The kidnapper drove a red Chevette. Or maybe it was a white Chevrolet. Or a brown van.
There were no suspects. There were lots of suspects.
Police circulated sketches of a burly middle-aged man who was seen near the abduction. They also released a sketch of a younger man.
From the beginning, the investigation into the 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling, 11, of St. Joseph, Minn., has been a searchlight scanning the horizon, pausing occasionally to focus in one
direction or another.
The latest twist came last week, when authorities announced that they had new information indicating that the abductor may not have used a vehicle after all. If so, he probably lived or stayed within
easy walking distance of the abduction.
"No doubt this new piece of information has renewed interest in the case ... blown new investigative life into it," said Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner. "We've got something fresh."
Sanner said the investigation has been "refocused to examine potential local suspects" who could have abducted Jacob without a vehicle. All of the people subjected to the new scrutiny have been
identified for years as potential suspects but never cleared.
In the days and weeks after the abduction, authorities conducted extensive interviews with neighbors of the Wetterlings. But they also spent much of their time looking elsewhere in Minnesota and
the nation on the theory that an abductor from outside the area might have driven off with the boy.
"This case received national attention so quickly and to such a great extent that calls were coming in from all over the country about possible sightings and descriptions of vehicles and matches on the descriptions of vehicles with suspects," said Jim Kostreba, a former Stearns County sheriff who played a major role in the investigation. "We couldn't dismiss them. So there's a lot of jumping around to different areas of the country."
Kostreba said investigators from the FBI, Stearns County and the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension were justified in pursuing a theory that the abductor used a vehicle because ramps to Interstate Hwy. 94 are a couple of miles from the Wetterling home, and the boy had visited a convenience store along another highway shortly before he was abducted.
"But it took up valuable time and resources, there is no question about that," Kostreba said.
The new information casts doubt on evidence that the abductor used a vehicle that left tire tracks at the scene. Investigators had long regarded the tracks as significant because they appeared near small footprints on a driveway off the township road near where the abduction occurred.
But last fall a man reported that he had driven to the abduction scene the night of the kidnapping after hearing police activity on a scanner. He said he came forward recently after having a casual
conversation with someone in law enforcement.
Investigators don't consider the man a suspect and say his account offers an innocent explanation for the tire tracks. An abduction without a vehicle would increase the likelihood that the kidnapper lived nearby.
Start at the center
Dennis Sigafoos was an agent for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension assigned to the case in 1989.
"My deal has always been, start in the neighborhood and stay in the neighborhood ... unless something takes you out of the eighborhood," said Sigafoos, now retired. "If there was no car,
then obviously we should have been in there even harder ... maybe a hell of a lot more could have been done. But I can assure you we talked to people and talked to people and talked to people. In my
heart, I believe we did both equally well - inside the neighborhood and outside."
But about a week after the abduction, most of the leads were taking investigators outside the area, Sigafoos said. Massive media coverage "brought in leads from all over, and it seemed we spent an
awful lot of time following up leads outside the area that really weren't worth following up. And we should have been back in that home area until something positively took us outside of it."
FBI Special Agent Paul McCabe also worked the Wetterling case and said there was a heavy emphasis on pursuing local leads.
"In all of these investigations you kind of start at the center and work out," McCabe said. "That's kind of how the investigation was done at that time. You start at the core and just keep going out and out and out, until we had the whole county covered, and then we kept going from there."
He said investigators continued to follow local leads even as they pursued angles that took them outside the Wetterling neighborhood.
"As you're pushing your way out, all of a sudden a new lead might take you back in," McCabe said. "The main thing is no one wants to get tunnel vision. You keep all of your options open."
Al Garber, a former FBI agent who supervised the Wetterling investigation, did not respond this week to questions about the case.
Sketches, tire tracks
During the first few months after the abduction, leads surfaced suddenly, only to quickly fade in importance.
The FBI released a sketch of an unidentified man it believed kidnapped Jacob and molested a 12-year-old boy from Cold Spring, Minn. The burly white man was reportedly wearing military-style
fatigues and a baseball cap. The sketch was circulated throughout the nation. Investigators later downplayed its significance.
Within days of the abduction, investigators were tracking 100 potential suspects and looking for a red Chevette seen near the Tom Thumb convenience store where Jacob, his brother Trevor, 10, and
friend Aaron Larson, 11, went to rent a video on Oct. 22, 1989.
They were approached by a masked gunman at about 9:15 p.m. as they returned home on a township road. He asked the boys their ages and then told Trevor and Aaron to run and not look back or he'd
shoot. They ran, and when they finally looked back, Jacob was gone.
Aaron and Trevor didn't report seeing or hearing a suspicious vehicle at the site of the abduction. But Kostreba said the boys were running from an abduction and may not have been looking or
listening for a vehicle.
Kostreba continues to believe there was a vehicle, saying it would have been very hard for an abductor to disappear so quickly with an 11-year-old boy without one. He says the innocent explanation for the tire track in the driveway doesn't rule out that another vehicle was used in the kidnapping and that the
abductor was a local person.
Whether a vehicle was used, Kostreba is skeptical of the theory that the abduction was committed by someone from outside the region.
"My personal feeling is that it's always a little bit closer to home," he said.