• Podcast
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • How to Podcast
  • Newsletter
  • Take a Survey

It's All Journalism

The broccoli of media-focused podcasts.

  • Podcast
  • Blog
  • FAQ
  • How to Podcast
  • Newsletter
  • Take a Survey

#225 – Investigative podcast sheds light on 27-year-old abduction

November 3, 2016 by ItsAllJournalism

 

For more than 20 years, Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance remained a baffling puzzle.

“Jacob, in 1989, was 11-years old. He lived in a small town, St. Joseph, in central Minnesota. One night, he went with his friend and his brother on a bike ride, around 9 o’clock at night, to get a video,” recounted Madeleine Baran, a reporter on American Public Media’s In the Dark podcast. The ride was short, on a dead-end road, but on the way home, the boys came across a man in the middle of the road. The man forced the boys into a ditch, asked them their ages, then told the other two boys to run away and not look back or he’d shoot them.

Samara Freemark and Madeleine Baran of American Public Media

Samara Freemark and Madeleine Baran of American Public Media

“The boys ran back to the Wetterling’s house, reported it to the police and the police got there right away,” Baran said. “A massive investigation began, with the National Guard, the FBI, the state’s crime bureau, the sheriff’s office. It was one of the largest missing persons operations in the United States.”

Yet from that day in 1989 until relatively recently, Jacob’s disappearance remained a mystery. The case is the subject of In the Dark, yet Baran and the podcast’s producer, Samara Freemark, didn’t set out to play detective or try to solve the case themselves.

“As an investigative reporter, I wanted to know what really happened here,” Baran said. “This is a case that seems, on the face of it, so simple and had so many resources, but it could not be solved.”

Instead, In the Dark looks at the responsibility to the public owed by first responders, investigators and others that were involved in the investigation of Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance.

“From a production standpoint, it’s an interesting challenge,” Freemark said. “The part of the story that’s most compelling, the plot of what happened, interested us least.” They didn’t want to be exploitative in their work, nor was that the focus of the podcast.

The central theme was whether the investigators, on all levels and from all organizations, lived up to their responsibility to the public.

The biggest challenge to telling that story was the fact that the case was still an open investigation, at least at the beginning, meaning the case file was sealed and unusable.

“There’s a confession, and the case file itself, hundreds of thousands of pages of paper — there’s a whole room in the sheriff’s office for it – none of that’s been released to the public,” Baran said. “We were trying to figure out what went wrong in a case where we did not have access to the files you have in closed cases.”

As a result, their research had to go a little more low-tech – there was no internet in 1989, after all — and involved newspaper clippings from the investigation and, in one case, literally digging through boxes for research.

As Baran was interviewing a former police chief, his wife remembered she had a video of coverage of the investigation into Wetterling’s disappearance. She was about to throw the tape out that week when Baran came by for an interview.

“She recorded everything of the early days, all the stations, all of it on one tape,” she said.

Free mark added: “For the podcast, in terms of production, it helps place you in the scene, but also for facts. Just knowing what was going on at the time. We did a clip review, we went through all the newspapers as well, but being able to see some of that stuff, the way it was covered on TV and radio, it was useful.”

— Amber Healy

On this episode of It’s All Journalism, host Michael O’Connell talks to American Public Media’s Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark about In the Dark, their podcast investigation into the 29-year-old abduction case of Minnesota resident Jacob Wetterling. In the Dark does try to solve the case, rather it takes hard look at why it took authorities so long to solve the crime.

#205 – Where economic policy and real life meet

Share Button
If you like this post, please share it along:

Previous Post

David Jackson is the founder of The School of Podcasting.
#224 – David Jackson schools us on podcasting

Next Post


#226 – Panda love and the federal beat

Leave a Reply Cancel reply




Related Posts

  • #380 Lacuna Voices will be home to stories that deserve an audience
  • Victoria Baranetsky#353 Reveal sues ICE for not responding to FOIA request
  • Margy Looney is managing editor at the International Journalists' Network. (Photo by Michael O'Connell)#181 – International journalism in the time of digital disruption
  • #5 – Steve Buttry, Digital First Media, Part 2

Learn How To Podcast

Turn Up the Volume equips journalism students, professionals, and others interested in producing audio content with the know-how necessary to launch a podcast for the first time. It addresses the unique challenges beginner podcasters face in producing professional level audio for online distribution. Beginners can learn how to handle the technical and conceptual challenges of launching, editing, and posting a podcast.

Order this new book by It’s All Journalism Producer Michael O’Connell.

Take a Survey, Earn Some Swag

If you haven’t heard, we created a five-question online survey to help us assemble a toolbox for journalists that we’ll share on our podcast and website. Please take a few minutes to share the tools that help make your job easier.

We’ve also just launched a new survey on how to improve our podcast. Let us know how we could do better.

To those people who complete one of our the surveys, we’ll be sending out a limited number of It’s All Journalism coffee mugs while supplies last. Show your support for good journalism by taking the survey and get a reward in return.

Help Support Our Podcast

Promoting good journalism is essential in a democracy. By donating to the It’s All Journalism Patreon page, you will help ensure that we continue producing the weekly podcast that focuses on good journalism. You’ll also help to boost us to the next level with live events and exclusive content. Donate here.

Sign Up for Our Weekly Newsletter

Latest Posts

  • 445. Investigative reporter exposes maid abuse in Beirut
  • 444. How Documented uses WhatsApp to reach its audience
  • Better News: Use Slack to host cultural conversations in your newsroom
  • 443. Tucson newspaper proves to be a vital source for the Latinx community
  • Top 10 podcast episodes of 2020

Copyright © 2021 · Pintercast Child Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in