Experts: Impact of Closs case to last for years

Jake Patterson’s court case ended more than a month ago in a smalltown courtroom in northern Wisconsin. But the impact of his crimes — the kidnapping of Jayme Closs and the murders of her parents — will last for decades.

Criminal justice experts say the enormity of the crime and Jayme’s dramatic escape from her captor will remain in the local and national consciousness for many years.

“In my experience, these types of cases have a very long life,” said Jim Walters, program administrator for the National Criminal Justice Training Center at Fox Valley Technical College. “We have seen families carry this for generations. We have cases 40 or 50 years old about these (kinds of ) crimes.”

The case burst onto the national scene virtually from the start, when the Barron County dispatch center heard screaming in a phone call for help in the early morning hours of Oct. 15 at the Closs residence. Inside, authorities discovered the bodies of James and Denise Closs and no sign of Jayme. An intensive search was launched.

“You have a home invasion, two murders and a girl kidnapped. Even in small-town America, a case like this will attract attention nationally,” said retired New York Police Department detective Joe Giacalone, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “People are so tied up with this true crime stuff.”

Giacalone, who has appeared on numerous national news programs to discuss police issues, said hashtags on social media with the name Jayme Closs caused the case to “go into a firestorm.”

“It invites people from all over the globe to follow the case,” he said. “People were looking out for (Jayme). They wanted to see how this played out.”

When Jayme was found alive 88 days later and Patterson was arrested, there was another surge of publicity. The stunning news led network telecasts that evening, and the subsequent guilty

plea that resulted in Patterson being sentenced in May to life in prison without the possibility of parole continued to keep the case in the spotlight.

Case in point: the CBS show “48 Hours” aired a program in June about Jayme’s ordeal. The main focus was the community, relatives and law enforcement praising her courage in escaping from Patterson, and what the future holds for the teenager.

“After she was found alive, we had to sit down and comprehend this. We have been working for 88 days,” said Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald. “This is a moment in history where people will remember where they were when Jayme was found.”

Fitzgerald said he “got kind of overwhelmed” when network and state news descended on Barron last October.

“You can never prepare yourself for something like that,” he said. “When Jayme Closs’ name surfaces, my phones were ringing off the hook. And it was mindboggling to see my face on national TV.”

Fitzgerald said the case had several elements that drew widespread media and social media interest when Jayme disappeared, and interest in the case continues to this day.

“A 13-year-old girl was missing; that had a lot to do with it,” he said. “And the violence of the case with murders on the front end and the kidnapping.”

Despite the circumstances, Fitzgerald repeatedly proclaimed that he was hopeful that Jayme would be found alive.

Walters said one of the main themes about the Closs case was the “loss of innocence. The community where she was taken from was a quiet community and now this has been shattered forever.”

National news followed this story so intently because it was a crime in progress, Walters said.

“In this digital age, that case was always front and center when you Google ‘child kidnapping.’ For as long we were still connected (to Jayme’s plight), this was a mouse-click away.”

Jayme’s case is similar in some respects, Walters said, to the cases of Jaycee Dugard, who was 11 when she was taken from a bus stop in 1991 and was held captive for nearly two decades before she was freed; and Elizabeth Smart, who was 14 when she was taken from her home in 2002 and was held for nine months before being reunited with her family.

“Jayme’s case serves as a (great) example of how these cases aren’t hopeless,” Walters said. “These cases remind us that you can’t give up and you can’t lose hope. Jayme’s case will always be one of those where people will point to and say she was lost for (nearly 90 days) and she escaped.”