In The Dark - S1 E8: What's Going on Down There?

Episode Date: October 18, 2016

In November 2012, a police officer named Tom Decker was shot and killed in Cold Spring, Minn., after getting out of his car to check on a man who lived above a bar. The man was quickly arrested and held in the Stearns County jail. He was interrogated but then released without charges. The state crime bureau later ruled him out as a suspect. Investigators turned their focus to another man, Eric Thomes, who hanged himself before he could be charged with the crime. Nearly four years after the murder, Sheriff John Sanner has refused to close the case "because we're still hopeful that new information will come in," he said.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Before we get started, I just wanted to let you know that we'd planned to have this be our last episode. But we're adding one more. That's next week. Previously, on In the Dark. 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? The kind of ways where you don't expect a child to be kidnapped at gunpoint. The only sad part is that we couldn't have found this out sooner and I guess I would really stress police

you know, pay attention and just go after these guys. I assume that if something serious happened to our kids that somebody would be there to investigate. In doing major cases 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. Over the past year, as I talked to law enforcement officers about the Jacob Wetterling case, there was one thing I heard all the time. Things were different back then, they'd say. Nowadays, we have all this new technology, new training. If a big crime happened in Stearns County these days, it would probably be solved right away. But I had a reason to be skeptical about that claim. The times had changed.

And that reason had to do with a crime I'd been assigned to cover in Stearns County a few years before I started reporting on the Wetterling case, a type of crime that is almost always solved, the murder of a police officer. I'd covered shootings of officers in Minnesota before, so I knew that most of the time, if someone kills a police officer, one of two things is going to happen pretty quickly. Either that person is going to be arrested, or they're going to be killed. But that's not what happened in this case. This is In the Dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports.

I'm Madeline Barron. In this podcast, we're trying to find out 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. And today, we're going to look into whether the problems in Stearns County stopped with Jacob. We're going to do something that seems like it would be pretty straightforward. We're going to look at the agency responsible for investigating Jacob's kidnapping, the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. And we're going to try to answer one simple question.

How good are they really at solving major crimes? The first person in our newsroom assigned to cover the police shooting was a reporter I worked with named Conrad Wilson. Here's what happened. So I got a call really early from the morning news editor, and she said, can you go to Cold Spring? There's been a cop shooting. I get there, and it was a strange scene to cover. And it seemed like it just kept getting weirder. Right.

Here's what we know from law enforcement accounts. On the night of November 29, 2012, law enforcement in Stearns County got a call from a woman asking them to go check on her son. He lived in an apartment above a bar called Winner's in the town of Cold Spring. Around 10.35 at night, an officer named Greg Reiter drove over. an officer named Greg Reiter drove over. And when he got there, he called another officer for backup, a 31-year-old policeman named Tom Decker. When he arrived, Officer Decker got out of his squad car,

while Officer Reiter stayed in his. And then, with no warning, and from out of nowhere, someone shot Officer Decker in the head and killed him. After the murder, the Stearns County Sheriff's Office didn't say a whole lot about what happened next. But Conrad and I found some of the details in a leaked document from inside the sheriff's office. So I remember getting that document. I got it from a source. And I remember reading it, and it was just, it was stunning. I mean, it was this account of what just seemed like police ineptitude. Once Officer Decker was shot, the other officer, Greg Reiter, didn't get out of his car and try to chase down the shooter. He didn't run out and try to see if Officer Decker was okay.

Instead, Officer Reiter stayed in his squad car. And then he put his car in reverse and watched as the suspect walked away. I mean, it's like, it makes no sense. And I even talked to like some. I talked to like a retired police chief in this tiny town in Minnesota. He had like four officers. I mean, it was a small town and he was just he couldn't believe it. You know, he was I remember we talked. He's like, that's not what you do. Like you go towards the suspect, you pursue.

And I mean, we were like asking people these ridiculous questions like, is this normal when a police officer is shot? And they're like, no, no, it's not normal. How stupid are you, reporter? The first person to find Officer Decker was a woman at the bar who went outside and spotted him on the ground. Then she ran back inside and someone from the bar called 911. Deputies from the Stearns County Sheriff's Office raced to the scene, and right away, people told police they'd seen a black van with a loud muffler leaving the parking lot right around the time of the murder. While all this was happening, the man who lived above the bar, the man who Decker and Ryder had arrived to

check on, was fast asleep. I was awoke to people screaming police. His name is Ryan Larson. I seen the flashlights bouncing around in the crack of my doors, my bedroom door. The door flew open. A bunch of guys came in with their assault rifles and flashlights, and they handcuffed me, opened up that back door, and led me outside. I mean, there were a hundred squad cars, two or three helicopters. I said, what is going on? This is crazy. A few months ago, I started talking to someone who worked in the Stearns County Sheriff's Office back then. who worked in the Stearns County Sheriff's Office back then. He asks that we not use his name and that we distort his voice because he's worried the Sheriff's Office might retaliate against him.

You know, I still live in Stearns County, so I don't need them following me around, looking for anything and everything to harass me and retaliate against me. This person told me that the night Officer Decker was killed, the lead investigators were convinced they had the right guy, that Ryan Larson was the one who did it, but that other officers who'd responded to the call weren't so sure.

There were other people on scene that were saying, hey, I think we should, you know, why don't we get a dog and track and do this, that, the next thing, and that's Investigation 101. They're going to follow up on leads and check all avenues, make sure everything checks out. And they said, absolutely not. We have the right person.

Why would we go any further? Why would we do any more? The officers brought Ryan Larson down to the Stearns County Sheriff's Office and put him in an interview room. Ryan said two investigators came to interrogate him. Stearns County Sheriff's Captain Pam Jensen and State Investigator Kenneth McDonald, the same team that had interrogated Dan Rassier about the Jacob Wetterling case a few years earlier. Captain Jensen came in and asked me, you know, why I did it. Why did I do what? You know, I had no clue what they're talking about. Why'd you shoot the officer?

What, excuse me? Just admit it. Tell us why you did it. It's okay. You know, sometimes some people snap. No, I didn't do it. Ryan Larson stayed in jail while investigators tried to build a case against him. I ended up finding out about this part of the investigation from that document that was leaked to us back then. The document was a two-page written statement from the Stearns County Sheriff's Office, signed by two officers. And it was created to get permission to hold Ryan in jail for a little while longer.

The document includes Officer Greg Reiter's account of what he saw that night. It's not clear from the document whether Reiter actually saw Officer Decker get shot. What it says is that Ryder heard two loud bangs and then saw a man standing near Officer Decker's squad car holding a weapon, and that it was a handgun. And that detail about the weapon was a big deal, because when officers stormed into Ryan's apartment above the bar, right away they saw a handgun next to him. But it turned out that wasn't the gun that was used to kill Officer Decker,

because Officer Decker wasn't killed with a handgun. He was killed with a 20-gauge shotgun. And after five days, investigators still couldn't find any other evidence against Ryan that would have allowed them to charge him. All of a sudden on Tuesday, one of the jailers asked me what size shoes I wear and what size pants I wear. And, you know, I told him I wear a size 11 shoe and 34 pants. And he comes back and he said, well, all I can find is a size 10 shoes and a 38 pants and this shirt. And I said, what's this for? And he said, well, you're going home.

I said, all right, then. They'll work. I probably would have left there naked if I had you. So Ryan got out of jail. And at some point, officers got a tip about a different guy, a 31-year-old man named Eric Thomas, a man who owned a dark van that matched the description of the van that people reported seeing that night. They went out and questioned him a few times.

And then one day, a little more than a month after the murder, investigators went to Eric's house to question him again. But this time, Eric fled and ran into a metal outbuilding close by. He refused to come out, and after a few hours, officers finally decided to go inside and found Eric dead. He had hanged himself. Authorities held a news conference to explain what had happened. They said that after Eric killed himself,

they found a gun on a property that Eric had access to, a 20-gauge shotgun. They tested it and said they believed it was the gun used to kill Officer Decker. Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner said a few words, mostly just praise for the investigation. This was a real good example of how the community and law enforcement worked together to get to the point that we're at today. investigation. This was a real good example of how the community and law enforcement worked together to get to the point that we're at today. We had a tipster call in based on the information

that we were asking for. It actually couldn't have worked any better. Thank you. A few months later, in August of 2013, a spokesperson for the State Crime Bureau told reporters that if Eric hadn't killed himself, he would have been arrested for the murder, and that Ryan Larson was no longer a suspect in the case. But it wasn't the State Crime Bureau that was in charge of the case. It was the Stearns County Sheriff's Office, and the sheriff, John Sanner, has decided to keep the case open. When I went to see Sheriff Sanner a few months ago, I asked him why. Because we're still hopeful that new information will come in. I have considered closing the case.

If it stays inactive for a period of time, if no new information comes in, that certainly is something we would consider. Keeping the case open means the public can't look at the files. It means that none of us can see exactly what happened in the investigation into Officer Decker's shooting. And it means that the sheriff doesn't have to clear Ryan Larson. Even three years after the state crime bureau, known as the BCA, ruled Ryan out as a suspect. I don't know if he was involved or not. I can't say that. Oh, so you're not prepared to say, like, he definitely didn't do it?

Oh, absolutely not. Oh, okay. Because the BCA has said that. Like, the spokesperson at least said he's no longer a suspect. Okay. At this point, Sanner shrugged, and he provided no evidence that Ryan Larson had anything to do with the shooting. Ryan Larson used to trust law enforcement. Growing up, he lived just a few blocks from Jacob Wetterling, right off the Dead End Road.

Ryan was the same age as Jacob. Their birthdays were just three months apart. Ryan still remembers the night Jacob was kidnapped. I was woke up just before midnight by searchlights in my bedroom window. Got up just to see police vehicles, helicopters all over the place. Investigators even came into Ryan's house that night and looked around. Checking closets, I believe they went through the kitchen, you know, bathrooms, tubs, anywhere.

There could have been a child hidden, I guess. And as an 11-year-old kid, Ryan was impressed by all the searching for Jacob. And it was what he expected from the cops. Because growing up, Ryan really looked up to law enforcement. By the time I met Ryan, that trust he'd felt in law enforcement was gone. When I went over to his basement apartment a few months ago, Ryan showed me his laptop. When I went over to his basement apartment a few months ago, Ryan showed me his laptop.

The screen was filled with files from his own investigation of the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. Ryan told me he tried to figure out what really happened the night Officer Decker was killed. He'd even called up Greg Reiter. He'd left the force after the murder and asked him what he saw. Ryan said there was one thing in particular that really didn't make any sense to him, and that was how Greg Reiter could have seen a handgun, the same kind of gun Ryan had, when really the crime was committed

with a very different kind of gun, a shotgun. It was a difference that should be obvious to anyone with any experience with guns, and especially to a cop. And Ryan said Greg Reiter told him that despite what was written in the statement that was used to hold Ryan in jail, he actually didn't see much at all that night. And that matches what I heard from my law enforcement source, who told me that inside the sheriff's office, investigators were saying pretty much the same thing. But when Ryan tried to get Greg

Ryder to come forward and tell the public what he really saw or didn't see that night, Greg Ryder hesitated. Ryan showed me texts they exchanged, including one he said was Greg Ryder's last message to him, sent on July 1, 2013, about seven months after the murder. It said, quote, I talked with my attorney and Captain Jensen last week. I did give them again the details that you and I talked about. They then told me that if I said anything, that I would be interfering with the investigation and would be sued and or charged. They also said that we are not to have any more communication. Ryan said he hasn't heard from Greg Reiter since. I couldn't reach Reiter either. I tried to ask Sheriff Sanner about this and Captain Pam Jensen, who's since left the sheriff's office, but they didn't respond.

All of this has really damaged Ryan Larson's life. He said even today, four years after the murder, people still look at him differently. Law enforcement kind of baited the hook and threw my name out there for the media. But the public, the people that I walk amongst every day, some of the comments they were saying, you know, suggesting to build the gals, you know, bring back public execution, you know, get the lynch mob ready. Did anyone at the sheriff's office ever apologize? No.

No, and that's, you know, probably the things I have the biggest problem with. I mean, you go out and you publicly accuse somebody of one of the most heinous crimes that a person could be accused of. You know, it doesn't matter. It's not going to go away. It'll always be there. Ryan started seeing a therapist. He was diagnosed with PTSD. I haven't actually gone out with my friends since 2012.

Spent a lot of time at home. Ryan dropped out of school for a while and almost stopped leaving his apartment entirely. He started spending hours and hours, late at night, reading about other cases the Stearns County Sheriff's Office had failed to solve. It's more than me that have a similar story to tell. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office has quite a reputation for horrendous investigations, false accusations, leaving families in the dark.

I mean, why can't anybody solve crimes? I mean, why is everything such a secret? I mean, what's going on down there? People of Stearns County just need to realize that something needs to change. You know, it might not affect them right now, but it's going to someday if something doesn't change now. Ryan Larson had become a part

of a kind of sad fraternity, a loose brotherhood of people who felt wronged by the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. People like Dan Rassier, the man who was named a person of interest in the Jacob Wetterling case, and the boys in Painesville, who were attacked by a strange man in the 80s. People without a lot of money or community support. People who are just out there on their own, trying to figure out what happened, trying to solve their own crimes, or clear their own, trying to figure out what happened, trying to solve their own crimes,

or clear their own names. And out of all these people I talked to, no one seemed more alone than a man named Brian Guimond, whose son Josh had gone missing in 2002, 13 years after Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped. I went to meet up with Brian Guimond at his house. He's a landscaper and lives alone. He has boxes full of his own research into his son's disappearance. There's all kinds of stuff in here. I haven't looked at these forever. Like what's in this notebook? Whatever happened that particular time. Notebooks, each one numbered.

Some of them had a copy of a missing persons flyer for Josh taped to the front. And inside were all his notes about phone calls with detectives, interviews with the media, and possible leads to check out. It's the only way you can remember. There's a lot of things I got in here on the Times, you know. In November 2002, Brian's son Josh was a 20-year-old student at St. John's University in Stearns County. And one night, Josh was at a small party at a friend's apartment on campus.

His friend said there was a little drinking, but not much, and at some point, Josh left. He was never seen again. Authorities found his car still on campus. None of his stuff had been disturbed. He didn't leave any kind of note behind. He just vanished. Brian said right away the Stearns County Sheriff's Office had a theory about what had happened to his son. Right off the bat, we were told he's in Stump Lake.

Pretty much that was the end of the story as far as the Sheriff's Department was concerned. Stump Lake is right on campus. Josh would have passed it if he'd walked back to his dorm room that night. A dog that investigators brought in the next day appeared to track Josh's scent to an area near the lake, or maybe to the bridge that crosses it. Investigators did search the lake, and the family even paid for a separate search

by a private company that specializes in this kind of thing. But none of them found any sign of Josh. Brian said investigators came up with an explanation for why Josh could still be in the area but not be found. That explanation? Quicksand. Okay. Went and got a hold of the soil and water guy for Stearns County.

No, we don't have any quicksand around here. So that's impossible. I got papers on that from him proving, no, this can't happen. Brian showed me the letter from the government soil expert. I got that letter right here. Oh, this is the soil letter. And no, as far as this soil expert knows, there's no such thing as quicksand just lying out there in Stearns County.

Brian told the sheriff's office about the letter. He says that investigators came up with a new reason why Josh's body wasn't found. Turtles ate him. Snapping turtles. Oh, that was just one of their excuses on how he's in that swampy area, you know, and now you can't find anything. Well, let's see, they ain't going to eat the skull. They ain't going to eat the clothes. We checked this out and talked to not one, but two experts in snapping turtles.

Both of them told us the same thing. No, a snapping turtle won't eat a whole human being like that. same thing. No, a snapping turtle won't eat a whole human being like that. I brought these two theories, the quicksand and the turtles, to the sheriff, John Sanner. Sanner became the sheriff a few months after Josh disappeared. And Sheriff Sanner told me he still does think it's possible that Josh was sucked into some kind of mud and ended up completely submerged in it. Did he have too much to drink maybe and wander off into an area that's very boggy and swampy? And then, of course, if you lay down, become tired, or else you get stuck and you simply pass out because of the amount of alcohol you've consumed.

These are just theories and possibilities. And then I got to the turtles. And then the other explanation he said that he got from the sheriff's office was that perhaps, like, Josh's body was consumed by turtles, snapping turtles. I can't imagine that happening. Okay. That didn't come from me. Have you heard that before? Because that's what he's saying you heard from the sheriff's office. I have. I think that was published in the St. Cloud Times years ago. Okay. Did it come from somebody in law enforcement? Possibly. I asked Sheriff Sanner if he ever tried to figure out whether anyone in his office was the one who told Josh's dad that snapping turtles could have eaten his son.

But does it matter at this point? Josh Guimond is still missing. The case hasn't been solved. You can probably find one or two stories like this of unsolved cases in any sheriff's office in the country. So the question is, does the Stearns County Sheriff's Office have more than just these few cases? Do they have a bigger problem when it comes to solving crime? And to help me figure that out, I brought in Will Kraft, our data reporter. Hi, Will. Hello. Will started out by looking at one number in particular. So there's this thing called the clearance rate. Clearance rates aren't quite what you might think.

So a clearance rate is not actually a measurement of how many crimes are solved. A crime is cleared when an agency arrests someone for a crime and charges them for the crime. There are a few strange things, such as if they find out who committed a crime, but that person is dead or they're overseas and can't be extradited. But in general, a crime is cleared when an agency makes an arrest and charges them. So they don't actually have to convict the person? No. Wow. Okay. So, all right. Is there another, something else we can use then? Like, is there a solved rate? Is there something else we can use then?

Is there a solved rate? No. Even though clearance rates are problematic, they're the best thing we have for measuring how effective an agency is. So Will went to look at the clearance rates for Stearns County. He found them in an office at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, also known as the BCA. I had to go to the BCA.

So that's a state agency. Yeah, so the state agency, they only keep one copy of these crime reports. What? Like an actual one copy? Yes, they have one copy. Do they hand it to you? Do they bring it to you and say, like, no water? Well, I did have to sit in a room with another person while they watched me read through these crime reports and take scans with my phone of all the relevant pages. Okay. So I had to go and I had to scan each page. So I took my scans, I brought them back, and I copied them into a computer by hand.

I sat down for a week and just transcribed crime reports. Will was looking at one group of crimes, the major crimes, also known as part one crimes. In technical terminology, these are part one crimes and they are murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft, and arson. So we're not looking at like DWI or my mailbox has been vandalized or there's graffiti at the school. No. Will looked at more than 40 years worth of clearance rates for these part one crimes in Stearns County. So I looked from 1971 to 2014.

Okay. And you've got a graph there of all this? Yes, I have a graph. Will showed me the graph he made. It's just one line. It goes from 1971 to 2014, and it's the percentage of Part 1 crimes the Stearns County Sheriff's Office has cleared.

The line goes up and down a lot. It starts out in the 1970s, with some years barely above single digits, and then it starts to go up in the 1980s. It reaches its highest point in 1984, five years before Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped. In 1984, Listerne's county sheriff's office cleared 38 percent of Part 1 crimes. They haven't had a better year since. Under the current sheriff, in the past 10 years or so, the line mostly bounces around in the teens. And for some years, the clearance rates are so low, the line is almost touching zero. In the year 2000, In the year 2000, the Part 1 clearance rate was only 8%. 8%?

It was 8%. The second lowest was in 1978, where they only cleared 9% of their Part 1 crimes. What could explain this? I have no idea. In 2014, Stearns County cleared 16% of its Part 1 crimes. And I want you to think about that for a moment. Because what it means is that if you were the victim of a major crime that year in Stearns County, it's way more likely than not that your crime wouldn't be solved.

I wanted to know how that number, 16%, compared with the rest of the sheriff's offices in Minnesota that year. So I asked Will to figure that out, and he found that there was a wide range of clearance rates, from 98% all the way to 0%. But Stearns County's rate was definitely low. It was in the bottom third for the entire state. I wanted to run these numbers by an expert, so I called a researcher in Pennsylvania named Gary Cordner. He spent a lot of time looking at rural crime in particular. Way back in the day, I was a police officer and a police chief, two different departments. I'm actually retired from about 30 plus years of teaching at two different universities.

I told Gary Cordner what we'd found out about clearance rates in the Stearns County Sheriff's Office. So in the 70s, in the mid-70s, it dropped as low as 9%. Wow. Yeah, which is remarkably low. It is. Gary Cordner was especially surprised by how low these numbers were because Stearns County is a mostly rural place. In general, police departments in non-urban areas solve a higher percentage of crimes than in cities. What Gary Cordner is saying here, that rural areas are usually better than big cities when it comes to solving major crimes, I think that's the opposite of what a lot of people assume. When you think about our culture, we have these two main images of law enforcement,

and we see them all the time, on TV shows and in movies. There's a small-town bumbling cop who has no clue what he's doing, and then there's the big-city detective with all the fancy CSI gear who can solve almost anything. So why would it be the opposite? Why are rural areas usually better at solving crime? Since my background is in small and somewhat rural policing, I'd like to say, you know, it's because of the, you know, the smarter and more savvy police that we have out there. But I don't think that's actually the main reason. I think police departments in more rural

areas, first of all, all in all, are less busy. So they might actually spend more time investigating crimes. That's one reason, but I don't think that's the whole story either. I think in general, solving crimes is easier in rural areas and small towns than it is in cities. If you've got a witness, the witness would be more likely to have literally recognized the person, maybe even know their name, you know, tell you where they live, which is not as likely to be true in a city. And then, you know, if it's a burglary, let's say, in a small town or a rural area, police are right away going to have several suspects in mind, police are right away going to have several suspects in mind.

You know, maybe even just one suspect, just because of the local knowledge that you tend to have in a more rural area. Right. You know, like a short list of like this kind of crime, that's either like John, Steve or Joe. That's like a classic Steve crime. Exactly. But these are all just guesses. The reality is there's just not that much research on why one place does a better or worse job than another when it comes to solving crime.

We just don't know. In fact, there's a whole lot we don't know about law enforcement. The federal government doesn't even know how many police departments there are in this country. One expert I talked to said the best estimate is somewhere between 12,000 and 18,000. The whole system is so decentralized, split between police departments, sheriff's offices, state crime bureaus, each with their own data and their own procedures, that even getting the most basic facts can be really difficult. getting the most basic facts can be really difficult. And this is surprising when you think about it. In this country, we're obsessed with crime rates. It seems we always want to know whether crime is going up or down. But once the crimes happen, plenty of us don't seem to be all

that interested in whether or not law enforcement actually solves them. I was talking about this with a guy named Thomas Hargrove. He used to be an investigative reporter. Now he runs a non-profit called the Murder Accountability Project. The group collects information on murder clearance rates from across the country and posts it on its website, so the public can be better informed. And one of the most striking things about Hargrove's website is just how wide the range is. Some places clear almost every murder. Other places clear almost none. We were a little concerned about making this data available because if you wanted to kill someone, you would be well advised to go to our site. You'd find the many cities in America quite easily where it is statistically unlikely that you'll get caught for murder. So you actually, you had that as a legitimate concern, like I'm providing

the data to... Yeah, yeah. In the end, we decided the only way that we're going to make improvements on murder clearances was to make this information very available. The people have the right to know this. I mean, they simply do, and they should be holding politicians accountable. And Thomas Hargrove told me something else I found interesting. In the case of a well-performing department, you ask the police chief what his clearance rate is, he knows to the decimal point and can cite those statistics year after year. He's watching very carefully. In those underperforming police departments, it's common for the chief to say, I don't know. And he genuinely may not know.

After all, why would you want to study things that don't make you look good? So they don't. So I went to the sheriff of Stearns County, Sheriff John Sanner, and I asked him Hargrove's question. Do you know what the clearance rate is? Right now, today? Not off the top of my head. Okay. You obviously know what it is.

I do. So, if I can just jump to that. I showed the sheriff the graph that Will had made, the graph that showed the clearance rates in Stearns County for major crimes, the ones known as Part 1 crimes. So, okay, so we looked at Part 1 crimes, and we went back from, like, 1971 to 2014 was the last year that we had. And we, this is our diagram. Sheriff Sanner took the sheet of paper in his hands and stared at it. So this is the percentages of the clearance rate.

So highest in the 80s, 38% in 84, and then kind of 20s, 30s, and then as low in 2000 as 8%, and then 16% in 2014. These seem very low to me. Like, is this an acceptable clearance rate? I don't think anything under 100% is. I want to clear everything that we get involved in. Sure, but you're not going to be able to clear 100%. So it's like, what's the threshold of, you know,

is there a bar that's, you know, every year, let's aim to clear 60% or let's aim to clear... Actually, the bar is we aim to clear them all. So then why is there such a gap then between like... I don't know. I have no idea why there is. And again, I'm not satisfied unless it's 100%. I shouldn't be satisfied unless it's 100%. Given the clearance rates, though, I mean, how can people in Stearns County trust that law enforcement will solve crimes? You know, what you don't see on this are all the crimes we do solve.

And I'm not trying to make excuses here. I'm just telling you that I consider this unacceptable too. I asked Sheriff Sanner what he thought could be done to improve his office's clearance rate. Hmm. I suppose what you're thinking about in answering that question is more training, that type of thing. I actually don't know. That question is more training, that type of thing. I actually don't know.

Sheriff Sanner told me a lot of crime solving comes down to one key factor. I guess the one factor that is kind of out there in any investigation is you have to factor in a certain amount of luck. Luck. And Sanner said sometimes you lucky, and sometimes you don't. We haven't had a lot of luck in some of these big cases that we're working on, although it doesn't deter us from continuing to work as hard as we possibly can and do everything we possibly can to get them resolved. But if you're looking at specifics as to how do we improve this, the first thing that would pop into somebody's head is we need to do a better job of training our investigative staff or we maybe need to do a better job of collecting and preserving evidence

so it can be used. Those are the easy things. It's the intangibles, that luck thing I'm talking about, that's hard to gauge. And sometimes just good old-fashioned police work and a little bit of luck go a long way. About two months after I talked with Sheriff Sanner, as we were putting this episode together, the state of Minnesota released the latest Part 1 clearance rates, the ones for 2015.

The Stearns County Sheriff's Office rate had dropped from 16 percent to 12 percent. I also wanted to ask Sheriff Sanner about what he thinks of the investigation of the Jacob Wetterling case. At the time I talked to him, it was still a few weeks before Danny Heinrich confessed to the crime and led officers to Jacob's remains. When I first started looking into this case, it was always described as like this giant mystery that, you know, Jacob just vanished, it's dark, and there was, like, nothing that could have been done differently to solve it. But then when I started looking into it, the way that I've looked at it has changed, and especially some of the failures of, like, the policing 101 stuff, like, not knocking on all the doors that night, not searching nonstop, you know, calling off the search in the middle of the night. And then the decision to name Dan Rassier as a person of interest. All of these things strike me as mistakes of the investigation or things that could have potentially negatively affected

the investigation. And I just want to give you a chance to respond to that? Of course, if things weren't done in the right order, if things weren't done at all early on, looking backwards more than 25 years ago, I can't do anything to change that now. So I'm not going to get wrapped around the axle about things that law enforcement did or didn't do, do I wish some things would have been done differently? Sure. Can I talk about that in this particular case? No. I just wonder about, like, to the people in Stearns County,

whether it would make sense to say, you know what, we really messed up some things in this, and we're going to tell you that this is what we did that we wouldn't do again. Is there some accountability to the public that's needed? Yeah, I guess I've never really looked at it like that. When I've looked back and looked at things that, boy, I wish we would have done this or I wish this would have been done. Again, that's all we can do is wish about that. I can't go backwards and change time. Nobody can. So this is what we've settled on in this country

as the best way to handle solving major crimes. To leave it up to people like Sheriff John Sanner. Sheriffs who don't know their clearance rates, who have no clear plan about how to improve them, and who refuse to look back and see what they could have done differently. And Stearns County isn't the only place with a crime-solving problem. And Stearns County isn't the only place with a crime-solving problem. There are all kinds of places, all across the country, with Part 1 clearance rates in the single digits or not much higher.

Farmington, New Mexico, your average clearance rate from 2005 to 2014 is 13%. East Chicago, Indiana, your clearance rate is 9%. Honolulu, your clearance rate is 6%. Assumption Parish, Louisiana, your clearance rate is 12%. King County, Washington, your clearance rate is 5%. The way our country handles law enforcement, with complete local control and no oversight, means that you could live in a place that hasn't solved a single crime in 50 years, and nothing would happen. Your sheriff's office could have a zero percent clearance rate, and no one from the government will step in and say, that's unacceptable, here's what has to happen.

Or even just ask the question, what's going on down there? And what this all means is that you are stuck with the law enforcement you've got. If you or someone in your family is murdered, you just have to hope the place where you live has a law enforcement agency with a good track record of solving crime. And if your case is never solved, nothing will happen. No one will come in and take over the investigation. And eventually, your name will be forgotten. Thomas Hargrove put it to me this way. You essentially disappear from the radar.

Your name is not recorded in any central authority. There's really no one out there who is assigned to review what happened to your case and whether more needs to be done, or even who you were. You become anonymous. Nobody can put together a list of the names of those 216,000 Americans who perished in unsolved murders.

And that really is kind of a national tragedy. And in Stearns County, what this means is that no one could intervene when the sheriff's office took nearly 27 years to find out that Jacob Wetterling had been killed and buried about a mile from the home of a man they all suspected had abducted a kid before. A man whose car a witness saw that night. A man whose name had been in the Wetterling case file since almost the beginning. A man who investigators had sat face-to-face with.

A man named Danny Heinrich. Everyone just had to wait and hope that somehow the Stearns County Sheriff's Office would manage to solve the Wetterling case. So this is where the story was supposed to end, with a sheriff's office that doesn't get held accountable in a case that took nearly 27 years to solve. This was supposed to be the last episode of In the Dark, but over the past six weeks, as we've been airing this podcast,

we've kept reporting. And we found out some things about the Jacob Wetterling case, and about Danny Heinrich, the man who confessed to Jacob's kidnapping, that we want to tell you about. And so we're releasing one more episode. That's next week

on In the Dark. In the Dark is produced by Samara Freemark. The associate producer is Natalie Jablonski. Significant additional reporting for this episode by Will Craft. 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 to learn more about the case of Officer Tom Decker and the case of Josh Guimond, and to learn more about the case of Officer Tom Decker and the case of Josh Guimond, and to learn more about clearance rates, and for a link to find out the murder clearance rate where you live. 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.