Wetterling Documentary Set For Stearns County Premiere At The Paramount

(KNSI) – Nearly 37 years after an 11-year-old boy was taken at gunpoint from a road in St. Joseph, the story of Jacob Wetterling is coming back to the community where it began.

“Echoes in the Night: The Search for Jacob Wetterling” has its Stearns County premiere Saturday, August 8th at the Paramount Center for the Arts. A reception starts at 4:00 p.m., with the film at 5:00 p.m. After the showing, there will be an onstage conversation with Patty and Jerry Wetterling, Jared Scheierl, researcher Joy Baker and director Chris Newberry. Newberry’s Minneapolis-based team began filming in 2015, and by chance started shooting the same week the perpetrator was arrested.

The film had its world premiere in April at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, where it was named a “Best of the Fest” selection.

Tickets are $10, plus a $3.50 processing fee and a $0.50 historic preservation fee. Proceeds benefit local nonprofits. The screening launches a month of showings around central Minnesota and the Twin Cities, including dates in Cold Spring, St. Michael and Woodbury.

Jacob was riding his bike home from a convenience store with his brother and a friend on the evening of October 22nd, 1989, when a masked gunman ordered the boys into a ditch and told the other two to run. The search that followed became one of the largest in state history, and the case went unsolved for nearly 27 years.

The break came from a separate crime. In January 1989, 12-year-old Jared Scheierl was abducted and assaulted in Cold Spring, then released. Advances in DNA testing later tied preserved evidence in that case to Danny James Heinrich of Annandale, who had been questioned and cleared in the Wetterling investigation in 1990. Scheierl’s persistence and Baker’s research into unsolved assaults near Paynesville helped push investigators to take another look.

Heinrich was arrested in October 2015 on federal child pornography charges. Under a plea agreement, he admitted in court on September 6th, 2016 that he abducted, assaulted and killed Jacob, and he led authorities to the boy’s remains in a pasture near Paynesville. He was not charged with murder as part of that deal.

U.S. District Judge John Tunheim sentenced Heinrich on November 21st, 2016 to 20 years in federal prison, the maximum allowed under the agreement, plus lifetime supervised release. Heinrich is serving his sentence in Massachusetts with a scheduled release date of March 28th, 2033. State officials have said they expect to seek his civil commitment as a sexual predator at that point.

Jacob’s parents helped drive passage of the 1994 federal law bearing his name, which first required states to create sex offender registries.

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