This Sunday will be 34 years since 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped by a masked man at gunpoint. It's a story that is seared into the memories of Minnesotans.
For those past 34 years, his mom, Patty, has been the face of the tragedy, the search and the hope through it all. She's become a national advocate for missing children.
Tuesday, she released her memoir, “Dear Jacob: A Mother’s Journey of Hope.” It’s co-written with Joy Baker, the central Minnesota blogger who Patty credits with helping solve the case.
Joy and Patty talked with MPR News host Cathy Wurzer.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
You have given countless interviews and speeches over the years. And you've had to retell your story again and again … you could have stepped back. But instead, you're again in the public eye with this book. Why did you want to do something like this?
Patty Wetterling: Well, first of all, you were a huge part of our search. The first thing I heard from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is the number one way kids are found is because people know their story and they see pictures. The Twin Cities media was brilliant at helping us and you carried us during that really, really tough time.
What I realized, people kept asking me to write this book and they kept calling for different reasons … I thought I could help by sharing some of what we went through. I honestly believe that hope is a critical life ingredient that we all need desperately, especially in today’s world. I think that we sometimes see the cynical side, the downside and so I wrote it for the hope, for the legacy and for Jacob.
And a thank you, for all the people who carried us when we couldn’t do it on our own.
Were you writing letters to Jacob?
Patty Wetterling: I did. I remember the very first ones were Thanksgiving — I didn’t want to have Thanksgiving. It was like, let’s just do hamburgers, and I got vetoed by my kids who wanted, you know, they wanted grandma and grandpa over and they wanted turkey and whatever. So we formed a tradition and Jacob wasn’t there.
And my sister has two boys that are Jake and Trevor’s ages. So there were always four boys to play together and then that year, there was just a three, it was really hard. At Christmas time, I pulled out all the decorations and there was Jacob’s letters to Santa and his stocking that I had made him and it was like I had to tell him, I wanted to hand him a notebook full of all of the letters because I wanted him to know all that we had done to find him when he came home.
I really believed that one day, he was going to come home and I could show him. I pictured him saying, “Where were you? Why didn’t you find me sooner?” So I wanted to let him know.
Joy, how did you get into the story?
Joy Baker: Well, also a long story. I was just trying to be a writer. I was 43 years old when I started my blog and I had been in marketing my entire adult life. I wondered about Jacob’s case; I hadn’t paid attention to it for a while. And then as I was looking into it, there was this breaking news about this great big lead about their neighbor down the road whose farmland was being dug up and searched. I thought that was a sign and I went with it.
We had met, and that was just at a charity gala in Willmar. Ironically, she happened to come to town to a gala that I was at for my work, she was the keynote speaker. I walked up to her afterward to introduce myself gave her my card and explained that I had been blogging about Jacob’s case, and I think I could just almost see red flags go right up above her head.
Patty Wetterling: The next morning Jerry was reading her blog, he read it aloud to me. And I'm pacing. It was unbelievable, she’s telling our story and it was accurate. There were no errors. It was detailed, and I was scared. It’s like I didn’t think anybody could tell our story. And I didn’t understand where she's going with this, what her intentions were and so we had a long, probably two and a half hour phone call that day.
Joy Baker: I could tell she was a little weirded out by the whole thing. It was awkward for both of us at first, for sure. I had already been putting suspects and witnesses together at Panera Bread. And I think Patty, well and rightly so, was a little nervous.
Patty Wetterling: At first she was writing about what had happened but now she was making things happen and I didn’t want her messing up what we had, which was not very much at that point. But the beauty of Joy is she’s really smart, and she is curious. She started asking questions nobody was looking at, nobody was doing.
Joy Baker: I had wanted to find this young man named Jared, who had been abducted and assaulted just nine months prior to Jacob’s kidnapping. I had never really heard of him before I started doing my research. But I thought, well, if I could find that guy and then I did.
Jared said we needed to get together with Patty Wetterling, you know, and she needs to know about this. I said, “Okay, well, do you want to give her a call?” And he said, “No, you should do that, you call her and just let her know that I want to talk to her son, Trevor and Aaron,” the other two witnesses and they wanted to get together and compare notes as well.
And so I said, “Okay, well, okay, I’ll give her a call,” and so I did. And Patty sort of just shut down at that point and said no. Number one, she’s really protective of Jared, you know, just protecting him as a young victim, but also very protective of Trevor, of course, her son and Aaron.
Patty Wetterling: Jared actually pulled us all together … and it was a brilliant coming together of minds and mission at that point. Joy’s an incredible researcher. When we started up writing again, she had dates and times and places. I think that’s kind of one of the problems with being a victim, your brain gets a little scrambled and I had things out of order. She would just make note cards and tell me about this and it was really a gift.
Do you hold any animosity toward some investigators for letting Heinrich slip through the cracks?
Patty Wetterling: My opinion is, you have to think back to 1989. There was a fundraiser to make sure all that law enforcement could get fax machines, DNA was not very well developed. This man had no criminal history for any sexually motivated crimes. They gathered evidence and visually it looked to you and I like: this is him. But forensically, they did not have any evidence.
I met with Pam Jensen, who was the captain at Stearns County for years. And she said, there’s about five people, we can’t rule them in, we can’t rule them out. Danny’s name was always on that list. He lawyered up, he didn’t want to talk to anybody. The FBI followed him too. They tracked him for quite a while. They didn’t have it until they did, they had enough to get a search warrant and then they got some DNA.
There were several other people that equally we felt could have done it. There’s some bad people out there. I really saw the commitment and the effort that was put into finding Jacob and Joy said this a million times, had they arrested him in 1990, we might have never found Jacob.
He lived his life in fear of being caught. And eventually, when they had his DNA as the man who assaulted Jared, he knew he was going down for that … he knew that technology was better and he plea bargained and led us to Jacob. I guess it doesn’t do me any good in terms of myself, my well being to hold animosity and pain and hurt.
Patty, if I remember the quote at the news conference, you said Jacob was alive until we found him.
Patty Wetterling: I had met kids along the way who had been kidnapped and came home after six months, five years, 10 years and 17 and a half years — so at what point do you give up? I worked very hard on believing that Jacob could be one of them. Until somebody proved to me that he wasn’t — I was always going to hope.
It was really hard to deal with that. But part of that is he’s still alive in our hearts, you know, he is with me all the time. It’s so ironic, I’ll be going somewhere and maybe unsure of what I’m going to do and some eagle will start flying and directing my car and it’s like, “Hi Jake, thank you.” He’s still with us and with our children and grandchildren, too. They never met him, but they carry him in their hearts too.
How are you feeling right now?
Patty Wetterling: October is hard. It’s always hard. And this year, it’s on a Sunday again. And so the kids will come up and the grandkids and you know, we just have our little sort of rituals of things we do on that day and we laugh and we remember — it’s healing to all be together.
I met somebody yesterday and she’s like, don’t you just wonder, you know, what he’d be doing, what he’d be like, and what jobs he’d be doing and all of that. And she was really critical to me because she was a mom.
She had a two-year-old when Jacob was kidnapped, and then later another son. He changed the way she parented and she followed our case, and she cried with us as a mom and I thought, you know, everybody needs to heal through that through Jacob’s abduction. It caused harm and pain to so many people. And I think that was really a nice message to get from this woman, a letter of encouragement that she was hurting too.
It’s time for us to make peace with what happened.
Does this book help you do that?
Patty Wetterling: It did. For me, I was constantly running ahead. What do we have to do next? Who haven’t we talked to? Who doesn’t know about Jake? When I ran for office, somebody told me I had 91 percent name ID and I was like, who are the other nine percent?
Writing the book was incredibly therapeutic and helpful for me to reflect and some of it was reliving some pain, but some of it was framing it and putting perspective on it.
I think that everybody can do that with their own lives because he changed a lot of lives. The abduction changed a lot of lives, it changed laws, it changed the way we configure parking lots in schools and so many things.
Joy, how did Jacob change you?
Joy Baker: Well, for one thing, I am a mother. I had two young boys at the time I started my blog. That’s really the first time why I put it away. After about three weeks of writing about Jacob’s case in 2010, I just said to myself, Joy, what in the world are you doing? You know, you’ve got a 13 and a 15-year-old boy, this guy, we don’t know where he lives or where he’s from. But I don’t live that far from St. Joseph.
At some point, it was just the coincidences that you could not deny, just one thing after another after another. I kept saying, you know, it’s like Jacob found me, this case found me. And it wouldn’t let me go.
Patty didn’t call me a stalker to my face, but it was a bit insinuated. I was horrified. You know, I just was like, Oh my gosh, is that really what she thinks of me? Throughout this whole thing, Jacob has led us all. He has been the shining light that brought answers. He is the one that kind of drove us to, to do what we did. There’s really no other explanation because it was absolutely magical.
Is there something you want readers to feel or to remember after they get done reading the book?
Patty Wetterling: The constant in all of this has been hope. Hope and belief in children and fight for the world that they deserve. Kids deserve the right to grow up safe and follow their dreams and not lose sight of that ever.
No matter what your life challenges are, pick yourself up and breathe and say, you know, I can do this. It’s the determination. I hope that people have a positive energy from it and there’s room for tears, but there’s also room for action. Let’s build this world. Jacob deserves that, all of our kids deserve it.
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Audio transcript
SPEAKER: This is Minnesota Now. And this Sunday will be 34 years since 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped by a masked man at gunpoint. It's a story that is seared into the memories of Minnesotans. For those 34 years, his mom Patty has been the face of the tragedy, the search, and the hope through it all. She's become a national advocate for missing children.
Today, she'll release her memoir. It's called Dear Jacob-- A Mother's Journey of Hope. And it's co-written with Joy Baker, the Central Minnesota blogger whom Patty credits with helping solve the case. Joy and Patty talked with MPR News host Cathy Wurzer.
CATHY WURZER: Gosh, how many years has it been since you and I have seen each other, Patty?
PATTY WETTERLING: Oh gosh, too many.
CATHY WURZER: Oh I know.
PATTY WETTERLING: Too many.
CATHY WURZER: Welcome.
PATTY WETTERLING: Thank you.
CATHY WURZER: Welcome. And Joy, it's a pleasure getting to meet you.
JOY BAKER: Thank you.
CATHY WURZER: Thanks for being here.
JOY BAKER: Yes, absolutely.
PATTY WETTERLING: Thanks for having us.
CATHY WURZER: [SIGHS] Patty, you have given countless interviews and speeches over the years. And you've had to retell your story again and again and again and again. And because you and your family lived a nightmare for years and have been in the public eye through all of this, you could have stepped back, but instead you're, again, in the public eye with this book. Why did you want to do something like this?
PATTY WETTERLING: Well, first of all, you were a huge part of our search. The first thing I heard from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is the number one way kids are found because people know their story, and they see pictures. So we worked with-- and the Twin Cities Media was brilliant at helping us. And you carried us during that really, really tough time.
What I realized-- people kept asking me to write this book. And they kept calling for different reasons, say, my son had a serious car accident. I don't know how you get through things. If you tell me how to get through this, how to get through my child has cancer, my wife has-- it's just one story after another. And I thought if I can help them share some of what kept us going, and I honestly believe that hope is a critical life ingredient that we all need desperately, especially in today's world.
I think that we sometimes see the cynical side, the down side. And so I wrote it for the hope and as a legacy for Jacob and as a thank you for all the people who carried us when we couldn't do it on our own.
CATHY WURZER: Were you writing letters to Jacob?
PATTY WETTERLING: I did. I remember the very first ones were Thanksgiving. I didn't want to have Thanksgiving. It was like, let's just do hamburgers. And I got vetoed by my kids who wanted-- they wanted grandma and grandpa over. And they wanted turkey and whatever. So we formed a tradition, and Jacob wasn't there. And my sister has two boys that are Jake and Trevor's ages. So there were always four boys to play together. And then that year, there were just the three. And it was really hard.
At Christmas time, I pulled out all the decorations. And there was Jacob's letters to Santa and his stocking that I had made him. And it was like, I had to tell him-- I wanted to hand him a notebook full of all of the letters because I wanted him to know all that we had done to find him when he came home. I really believed that one day he was going to come home, and I could show him that. Because I pictured him saying, where were you? Why didn't you find me sooner, kind of thing? So I wanted to let him know.
CATHY WURZER: Oh my gosh, that has got to be incredibly hard.
PATTY WETTERLING: It was hard, but things were happening. His cousin got married. His grandpa, Jerry's father died. And I just wanted to have him be part of our lives throughout this journey. So I wrote not regularly, but periodically. And I just carried those with me all this time. They were disorganized.
[LAUGHTER]
CATHY WURZER: Well, that's-- I mean, because so much was happening in your life, obviously, in these past 34 years. Joy, how did you get into the story?
JOY BAKER: Well, also a long story, but--
PATTY WETTERLING: It's a good one.
JOY BAKER: Yeah. So I was just trying to be a writer. I was 43 years old when I started my blog. Had been in marketing my entire adult life.
CATHY WURZER: And of course, the biggest mystery to that point in the state of Minnesota was, where was Jacob Wetterling?
JOY BAKER: Yeah, that's exactly where I went with it. So I wondered about Jacob's case. I hadn't paid attention to it for a while. And then as I was just looking into it, there was this breaking news about this great big lead about their neighbor down the road whose farmland was being dug up and searched. So I thought that was a sign. And so I went with it.
CATHY WURZER: But I can imagine, Patty, over all these years, I can't even imagine the people that you've run into who are less than honest, shall we say. A number of unscrupulous individuals I'm sure you've dealt with. And not that I'm saying Joy is unscrupulous. But I mean, here's this person. You don't even know who she is. And she's coming to you and saying, hey, let's write about this.
PATTY WETTERLING: It's like, who is this woman? Literally. I was overwhelmed. She had written a few blog posts. And we had met.
JOY BAKER: And that was just at a charity gala in Wilmer. Ironically, she happened to come to town to a gala that I was at for my work. She was the keynote speaker. So I just walked up to her afterward to introduce myself. Gave her my card. Explained that I had been blogging about Jacob's case. And I think I could just almost see red flags go right up above her head.
PATTY WETTERLING: And then the next morning, Jerry was reading her blog. He read it aloud to me. And I'm pacing, and it's like unbelievable. She's telling our story. And it was accurate. There were no errors. It was detailed. And I was scared. It's like, I didn't think anybody could tell our story. And I didn't understand where is she going with this? What are her intentions? And so we had a long, probably 2.5-hour phone call that day.
JOY BAKER: I could tell she was a little weirded out by the whole thing. It was awkward for both of us for sure.
PATTY WETTERLING: And then I was busy. And she was busy. And it took two years before we really-- or was it a year and a half?
JOY BAKER: But I, by that time, had already been putting suspects and witnesses together at Panera Bread. And I think, Patty, and rightly so, was a little nervous. Like, what in the world are you doing? Who is this woman, and what is she doing?
PATTY WETTERLING: At first, she was writing about what had had happened. But now, she was making things happen. And I didn't want her messing up what we had, which was not very much at that point. But the beauty of Joy is she's really smart. And she is curious. And she started asking questions nobody was looking at, nobody was doing. The sheriff had named a person of interest. And so when she met Jared, and then Jared pulled us all together. So that was the team-- Jerry, me, Joy, and Jared.
JOY BAKER: I figured out that I had wanted to find this young man named Jared who had been abducted and assaulted just nine months prior to Jacob's kidnapping. And I had never really heard of him before I started doing my research. But I thought, well, if I could find that guy-- so I did find him. He said, well, we need to get together with Patty Wetterling. And she needs to know about this and find out about it.
And I said, oh OK. Well, do you want to give her a call? And he said, no, you should do that. You call her and just let her know that I want to talk to her son Trevor and Aaron, the other two witnesses. And they wanted to get together and compare notes as well. And so I said, OK. Well, OK, I'll give her a call, or whatever. And so I did, and Patty sort of just shut down at that point and said, no.
PATTY WETTERLING: No way.
JOY BAKER: Number one, she's really protective of Jared, just protecting him as a young victim, but also very protective of Trevor, of course, her son, and Aaron.
PATTY WETTERLING: Jared actually pulled us all together. And we went to Joy's house. And it's a lovely home. And she had pictures of her kids on the wall, and everything looked normal. [LAUGHS] And I guess I needed that. Her husband is delightful. And Jerry gets along with everybody. And it was a brilliant coming together of minds and mission at that point.
And then from then on-- Joy's an incredible researcher and put order to my-- when we started writing again, she had dates and times and places. And I think that's kind of one of the problems with being a victim, your brain gets a little scrambled. And I had things out of order. And so she would just make note cards and tell me about this, and this was going on around that time. And so it was really, a gift.
CATHY WURZER: I'm remembering my colleagues who did In the Dark podcast. Remember that one?
PATTY WETTERLING: Sure.
CATHY WURZER: Reported that officers actually arrested Danny Heinrich, Jacob's killer, gosh, in 1990 for a different assault. And it took until 2016 to get the confession.
PATTY WETTERLING: Right.
CATHY WURZER: And I wonder, do you hold any-- either of you-- any animosity toward some investigators for letting Heinrich slip through the cracks?
PATTY WETTERLING: I'll say my opinion is, you have to think back to 1989. There was a fundraiser to make sure all the law enforcement could fax machines. DNA was not very well developed. This man had no criminal history for any sexually-motivated crimes. Later, you'll find out they had tire tracks, and they took his shoes. So they gathered evidence. And visually, it looked to you and I like this is him. But forensically, they did not have any evidence.
And I met with Pam Jensen who was the captain at Stearns County for years. And she said, there's about five people we can't rule them in, we can't rule them out. And Danny's name was always on that list. He lawyered up. He didn't want to talk to anybody. And they honestly didn't have-- I know the FBI followed him, too. They tracked him for quite a while. And they didn't have it until they did 2015. They had enough to get a search warrant. And then they got some DNA.
CATHY WURZER: That name was always on lists. Isn't that interesting? I know. Did that just rankle you?
PATTY WETTERLING: No, you know, I got it. There were several other people that equally we felt could have done it. There's some bad people out there. And I really saw the commitment and the effort that was put into finding Jacob. And Joy has said this a million times. Had they arrested him in 1990, we might have never found where's Jacob? Because it was the process of him-- he lived his life in fear of being caught. And eventually when they had Jared's DNA, his DNA as the man who assaulted Jared, he knew he was going down for that.
Well, they couldn't arrest him for that. The statute of limitations had run out, but he knew that technology was better. And he plea-bargained and led us to Jacob. So I guess it doesn't do me any good in terms of my well-being to hold animosity and pain and hurt.
CATHY WURZER: I'm wondering, so Jacob was found. And I think, Patty, if I remember the quote at the news conference after you said Jacob was alive until we found him.
PATTY WETTERLING: Right.
CATHY WURZER: Yeah.
PATTY WETTERLING: I had met-- along the way, I had met kids who had been kidnapped and come home after six months. Elizabeth Smart was nine months. Five years, 10 years in Cleveland, and 17.5 years. So at what point do you give up? I knew that there's missing kids out there, and I wanted so badly and worked very hard believing that Jacob could be one of them. Until somebody proved to me that he wasn't, I was always going to hope. And so it was really hard to deal with that.
But part of that is he's still alive in our hearts. He is with me all the time. It's so ironic. I'll be going somewhere and maybe unsure of what I'm going to do and some eagle will start flying and directing my car. And it's like, hi Jake, thank you. He's just still with us and with our children and grandchildren, too. They never met him, but they carry him in their hearts, too.
CATHY WURZER: I wonder the body tends to keep score of that, which is traumatic. It's been said that, anyway. And I believe that to be true because people who have been through traumatic experiences sometimes feel the trauma in their body, especially as an anniversary comes along. So how are you feeling right now?
PATTY WETTERLING: October is hard. It's always hard. And this year, October 22 is a Sunday again. And so the kids will come up and the grandkids. And we just have our little sort of rituals of things we do on that day. And we laugh. And we remember. And it's healing to all to be together. But yeah, clearly, it was-- I met somebody yesterday. And she's like, don't you just wonder what he'd be doing, what he'd be like, and what jobs he'd be doing and all of that?
And she was really critical to me because she was a mom. She had a two-year-old when Jacob was kidnapped, and then later another son. And he changed the way she parented. And she followed our case. And she cried with us as a mom. And I thought, everybody needs to heal through Jacob's abduction. It caused harm and pain to so many people. And I think that that was really a nice message to get from this woman to encourage-- a letter of encouragement that she was hurting, too. So it's time for us to make peace with what happened.
CATHY WURZER: Does this book help you do that?
PATTY WETTERLING: It did. For me, I was constantly running ahead. What do we have to do next? Who haven't we talked to? Who doesn't know about Jake? When I ran for office, somebody told me I had 91% name ID. And I was like, who are the other 9%? I'm looking for them. And I was like, somebody doesn't know. We all need to know. And I did that for almost 27 years.
So writing the book was incredibly therapeutic and helpful for me to reflect. And some of it was reliving some pain. But some of it was framing it and putting perspective on it. And I think that everybody can do that with their own lives, because he changed a lot of lives. The abduction changed a lot of lives, changed laws. It changed the way we configure parking lots and schools and so many things.
CATHY WURZER: As you mentioned, changed parenting for so many of us.
PATTY WETTERLING: Yeah.
CATHY WURZER: I mean, think about that.
PATTY WETTERLING: There's part of that that's good. It's like nobody took their kids for granted. It's like, hug your kids. Tell them how special they are and know who their friends are and go with them. Don't just drop them off and come back three hours later. Be part of their lives. And I still think that's-- especially now with technology, it's easier for parents to disengage. And they need us.
CATHY WURZER: Joy, how has Jacob changed you?
JOY BAKER: Whoa.
PATTY WETTERLING: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
JOY BAKER: That's a tough one. Well, for one thing, I am a mother. Also a boy mom. I had two young boys at the time. Well, they were in their young teens, I should say, at the time I started my blog. So that's really the first time why I put it away. After about three weeks of writing about Jacob's case in 2010, I just said to myself, Joy, what in the world are you doing?
You've got a 13 and 15-year-old boy. This guy, we don't know where he lives or where he's from, but I don't live that far from St. Joseph. At some point, it was just the coincidences that you could not deny. Just one thing after another after another, I kept saying it's like Jacob found me. This case found me. And it wouldn't let me go. Every time when Patty called me the-- she didn't actually call me a stalker to my face.
[LAUGHTER]
But it was a bit insinuated. And I was horrified. I just was like, oh my gosh, is that really what she thinks of me? And I'm normal. I'm nice. Throughout this whole thing, Jacob, I think, has led us all. He has been the shining light that brought answers. And he is the one that kind of drove us to do what we did. There's really no other explanation because it was absolutely magical.
CATHY WURZER: Final question here. Is there a feel or something that you want readers to feel or to remember after they get done reading the book, Patty?
PATTY WETTERLING: The constant in all of this has been hope-- hope and believe in children, and fight for the world that they deserve. Kids deserve the right to grow up safe and follow their dreams and not lose sight of that ever. No matter what your life challenges are you, you sort of pick yourself up and breathe and say, I can do this. And it's determination. And I hope that people have a positive energy from it. And there's room for tears, but there's also room for active activity, of action. Let's build this world. Jacob deserves it. Our kids deserve it.
CATHY WURZER: I've enjoyed the conversation just because it's been so long since I've seen each other, Patty. But it's still sad. Every October, it's still is this little nudge that you remember back all those many years, but--
PATTY WETTERLING: Light a little candle. It helps soften the darkness.
CATHY WURZER: Thank you. Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker, thank you so much.
JOY BAKER: Thank you.
PATTY WETTERLING: Thank you, too.
CATHY WURZER: Nice to have you here.
JOY BAKER: Thank you.
SPEAKER: Patty Wetterling and Joy Baker talking with our Cathy Wurzer. Their book Dear Jacob is out today.
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