The “In the Dark” Podcast and the Wetterling Act
Yesterday, American Public Media premiered the first two episodes of the new podcast, “In the Dark,” by Madeleine Baran. Baran is a reporter for APM Reports, American Public Media’s investigative reporting and radio documentaries project. In 2015. she won a Peabody Award for her role in the documentary, “Betrayed By Silence,” which took an indepth look into the child sex-abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. She is also a guest on tonight’s episode of the Undisclosed Podcast.
“In the Dark” is about the 1989 abduction of Jacob Wetterling. As APM Reports notes,
In the beginning, the case seemed to have a lot going for it: The abduction took place on a dead-end road with limited escape routes, there were two witnesses who reported it right away, the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office responded almost immediately. Yet as the circle of geographic possibilities widened by the hour, the police made decisions that would hobble the investigation for decades to come.
Indeed, the case went unsolved until “person of interest” Danny Heinrich recently “led authorities to the remains of the 11-year-old, whose abduction from St. Joseph stunned Minnesotans and changed the way parents watch over their children.” Two days ago, Heinrich admitted to abducting and killing Wetterling as part of a plea deal.
As I note in tonight’s Addendum episode, Wetterling’s disappearance in 1989 marked a clear shift in the way we treat sex offenders, with the 1980s on one side of a line and everything since then on the other.
Wetterling’s disappearance transformed his mother, Patty, a self-described “stay-at-home mom,” into a tireless advocate for missing children. She was appointed to a governor’s task force that recommended stronger sexual offender registration requirements in Minnesota.
The more stringent requirements were subsequently implemented on a national basis when the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act was included in the Federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994.
The Wetterling Act required states to establish stringent registration programs for sex offenders – including life-long registration for a subclass of offenders classified as sexual predators.
The Wetterling Act was followed by other legislation such as the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. These subsequent laws increase the categories of individuals who must register as sex offenders, such as teenagers who engage in sexting. This has led some to question the expanding circle of sex offenders who must register, and one of those critics is Patty Wetterling herself.
Although she remains a prominent advocate for child safety — she is the board chair of the influential National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the director of the Minnesota Health Department’s sexual violence prevention program — she has expressed gnawing doubts over the past several years about how we deal with sex offenders, a striking stance for someone who has been personally affected in such a devastating way.
“We have an intolerance for sexual violence, which I agree with,” she said recently over coffee downtown. “People want a singular solution, and the solution that’s been sold over the years is lock ’em up and throw away the key. But we’ve cast such a broad net that we’re catching a lot of juveniles who did something stupid or different types of offenders who just screwed up. Should they never be given a chance to turn their lives around?”
In the first episode of “In the Dark,” by Baran herself uses the image of the expanding circle to show how the Wetterling case became less solvable with each passing hour, and how the way the investigation was conducted complicated things further. I’ve now had the chance to listen to each of the first two episodes, and the podcast is adroitly researched and presented. I highly recommend it.
-CM