I'd been a new mother for five months and 27 days on the horrible night Jacob Wetterling was snatched and disappeared. I held my baby girl tighter after that and, for years, I secretly searched for him. At gas stations. In parks. On family trips out West.
I did it out of equal parts grief and guilt, realizing even then that I had been granted the simple gift of watching a child move through every normal milestone while another Minnesota mother stared, hellishly, into emptiness. Year after year after year.
Naively, I thought I was the only one. I was so wrong.
Last Wednesday, our newsroom got wind of a potential break in Jacob's disappearance. Backhoes were unearthing chunks of grass and dirt from a farm property about a half-mile from the Wetterling home in rural St. Joseph. Reporters, photographers and videographers flew into cars and headed up. Others, some who have covered this story since Day One, grabbed their phones to call longstanding sources.
It was not an over-reaction. By Thursday, our online coverage had generated about a half million page views. It's an extraordinary number for our website, but fitting for an extraordinary story.
Nearly 21 years have passed, and Jacob Wetterling remains "our" Jacob. He lives inside all of us, sometimes still a sweet-faced boy of 11, sometimes an age-progressed man of nearly 32, periodically popping into our collective consciousness as we raise our children, teach them to trust, struggle to let go.
And as hard as it is to admit, we struggle to let go of Jacob, too. Since Jacob's disappearance, investigators have chased more than 40,000 leads across the world. No one needs or deserves closure more than the Wetterling family, but the rest of us also feel a visceral need for an answer, please.
The cruel reality, though, is that closure may carry a colossal cost: the end of hope.
