S1 E8: What's Going on Down There?

In The Dark

The New Yorker

Society & Culture, True Crime, Documentary

4.7 • 28.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2016

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In November 2012, a police officer named Tom Decker was shot and killed in Cold Spring, Minn., after getting out of his car to check on a man who lived above a bar. The man was quickly arrested and held in the Stearns County jail. He was interrogated but then released without charges. The state crime bureau later ruled him out as a suspect. Investigators turned their focus to another man, Eric Thomes, who hanged himself before he could be charged with the crime. Nearly four years after the murder, Sheriff John Sanner has refused to close the case "because we're still hopeful that new information will come in," he said. Support investigative journalism with a donation to In the Dark.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we get started, I just wanted to let you know that we'd plan to have this be our last episode.
0:05.0	But we're adding one more. That's next week.
0:10.0	Previously on In the Dark.
0:12.0	The biggest question in my mind is, you know, how could this type of crime happen in this somewhat remote area of our county?
0:21.0	The kind of ways for you don't expect a child to be kidnapped at gunpoint.
0:25.0	The only sad part is that we couldn't have found this out sooner. And I guess I would really stress, please, you know, pay attention and just go after these guys.
0:36.0	I assume that if something serious happened to our kids, that somebody would be there to investigate.
0:42.0	In doing major cases, I think experience is very, very important. And you learn from every case you do.
0:49.0	And if you aren't willing to do that, then you shouldn't be an investigator.
0:59.0	Over the past year, as I talked to law enforcement officers about the Jake of Wetterling case, there was one thing I heard all the time.
1:07.0	Things were different back then, they'd say.
1:09.0	Nowadays, we have all this new technology, new training.
1:13.0	If a big crime happened in Stern's County these days, it would probably be solved right away.
1:19.0	But I had a reason to be skeptical about that claim the times had changed.
1:23.0	And that reason had to do with the crime I'd been assigned to cover in Stern's County a few years before I started reporting on the Wetterling case.
1:31.0	A type of crime that is almost always solved. The murder of a police officer.
1:37.0	I covered shootings of officers in Minnesota before.
1:41.0	So I knew that most of the time, if someone kills a police officer, one of two things is going to happen pretty quickly.
1:48.0	Either that person is going to be arrested, or they're going to be killed.
1:53.0	But that's not what happened in this case.
1:56.0	This is in the dark, an investigative podcast from APM Reports. I'm Madeline Barron.
2:11.0	In this podcast, we're trying to find out what went wrong in the case of Jacob Wetterling, an 11-year-old boy who was kidnapped in a small town in Central Minnesota in 1989.
	...

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