Unspeakable Things

by Jess Lourey

The true version of events has been told well in other places, most notably in season one of the In the Dark podcast.

Here’s the thing about trauma: our bodies and mind can’t hold its sharp edges for very long. So, when in the summer of 2016, Minnesota newspapers proclaimed that the mystery of what happened to Jacob Wetterling twenty-seven years earlier was close to being solved, I avoided reading about it. It brought up too much pain. Then, in September of 2016, Jacob’s killer—and the man who’d terrorized my hometown for years—confessed within two weeks of the coincidental release of the In the Dark podcast. Those two events happening so close together made a noise that was impossible for me to ignore. As a result, in October 2016, I invited a handful of classmates to my house in Minneapolis. I’d seen them at reunions, we were Facebook friends, but we didn’t hang out, not since high school, not until that night. We carved pumpkins and caught up and then, I asked them: what do you remember? Their stories aren’t mine to share, but by the end of the night, I realized many of us had been very, very scared growing up in Paynesville. Their courage in sharing their stories brought my own trauma to the surface. I viscerally remembered the terror of a town curfew, of knowing a bogeyman was abducting and molesting kids on the street, and of returning to a home that felt even less safe. Unspeakable Things was difficult to write for all the reasons you can imagine, but also because when you grow up in a home and a town like that, you’re taught to be silent. You’re told that the real crime is in telling the world what’s going on. But I wasn’t going to be silent anymore. Incidentally, a woman from Paynesville came to my UNSPEAKABLE THINGS release party. We’d never met, but she traveled out on a snowy night to let me know she thought it was fine I’d written the book but that I shouldn’t tell anyone I was from Paynesville or share what had happened there. My initial reaction was shame (I was wrong to talk about it!), followed by disbelief (you know other people already know, right?), but both emotions mellowed into gratitude. She’d validated why it had taken me so long to write the story: childhood training to protect the predators, to not “rock the boat,” dies hard.