Matt Furber and Mitch Smith

<h1>BARRON, Wis. — The crime began with a chance encounter: From the moment Jake Patterson spotted a 13-year-old girl boarding a school bus last fall, he “knew that was the girl he was going to take,” Wisconsin investigators said in court documents released Monday.</h1>

In the days that followed, Patterson, 21, mapped out his plot to abduct Jayme Closs, a middle-school student whom he had never met before, the investigators said. He took a shotgun from his father, switched out his car’s license plate and bought a mask from Walmart. He shaved his head and face — to leave no traces — and wiped clean his shotgun shells. He twice drove out to Jayme’s house in the small town of Barron, but saw cars in the driveway or people awake inside, the report says.

Then, late on an October night, Patterson pulled up again to the home of the Closs family — people he had never met — and killed Jayme’s father, James Closs, with a single blast of the shotgun. He then forced his way into a bathroom where Jayme and her mother, Denise, were hiding in a bathtub, the investigators said. He ordered Denise Closs to cover her daughter’s mouth with black tape, then killed Denise. Then he tied up Jayme and forced the teenager into the trunk of his car — all of it in a matter of four minutes.

The details of Jayme’s abduction and captivity, outlined in documents released as Patterson was formally charged in the kidnapping and killings, were elaborately planned, gruesome and terrifying. They told the story of a girl who was forced to spend three months held against her will in the cabin of a volatile stranger after having witnessed the deaths of her parents. It was the situation every parent fears — and one that experts say is exceedingly rare: a targeted attack on a child by a total stranger.

Patterson, who was ordered held on $5 million bail, did not enter a plea during a brief court appearance Monday. Investigators say that he confessed to them and provided the details they described about the planning behind the abduction. Patterson’s lawyers did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

Wearing an orange jumpsuit, Patterson appeared via video from the Barron County Jail and answered “no” and “yes, sir” to basic questions from the judge. Patterson, who wears glasses and has close-cropped, receding brown hair, showed no obvious emotion during the court appearance. At various points, he yawned and rubbed his chin.

The allegations have upended Barron, where residents spent weeks searching for Jayme as scores of investigators swarmed to the small town and followed thousands of tips and false sightings. Residents said they were thrilled that Jayme had managed to escape from her captor last week. She has since been staying with family members, who posted a photograph of her smiling and holding her dog, Molly.

But residents were stunned by the investigators’ descriptions of what had happened — the randomness of it, but also the chilling and seemingly intricate planning.

Some parents were newly hesitant about school buses, and wondered aloud what else might no longer be safe.

“I’ll be taking my child to school,” said Amy Christensen, manager of Skippy’s Pub in downtown Barron, a town of about 3,400 people. Since this happened, Christensen said, she has let her 3-year-old daughter sleep with her. “I’ve been holding her close every night,” she said.

The charges against Patterson buck national trends in homicides and kidnappings.

In 2017, fewer than 10 percent of homicide victims were killed by strangers, according to the FBI. And according to the National Center for Missing &amp; Exploited Children, cases in which strangers abduct children are very rare; of more than 25,000 reports of missing children that the group received in 2018, only 77 were abductions by nonfamily members, said Erin Farrell, a center representative.

The prosecution’s 12-page complaint, which included details from interviews by law enforcement officials with Jayme and Patterson, provided chilling answers to questions that had haunted Barron ever since Oct. 15, the night that the Closses were killed and their daughter vanished.

Patterson spotted Jayme last year as he was driving to a job he held briefly at a cheese factory while she boarded a school bus. Within days, authorities said he told them, he was assembling supplies to abduct her and taking steps to disguise his identity. Prosecutors said he resolved to kill anyone else in the Closs home, rather than allow anyone to threaten his plan.

“He indicated that if he had been stopped by police, it was likely he was going to shoot at police officers with the three shotgun shells that he had remaining,” Brian Wright, the Barron County district attorney, said in court.

In fact, Patterson told investigators that he saw police cars speeding toward the Closs home about 20 seconds after he left with Jayme bound and stuffed in the trunk. After slowing down for them, Patterson continued about an hour north to Gordon, where he took Jayme inside a cabin and forced her to change her clothes.

In the 88 days that followed, Jayme told investigators, she was kept inside the cabin and forced to hide under Patterson’s twin-size bed when he had guests over or when he left. Sometimes, she went without food, water or access to a toilet for as long as 12 hours, she said.

Mark Fruehauf, the district attorney in Douglas County, which includes Gordon, said more charges could be filed in the coming weeks related to Patterson’s actions after the initial kidnapping. Fruehauf did not offer details, but court filings said Patterson used force and threats to prevent Jayme from escaping.

When she was forced to hide under the bed, Jayme told detectives, Patterson would box her in with totes and laundry bins that he secured with barbell weights. He would turn on music to prevent guests from hearing any noise she made. And one time, when Patterson believed she had tried to escape, Jayme said he struck her and threatened worse consequences if she tried again.

But last Thursday, after Patterson told Jayme he was leaving for a few hours, she managed to force her way out from under the bed, she said. She grabbed a pair of men’s shoes — apparently Patterson’s — and ran to a nearby road, shoes ill-fitting and on the wrong feet, crying out for help. A woman who was walking by with a dog took her to a nearby home. “I’m Jayme Closs,” the woman recalled the girl saying. “I don’t know where I am.” And then: “Please help — I want to go home.”

Wright, the prosecutor, called Jayme’s escape “incredible.” He said, “You can see the amount of control that he was exerting over her, and at some point she found it within herself at 13 years old to say, ‘I’m going to get myself out.'”

As sheriff’s deputies took Jayme to safety, they set out to look for Patterson. A short time later, deputies saw the car that Jayme had described to them, and pulled him over.

Patterson, who had apparently been out looking for Jayme, told the deputies he knew why they had stopped him.

This article originally appeared in <a id="948b56e5-6306-426d-b1ac-0f9fedc99a82" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/jayme-closs-patterson.html">The New York Times</a>.

Jayme Closs, spotted by a stranger, endured 88 days of horror, detectives say

In the days that followed, Patterson, 21, mapped out his plot to abduct Jayme Closs, a middle-school student whom he had never met before, the investigators said.

The man, Jake Patterson, 21, was charged Monday with kidnapping, burglary and two counts of first-degree intentional homicide, and was scheduled to appear in a Wisconsin courtroom later in the day. He was arrested Thursday, shortly after Jayme escaped from under a twin-size bed where she was being held and sought help from a woman walking a dog.

Her disappearance three months ago stunned her small hometown, Barron, Wisconsin, and set off a nationwide search.

Jayme, who said she had never before met Patterson, said she was awakened by her barking dog on Oct. 15, the night of the attack. She said she saw a car outside her house and alerted her parents. Her father, James Closs, went to investigate and was shot and killed near the door as Patterson forced his way into the house.

Jayme told authorities that she and her mother, Denise, hid in a bathtub. Patterson forced his way into the bathroom, pulled back the shower curtain, and made her mother, Denise Closs, place black tape over her daughter’s mouth, Jayme said. Patterson then shot her mother with a shotgun that he had taken from one of his relatives, and dragged Jayme, with her wrists and ankles bound, to his car, where he put her in the trunk.

Perhaps 20 seconds after driving away from the house, Patterson said, he slowed down to make way for a sheriff’s deputy who was responding to a 911 call placed by Denise Closs before she was shot.

Jayme told investigators that she was held by Patterson for nearly three months in a cabin in Gordon, Wisconsin, about 65 miles north of her home. When Patterson had guests over, she said, he would make her hide under his bed, boxing her in with totes and laundry bins that he secured with barbell weights.

But last Thursday, when Patterson said he was leaving for a few hours, Jayme forced her way out, grabbed a pair of ill-fitting men’s shoes, left the cabin and ran to a roadway seeking help. A woman who was walking by with a dog escorted her to a nearby home, where sheriff’s deputies were called.

A short time later, according to court records, deputies confronted Patterson near the cabin on a wooded cul-de-sac.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/jayme-closs-patterson.html" id="dedcbb83-c564-3733-a848-7c40744c6fa2">The New York Times</a>.

BARRON, Wis. — The man accused of kidnapping Jayme Closs and killing her parents told investigators that he had spotted 13-year-old Jayme getting onto a school bus last fall and decided then that “that was the girl he was going to take,” according to court documents released Monday.

Man Accused of Kidnapping Jayme Closs Targeted Her at a School Bus Stop, Authorities Say

To give a sense of the place, he could have described local landmarks like the giant statue of Otto the Otter. Or the Minnesota-shaped welcome sign next to the Applebee’s. Or the expansive prairie that surrounds the town.

Instead, Relotius invented a condescending fiction. On the venerated pages of Der Spiegel, a German newsmagazine, Relotius portrayed Fergus Falls as a backward, racist place whose residents blindly supported President Donald Trump and rarely ventured beyond city limits. He made up details about a young city official. He concocted characters, roadside signs and racially tinged plotlines.

For more than a year, exasperated Fergus Falls residents fumed to one another about what happened but generally avoided drawing outside attention to their unflattering portrayal. It all might have faded into history, except Relotius was outed this month by his own publication as a serial fraudster who invented sources, made up quotes and spent years engaging in broad journalistic deception.

When he was exposed, that fact that his portrayal of Fergus Falls was false went public, too, as well as the efforts of some people in town to document what he got wrong.

Soon, the town found itself in the midst of an international furor that it did not ask to be part of. The U.S. ambassador to Germany accused Der Spiegel of a pattern of journalistic malpractice. National and international news outlets have visited the city, about 175 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Painful memories of being lied about have resurfaced.

“I just think of the false impression it gave to the people of Germany,” said Mary Lou Bates, 85, as she drank coffee with a friend Wednesday at the Viking Cafe, one of the many places in town that Relotius described inaccurately in his March 2017 story.

But Bates, who suggested that bias against Trump may have fueled the article, said she was not one to hold a grudge. “If the story is retracted, and the true story comes out,” she said, “you can forgive. I’m one for forgiveness.”

She’s not alone. As upset as Fergus Falls residents were with their treatment — upset enough to compile a damning point-by-point rebuttal of Relotius’ story — many of them have also been willing to accept apologies, set the record straight and forge ahead, almost sanguine about the whole ordeal. Another Der Spiegel reporter, who visited Minnesota in recent days to chronicle Relotius’ missteps, suggested that Fergus Falls might be “the most forgiving city in the Western Hemisphere.”

“We’re taking the high road,” Mayor Ben Schierer said in an interview, in which he praised his city’s arts, parks and schools, which mostly seemed to escape Relotius’ notice. “We’ve moved on.”

Indeed, amid the heartache and hassle, some in Fergus Falls have seized an opportunity to tell the world what their city is really like. Sure, it has its struggles and tensions. But on the whole, residents get along, there is plenty to do, people enjoy living there.

“It’s not Mayberry, but there’s a lot of opportunity,” said Schierer, who owns a pizza restaurant and brewery where Relotius would write when he was in town. “There’s optimism.”

Michele Anderson, who works for a local arts nonprofit, said she had been eager to read Relotius’ work and used Google’s translation service last year to convert the German text to English. The translation was imperfect, but it was immediately clear the story was a fabrication. When Anderson saw someone praise the article on Twitter in April 2017, she replied that the story was false, a “hilarious, insulting excuse for journalism.” For more than a year, Der Spiegel did not respond.

Because the article was published only in German, its readership in Minnesota was limited. And at first, some in Fergus Falls said there was a desire to give Relotius the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they had read a faulty translation. Or maybe the reporter made a few honest mistakes.

Civic leaders eventually commissioned a professional translation, the text of which circulated around town in a shared online document. As the truth spread — that the story was not only largely false, but also deeply insulting — residents began weighing their options. City officials discussed whether they had any legal recourse. Anderson and a friend began compiling a list of the article’s inaccuracies. But unsure what options they had and not wanting to draw more negative attention, residents mostly kept their anger within city limits until Relotius’ broader misdeeds were exposed this month.

The fabrications in the article ranged from the trivial (an account of a foreboding forest that does not exist and a Super Bowl party that did not happen) to the personally devastating (the city administrator was falsely portrayed as a gun-obsessed, romantically challenged man who had never seen the ocean) to the downright inflammatory (Relotius claimed — falsely, residents say — that there was a sign that said “Mexicans Keep Out” at the entrance to town).

As most residents quietly moved on, Anderson, along with a friend, continued work on a detailed fact check of the article, which they published last week after Relotius was outed by his employer. Their title: “Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town.”

“There’s really nothing like this feeling — knowing that people in another country have read about the place I call home and are shaking their heads over their coffee in disgust,” Anderson wrote in her post.

Relotius, who visited around the time of Trump’s inauguration, had been fixated on voters’ support for the new president. Indeed, about 64 percent of voters in Otter Tail County, of which Fergus Falls is the county seat, chose Trump in 2016, though Hillary Clinton narrowly won Minnesota.

The election results speak for themselves, but a series of interviews this week with Fergus Falls residents revealed political nuance — liberals, conservatives, people who politely said it was no one’s business.

“It’s not an eyes-closed, all-for-Trump type of community,” said Ward Uggerud, 69, a retired electrical engineer, who like many people declined to say whether he voted for the president. “It’s an all-for-the-community place. Everybody’s got to do their part.”

Unlike other American counties that voted for Trump, there was not a wild political swing in Fergus Falls, making it a strange place for Relotius to choose to profile. Otter Tail County had also supported Mitt Romney and John McCain. And well-trod story lines about factory closures and population decline, often cited in accounts of Trump’s success, did not apply in Fergus Falls, where the downtown is bustling and the population is steady. (A Target store closed recently, despite community efforts to save it, but that was after Relotius left town.)

All that left residents wondering: Why did Relotius write what he did? And since he wasn’t going to tell the truth, why did he even bother coming?

“What happened, I think, was that he was trying to look for a cliché of a Trump-voting town and he simply didn’t find it,” said Christoph Scheuermann, the Der Spiegel correspondent who visited Fergus Falls last week to apologize and write about the town’s true story.

Scheuermann said the Fergus Falls he encountered was “almost the opposite” of the one Relotius described.

“I felt a lot of warmth,” he said. “Everybody was welcoming.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/us/der-spiegel-fergus-falls-minnesota.html" id="e9390582-1c56-385f-a188-bd1af0b589ab">The New York Times</a>.

Minnesota Town Defamed by German Reporter Is Ready to Forgive

FERGUS FALLS, Minn. — Claas Relotius, who spent weeks reporting in Fergus Falls last year for one of Europe’s most respected publications, could have written about the many residents who maintain friendships across partisan lines, about the efforts to lure former residents back to west-central Minnesota or about how a city of roughly 14,000 people maintains a robust arts scene.

In recent days, as Relotius was exposed for fabricating stories for years on multiple continents and was fired from Der Spiegel, Fergus Falls has found itself in the midst of an international furor that it did not ask to be part of. The American ambassador to Germany accused Der Spiegel of a pattern of journalistic malpractice. National and international news outlets have visited the city, about 175 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Painful memories of being lied about have resurfaced.

But as upset as Fergus Falls residents were with their treatment — upset enough to compile a damning point-by-point rebuttal of Relotius’ story — many of them have also been willing to accept apologies, set the record straight and forge ahead, almost sanguine about the whole ordeal. Another Der Spiegel reporter, who visited Minnesota in recent days to chronicle Relotius’ missteps, suggested that Fergus Falls might be “the most forgiving city in the Western Hemisphere.”

Michele Anderson, who works for a local arts nonprofit, said she had been eager to read Relotius’ work and used Google’s translation service last year to convert the German text to English. The translation was imperfect, but it was immediately clear that the story was a fabrication. When Anderson saw someone praise the article on Twitter in April 2017, she replied that the story was false, a “hilarious, insulting excuse for journalism.” For more than a year, Der Spiegel did not respond.

Because the article was published only in German, its readership in Minnesota was limited. But civic leaders commissioned a professional translation, the text of which circulated around town in a shared online document. Outrage simmered.

The article’s fabrications ranged from the trivial (an account of a foreboding forest that does not exist and a Super Bowl party that did not happen) to the personally devastating (the city administrator was falsely portrayed as a gun-obsessed, romantically challenged man who had never seen the ocean) to the downright inflammatory (Relotius claimed there was a sign that said “Mexicans Keep Out” at the entrance to town).

Frustrated but unsure what recourse they had, most Fergus Falls residents quietly moved on. But Anderson, along with a friend, went to work on a detailed fact check of the article, which they published last week after Relotius was outed as a fraudster. Its title: “Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town.”

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Matt Furber and Mitch Smith

Articles written by the author

Jayme Closs, spotted by a stranger, endured 88 days of horror, detectives say

Man Accused of Kidnapping Jayme Closs Targeted Her at a School Bus Stop, Authorities Say

Minnesota Town Defamed by German Reporter Is Ready to Forgive

Minnesota Town Defamed by German Reporter Is Ready to Forgive