Although authorities received countless tips about Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance, CNN writes that they looked into a previous case that was incredibly similar. According to NBC News, Danny Heinrich was a local man who was suspected of abducting and assaulting 12-year-old Jared Scheierl. This incident occurred in Cold Spring — 10 miles away from St. Joseph — months before Jacob’s disappearance. Scheierl was let go by his captor and was also told to run and to not look back unless he wanted to get shot. Despite the same modus operandi as Jacob’s disappearance, there was not enough evidence to tie Heinrich to either boy’s case.
Years went by without any plausible leads or developments. In 1998, nine years after his abduction, Patty Wetterling told The New York Times that she believed her son was still alive. Over a decade later, Joy Baker, a Minnesota-based writer and blogger that was interested in the case, discovered Scheierl’s story (via Mamamia). Baker befriended him, and they concluded that his abduction and Jacob’s were indeed connected.
Baker discovered that several young boys had been assaulted between 1986 and 1989 in Paynesville, Minnesota, a city that is close to both St. Joseph and Cold Spring. The police disagreed with this assessment, but Baker and Scheierl pushed on, and one name kept coming up: Danny Heinrich. In 2014, Baker and Scheierl went on CNN’s “The Hunt with John Walsh,” which ultimately reinvigorated the case (per Fox43).
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