Missing : Son Vanishes, but Minnesota Family’s Hope Cannot Be Kidnaped or Killed : Crime: Four months after Jacob’s abduction, Patty and Jerry Wetterling maintain the search. A gunman grabbed the boy as his brother and a buddy watched helplessly.

The flyers with Jacob’s smiling face are yellowing, the ribbons bearing his name are tattered, the tips to investigators are dwindling. Time fades almost everything--except hope.

Hope is what guides and drives Patty and Jerry Wetterling, from what they do and say to how they think and pray. For almost four months, they have prayed that their abducted son, Jacob, will be returned.

Theirs is a story with a beginning and a middle, but no end.

“Every day, you’re suspended,” Patty Wetterling said. “There’s no meaning to days and nights and weeks. Some people call and say, ‘It’s been seven weeks, it’s been eight weeks.’ After five minutes, it was too long. . . . It’s painful to me every morning when I wake up and he’s not here. It’s wrong.”

A masked gunman grabbed Jacob, then 11, as he, his brother and a buddy headed home back from a convenience store. The abductor ordered the other boys to run or he would shoot, then disappeared into the darkness with Jacob--less than half a mile from the family’s home.

No night will ever seem longer, no feeling more helpless. A missing child, a stunned family. Then days of helicopters, dogs and the National Guard scouring the fields. The Wetterlings were afraid they would find something, and afraid they would find nothing.

Fears have since turned to frustration. Jacob’s name is no longer a staple of the local news. The family’s 24-hour police guard left weeks ago. The 70-member investigative team has shrunk to about a dozen.

Jerry Wetterling, 41, a chiropractor, is back at work. The three children are back in school. But skating, fishing and football outings have been replaced by efforts to keep the story alive.

“We’re not ready to pull together as a family of five and go on,” said Patty Wetterling, 40. “That’s not right yet for us.” She paused, then added: “I don’t ever want that to happen.”

For the Wetterlings, it’s not if Jacob will return, but when . Hope is their theme. Tens of thousands of “Jacob’s Hope” hats, white ribbons, signs, buttons and T-shirts have been distributed nationwide. The words adorn a candle atop City Hall and a sign in front of the family home in this quiet central Minnesota town of 3,200.

“We choose to remain hopeful because we believe we’re going to get Jacob back,” his mother said. “Kids do come home after a very long time.”

Of nearly 24,000 missing children reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in a 5 1/2-year period ending in December, abductions by strangers accounted for less than 4%. Most other disappearances involved family members or were runaways.

Despite the “public sense these cases are doom and gloom,” about 60% of children in long-term stranger abductions are found alive, said Ernie Allen, the center’s president.

One of the most publicized, Steven Stayner, disappeared in California at age 7 in 1972 and surfaced in 1980 at a police station about 200 miles away with a 5-year-old boy his abductor had snatched. Stayner was killed in a motorcycle-car accident last year.

But others remain haunting mysteries: Johnny Gosch, the 12-year-old Iowa paperboy, gone since 1982; Etan Patz, the 6-year-old New Yorker last seen walking to a school bus stop almost 11 years ago.

Investigators in the Wetterling case have logged about 20,000 calls, tips and potential suspects since the abduction Oct. 22. They have released sketches of a 40- to 50-year-old man who last year kidnaped, sexually assaulted, then released a boy 10 miles away, and another of a man with a menacing stare spotted in the store the same day that Jacob was there.

Investigators believe there is a good possibility they are the same man and consider him one of their stronger suspects.

Corporations, famous athletes and hundreds of everyday people also have joined the search. A local pharmacist called dozens of people in different area codes with the Wetterlings’ phone number in case Jacob got free and didn’t know about long distance or wasn’t sure where he was.

A volunteer office, including people who don’t even know the family, directs the publicity effort. “I came just because I’m a mom,” said worker Pat Feldhege. “It’s pretty hard to resist Jacob’s smile.”

More than 50 million flyers--most sent by a direct-mail marketing company that regularly features missing children--have been distributed and posted in train stations, truck stops, airports and malls. It is a cruel reality for Patty Wetterling, who previously couldn’t bear to see missing children on milk cartons.

“I don’t want him to be a poster child,” she said. “We’ve become symbolic and I don’t want to appear ungrateful or angry . . . (but) I’m not satisfied with that. . . . I’m just a mom who wants her kid.”

Jacob’s parents travel the country, making TV and radio appearances, patiently and articulately answering questions, baring their souls to America in hopes of finding their son.

Sometimes they meet parents of other abducted children. It is no solace to Patty Wetterling.

“I think it shouldn’t happen to anybody, much less a group of people, and I especially don’t want to be around a group of people who’ve been doing this for years,” she said. “It’s not comforting to know somebody else is going through hell.”

The Wetterling house is filled with signs of Jacob, a sixth-grader with a budding interest in the trombone, a passion for sports and, his family said, a keen sense of fairness.

His orange parka hangs in his closet, his hand-drawn picture of a Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle and posters of the Detroit Pistons’ Isiah Thomas and the Chicago Bears’ Neal Anderson line his walls. His dog, named after football player Marcus Allen, pads around waiting for his pal.

Feb. 17 was his 12th birthday.

As weeks turn to months, the house has been decorated with balloons; inspirational poems; letters and cards from strangers; paper birds from schoolchildren; a hand-scrawled message, “We Won’t Give Up”; and a note from his 8-year-old sister, Carmen: “We are so sorry. . . . Evrybuty cry’d very hard. I love you. . . . “

Carmen was “really upset that Santa Claus didn’t bring Jacob any toys,” Patty Wetterling said. “I told her he didn’t bring them here. ‘Maybe he found Jacob, or maybe he’s waiting until we find Jacob.”’

Trevor, 10, who was with Jacob that night, thinks of his brother too. When he recently got a baseball player’s autograph, he collected an extra one. He often sleeps in his parents’ room and didn’t want to return to school.

“I said there’s a law that said kids have to go to school and he said, ‘Even when your brother’s missing?’ ” his mother said. “I didn’t know what to say to that.”

The Wetterlings say attending Trevor’s hockey games is a sad reminder of Jacob’s love of the sport and skill as a goalie.

But some tasks are more grim. Jerry Wetterling had to check to see if Jacob was shown in pornographic pictures found by police in an impounded car in Minneapolis.

Both Wetterlings are involved in the community: Patty once was PTA president, Jerry led the chamber of commerce and a local NAACP chapter. Finding Jacob is their work now.

“At one point, I started getting more numb,” Patty Wetterling said. “I actually felt kind of good because . . . maybe he’s gotten to feel more numb and then he wouldn’t feel so lost or alone or afraid or pained.

“Whatever’s going on, he’s just not feeling much of it,” her husband said. “I feel that’s what he’s had to do to survive.”

The Wetterlings say they don’t think of the “what ifs.”

“I’m not unrealistic, but I can’t function if I think about all the bad stuff,” Jacob’s mother said. “If I get down, lots of times I’ll go find a group of kids because kids symbolize hope.”

Dan Carle, a friend who counsels the Wetterlings, said the family displays no vindictiveness. “They seem to have a quality of being able to forgive . . . to hope,” he said. “There’s a spiritual dimension to this family deeper than I understand.”

Jerry Wetterling is an idealist, his wife an optimist. That hasn’t changed.

“I have always been the type of person that if there’s a 5% chance of doing something, I want to be in that 5%,” Patty Wetterling said. “If there’s one chance in a million that Jacob can still come home, I want Jacob to be the one.”