Echoes in the Night

Yesterday afternoon, I took a trip down the highway to the nearest town where I could catch a matinee of Echoes in the Night: The Search for Jacob Wetterling. It's a documentary about the over 25-year agony of Jerry and Patty Wetterling of St. Joseph, Minn., whose 11-year-old son was kidnapped off his bicycle on Oct. 22, 1989 and never seen again. And also the guy down the road who was the prime suspect for all those years, mainly because he was a bit of an oddball and lived with his parents, whose driveway ended about where Jacob was last seen. And also a guy named Jared, a.k.a. "The Cold Springs boy," who in January of that same year was abducted and sexually assaulted by a stranger who was long suspected, and eventually proved, to be the same guy who snatched Jacob. And about an investigative blogger named Joy, who was the first to spot a link between Jared's case and a series of attacks on young teenaged boys in the nearby town of Paynesville, where Jared and his family had coincidentally moved after his ordeal. And to a lesser degree, the journalists and law enforcement people connected with the case, and a classmate of Jacob's who ended up making a career of educating children and communities about child sex abuse.

Eventually – though already over a decade ago – an Annandale, Minnesota resident named Danny Heinrich confessed to snatching, raping and shooting Jacob, and led authorities to where he hid the boy's remains. He got 20 years for a single count of possessing child pornography, and was never even charged with his attacks on Jacob, Jared or the other boys – though the documentary does go on to show Jared being awarded a large but uncollectable sum of money for the harm Heinrich did him.

Even as a solved case, the story leaves you with an uneasy feeling, as no doubt it should. The Wetterlings didn't really want justice; they just wanted to know where their son was, and cutting a deal with his killer was the price of getting that – even at the expense of justice for Jared. You can't walk out of this movie feeling good. And I, for one, cried as quietly as I could through a great deal of it.

I'm not feeling like delivering a Scenes That Made It For Me list for this film. It was good, but not something that filled me with joy. It was, in a word, heartbreaking. It brought back memories of a case that affected my then (when I was a teen myself) and now home state (again, after years away from Minnesota). Memories like a mom going spare in the convenience store where I worked, senior year in high school, because her son – coincidentally also named Jacob – had disappeared while she was shopping. Only after the police showed up was the child found, sitting in the backseat of his mom's car, waiting for her to come out of the store. And of course the smiling face of the sweet, happy kid in the photo that was circulated, year after year, while the search for him went on. My youngest brother, also named Jacob, who at the time of Jacob Wetterling's disappearance was only 3 years old, would later grow to look a bit like him. From the beginning, I had a vivid intuition of the thoughts and feelings his family members were going through, and now I can roughly guess what kind of man he would look like at the cusp of middle age. He'll never get to grow up or grow old, however, because as Patty said, he remained alive for them only until they learned that he had died the day he was taken.

I can tell you about some bits of this movie that destroyed me, however. The suspect down the road saying he considered suicide but didn't want the authorities to conclude that he did it and close the case. Jerry Wetterling declaring he was done talking to the media after 50 tipsters "turned him in" as a suspect in his own son's disappearance, based on the brave face he put on for his family's benefit. Patty describing how depressed she became until she thought about her son, curled up and hopeless, and forced herself to "get up." Jared's fury when the prosecutors represented him as having agreed to Heinrich's plea deal, when he had done no such thing. Patty's disillusionment when, after successfully campaigning for state and later federal laws establishing a sex offender registry, the results proved to be harmful in their own disturbing way (e.g. 10-year-olds being labeled for life as sex offenders after being caught "playing doctor"). Or again, what it cost Jared throughout his life to be unable to let go of what had happened to him when he was 13 years old; even his first wife (at the point where their marriage broke) telling him they were never going to catch the guy so he should move on. I wanted to write a line of dialog for him, something like, "My experience melted me down and poured me into a mold, and this is what it made me." And Patty's message seems to be that you can end child sex abuse and other violent crimes if you teach children early enough to respect other people. But I couldn't escape the thought, "Oh Lord, people suck."

The fact that they got the guy is a little satisfying. The fact that he never legally answered for most of what he did, and the people he really harmed, is deeply unsatisfying. And the way the film ends with home video of Jacob Wetterling describing himself only weeks before his death is everything about this movie, emotionally. Which is mostly – and I repeat – devastating.