MINNEAPOLIS — Federal authorities are investigating a man arrested for child pornography for potential involvement in the 1989 abduction of an 11-year-old boy who is still missing.
Daniel James Heinrich, 52, was arrested Wednesday and charged with five counts of possessing and receiving child pornography, but has not been charged in connection with the disappearance of the boy, Jacob Wetterling of St. Joseph, Minn.
After searching Heinrich's Annandale, Minn., residence July 28, investigators found 19 three-ring binders filled with pornographic images of young boys, a computer hard drive filled with images, and a collection of VHS tapes containing images of children, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger said.
Jacob was riding his bike home from a convenience store Oct. 22, 1989, with his younger brother and a friend when a masked man with a gun appeared and told all the boys to lie down in a ditch at the side of the road. The kidnapper asked each boy his age before ordering the other two to run into the woods and not look back.
A sample of Heinrich's DNA has been matched to a kidnapping and sexual assault case from January 1989 involving a 12-year-old boy from Cold Spring, Minn.
Eleven years ago, KARE-TV spoke with that now-adult victim, a man named Jared Scheierl, about what happened that night.
Scheierl, who looked a lot like Jacob, was grabbed off the street, forced into a car and driven to a remote area where he was violently sexually assaulted. Following the assault Scheierl was dropped off and told that if he turned around he would be shot.
"This isn't someone new to us," Stearns County Sheriff John Sanner said Thursday. Henrich had long been a suspect in Scheierl's sexual assault, as well as a series of attacks on other boys in the Paynesville, Minn., area.
While Henrich has not been charged in connection with Jacob's abduction, he now is being named as a person of interest in connection with that crime, said Richard T. Thornton, FBI special agent in charge.
"The search for Jacob is an ongoing investigation and we will watch and learn with everyone else, the Wetterling family said in a statement. "Right now we know what is being reported. We know what you all know.
"For 26 long years we have said that somebody knows something," the family said. "If you know anything about his man, his ties to St. Joseph in 1989 and his victimization of children or since, please call the Stearns County Sheriff's Department."
