Susan Sink

I’ve been more than ambivalent about the recent trend in crime-exploring podcasts that throw doubt on the results of the criminal justice system. It’s not even so much that I doubt their editing and production process led us to the right conclusion (though there’s some of that) as I’ve just felt they weren’t very good at storytelling. Serial season 1 was the worst, in my opinion. And the fact that it opened the door to millions of people binge-listening to these radio programs was really discouraging to me. It seemed the last refuge of the short-attention-span, no-rabbit-hole-too-small online culture. AND it led many people to make decisions about an actual case that the podcast didn’t itself make and couldn’t really be drawn from the podcast. They weren’t trying to solve the case. They were just trying to show that Adnan didn’t get a fair shake. That they did in the most random, meandering, confoundingly confusing way possible. And they took the longest possible time to do it.

But I was very interested from the beginning to hear what Madeleine Baran and the American Public Media team would do with the Jacob Wetterling case in their series In the Dark. I was especially interested to hear the series when, two weeks before it was scheduled to air, Danny Heinrich confessed from prison and led law enforcement to Jacob’s body, which had been buried in a corn field 20 miles from his home for 27 years. Suddenly the case was solved, so “who done it” was not in play. APM moved up the scheduling by a week, and also went back and re-edited, a great piece of work in itself, so the series would match what had been revealed. But the essence of their piece was intact. Their question was: “Why did it take so long to get Danny Heinrich?” Where, how, and why had the investigation– especially the investigation conducted by the Stearns County sheriff’s department– failed?

The Jacob Wetterling abduction looms large in the area where I live. The case was hugely important in establishing a sex offender registry in this country, and so had national significance as well. When news of the confession broke, it made The New York Times.

I live less than a mile from the abduction site (as the crow flies). In 2010, the sheriff’s office conducted an ill-advised and  harassing search of a farm next to the site and for days we had the whir of news helicopters over our house. I ended up writing a short story about the experience.

The reason this podcast is so good is because it is well written and well organized. Baran breaks down the story into key themes and explores each one fully and meaningfully in an episode. She talks to the right people and she uses the interviews wisely. She not only follows the narrative in a straightforward and manageable way, she sees what is important in the narrative. She sees why and when and how the case gets away from the local investigators: in the beginning when the sheriff’s office didn’t canvas the neighborhood; in the days when the case drew national media attention and the scope broadened into psychic and serial killer territory; in the desperation when a new sheriff focused on the easiest-at-hand scapegoat and hounded him.

Why this podcast is important to me is that it has changed the narrative for me here in St. Joseph. I have written a draft of a novel about another bungled investigation, of a police killing in Cold Spring, Minnesota, just up the road. I approached the novel with the narrative that is firmly in place for many of us out here– that we are small, friendly, safe communities where nothing very bad ever happens. And because of that, when something truly bad happens, it is “outside” of us, and so impossible for us to “solve.” No small-town police department, or sheriff’s department, can be expected to manage cases this complicated and beyond the pale. But that’s not really true. The case could have been solved. The Stearns County Sheriff’s office could have done better (as one person in the podcast says, nothing presented in the podcast is new; all the evidence was there, all these years). Hindsight is 20/20, but it’s hard to get away from the fact that a local blogger put all this together before Baran or law enforcement.

The truth is, the Cold Spring case also suffered greatly because the department arrested and focused on (and ruined the life of) the wrong guy in the days after the crime. And more than that, these two crimes are not the only horrific crimes in this county. Baran talks about other unsolved cases that should have been solved: the murder of two teen girls in the 1980s that was not taken seriously and was lost in the politics of a sheriff’s election; and the murder of a woman and her children out in the country in the 1970s where a simple question to the one surviving member of the family could have broken open the case. Cold Spring also had one of the nation’s post-Columbine high school shootings. Each of these things shook the community, and then subsided. Maybe we didn’t go back completely to thinking of the area as small-town-safe, but I do see kids with greater freedom around here than I see elsewhere (and I’m glad about that, as long as they’re also watchful and not careless about safety and the dangers of this world). But whether this is overall a safe place is not what is at issue. What is at issue is the way we push away what we don’t want to face, what we don’t want to claim. Although we waited with hope and with the porch light on for Jacob to possibly return from the abduction, the truth of what happened did not come to light because we/the sheriff’s department did not bring it to light.

To explain how deep this myth runs for me, I have to remember something I realized teaching a catechism (faith formation) class at the Cold Spring Catholic church. One week we were told that in lieu of the planned lesson, we’d be doing a “safe environment” training about childhood sexual abuse. This yearly pre-emption of catechism was a response to the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, which included cases throughout this very Catholic area. It made me uncomfortable, though, that the parents hadn’t been told about this change in schedule. I am all for this kind of education, but I am also a sexual abuse survivor, and my reaction was that this was not a wise thing to drop without warning on parents and 13-16 year old children. I had other issues with how this initiative was being rolled out, but what struck me was that I know the statistics and it was nearly certain that there were victims of sexual abuse (albeit not necessarily by clergy) sitting at those long tables in Heritage Hall. Were we prepared for fallout– including possible accusations– that might come out of this? But my sense was, talking to others, that it was ok because it was a warning about something that might happen, not something that had happened. Of course this is another giant can of worms, but I think it’s part of the same story that we don’t believe these things can happen in our community. If they do, they have nothing to do with “us.” In many ways that is what went wrong in the Jacob Wetterling investigation, even as a member of our community was scapegoated.

In the Dark is a masterful series, well worth listening to in its entirety. And when you do, don’t think it’s only about a small town in Central Minnesota, which you might think of as backward or incompetent or just plain unequipped to see the truth. Because we all turn away to preserve the myths of our small towns and communities. And kudos to Madeleine Baran and her crew for telling us the story in such a meaningful and clear way.