MN - Jacob Wetterling, 11, St. Joseph, 22 Oct 1989 - #6

[cGorg]

Is the stearns truth website up and running? What's the address?

vocnow.com

I just looked....it just says "vocnow arriving October 18, 2013"...nothing new yet.....

 

[human]

I put some of the text into Gender genie which is now called hackerfactor.

It came out as male.

Others may wish to try it.

http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze

 

[human]

Midwest, I can hardly wait.

I hope someone else does the gender genie as results are unusual for the text I used this time.

It gives a formal male and an informal female for the analysis

 

[cGorg]

I hope you will go to the link and insert text and see what you come up with.

human.....i tried my own paragraph as a test and it was correct. Informal 78.7% correct + Formal 63.7% correct.

quite interesting.

 

[cGorg]

human....not sure which text you used but I grabbed the first paragraph of the last post. here's what I got:

Informal 88.91% Male, Formal 47.12% Female
Weak emphasis could indicate European

 

[eileenhawkeye]

I found an article from November 19, 1989 stating that investigators had received 15,000 tips in the case at that point. That number is significantly higher than anything I've heard in other high-profile cases. For example, there were 4000 tips in the first three weeks of the Jessica Ridgeway case, 3000 tips in the first five weeks of the Kyron Horman case, 1000 tips in the first three weeks of the Baby Lisa case, and 5000 tips in the first three weeks of the Polly Klaas case.

I wonder why exactly Jacob's case brought in a significantly higher number of tips than the cases I mentioned? I thought it might have do with Jacob being abducted by an unknown predator, but so were Jessica and Polly. Then I thought, maybe it was different in 1989, but Polly went missing only a few years later and didn't get as many tips.

So what did you think it was? We are talking 10,000+ tips more than other cases, cases that had just as much, or more, media exposure.

ETA: When you read the old articles about the case, about the number of tips, the searchers, the media coverage (#1 Story in Minnesota in 1989), this massive effort to find Jacob...It becomes almost bewildering that the case hasn't been solved. Jacob has not been found. The person who took Jacob is pretty much a blank. This is the type of case that you would think would benefit from all of that but it didn't. Jacob's case has to be one of the biggest non-family member child abduction cases to go unsolved, right?

 

[cGorg]

human....when I copied the entire post I got a different reading:

Informal 67% Male, Formal Female 34%. I think more words are more accurate than just a few words so not sure how scientific this thing is.

 

[shergal]

cGorg: I think some of that post was copied from legal doc descriptions though, wasn't it? The actual description of the perp. So that may skew it.

eileenhawkeye: That is an enormous amount of tips. I recall our neighbors at the time went to AZ for the winter and they said there were flyers all over down there also. So it may be there was just a lot of coverage at first. Part of it may have been because it was so shocking that something like that could happen in such a small rural town. Or maybe back in 1989 everyone was more willing to get involved? Not sure. It certainly affected the lives of everyone in the state and even surrounding states.

Even Sheriff Sanner admits they lost the local piece right away, because they were so sure he was taken in a car. So they didn't do searches in homes they should have right at the start. And there were no data bases back then on sexual predators or online resources you could use to check on past criminal records. The Wetterling Foundation has changed that so much.

 

[cGorg]

The mentioning of Thread #4 today.....I went through that again. A bit off the current topic but there is Post #484 by Ryan which cuts to the chase. A few small factual errors but definitely worth re-reading. Reminds me that with a mystery like this it's easy to get diverted by all of the extraneous information on this case.

 

[shergal]

I remember a long post by a "Ryan" who described how the perp waited in his car, but I couldn't find it at your #484?

 

[cGorg]

I remember a long post by a "Ryan" who described how the perp waited in his car, but I couldn't find it at your #484?

#434,Thread #4 My apologies, mistyped. Sorry to have given you the wrong direction.

 

[shergal]

Here's the link for Ryan's post.
http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=118670&page=18

<modsnip>

He did have one major fact wrong (and in reading further on that page, I noticed another poster, Trino, kept repeating it also... DR has stated publicly - most recently in that WCCO interview that he took a poly but he DOES NOT KNOW whether he passed or not. So people stating DR passed a poly are mistaken.

The rest of Ryan's theory is believable, I guess, although it seems to me if this is really what happened, the perp got awfully lucky in that the boys lived out further past DR's driveway. There is no way the perp could have seen from the north end of the road how far the boys had come from. Since so few people lived further out on the road past DR's farm, odds are great that kids coming from Tom Thumb would have turned off to their homes before DR's driveway.

 

[Cappuccino]

Back in 1989 there was no turn off on that road before DR's driveway. So if someone had seen them come out of that road he would have known that they had to go at least that far if they returned that way.

 

[human]

Back in 1989 there was no turn off on that road before DR's driveway. So if someone had seen them come out of that road he would have known that they had to go at least that far if they returned that way.

I am very confused, There were several homes on the road closer to the Tom Thumb.

 

[cGorg]

shergal + cappuccino,

I think you're both right in your comments. Although a bit creepy, it seemed Ryan's post was very plausible. It could be argued where the perp was located in a vehicle when he saw the boys but it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where they were returning if he had the right vantage point and especially if the perp had 'tooled around' previously in his car. In any case, a certain amount of luck may be involved but that can also be said of DR as the perp.

 

[human]

This is an interesting post .


Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 6,332
Dan Rassier admits he is a packrat. Does Dan Rassier have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) like the diagnosed packrats on the television show Hoarders?

In this study published in American Journal of Forensic Psychology, Volume 28, Issue 3, 2010 / 9, avoidant personality disorder and OCD were the personality disorders with the highest prevalence among rapists and child molesters.
http://www.uccs.edu/Documents/fcoolidg/francia.pdf

 

[Cappuccino]

shergal + cappuccino,

I think you're both right in your comments. Although a bit creepy, it seemed Ryan's post was very plausible. It could be argued where the perp was located in a vehicle when he saw the boys but it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where they were returning if he had the right vantage point and especially if the perp had 'tooled around' previously in his car. In any case, a certain amount of luck may be involved but that can also be said of DR as the perp.

I find Ryan's scenario very plausible too, and I don't find his post creepy. All he's really doing is describing what we know has happened in other cases of "grabbers" - and in every single case they get lucky somehow. They're opportunists by nature, their crimes depend on a certain amount of flukey luck.

 

[Cappuccino]

Er...people - are we allowed to sleuth other posters? Genuine question, I don't know and I don't think I've ever seen the issue arise before.

 

[midwestphd]

I'm really not sleuthing anyone. Just conducting an experiment. I could do the same with my own language.

 

[Cappuccino]

I've seen him comment and debate under various newspaper articles about the case. You'll probably find some linked to in this very thread if you have the patience to search, but I'm afraid I can't direct you to one off the top of my head.