'It's All for Jacob'

Her 11-year-old son was abducted at gunpoint by a masked man in 1989, and for years she searched, becoming a missing-children's advocate. Now Patty Wetterling shares her heartbreaking journey to catch his killer-and how her son lives on in her

- JOHNNY DODD

It was a pitch-black, moonless night in rural Minnesota in October of 1989 when 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling, his younger brother Trevor and best friend Aaron Larson were pedaling their bikes from a local video rental store with a bag of candy and a VHS tape of The Naked Gun. The boys were almost home when a man wearing a mask and brandishing a revolver stepped out of the darkness and ordered the three of them into a ditch. After asking their ages, the stranger told Aaron and Trevor to run to a nearby tree line and not look back or else he would shoot them. By the time the boys arrived home and police were called, Jacob and the stranger had vanished. "From that day on," says Jacob's mom, Patty Wetterling, "I just held on to hope."

For nearly three decades Patty remained steadfastly convinced that her son would reappear one day, and that her family would put their nightmare behind them. "I had dreams about him coming home. How we would heal and all the things we would do," she recalls.

But that never happened. Instead the now-74year-old mother of four turned her agony into action, becoming a passionate advocate for missing children. She crisscrossed the country speaking to parents and investigators about child abduction and exploitation, and in 1994 her lobbying efforts paid off when the U.S. Congress passed the Jacob Wetterling Act, creating a national sexoffender registry to help law enforcement more easily track predators across the country.