Jacob Wetterling

On the evening of October 22, 1989, eleven-year-old Jacob Erwin Wetterling was riding his bicycle with his brother Trevor (10) and friend Aaron Larson (11) near their home in St. Joseph, Minnesota. A masked man with a gun emerged from a driveway and ordered the boys to lie face down. He asked their ages, then told Trevor and Aaron to run or he would shoot. He abducted Jacob.

The kidnapping sparked a nationwide search and became one of the most prominent missing child cases in American history. Jacob's parents, Jerry and Patty Wetterling, became tireless advocates for missing children's rights. Their advocacy led to the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act of 1994, which established the first sex offender registry system.

For 27 years, the case remained unsolved. In 2015, Danny James Heinrich, a convicted child pornographer who had long been a person of interest, was arrested on child pornography charges. Under a plea deal, Heinrich confessed in September 2016 to kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and murdering Jacob on the night he was taken.

Heinrich led investigators to Jacob's remains, which were found buried on a farm near Paynesville, Minnesota. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the child pornography charges, as part of the plea deal that gave the Wetterling family answers after nearly three decades.