House that belonged to Jacob Wetterling's killer is razed

The pain and anger bubbled up, and then came quiet relief for Patty Wetterling on Friday as she watched a demolition crew tear down the Annandale house that once belonged to the man who killed her son.

"A little bit more of this man has been erased from our lives," Wetterling said.

The white, one-bedroom house belonged to Danny Heinrich, who confessed in September to killing 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in the fall of 1989. Heinrich led authorities to a shallow grave on a farm near Paynesville that held the boy's remains, ending decades of searching and dashing any hope that he might someday be found alive.

Last year, authorities searched Heinrich's Annandale home and found a trove of child pornography and surveillance videos of boys at play. The discovery gave them the leverage they needed to coax Heinrich to confess. He's now in federal prison.

In Annandale, a Wright County community of about 3,000, the house Heinrich left behind has stood as a bleak reminder of one of the most tragic events in Minnesota history.

Woodbury real estate developer Tim Thone and his wife were young parents when Jacob was abducted by a masked gunman. Some time after Heinrich's arrest, Thone decided he would buy and demolish the house.

"This is an icky thing, and we're just trying to make a good thing," he said recently. "To make everybody feel good for three minutes, because you'll never really feel good" about what happened to Jacob.

On Friday, Wetterling, her supporters and others from the community stood under gray skies and watched the house come down. "It was a mixture of every type of emotion that you can have," she said.

As the demolition equipment clawed the house down, Wetterling was reminded of "all the destruction that this man caused and the rubble he left behind.

"I thought about all the victims trying to put their lives back together," she said in a phone interview Friday evening.

She thought about how much she misses Jacob and the lives they had. And she mourned for every child in a photo or video "that this man looked at, because every time he watched, he was revictimizing kids who had been used for those videos," she said.

As the town's police chief and school superintendent stood nearby, Wetterling thought about the middle school just a block away.

"In October, a year ago, this man was still living in this house and taking pictures of kids," she said.

Neighborhood residents embraced Wetterling, giving her the "biggest hug you could ever have," she said.

"And there were tears," she said. "They were so grateful, because now they could finally take the heavy curtains down and [pull] the blinds up" on windows that had looked out onto the house.

With Heinrich's house obliterated, her tears of sadness and anger changed to some of sheer relief.

"After it was all said and done, I feel like we can breathe. … A big part of this man is erased from our lives. That's huge. It felt cleansing," Wetterling said. "It was letting go of a lot of sad."

"Shortly after, this light snow came to wash it all away," she said. "It was really lovely."

Mary Lynn Smith • 612-673-4788