How the Internet Cracked a 27-Year Cold Case Police Called Impossible

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On October 22nd, 1989, in a small town in Minnesota, an 11-year-old boy named Jacob disappeared into thin air.

At 9pm, Jacob, his best-friend Aaron, and his younger brother Trevor were heading home from a nearby convenience store. Two of them on bikes, one on a scooter. As they approached a particularly dark stretch of road near a long gravel driveway, a man stepped out of the darkness.

He was dressed in all black, his face covered – maybe with pantyhose, maybe a ski mask. The boys couldn’t tell in the dark. But they could clearly see that, in his hand, he had a gun.

The man’s voice was low and gravelly, ordering the boys to lay face down in the ditch and tell him, one by one, their ages.

He started with Trevor. Ten years old. The man told him clearly:
“Run into the woods. Don’t look back or I’ll shoot.”

Trevor followed the order without hesitation. The man grabbed Aaron next and told him the same thing:
“Run. Don’t look back.”

Aaron ran. But eventually he did look back, and when he did, the man – and Jacob – were gone.

For 27 years, the name Jacob Wetterling haunted the American consciousness. His face staring out from missing person posters in his red hockey jacket. For decades, due to police and FBI negligence, his disappearance would go unsolved, and the man responsible would be free to claim as many victims as he pleased. As it would turn out, during the nearly three-decade-long investigation, detectives had in fact crossed paths with the man they were searching for on numerous occasions—but they didn’t realize it. That was until a couple of average everyday people with an internet connection cracked the case wide open.

Let’s get into it.

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