Solved cold cases in Minnesota
3 documented cases.
Jacob Erwin Wetterling
Jacob Wetterling, 11, was abducted at gunpoint near St. Joseph, Minnesota on the night of October 22, 1989, while biking home from a convenience store with his brother and a friend. The case haunted Minnesota for 27 years until 2016, when Danny Heinrich, who had been linked by DNA to a 1989 assault on another boy, admitted in federal court that he had abducted, assaulted and killed Jacob, and led authorities to the remains near Paynesville.
Jeanne Ann "Jeanie" Childs
Jeanne Ann "Jeanie" Childs, a 35-year-old woman, was found stabbed roughly 65 times in her south Minneapolis apartment on June 13, 1993. The case went cold for more than two decades until investigative genetic genealogy traced unknown crime-scene DNA to Jerry Arnold Westrom, who was arrested in 2019 and convicted of first-degree murder in 2022.
Michelle Busha
Michelle Yvette Busha, an 18-year-old from Bay City, Texas, was hitchhiking along Interstate 90 in southern Minnesota on May 26, 1980, when she was picked up, sexually assaulted, and strangled; her body was found four days later in a drainage ditch near Blue Earth in Faribault County. For years she was an unidentified Jane Doe and the killing went unsolved. The case broke not through forensics but through a confession: in 1988, Robert Leroy Nelson, an on-duty Minnesota State Patrol trooper at the time of the murder who was by then imprisoned in Texas, admitted to the killing. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in 1989. The victim herself was not positively identified until 2015, when DNA from her exhumed remains matched a family sample, prompting the local sheriff to call it not a question of who done it, but who she was.