LE seems to have put a lot of effort into the tire tracks
From ELOC's book.
And one is on pg. 133.
To be sure, investigators had thoroughly vetted all leads in the case. Dwayne Hood, a journalism graduate from Nashville, Tennessee, found himself a potential suspect after he showed in- terest in obtaining copies of St. Cloud Times newspaper articles printed in the days immediately following Jacob's kidnapping. The very next day after his inquiry, an FBI agent paid a visit to Hood. Hood was impressed with the amount of information that the agency had already collected on him. The FBI agent photo- graphed the man's car and removed its rear tires to take detailed photos of them. They took front and side mug shots of the man as well.93
Hood followed up the interrogation with a letter to the St. Cloud Times, commending the investigative effort. He pledged his intent to assist the search effort himself, by distributing Jacob's poster in TN.
Yes, that's right. And until someone can show me or remind me of a reliable source that said they were searching for the tires that made the tracks right next to Jacob's footprint, I'm starting to believe that they put a lot of effort into finding tracks that were different from those.
(I do want to go back and find Patty's quotes about the footprint to remember if she said anything about UNidentified tire tracks adjacent to the footprint...totally possible, but I'm not finding it right now.)
This isn't my only theory, and I'm sorry to be in the position of having to sleuth what LE knows instead of being able to sleuth anything that would be new to the investigation...
Theory: LE knew by next day that the tracks next to Jacob's footprint were made by a Rassier vehicle. Ruling out vehicles from the farm (presuming the perp wasn't the farmer) would be as basic as IDing and ruling out a family's fingerprints at a break-in before IDing perp fingerprints. But it quickly became enough of a red flag that a Rassier car drove by Jacob's print, so they checked him out at the school the next day and followed up with a property search soon after...and he has been a person of interest since then.
But he wasn't the top person of interest because there were those other tracks, the unidentified tracks, which were--again, I THINK, not the same tracks we've been looking at and not even that close to Jacob's footprint. Since they had no idea what mysterious car those came from, it was important to find out and they put a lot of effort into it. No luck.
Then Kevin came forward, and we are left with the local-man-on-foot theory, who just may have used one of the vehicles on his own family's farm to move Jacob somewhere either on the property or off the property as his next step. This isn't a new idea--lots of people have wondered this.
This theory can be DR by himself or DR with a friend, or even just a friend of family member of DR.
Again, not my only theory, as Hollinger gives me nightmares. But then they had to have known each other too, from St. Johns and through music, and I can fit Hollinger right into this theory too, or Gillespie, or any other potential suspect.
I'd really hoped this case would break last year, right before the 25th year. Here we are with the date coming up again tomorrow. I really wish I could do something besides guess at what LE knows. Frustrating. I'm so grateful and amazed at all the Wetterlings have done for other children while living with this grief and frustration. They need some of that good karma to come back to them.
