A Blogger's Determination: How Joy Baker, a True Crime Blogger Helped Solve a 21-Year-Old Abduction Case

Patty Wetterling, the mother of 11-year-old Jacob, who was abducted in 1989, had long feared that the police would never crack the case. Then, Joy Baker, a part-time blogger, got involved, and everything changed.

In 2015, six years after Joy began writing about the case in St. Joseph, Minnesota, the police arrested Danny Heinrich, a 53-year-old plywood factory worker who later confessed to kidnapping, molesting, and murdering Jacob. The incredible story of the friendship between these two women and the authorities' breakthrough is detailed in a new book, "Dear Jacob: A Mother’s Journey of Hope," released on October 17.

Jacob's disappearance shocked Minnesota and the nation from the very start. It occurred on a dark, moonless autumn night while Jacob, his younger brother Trevor, and their friend Aaron Larson were riding their bikes home with a bag of candy and a VCR tape of "The Naked Gun."

A masked man with a revolver emerged from the darkness and ordered them to lay in a ditch. He inquired about their ages, then instructed Trevor and Aaron to run to the woods without looking back, or he would shoot.

By the time Trevor and Aaron reached home and the police were called, Jacob and the man had vanished.

Patty, Jacob's mom, held on to hope, believing her son would return one day. But that day never came. Until Heinrich's confession in 2016, Patty channeled her grief into advocacy for missing children and played a pivotal role in the passing of the Jacob Wetterling Act, creating a national sex offender registry in 1994.

After years of investigating thousands of leads and examining numerous suspects, investigators seemed to hit a dead end. That's when Joy Baker, a mother herself, began writing about Jacob in 2010, living 45 minutes away from Patty. Joy tracked down Jared Scheierl, a 37-year-old plumber who had been abducted and molested at 12, similar to Jacob, and had spent years seeking justice.

Joy became convinced that their cases were connected. She combed through microfilm archives and discovered reports of other children being stalked and threatened by a masked, armed man in the late 1980s.

In 2015, the state's crime lab re-tested Scheierl's clothing, linking the DNA to Heinrich. In a 2016 plea agreement, Heinrich confessed to his crimes, and Jacob's family finally got closure. Patty, although devastated by the truth, will forever be grateful to Joy for her relentless work.

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