The Kidnapping of Jayme Closs

On October 15, 2018 the Closs family was asleep in their home in Baron, WI. A masked man showed up in the middle of the night and murdered James and Denise Closs and kidnapped 13 year old Jayme Closs from her home. It would be almost 3 months before anyone knew what happened to Jayme, and who took her.

The Night Jayme Disappeared

In the early morning hours of October 15, 2018, the Closs family was sound asleep in their ranch style home in Barron, Wisconsin. With a population of about 3400, Barron is a small town located about 90 miles east of Minneapolis. It is bordered by dense forest and other rural towns. There isn’t much in Barron, one of the most notable things there is the Jennie-O Turkey factory. The city being so rural and spread out is precisely why nobody heard or saw what happened to the Closs family around 1AM on October 15.

As the family lay sleeping, a car they didn’t recognize pulled into the driveway and the family dog Molly began barking. James Closs, 56 got up and looked out the window to see what was going on. He shone a flashlight through the window to try to see who was there. Then someone began pounding on the front door of the house. James went to the front door and peering through the glass window in the door said “show me your badge,” trying to protect his family from any impending danger.

At this time, Denise Closs, 46 and the couple’s 13 year old daughter Jayme went into the bathroom and barricaded themselves in the tub behind the shower curtain using a cabinet drawer to keep the door from opening.

Then there was a gunshot.

Denise Closs quickly dialed 911 from her cell phone, but was unable to speak to dispatchers before the intruder broke the door down.

Click HERE to hear audio from that 911 call.

You can’t really tell what’s going on or hear anything definitive, but it sounds pretty clear there are multiple voices on the call and something horrible is happening. The call line goes dead and officers are dispatched to the location.

When police arrived only 4 minutes later, they found James Closs deceased in the front doorway, a gunshot wound to his face. As they entered the home, they found Denise Closs deceased in the bathtub with a gunshot wound to the head. As they searched the rest of the house, they noticed photos of a young girl with the couple on the walls and an empty bedroom that belonged to a teenage girl. They found the family dog Molly cowering alone in the house, but Jayme Closs was gone.

Who Was the Closs family?

James and Denise Closs were married in Las Vegas on June 9, 2003. At the time of their deaths, they had both worked at the Jennie-O Turkey Factory in Barron for nearly 30 years.

James was a huge Green Bay Packers fan and could be found talking about sports (current or reminiscing about his high school sports glory days). Denise loved gardening, feeding the birds, and taught religious school at her church, St. Peter’s Catholic Church in a nearby town.

Jayme was in 8th grade at Riverview Middle School. She enjoyed jazz dancing, playing volleyball, and Starbucks Frappucinos. Her dog Molly was her “everything” according to her aunt, Jennifer Smith.

As police combed through the crime scene, they looked for any clues as to who may have done this or where Jayme could be. Initially, when they entered the house they thought James could have committed suicide. Upon further inspection, they realized there was no gun present at the scene, and he had been shot through the glass window pane in the front door, likely as he was answering the door. Crime Scene investigators removed items from the house, hoping to find some DNA or physical evidence that would lead them to a suspect.

They found nothing.

Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald gave a press conference later that morning to notify the community of Jayme’s disappearance and the murder of her parents.

Where Did Jayme Go?

Immediately, searches were organized. Thousands of searches combed the fields and forests for any sign of where Jayme could have gone. The community came together in prayer and never lost hope of finding Jayme alive. Sheriff Fitzgerald never lost hope either. He never really entertained the idea that Jayme could have been a co-conspirator in her parents’ death and her disappearance. He believed from the beginning that Jayme was a missing and endangered child and issued an Amber alert. We say this in so many cases, and it feels like every single town says “this kind of thing doesn’t happen here,” but it REALLY doesn’t happen in Barron.

There had been no murders in Barron in the last several years, and only 4 total in the entire decade before this. This was really a city where “murders just don’t occur.” People didn’t even feel the need to lock their doors in 2018. There is a kind of security in living in a rural area I think; that feeling of being so far removed from everyone else that if something like this was going to happen it’d have to be someone that knew you or knew where you lived. That a random act of violence wasn’t likely to happen to you because someone would have to be deliberate to find you. I used to try to use that logic myself when I was scared at night if I heard a car or a noise that sounded like to me that someone was breaking into the house. I would tell myself “someone would have to want to kill us. Nobody is just going to come across our house.” This didn’t make me feel any better, but I can see why a logical person would feel more at ease about that.

As the investigation got under way, law enforcement asked residents for tips leading to Jayme’s whereabouts. They asked residents to watch neighbors for suspicious behavior, saying that many times people will act differently after committing a violent act. In the weeks after Jayme’s disappearance, officials offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to Jayme’s return. Jennie-O, the turkey factory where the Closs’s worked, matched that $25k which brought the reward to $50k total. Detectives were running down every lead, and there were over 2,000 of them by the end of the investigation with no results.

Then, on October 29th, 2 weeks after the abduction and murders, a 32-year old man was arrested for burglarizing the Closs home. Kyle Jaenke-Annis entered the Closs home shortly after 2:30AM through a patio door. Motion activated security cameras set up after the abduction caught him entering the home. As he left the home, law enforcement arrested him. He admitted to entering the home without permission and stealing items he thought “nobody would miss”. Police found 2 girls’ tank tops and a pair of underwear on him. He said he worked at the Jennie-O factory but didn’t know the family. As for his reason for burglarizing the home, he said that he was curious about what size Jayme wore.

EEEWWWWWW

Police looked into him but cleared him of any involvement in the murders and abduction. He’s just a creep looking for teenage girls’ clothes. WTF. The holidays came to Barron, but nobody felt like celebrating. Jayme was still gone, and it was December. On December 12, the town hosted a lighting of a “Tree of Hope” outside Riverview Middle School in honor of the Closs family and in hopes of finding Jayme alive. Residents sent food to law enforcement who were working around the clock to find Jayme and run down the more than 2,000 leads they’d received in the case. There was an outpouring of support from everyone in the entire town it seemed like.

Christmas came and went. People exchanged presents, but Jayme’s presents from her family stayed wrapped under the tree. They couldn’t let themselves think the unimaginable. They believed she would come home and be able to open them.

And then something happened.

On January 10, Jeanne Nutter was walking her dog in Eau Claire Acres, a development of cabins near the Eau Claire river. Many of the cabins are unoccupied in the winter, and Jeanne isn’t even normally at her cabin in the winter, but luckily on this day Jeanne was there and happened to be walking her dog in the snow. At around 4PM, she saw a girl walking toward her in the snow. She was dirty, appeared malnourished, had matted hair and was wearing a pair of New Balance sneakers much too large for her with no coat.

She approached Jeanne and said “I’m lost- I don’t know where I am, and I need help.” She then said “I’m Jayme.” Jeanne immediately knew who was standing in front of her. They were in the town of Gordon, about 70 miles east of Barron, but she knew exactly who Jayme Closs was. She held onto Jayme and they walked to the nearest house where Kristin and Peter Kasinkas lived. When Kristin opened the door Jeanne said “This is Jayme Closs. Call 911!” They immediately called 911.

Click HERE to hear audio from that 911 call.

The women expressed fear that Jayme’s abductor would come looking for Jayme. He said he’d be gone a few hours, but she had no idea when he would be back. They locked the door and Peter stood guard with a gun at the front door on watch for anyone approaching the home. Law enforcement arrived at about 4:45PM and the 88 day ordeal for Jayme Closs was finally over. She never had to be a prisoner again.

She identified her captor as 21 year old Jake Patterson. Law enforcement went to find him. Jake had just gotten home as Jayme was being held waiting for law enforcement to arrive. He noticed she was gone and saw footprints in the show outside. He jumped into his red Ford Taurus and went to find her. As police were transporting Jayme to the station, they passed a red car driving in the opposite direction. A license plate check came back to a Patterson. They pulled the car over. The driver was Jake Patterson. He held his hands up and said “I know what this is about. I did it.”

Their Connection

Jake Patterson was 21 when he murdered James and Denise Closs and abducted Jayme. He was living in his father’s rural cabin in Gordon, Wisconsin alone. Jake grew up in Wisconsin and graduated in 2015 with a very small graduating class of 34. Friends and family described him as quiet; not a loner, just quiet. He was well-liked and had friends. He was kind of that forgettable person that you wouldn’t notice unless something happened. It reminds me of the Princess Diaries when Anne Hathaway says “somebody sat on me again today.” He sort of faded into the background.

He loved playing board games like Risk. He was prematurely balding. He had trouble holding down a job. He kind of seems to have no personality, kind of like his personality was his lack of a personality. His senior quote in the yearbook was “I’m finally done with school.” He never dated in school. EVER. He never even talked about girls. He only talked about joining the marines. Which he did, but didn’t last very long. He was discharged only 5 weeks after beginning training. The Marines only statement regarding the reason for this was “The character of his service was incongruent with Marine Corps’ expectations and standards.”

His grandfather attributed this to health issues but wouldn’t elaborate either. It sounds more like maybe behavioral than health issues if they’re using the word character, but I could be wrong. Maybe statements or some type of action. After graduation, friends that he usually spent time with were ignored. He just stopped talking to them for some reason.

There didn’t appear to be any connection between Jake Patterson and the Closs family either. He had worked for a VERY brief time in the Jennie-O factory where the Closs’s worked, but he never worked with them and never met them. It seemed like most people in the area either worked there or had family that did. It was a large source of employment opportunities for the rural area.

The “connection” between Jake Patterson and Jayme Closs would prove to be absolutely terrifying. In the fall of 2018, Jake worked FOR TWO DAYS at the Saputo Cheese Factory in Almena, WI. On one of those days as he drove home through Barron, he was behind a school bus. As he sat stopped behind the bus on it’s morning route to pick children up for the school day, he watched Jayme Closs walk from her home to the bus. It was at that moment he said “I knew she was the girl I was going to take.”

He later told police that he had been considering taking a girl for about 2 years by that point. It was a year into first having this desire or urge that he began to think about it specifically- like how he would go about it and what preparations he would make- rather than just the general run of the mill “I want to abduct a girl” thoughts. He didn’t know her name, or who lived in the home. He just knew he was going to take her.

Jake immediately began making his plans. He purchased a ski mask at WalMart and shaved his head and facial hair so as not to leave any physical evidence behind. He began researching types of guns to use and decided on a 12-gauge shotgun, because he felt like that would inflict the most damage. He landed on a Mossberg because his research told him that this was a very common brand and would be harder for police to track down. He made superficial modifications to his car to make it less identifiable including changing the license plate.

The Attack, Kidnapping, and Some Closure

On October 15th, he knew this was it. He wasn’t leaving without Jayme and he couldn’t leave any witnesses alive inside. He told himself “It’s me or them.”

He told investigators he turned his lights off and coasted into the driveway. Wearing a ski mask, steel toe boots and dark clothing, he approached the front door. “Open the fucking door,” he told James Closs who asked to see his badge. He shot through the window pane as James tried to look through to see who was at the door. He then shot at the lock on the door to gain entry into the home.

Stepping over James’ body, he cleared the house. Only one door wouldn’t open. The bathroom. He attempted to kick down the door, but it wouldn’t budge. He began ramming it with his shoulder 10-15 times before the drawer keeping the door from opening split apart. He then opened the shower curtain and found Jayme and Denise inside. He ordered Denise to duct tape Jayme’s mouth shut. When he was unsatisfied with how she was doing it, he set his gun down on the sink and did it himself. He said he then pointed the gun at Denise’s head and looked away as he pulled the trigger.

He grabbed Jayme and stepped over her father’s body again, almost slipping in his blood. He forced Jayme into his trunk and they fled.

He spent a total of 4 minutes in the Closs home. Deputies actually passed his car as they arrived at the Closs home. He pulled over to yield for the police and they flew past the car. Jayme could hear the sirens, and then they faded away. They drove for what she said felt like 2 hours and they arrived at Jake’s home in Gordon. A sign above the door reads “Patterson’s Retreat.”

Once there, he burned Jayme’s clothes, his gloves and the duct tape in the basement. He gave Jayme a pair of his sister’s pajamas to wear and made a space for her underneath his twin size bed. When he was gone, had people over, or they slept for the night, Jayme would be on the floor under the bed in a space about 2 ½ feet tall. He barricaded the sides of the bed with weights and totes so that she couldn’t get out. He would scream at her to scare her into submission and he threatened her with harm or worse should she not “follow the rules.”

He believed she tried to get out from under the bed on 2 occasions and flipped out to where he said “she knew she better never try that again.” On one occasion, he struck her on the back “very hard” according to Jayme. Other times, he would force her to play games with him and he said they would “talk.” They talked about a lot of things, but just not like the situation they were currently in. After about 2 weeks of having Jayme in his home, he believed he’d gotten away with it and that authorities would never locate her saying, “Well after awhile I thought, well I could get away with this,” he said. “I mean, I understand how when there’s no connection, a person has no connection to someone, how that’s f—ing almost impossible to solve, or really hard to solve.”

He put the plates back on his car and started to live normally again. He went to his grandparents for Christmas dinner. He left Jayme under the bed for over 12 hours at times with no food, water or bathroom breaks. His father visited him every Saturday, and he turned up the radio in his bedroom to hide any noise she might make. He trusted that she was fearful enough that she wouldn’t scream or give him away when his father was there. Jake’s family reported that he never acted strangely during this time.

And so, on January 10, 2019 Jake told Jayme he’d be gone for a few hours. He left the home in Gordon to apply for a job at a liquor distributor. On his application he listed “honest and hardworking” as his skills.

BARF.

That’s when Jayme saw her opportunity.

After Jake was arrested, he confessed and pleaded guilty to all counts. After he pleaded guilty, as he left, he said ” Bye, Jayme, ” though it appeared the comment was directed at no one in particular. Jayme wasn’t in the courtroom that day.

He was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of kidnapping. He was sentenced to 2 life sentences plus 40 years.

Jayme’s attorney read a statement at his sentencing hearing.

To hear Jayme’s statement, click HERE.

He gave an at times emotional statement saying he would take it back if he could. A reporter Lou Raguse sent him a letter in prison and Jake wrote him back.

Here are the questions Lou asked and Jake’s Responses:

Hi, IDK if I’ll actually send this. I’ll answer some of your questions, some I can’t(?) [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] I won’t put a lot of details anyways.

Question 1: Why did you confess when you were caught, and why did you confess in such detail?

I knew when I was caught (which I thought would happen a lot sooner) I wouldn’t fight anything. I tried to give them everything, [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] (wasn’t completely honest) so they didn’t have to interview Jayme. They did anyways and hurt her more for no reason.

Question 2: What is your plan now? Plead guilty or take the case all the way to trial?

Plead guilty. I want Jayme and her relatives to know that. Don’t want them to worry about a trial. Was actually going to on the 6th, but in a case like this it’s not really allowed? So the judge moved it to the 27th of March.

Question 3: What led you to want to kidnap a girl in the first place?

It’s not black and white. [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION]

Question 4: Do you have any remorse or regrets for the things that you did?

Huge amounts. [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] I can’t believe I did this.

Question 5: What was your long-term plan if Jayme had not escaped that day?

Won’t say. [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] It was really stupid though looking back.

Question 6: Did you confide in anyone or leave any hints that people failed to pick up on.

No. [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION]

Question 7: Did your family really have no clue? How often were family members in your cabin, and how close did they come to discovering Jayme under the bed?

No one knew. My dad only came on Saturdays, the same time every day. So it was a routine. Jayme hides on Sat. [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] My family respects privacy so no one even went in my room.

Question 8: Did you ever return to Barron after the crime or insert yourself in any of the vigils or anything being held in Jayme’s honor? Did you ever get close to her family following the shootings/kidnapping?

I stayed away from Barron.

Question 9: How closely did you follow the news coverage, and was Jayme aware of the news coverage and the extent to which people were searching for her?

I followed it [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] through my phone. If something popped up on TV about it, I would change the channel. [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] Would tell Jayme “I’m sorry, I can’t watch this.” IDK what she knew.

Question 10: When in your life did you realize you were capable of doing something like this? I just watched a 20/20 Special on BTK killer, and he told a reporter he knew as a teen that he wanted to do something like this one day, and he was jealous over attention other killers like Ted Bundy were receiving. Did you feel any of those same thoughts?

The cops say I planned this thoroughly, and that I said that. They’re really good at twisting your words around, put them in different spots, straight up lie. Little mad about that. Trying to cover up their mistakes I guess. This was mostly on impulse. I don’t think like a serial killer.

Question 11: What goes through the mind of someone who wants to carry out something like this?

At the time I was really pissed. I didn’t “want” to. [PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] The reason I did this is complicated.

[PEN SCRIBBLE REDACTION] = self redaction lol

No one will believe or can even imagine how sorry I am for hurting Jayme this much. Can’t express it.

[on the back:]

I’m Sorry Jayme! For everything. I know it doesn’t mean much.

The Closs family home has since been torn down. Jayme has started school and lives with her aunt and uncle. The Closs family attorney Chris Gramstrup said the teenager spent her first summer without her parents hiking through state parks, reconnecting with friends and celebrating special occasions with her family – including her 14th birthday. Gramstrup also read a statement on behalf of Jayme, who thanked everyone for the kindness and concern they have shown her.

“I’m very happy to be home and getting back to the activities that I enjoy,” she said. “I love hanging out with all my friends, and I feel stronger every day.”

Gramstrup acknowledged the strength of Jayme’s father and her mother’s kind, caring heart, both qualities he said they passed on to their daughter. The people around her see her getting stronger, too, he said.

“It’s her strength and her heart that has and will continue to get her through this and move forward with her life,” he said.