Woman shares experience blogging about Jacob Wetterling case

"Really, I feel like I didn't find this story," Baker said Wednesday while speaking in Willmar. "This story found me."

It was national news when, in June 2010, investigators had a suspect in the Jacob Wetterling case: The Wetterlings' next-door neighbor. And they were digging up his yard.

It wasn't Baker's first blog, but that news prompted her first writing about the 1989 disappearance of Wetterling.

Baker spoke Wednesday about the "emotional, crazy rollercoaster" that is her blogging career at an event put on by Willmar women's leadership group WeLEAD.

Baker told the group that she did not think she wanted to continue to write about Wetterling.

It was too close to home.

Her two sons, after all, were 13 and 15 years old in 2010.

Only 40 miles separate New London from the Wetterling home in St. Joseph.

She put Jacob aside, and searched for a "happy

mystery." She wrote about other things.

A 2011 two-month sabbatical from the advertising company she co-owned changed her path.

"At the end of 2011, I said, 'I love this sabbatical thing so much, I think I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life,' " Baker said.

She sold her half of the company that year.

"At this time in my life, if I'm ever gonna do this thing it's gotta be now."

Though Baker eventually returned to full-time work, in marketing and communications for Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar, the extended sabbatical was the start to really following her passion.

She said she couldn't stop thinking about the story of Jacob Wetterling, and she wondered if it might be her calling to continue following and writing about the story.

In 2013 she was contacted by Dan Rassier, the neighbor to the Wetterlings who had been a suspect and had his property dug up back in 2010.

Rassier had seen Baker's blog and wanted to tell his side of the story.

After meeting him at the St. Cloud Library, "I really felt pretty strongly that he had nothing to do with it," Baker said.

The police spotlight had been turned on Rassier in 2003, after a set of tire tracks at the scene the night of Jacob's disappearance were accounted for and dismissed as evidence.

Rassier was then a person of interest, because investigators believed the suspect had to have been on foot.

"At that point I really decided that what I wanted to do was talk to people who had some direct connection to the case," Baker said.

She reached out to Jared Scheierl, who had been a boy living in Cold Spring when he was abducted off the street in 1989, assaulted, and let go.

They talked, and she shared his story on her blog.

Then came comments from readers, who had found an article in the Paynesville Press documenting five attacks on young boys in 1986 and 1987.

Baker and Scheierl then worked as a team to contact those boys.

Later, new information came about: One of the Paynesville victims had grabbed their assailant's hat and still had it.

It was sent to the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and matched a man named Danny Henrich. He has been called a person of interest in the Wetterling case and is currently facing unrelated child pornography charges in federal court.

DNA on a sweatshirt Jared Scheierl wore at the time of his abduction also matched with Henrich.

Investigators have said in the past they had long believed Heinrich was a suspect and had previously looked at a possible connection between the Cold Spring and Paynesville cases.

Baker was one of the first to talk publicly about the link. She says it may have helped make other victims of the Paynesville assaults known.

"It really did make a difference, in what we were doing," Baker said. "It's just such a crazy story … this is where I am today."

RELATED STORY:

WeLead luncheon, speaker inspire Willmar-area women

Source: Woman shares experience blogging about Jacob Wetterling case