Man arrested in teen’s abduction, parents’ deaths
Wisconsin girl escapes after being held captive for three months in isolated cabin
BARRON, Wisconsin — A 21-year-old man shot a Wisconsin couple to death at their home in a scheme to kidnap their teenage daughter, then held the girl captive for three months in an isolated north woods town before she managed to escape, authorities said Friday.
Jayme Closs, 13, was skinny, dishevelled and wearing shoes too big for her when she approached a stranger and pleaded for help Thursday in the small town of Gordon, where Jake Thomas Patterson lives. Patterson was then arrested and jailed on kidnapping and homicide charges.
The news that Jayme was safe was greeted with joy and relief 100 kilometres away in her hometown of Barron, population 3,300, ending an all-out search that gripped the state, with many people fearing the worst.
“My legs started to shake. It was awesome. The stress, the relief — it was awesome,” Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald said, describing the moment when he learned Jayme had been found.
Jayme told one of the neighbours in Gordon who took her in that she had walked away from a cabin where she had been held captive.
“She said that this person’s name was Jake Patterson: ‘He killed my parents and took me,’ ” said another one of the neighbours, Kristin Kasinskas. “She did not talk about why or how. She said she did not know him [before the incident].”
The sheriff gave no immediate details on what happened to Jayme during her captivity, why she was seized or how she escaped. He said he did not know if she had been physically abused but that she was hospitalized overnight for observation and released after an exam.
Investigators are interviewing her. The sheriff said investigators do not believe Patterson and the girl knew each other.
Patterson worked for one day in 2016 at the same turkey plant in Barron as Jayme’s parents, Jennie-O Turkey Store president Steve Lykken said. Patterson quit the next day, saying he was moving from the area, Lykken said.
Kasinskas called 911 to report that the girl had been found after another neighbour out walking her dog encountered Jayme and brought her to Kasinskas’s house.
Minutes later, Patterson was pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy based on a description of his vehicle Jayme provided.
Patterson is scheduled for an initial court appearance Monday. It was not immediately known whether the unemployed man has a lawyer.
Jayme’s grandfather, Robert Naiberg, said he had been praying for months for the call he received about his granddaughter.
“I thought: ‘Good for her! She escaped,’ ” he said.
Jayme disappeared from her home near Barron after someone broke in and killed her parents, James and Denise Closs, on Oct. 15.
Fitzgerald said investigators believe Patterson killed them in order to abduct the girl.
Property records show that the cabin in Gordon where Jayme was allegedly held belonged to Patterson’s father at the time of her disappearance.
Patterson has no criminal record, according to the sheriff. He graduated in 2015 from Northwood High School, where he was on the quiz bowl team and was a good student with a “great group of friends,” said District Supt. Jean Serum.
Kasinskas said she taught Patterson science in middle school, but added: “I don’t really remember a ton about him.”
“He seemed like a quiet kid,” she said. “I don’t recall anything that would have explained this, by any means.”
The woman who first spotted Jayme on Thursday, Jeanne Nutter, said she was walking her dog along a rural road when the girl called out to her, grabbed her and revealed her name.
“I was terrified, but I didn’t want to show her that,” Nutter, a social worker who spent years working in child protection, told the Associated Press. “She just yelled: ‘Please help me! I don’t know where I am! I’m lost!’ ”
Nutter took her to the home of Peter and Kristin Kasinskas. Jayme was quiet, her emotions “pretty flat,” Peter Kasinskas said.
Jayme told the couple she didn’t know where she was or anything about Gordon, a town of 644 people in a heavily forested region, where logging is the top industry. From what she told them, they believe she was there for most of her disappearance.
After Jayme vanished, detectives pursued thousands of tips, watched dozens of surveillance videos and conducted numerous searches. Officials recruited 2,000 volunteers for a huge ground search Oct. 23, but it yielded no clues.
Fitzgerald said in November that he kept similar cases in the back of his mind as he worked to find Jayme, including the abduction of Elizabeth Smart, who was 14 when she was taken from her Salt Lake City home in 2002. Smart was rescued nine months later after witnesses recognized her abductors from an TV episode of America’s Most Wanted.
Smart said in an interview that Jayme’s story is “why we can never give up hope on any missing child.”