"A few days later authorities thought they had another break. Witnesses claimed they saw an unusual man in his 50s in two St. Joseph convenience stores the day Jacob went missing, including at the Tom Thumb. The man, described as 6 feet tall with a large build and receding white hair, had silently glared at customers and did not buy anything. An alert was issued, as was a sketch. No results."
http://www.checotahpolice.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36&Itemid=31
Good article. I don’t see how it could have been a stranger in the store. He wouldn’t have known the area or where the boys were headed. Aaron said he’d heard a noise on the way to the store so I’m thinking someone was already there.
Let’s say the farmer’s son walked down to the mailbox (the Witterling’s road has street mailboxes so that’s probably the way mail was delivered in ‘89) and saw the boys. He may have gotten ticked off if they were being loud and joking. Maybe he’d been mad at them over a period of time running up and down his road. Or since there’s a universal rivalry between band kids and athletes, maybe he had overheard Jacob mouthing off about band nerds and he felt he needed to be taught a lesson. I get the impression he wasn’t the girls’ basketball coach until years later. Anyway, knowing they would be back soon, he lay in wait for them. He had been a teacher at the school for about 10 years by then so he donned his mama’s stocking to hide his identity. He would have known about the prior abduction that occurred 9 months before so he might have done a copy cat. Patty says Jacob was stubborn so things might not have gone as smoothly as the perp thought they would and instead of releasing him relatively unharmed as the other boy had been, this time things turned from bad to ugly.
It just doesn’t make any sense that a teacher would be so disinterested that night knowing it might have been one of his students and his neighbor. Although, since the parents were gone, he might have been doing drugs and wanted to stay as far away from the cops as possible. No matter what the reason for his attitude, it was all very strange.
Learning about Mr. Wetterling (Ba hai’ and NAACP), they both must be “peaceable folk”. Much more so than I would be knowing every day I drove to town I’d have to pass by that farm and what possibly happened there. Strange Patty says they don’t know the farmer’s son. Patty says they haven’t moved or changed their phone number hoping Jacob would return one day. I wonder if they haven’t moved partly to show the neighbor they are still there and watching. I wonder what the other neighbors think.