How a True Crime Blogger and Jacob Wetterling’s Mom Teamed Up to Solve the Boy’s 27-Year-Old Abduction Cold Case

The behind-the-scenes story of the two women’s friendship and how the authorities finally cracked the case that had been is told in a new book

Nearly 21 years after her 11-year-old son Jacob was abducted at gunpoint in 1989 while riding his bike home from a video rental store, Patty Wetterling had begun to fear that police might never solve the case—then part-time blogger Joy Baker got involved.

“Without her work, this wouldn’t have been solved,” Patty says in an interview in this week’s issue of PEOPLE.

By 2015—six years after Joy began writing about the case that took place in St. Joseph, Minn.—police had arrested Danny Heinrich, a 53-year-old plywood factory worker who later confessed to kidnapping, molesting and murdering the boy.

Related: Jacob Wetterling's Parents Share Heartbreak After Learning the Truth About His 1989 Disappearance

The behind-the-scenes story of the two women’s friendship and how the authorities finally cracked the case that had been languishing for nearly three decades is told in a new book—Dear Jacob: A Mother’s Journey of Hope—that was released on Oct. 17.

For more on the Jacob Wetterling case, subscribe now to PEOPLE or pick up this week's issue, on newsstands now.

From the very beginning, Joseph’s shocking disappearance made headlines around Minnesota and the nation.

It happened on a pitch black, moonless autumn night near his rural Minnesota when Jacob, along with his younger brother Trevor and best friend, Aaron Larson, were pedaling their bikes with a bag of candy and a VCR 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 them to lay in a ditch. He asked them their ages, then told the two boys with Jacob to run toward a nearby wooded area and not look back or he would shoot.

By the time the boys arrived home and police were summoned, Jacob and the man had vanished into thin air.

“From that day on I just held on to hope,” recalls Jacob’s mom, Patty, who remained convinced that her son would one day reappear, allowing the family to put the nightmare behind them. “I had dreams about him coming home and how we would heal and all the things we would do.”

But that never happened. Up until Heinrich’s confession in 2016, the now-74-year-old mother of three grown children turned her grief into action.

Patty became a passionate advocate for missing children as she crisscrossed the nation speaking to parents and investigators about child abduction and exploitation. In 1994, her lobbying efforts paid off when Congress passed the Jacob Wetterling Act that created a national sex offender registry.

Despite exploring thousands of leads and looking at hundreds of suspects, investigators eventually appeared to hit a dead end and Patty feared the case “might never be solved.”

And then in 2010 Joy—a mother of two teenage boys and a former ad agency owner who lived 45 minutes away from Patty—started writing about Joseph.

She eventually tracked down Jared Scheierl, a 37-year-old plumber who had allegedly been abducted and molested at the age of 12 by an unknown man in a neighboring town 10 months before Jacob’s disappearance. Scheierl had spent years consumed with finding his attacker and bringing him to justice.

Baker was convinced that his case was linked to Jacob’s and began her own investigation. She started combing the microfilm archives of a community newspaper in nearby Paynesville, Minn., and learned of reports in the late 1980s of other children who had been stalked and threatened by a masked man with a gun.

“If it had just been me, a blogger mom from New London, Minn., I don’t think investigators would have paid any attention to what I wrote,” explains Baker, who watched as police began following up on the leads she unearthed. “But they had to listen to Jared because he was a victim.”

Despite initially being skeptical, even Patty became a supporter of Baker’s efforts. “I’d never read a blog and had no idea what it was,” she admits. “But I soon realized she was asking questions nobody had.”

By 2015, the state’s crime lab re-tested the clothing that Scheierl was wearing during his alleged assault decades earlier and linked the DNA they found to Heinrich. In a 2016 plea agreement, he confessed to abducting, molesting and killing Jacob, and received a 20-year prison sentence—though it’s unlikely he’ll ever be released.

Related: 'Jacob, I'm so Sorry:' Mother of Jacob Wetterling Gives Emotional Statement After Son's Killer Confesses

Finally learning what had happened to her son all those years ago proved devastating to Patty and her family. “It was a really dark, horrible time for us,” she says.

But she admits to being forever indebted to Joy for the work she did to put her son’s killer behind bars. “I went from asking, ‘Who the hell is Joy Baker?’ to her becoming one of my closest friends. She’s been a gift to our family and we’re so very grateful.”

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.