Jared Scheierl is still asking the question that never leaves him: why was he left alive when Jacob Wetterling was not. In a recent interview, Scheierl said the old wound opened again as the Wetterling case returned to the spotlight, bringing Danny Heinrich’s confession back into view.
That question matters because Heinrich did more than admit what he had done. He confessed to abducting, assaulting and killing Jacob Wetterling and led authorities to the place where he had buried him in a quiet stretch of farmland. Jacob’s remains were recovered in 2016, closing a search that had started on Oct. 22, 1989, when the 11-year-old was taken while biking home after a night that began like any other.
The details still read like a nightmare that should have ended differently. Jacob was riding home with his 10-year-old brother and best friend when a masked man approached the three boys on the street. The man kidnapped Jacob and told the others to run home and not look back or he would shoot them. For years, that was one of the most painful unresolved crimes in Minnesota, a case that stayed open because no one could connect the dots with certainty.
Investigators eventually had a reason to look at another abduction and assault that happened nine months earlier in nearby Cold Spring, Minnesota. Jared, then 12, was kidnapped in January 1989, driven to a remote location and sexually assaulted. “After the incident was done, then he got back in his car and dropped me on the outside of Cold Spring, and told me to, ‘Run, don’t look back,’ or he’d shoot,” Scheierl later said. Following a cold case review, DNA found on Jared’s clothes matched a man named Danny Heinrich, tying the two crimes together before Heinrich ever struck a plea deal.
That deal came almost a year after Heinrich was arrested on federal charges of child pornography in October 2015 after a search of his home. In exchange for a 20-year sentence on a single child pornography count, he provided information about his crimes against Jacob. He also admitted to assaulting Jared, but he could not be charged in that case because the statute of limitations had already expired. Minnesota later changed its laws in 2021 to remove that deadline for sexual violence, a move that reflected how long the damage can last even when the criminal case cannot move forward.
For Scheierl, the legal timeline does not settle the human one. His interview turns the Wetterling case from a closed chapter into a harder question about survival, chance and why one child was taken and another was spared. ABC’s updated 20/20 episode, Where Are You Jacob?, revisits the case on Friday, July 17, with streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu, but the sharpest part of the story remains the question Scheierl cannot shake.
