is set to be released from prison in 2032.
