In The Dark - S1 E7: This Quiet Place

Episode Date: October 11, 2016

Soon after the abduction and murder of Jacob Wetterling in 1989, Stearns County sheriff's investigators came face to face with his killer, Danny Heinrich, who would confess to the crime 27 years later. Then they let him go. It wasn't the first time that had happened in Stearns County. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Previously, on In the Dark. It's a case that defied logic then and now. On the outskirts of his hometown of St. Joseph, a young boy's mysterious disappearance. What they called an abduction of a child. Well, my initial thought was, you don't think that happens here. People of all ages and walks of life came out to keep the hope alive. Hope that 11-year-old Jacob will return home safely. You know, I don't know. I know we reached a point after the investigation there,

we had really nothing at that point. We let Henry go. They had all of that. None of it was new. None of it is new. Stearns County, the FBI, they've all had all of that. None of it was new. None of it is new. Stearns County, the FBI, they've all had all of this. None of this was new. Just like, what? We lived here the whole time and he's just down the damn road all those years, you know? And it's like, what? The people that worked on that case gave truly 110% every day they were there.

And I don't know. I don't know that there's anything we could have done differently. In December 1978, in a farmhouse in a remote part of Stearns County, the same county where Jacob Wetterling was later kidnapped. A woman named Alice Hewling was getting ready for the holidays. Alice was divorced, and she lived with her four kids, Susie, Patty, Wayne, and Billy. Susie was the oldest. She was 16, and she worked part-time as a waitress

at the Cozy Cafe in a nearby town. On the night of December 14, 1978, Alice and her four kids went to bed. Alice's bedroom was on the first floor. The kids slept upstairs. Sometime late at night, a man entered the Hewling house. He cut the phone line, and then he went into Alice's bedroom and attacked her.

He hit her with some kind of heavy object, maybe a metal club, and shot her. And then the man headed upstairs. He shot and killed three of Alice's four children in their beds. And then the man approached 11-year-old Billy, who was hiding under his covers, trying to stay as still as possible. The man fired two shots in Billy's direction. Both hit the pillow, just inches from Billy's head. Billy kept still, hoping the man would think he was dead. Then the man left.

The murder shocked the rural Stearns County community where the Hewlings lived and left state crime bureau investigators and sheriffs puzzled, searching for some fragment of reason behind the slayings. No arrests had been made, and officials would say nothing about suspects. The case was still unsolved 11 years later, when Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped, in the same county. This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I'm Madeline Barron.

In this podcast, we're looking at what went wrong in the case of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped in a small town in central Minnesota in 1989. After Jacob was kidnapped, everyone, the media, law enforcement, neighbors, talked about how surprising it was that a crime like that could happen here, in this quiet, rural place. The kind of ways where you don't expect a child to be kidnapped at gunpoint. Considered to be America's quiet and safe heartland. One night, one awful event has robbed this town of its innocence. The implication was that the agency in charge of investigating Jacob's disappearance,

the Stearns County Sheriff's Office, had never worked a case like this before. A case so mysterious and terrifying. But that wasn't true. Jacob's kidnapping wasn't the first big case the Stearns County Sheriff's Office had dealt with. And it wasn't the first big case they'd failed to solve. The Jacob Wetterling case was just one in a long line of failed investigations. After the killer left the Hewling house, the boy who survived, 11-year-old Billy Hewling, ran through the snow to a neighbor's house. He told them his family had been shot. Jim Kostreba was the first officer called to the scene. I can still remember driving up to the house, how cold it was and how bright the moon was shining.

It was a beautiful evening, a beautiful night. And I think what I remember most about stepping inside the door was the smell of the gunshot powder. Then I knew that something terrible had happened at that house. Kostreba peered into the bedrooms. And I can remember seeing those three children dead in their beds along with their mother. The four homicides at the house was a little unnerving, to say the least. Kostreba would go on to work on the Jacob Wetterling case.

He even became the sheriff of Stearns County, two years after Jacob was kidnapped, and held that job until Sheriff John Sanner took over in 2003. But back then, Kostreba was just a patrol deputy, not an investigator. So he secured the scene until the investigators could get there. Meanwhile, a young EMT named Steve Mund arrived at the Hewling House. Mund later got a job as a deputy in the sheriff's office, and he worked on the Wetterling case, too. But that morning, Mund was there to take the bodies to the coroner.

Obviously, this was a huge deal in the St. Cloud area in 1978. I mean, homicides are normally one person. You don't have an entire family killed, or nearly an entire family killed, except for Billy. Mund watched as the investigators arrived to collect evidence. They took photos of the inside of the house. In some of the pictures, you can see the kids' toy cars scattered around. I'd read a statement Mund gave later about seeing investigators at the scene do a few things that seemed pretty questionable.

investigators at the scene do a few things that seem pretty questionable. That statement later ended up in court, and in it, Mund said that he saw a state investigator pick up a phone in the house before he dusted it for fingerprints, and that a captain from the Stearns County Sheriff's Office realized the mistake and, quote, said something like, oh well. Mund wrote that at that point, he turned to his co-worker and said, quote, maybe we should wait outside until the sheriff's office was done. While they waited, Mund said he saw the sheriff come out of the house, holding what looked like the flashlight he'd seen on the Hewling's kitchen table. The sheriff used it to search the woods for any sign of footprints. But that flashlight, it might not have belonged to the Hewlings. It might have been the killer's.

When I reached Steve Mund, he didn't want to talk about any of that. From 1978 to now, police training and education and crime scene processing techniques have improved a thousandfold. So there's no doubt in my mind that people there did the best they thought they were doing at the time. And looking back, maybe they could have done better. But I think at the time, they could have done the best that they think they're doing. The murder of the Hewing family terrified people in Stearns County. Newspapers reported on how parents were arming their children with shotguns,

and men were taking time off work to stay home with their wives and children. People sat facing their front doors with guns ready. One man told a reporter, All I can say is I would hate to run out of gas at two in the morning and have to knock on any of my neighbor's doors. I was talking to a woman in Stearns County named Jen Kolzer about the panic in the community back then. When we moved out here in 72, you never locked a door. Never, ever. We never locked a door. But all at once we're locking doors because we lived back here on the end of the road.

Somebody could come in here and nobody would ever know it. Actually, I started having a gun in the house, a pistol. Wow. Because you're thinking, like, if this happens, I want to be... They're not getting in. Jen told me a policeman actually gave her some advice on what to do. If you have to shoot somebody outside, drag them in because they had to be in your house. Okay. To be, like, legal.

Mm-hmm. Okay. And it'd be a good idea to shoot a warning shot in the wall so they could check. The sheriff of Stearns County at the time seemed just as baffled as everyone else when he spoke to a TV reporter shortly after the murders. I guess the question in my mind is, you know, how could this type of crime happen in this somewhat remote area of our county? crime happen in this somewhat remote area of our county. And I guess one has to take a close look at determining a motive for this type of crime because it certainly is unusual.

Four days after the Hewling murders, in the next county over, Wright County, a man named Joseph Turrey stopped by a truck stop for something to eat. I'm in there having breakfast, and I'm trying to get a couple of dates with a couple of the waitresses, you know, acting, you know. That's how I get most with a couple of the waitresses, you know, acting, you know. That's how I get most of my dates with waitresses, you know, because I eat out. Everywhere I eat is eat out, you know. I talked with Turi on the phone, and he told me he used to go to that restaurant all the time. It was a popular place.

Alice Hewling used to go there sometimes for coffee. Turi was a regular. He'd been living in his car. And in the weeks leading up to the Hewling murders, some of the waitresses had started complaining to their boss that Turi had been harassing them, and that sometimes he'd even followed them in his car when they drove home after their shifts late at night. So I guess they called the cops and said that this guy was

harassing them or something. So a deputy from the Wright County Sheriff's Office stopped by. So he comes in there and he, I guess he went around the parking lot and my car was sitting right out there. And then he comes in and he says, I got to talk to you outside for a minute. The deputy thought the car Turi was driving might be stolen, so he arrested him. And then he comes in and he says, I got to talk to you outside for a minute. The deputy thought the car Turi was driving might be stolen, so he arrested him. It would later turn out that the car wasn't actually stolen. But what caught the officer's attention was what was inside the car. A small brown diary with a list of the names of waitresses, their addresses, and their license plate numbers,

a metal club, and a little toy car, a Batmobile car to be exact. Immediately, the chief deputy of the Wright County Sheriff's Office connected it to the murder of the Hewling family that had happened just four days earlier, and he contacted the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. He told them he had a possible suspect they should interview, a man named Joseph Turrey. I let the record show that we're at the Wright County Sheriff's Office. The time is 2.40, and Officer Kostreva and I are talking to Joseph Donald Turi, and the date of birth is 2-7-51.

I got this recording from the archives at the Stearns County Courthouse. In the interview, two officers from the Stearns County Sheriff's Office are interrogating Joseph Turi. One of the officers is a detective named Ross Baker. He died a year later. The other is Jim Kostreba, the first officer called to the scene of the Hewling murders. In that 1978 interrogation, the officers sat down with Joseph Turi, and out of nowhere, Turi starts saying he didn't rape anyone. Look, he says,

just because I have this diary with a list of waitresses doesn't mean I took these women out and killed them. The officers put some items from Turi's car on the table in front of him. The toy Batmobile, the metal club. Detective Baker asked Turi about the metal club. Did you make that? I found that. Where did you find it? Pretending my business.

What difference does it make? Well, the difference is it got to make. Well, just, I don't know. Is it illegal to have that thing as a gun or a shotgun? No, I don't think it's illegal to have it. It might make a policeman a little unhappy if you stepped out of a car and had this thing in your hand. And they asked Turi about the toy Batmobile. And I noticed a little toy there, a little thing with Batman. Was that in the car when you got it, too? And they asked Turi about the toy Batmobile. Turi was just 27 years old, so what he's saying here, that the toy Batmobile was for his grandkids, didn't make a whole lot of sense. a grandkid? My daughter does. I'm an uncle or whatever. Well, if your daughter has children,

well, then you'd be a grandfather. How old are you? No, I mean my sister. Oh, your uncle. Yeah, uncle. Torrey changes his story and says, okay, so no, no, I'm not a grandfather. as, okay, so, no, no, I'm not a grandfather. I'm an uncle. Or whatever. Was that a difference that a couple toys make? Well, it might make a lot of difference. The officers tried to ask Turi more detailed questions about the toy Batmobile. But Turi, he wasn't having it.

You're sick of this shit. Go on, bury me. Why don't you dig a hole and throw me in the sun, bitch? Well, this is the first time I've ever even talked to you, you know. it. in the car or belong to your sister's child, there's nothing to get upset about, really. There. The officers left. Turi stayed in jail. And over the next few days, the officers did some investigating. They had the seats and door panels torn out of Turi's car, looking for a gun.

But they didn't find one. They went to the place where Turi had worked as a mechanic and looked at his time card. It didn't give Tury an alibi for the night of the murders. They went back and questioned Tury again and brought up the murders directly. Tury responded by asking them all kinds of questions about what kind of evidence they had, by asking them all kinds of questions about what kind of evidence they had, whether they'd found the gun, and whether anyone had identified him as the murderer. But there was one thing the officers didn't do.

They didn't take a closer look at that toy Batmobile that they'd found in Turi's car. They didn't bring it to Billy Huling, the boy who survived. They didn't ask Billy if he owned a toy Batmobile like this one, and then check the house to see if it was missing. The officers didn't do any of that. A week or so later, without any evidence to hold him, a judge let Joseph Turi go.

Once Turi got out, he went on a murdering and raping spree that's so complicated, I had to create a timeline just to keep track of it. He kidnapped a waitress from the side of a road in West St. Paul, drove her to a secluded area, sexually assaulted her, and killed her. He broke into a house and killed a teenage girl who was home alone. He started driving around Minneapolis late at night looking for women outside. He grabbed at least two women off the street and raped them, and he kidnapped and raped a 13-year-old girl.

He also tried to kidnap at least two other women, but they got away. One of them escaped by smashing a lit cigarette in his face. Turi's crime spree didn't come to an end until 1980. And it wasn't the Stearns County Sheriff's Office that put an end to it. It was the Minneapolis police. They arrested Turi for several rapes. And while Turi was in custody,

he was charged with murdering the waitress from West St. Paul. And then everything, everything broke loose. You know, all the shit hits the fan, you know? You have one minute remaining. Damn. Turi received a life sentence for killing the waitress,

and he's been in prison ever since. The Hewling case remained unsolved until, about two decades after the murders, an agency from outside Stearns County got involved, a cold case unit from the state of Minnesota. The state cold case unit took a look at the case. They went to find Billy Huling, the boy who survived the murders. He was by that point grown up with a family of his own. One of the people involved with the case told Billy there was some evidence they wanted him to look at,

some evidence that might help solve the case. And Billy replied, out of nowhere, did you guys find my Batmobile? From there, state cold case unit investigators quickly built a case, based not on high-tech DNA testing or advancements in police technology, but on the exact same evidence that the Stearns County Sheriff's Office had known about since 1978. The metal bar and the toy Batmobile. 1978, the metal bar and the toy Batmobile.

21 years after Turi had killed four members of the Hewling family, and after he'd gone on to kill at least two more people, and sexually assaulted at least three more, a jury finally convicted him of the Hewling murders. We still don't know exactly how many people Joseph Turi raped or killed. He's suspected of killing another girl in Stearns County in 1979, but he hasn't been charged with that crime. I talked to a woman who told me she was attacked by Turi five years before the Hewling murders.

LaVon Angus-Sether was working as a waitress in Hudson, Wisconsin back then. And one night, she served a customer who just didn't seem right, a kind of greasy-looking guy. And at the end of her shift, she left and started walking home. He jumped out of some lilac bushes and had a 12-pack in his hand,

and he just swung it up and hit me across the side of my head and knocked me out into the street. Oh, my gosh. And then the next thing I knew, he was on top of me. I knew it was the customer guy, and he's on top of me. I don't know what he was doing, but I just realized that no cars were coming down Main Street, and nobody was going to save me, and I had to wrestle away.

And I just somehow threw him off of me, and I threw him off, and I ran. LaVon told me she reported it right away to the local cops in Wisconsin, but she said they didn't take it seriously. LaVon got married and moved away, and she didn't think much about the attack until two decades later, when she was watching a TV show about an unsolved murder, and all of a sudden, the face of the guy who tried to attack her was on the screen, and she learned his name, Joseph Turi.

The only sad part is that we couldn't have found this out sooner and made sure, you know, other girls didn't have that happen to them. And I guess I would really stress police, you know, pay attention and just go after these guys. I talked to LaVon about the healing case, too. What gets me, I guess, about it is that they didn't go and ask Billy. If he had a Batmobile toy, I know. I think about that, too, that they could have caught him, and it just took too long.

It's too long. I called Jim Kostreba, the officer who questioned Turi in 1978, and I asked him about this. Why didn't you go to check with Billy Hewling to see if he had a toy Batmobile? That's a question that comes up in my mind many, many times. It's something that I think about quite a bit. Because it's something that should have been done, and it wasn't. And in retrospect, it should have been. Over the past year, I've talked to a lot of law enforcement officers.

Kostryba was the only one who acknowledged he'd made some mistakes. I don't think it's unusual to look back and see what could have been done differently or what was missed or not done properly. And certainly in this case, because of what he did over the years, certainly makes it much more difficult, yes. I think experience is very, very important, and you learn from every case you do. And if you aren't willing to do that,

then you shouldn't be an investigator. But Kostrybas said, as far as he knows, there were no changes made at the sheriff's office to prevent this kind of mistake from happening again. In fact, as best I can tell, there was never any formal training or review at the sheriff's office about how to learn from the Hewling case. This kind of looking back is something we're used to in other professions, even if it's not always perfect. Hospitals conduct postmortems when patients die unexpectedly. Companies do a review when a new product fails.

Farmers reassess after a bad year. And the reason for doing this is to try to find out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. And it's not as though this was a one-time problem in Stearns County, having a case they couldn't seem to solve. One day, I went to the archive of the Stearns County History Museum to do some research on the Jacob Wetterling case. I was there to copy flyers from the early days of the search for Jacob and to read old news clippings about the case.

But I got distracted, and I noticed a filing cabinet with a bottom drawer labeled Crime. I opened it and discovered file after file of unsolved murders from the 1970s and 80s, the years leading up to Jacob Wetterling's kidnapping, all of them in Stearns County. There was a file about a bomb that had exploded in a small-town post office in 1976. The blast had killed the assistant postmaster, and the case was never solved. There was a file about a murder of an elderly woman named Myrtle Cole in 1981,

and how investigators had failed to take prints from her hands, so they had to exhume the body. That case was never solved either. There was one file in particular that caught my attention. It was labeled Murder Reeker St. Cloud. It was about the Murder, Reeker, St. Cloud. It was about the disappearance of two girls, Mary and Suzanne Reeker, in 1974, 15 years before Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped. I went to meet up with the mother of Mary and Suzanne. Her name is Rita Rieker. It happened so many years ago. In some ways, it's like yesterday, but most of the time, it's like 41 years has gone by, and it's still unsolved. We sat on the couch at Rita's neat two-story house in St. Cloud, just a few miles from St. Joseph, where the Wetterlings live. Rita's lived in this house for more than 40 years. It's where she raised six children.

One day, in September of 1974, two of Rita's daughters, Mary and Suzanne, went out to buy school supplies. They never came back. My husband and I went down to the police department, and we asked if there was a, I forget what the term is, but a murder squad or something in the police department. Like they should have people there who would investigate murders. Well, shouldn't they?

And they just looked at me and said, lady, you watch too much TV. You know, that was, yeah, that's, that's. But yeah, I assumed that if something serious happened to our kids, that somebody would be there to investigate. Right. So what was the reaction instead? That we were just imagining too much. We should go home and wait, and when they got hungry enough, they'd be back. No one from law enforcement was looking for the girls.

So Rita and her family just started searching on their own. Everywhere that we could think of, yeah. My husband took off work, and there were days we kept the kids home from school and just looked wherever we thought, you know. I mean, there's all kinds of, there's ditches and water and that sort of thing right in St. Cloud itself, you know, and how did, how would we even know where to look? Yeah, yeah. Rita and her family didn't find anything. Yeah.

Rita and her family didn't find anything. 26 days after the girls went missing, two teenage boys were walking in a quarry on the outskirts of town, and they noticed something in the brush. It was the body of Suzanne Rieker, lying face down, covered in leaves. Officers arrived, and they found Suzanne's sister, Mary. Both girls had been stabbed to death. Because the bodies of Mary and Suzanne had been found outside of the city limits,

the case passed into the hands of the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. And I guess we expected a big-time investigation to start from there on. But our case could not have happened at a worse time in history for an investigation. If you read the details over, I'm sure you know a little bit. You don't know too much about that? No, I was going to. Rita told me that her girl's bodies were found five weeks before the sheriff's election in November. So some of the deputies

on the sheriff's horse were running for the office of sheriff, which was not a time for for them to do a big investigation. They were busy with the elections and all before they could really get serious about an investigation. The Reker case got really tangled up in the politics of the sheriff's office. The lead investigator seemed to want to have the case so that he could use the solving of it to get elected as sheriff. When that didn't happen, he refused to let the sheriff even look at the case file. And when the sheriff finally

managed to pry the case away from his lead investigator, four years later, the investigator held on to some evidence, a pair of eyeglasses that had been found at the crime scene. He kept them in his desk drawer. No one found them until he died, nine years after the Reker girls were killed. One year, opponents of the sheriff tried to spread a rumor that the sheriff was looking to arrest someone, anyone, right before Election Day to gain political points. A man running against the sheriff leaked a strange story to the local media about a possible suspect, a goateed sketch artist who'd used a knife to sharpen pencils in a taxi in a suspicious manner. That lead didn't pan out, but it did

damage the sheriff. He lost the election. The case was a mess. Meanwhile, Rita Reker kept waiting to find out what had happened to her girls. Forty-two years later, she's still waiting. It's such a mystery to me. It's just that there are questions unsolved. All those little details about your child are important. Those are the last things that took place in their life. And I guess it's because you want to identify with your child

till the last minute of their life. I guess it's because you want to identify with your child till the last minute of their life. And somehow you wish you could have been there to save them. Even now. So there were a lot of questionable things going on in the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. But it was hard for anyone to do much about it. There just wasn't much accountability for the sheriff. And I think part of the reason why has to do with the office of the sheriff itself.

We talked to a former Stearns County Sheriff's Detective named Lou Leland. He worked on a lot of the big cases back then. And Lou said the sheriff, back then and now, just has too much power. And they can't fire him. You know, like the chief of police, he works at the pleasure of the city counseling, fire them any day they want, and they don't even need a good reason. But, you know, the sheriff is... Oh, God. The thing about sheriffs is, for the most part, no one's in charge of them. There are around 3,000 sheriffs in the United States,

and almost every one of them is elected. Sheriffs only answer to the people once every few years, when they come up for re-election. That's different from how it works for a lot of other law enforcement agencies. Most police chiefs are appointed, usually by the local mayor or the city council. If the chief messes up, the mayor can fire them. Sheriffs are the exception, and that exception has given them tremendous power. Just look at Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona. He's a sheriff who set up a tent city outside in 100-plus degree heat for inmates of his jail.

He's reinstated chain gangs and forced inmates to wear pink underwear. And although Sheriff Arpaio has been sued and subjected to court orders and criticized by human rights groups, he's still in office because he keeps winning elections. As he put it in an interview I found on YouTube. I can get elected on pink underwear. And sheriffs are especially powerful outside of big cities. If you live in a rural county, it's usually the sheriff who's responsible for solving major crimes, not the police department. So I wondered, had anyone ever, at any point, tried to do something about this? Like, tried to put a check on the sheriff's power in Stearns County, to try to change the way sheriffs work?

And then we came across an old bill that had been introduced in the Minnesota legislature in 1979, five years after the Reker girls were killed, and one year after the Hewling family was murdered. It was written by a state lawmaker for the Stearns County area, a guy named Al Patton. It proposed getting rid of elections for sheriff. Al Patton's been retired for a while. Our producer Samara called him up to see if he'd be willing to talk a bit about his bill. What's on your mind, kid? I was calling you because we came across a bill that you put forward about sheriff's elections.

Oh, for heaven's sakes, Elias. Jesus Christ, after almost 40 years, we're going to stir up this cat again, huh? Okay, let's see what we can stir up. Where do you want to meet? Samara and I drove out to meet Al at a coffee shop near his house. How you doing? I'm doing fantastic. If you can keep up with me, we're doing business.

Al told us that in the 1970s, he started hearing about problems in the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. Problems with evidence handling. Infighting among deputies. A lack of training. Failed investigations. Crimes are being committed that were unsolvable for the education and background of the individual is holding the position of sheriff. And the way Al Patton saw it, the public wasn't doing a very good job of scrutinizing the sheriff

before deciding whether or not to vote for him. There's just not that much information that comes out in the media during a campaign for sheriff. The newspaper interviews everybody, four or five candidates on the same page, and that page gets flipped over, no one's going to read that. And so they read a couple campaign ads, and that's how you elect your sheriff. So Al Patton came up with a possible solution. It got to the point where I'm going to introduce a bill. We're going to try and flush these people out. Introduce a bill to abolish the sheriff's department.

That is a bold move. The bill wouldn't have actually abolished sheriff's offices, but it would have gotten rid of elections for sheriffs and turned the job into an appointed position. Sheriffs would be appointed by a county board. That would be a huge change. So it's not a surprise what happened to Al Patton's bill in the Minnesota legislature. The reaction of the piece of legislation I introduced was not mixed with mixed feelings, I'll tell you.

It was very straightforward. It was resisted. Al told me that lobbyists from the state sheriff's association came to pay him a visit pretty quickly. I always met with severe backlash from the sheriff's association. I tried to find someone from the sheriff's association who remembered this, and they said no one's around anymore from back then. But I did talk to the general counsel for the Sheriff's Association, and he told me they've always opposed any effort to get rid of elections for sheriff. He said

switching to a system of appointed sheriffs wouldn't make the process any less political. And he said elections are good because that way it's the public who gets to decide, and they can hold the sheriff accountable directly. Al Patton told me the lobbyists back then made a similar argument. They turned it into a question about democracy and the will of the people. You don't want to take the power of the vote away from the people, do you, Al? Did they tell you, like, withdraw this bill? No, they're very...

You need to understand lobbying. There's no threats available. They're just very nice, polite suggestions. So what did they suggest then? Well, I'll... Oh, yes, definitely they'll look into it and deal with it. And we'll do that for you. We'll do that right away.

Yep, they dealt with it all right. They squished it. They squished it, he said. The bill never even came up for a vote. Patton's effort had failed. What has changed in those 40 years? Nothing has changed. So the problems that were back 40 years ago or beyond are still with us today.

But there has to be an element in there to have accountability. And when accountability is not there, disastrous things happen. And this whole long history of the failed investigations, the murder of the Hewling family, how they let a serial killer go, the murder of the Reker girls, the politicization of police work, the failed efforts to fix things. All of that had been more or less forgotten by the time Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped in 1989. When Jacob was kidnapped, it was like none of that had ever happened. I read and watched all the old news coverage I could find, hundreds of articles and many hours of TV reporting.

And as best I could tell, no one was writing stories about how the sheriff's office had a bad track record when it came to solving big crimes. There are no editorials in the paper saying, we should be concerned that the sheriff's office is the one in charge of this case. Just look at all these other cases, all those mysterious, violent, high-profile, unsolved crimes. No one mentioned any of that. Instead, they said what people always say about a place like Stearns County. What a quiet, peaceful place. These small-town cops had no idea what hit them.

How could this happen here? Next time on In the Dark. 10-4 Cold Spring, 200 Main Street behind Winter's Bar. I'll get you an event in a second. Shots fired, officer down. Stearns County Sheriff's Office has quite a reputation for horrendous investigations, false accusations, leaving families in the dark.

How does Stearns County compare to the rest of Minnesota and the rest of the country? What's going on down there? Why can't anybody solve crimes? I mean, why is everything such a secret? You know, what you don't see on this are all the crimes we do solve. And I'm not trying to make excuses. I consider this unacceptable, too. In the Dark is produced by Samara Fremark. The associate producer is Natalie Jablonski. In the Dark is edited by Catherine Winter, with help from Hans Butow.

The editor-in-chief of APM Reports is Chris Worthington. Web editors are Dave Peters and Andy Cruz. The videographer is Jeff Thompson. Our theme music is composed by Gary Meister. This episode was mixed by Johnny Vince Evans. Go to inthedarkpodcast.org for a closer look at convicted killer Joseph Turi and to listen to audio from that interrogation in 1978 Thank you. Hi, this is David Remnick, and I'm pleased to share the news that I'm Not a Robot,

a live-action short film from the New Yorker's Screening Room series, has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. This thought-provoking film grapples with questions that we can all relate to about identity and technology and what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. I encourage you to watch I'm Not a Robot, along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films, at newyorker.com slash video. Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm proud to share the news that three films from the New Yorker documentary series have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. And they are Incident, Seat 31, Zoe Zephyr, and Eternal Father. And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism, exploring themes of justice, identity, and the bonds that shape us. These extraordinary films,

which were created by established filmmakers as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge, and move you. I encourage you to watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films at newyorker.com slash video.