SOLVED: Missing in Wisconsin | Jayme Closs, 13 | Found Alive After 88 Days

A man with a shotgun walked up to a quiet family home in the middle of the night. 4 minutes later, both parents were dead and their 13-year-old daughter was gone. No ransom, no suspects, no trace. For 88 days, the country searched frozen forests and empty highways, believing she would never be seen again. But the man who took her made one fatal mistake. He left her alive.

 This is the story of Jaime Lynn Clauss, a 13-year-old girl from Baron, Wisconsin, who lost everything in a single night, endured conditions that would break most grown adults, and then walked out into 18° winter air, no coat, no phone, shoes on the wrong feet, and saved her own life. This is cold case model, and we do not look away.

Like this video. Be subscribed to Cold Case Model. Turn on notifications. We drop new cases every week. Share this one because Jaime’s story deserves to be heard. Baron, Wisconsin sits in the northwestern part of the state, about 45 miles from Oaklair. You probably never heard of it before October of 2018. It has a population of just over 3,000 people.

 The kind of place where the downtown consists of a hardware store, a couple of diners, a bank, and a turkey processing plant that employs a big chunk of the town. People here know each other. They wave from porches. Their kids ride bikes in the street after dark and nobody worries much about it because this is Baron.

 Nothing bad happens in Baron. James Clauss was 56 years old. Everyone called him Jim. He was a big man, broadshouldered now with a quick laugh and the kind of steady, dependable energy that made people trust him instantly. He had worked for years at the Geneo turkey store plant right there in Baron, the same plant where his wife worked.

 Friends remembered him as the guy who showed up. The kind of neighbor who would be at your door with tools before you even finished asking. He loved hunting and fishing. He loved his family more than anything else in the world. Denise Clauss was 46. She was warm and organized and always smiling in pictures.

 She was the heartbeat of that household, the one who made sure everything ran, who made sure their daughter had dance lessons and sleepovers and all the small joys that stitch a childhood together. Jim and Denise had been together for decades. They had built a quiet, honest life in a singlestory home on the outskirts of town, surrounded by trees with a big yard and a dog named Molly who had enthusiastic opinions about everything.

And then there was Jaime. Jaime Lynn Clauss was born on July 13th, 2005. She was 13 years old in October of 2018, and she was in the 8th grade at Riverview Middle School. long brown hair, braces, a shy smile that seemed to light up from the inside out. She loved to dance, hip hop, jazz, anything with a beat that let her move.

 She had friends, sleepovers, the kind of ordinary teenage social life that felt huge and important and everything all at once. Jim and Denise called her their princess. She was an only child. That bond between the three of them was close and fierce and full of love. There was not a single reason in the world for that family to be afraid.

 None of them knew that a 21-year-old man named Jake Thomas Patterson had already made a decision that would destroy all of it. Jake Patterson grew up in the area. He lived in a remote cabin in Gordon, Wisconsin, about 70 mi north of Baron. He was quiet, kept largely to himself. He had graduated high school and done a brief, unremarkable stint in the United States Marines that ended almost immediately.

He had worked odd jobs, including a couple of shifts at a local cheese factory. He had no criminal record, not so much as a parking ticket. On paper, he was completely invisible. But inside, something deeply disturbing had been growing for close to a year. Deep Patterson told investigators after his arrest that he had been planning to abduct a teenage girl for approximately 12 months.

 He said plainly that if it had not been Jaime, it would have been someone else. He was going to do this no matter what. He had made up his mind. One ordinary morning in September of 2018, Patterson was driving to work at that cheese factory near Almina when his car stopped behind a school bus. The doors opened. A girl stepped on.

 He had never seen her before. He had no connection to her or her family. He did not know her name. But according to what he later told investigators, something clicked in his mind when he saw her. Those were his words. Something clicked. And just like that, Jaime Clauss became his target.

 What happened next is the part that is truly chilling. May Patterson did not act on impulse. He planned. He went to a Walmart in Rice Lake and purchased a black balaclava mask. He researched shotguns, specifically selecting a Mossberg 12 gauge pumpaction model because he had done enough research to know it was one of the most commonly owned firearms in the country and would therefore be harder to trace.

 He took his father’s shotgun. He loaded it with 12 gauge slugs, which he chose because, and these are words from the criminal complaint, he believed they would inflict the most damage. He took a shower and shaved both his face and his head before the attack, deliberately, methodically to avoid leaving behind any DNA or hair at the scene.

 He wiped down the shotgun to eliminate fingerprints. He he stole a license plate from another vehicle and put it on his own red Ford Taurus so that if anyone caught his plate number, it would lead investigators nowhere. He removed the interior trunk release lever from his car and disabled the trunk light. He thought of everything.

 Then he drove to the Clauss home on the outskirts of Baron. The first time he turned around, there was too much activity in the house, too many lights on, too many signs of life. He was afraid of witnesses. He left. The second time, same thing. He turned around again. The third time was October 15th, 2018.

 And this time, he did not turn around. Jaime was asleep in her room when the family dog Molly started barking. She woke up, went to the window, and looked outside. There was a car in the driveway she did not recognize. Her stomach dropped, heart pounding, she ran to wake her parents. Jim Clauss got up and went to the front door with a flashlight.

 He looked through the small decorative glass pane in the door and shone the light at the figure standing outside. Patterson was dressed head to toe in black, ski mask over his face, 12 gauge shotgun in his hands. According to the criminal complaint, James apparently mistook him for a police officer because he asked him to show his badge.

Patterson later told investigators that James shown the light in his face. And at that point, Patterson fired through the glass pane in the door. James Clauss, 56 years old, was struck. He fell near the front door. Jaime heard the shot from the bathroom where she and her mother had run to hide. She told investigators later that when she heard that gunshot, seeing she knew.

 She knew her father was gone. Denise had grabbed her cell phone and dialed 911. The call connected at 12:53 in the morning. The dispatcher heard chaos on the other end. Screaming, a struggle, muffled crying. But before Denise could speak a single word, Patterson had blasted through the front door and was moving through the house toward them.

 He found the bathroom door locked and barricaded from the inside. He broke it down. What he found inside was a mother and her daughter in the bathtub. Denise with her arms wrapped tight around Jaime, trying with every last ounce of herself to shield her child from what was coming. Patterson pointed the shotgun at Denise Clauss’s head. He pulled the trigger.

Denise Clauss, 46 years old, was shot and killed while her arms were still around her daughter. Jaime had just watched her mother die in front of her. Patterson taped Jaime<unk>s wrists together with duct tape. He dragged her out of that bathroom across the house, across the yard, and forced her into the trunk of his red Ford Taurus.

 Then he got behind the wheel and drove north. The entire attack, from the moment he fired through the front door to the moment he drove away, took approximately 4 minutes. On his way out of Baron County, Patterson passed the responding sheriff’s deputies, racing toward the Claws home with their lights blazing and their sirens screaming.

 They passed each other in the dark. Dash cam footage later confirmed his car was visible. The deputies ran the license plate. It came back registered to someone else entirely. Patterson’s stolen plate had worked exactly as he planned. They had nothing. The deputies arrived at the Clauss home to find a front door blown open.

 James Clauss dead near the entrance. Denise Clauss dead in the bathroom and a house that felt violently, impossibly empty. Molly was barking herself frantic. Jaime’s phone was still plugged into the charger on the kitchen counter. And somewhere out in the Wisconsin dark, a man in a red Ford Taurus was driving 70 mi north with a 13-year-old girl locked in his trunk.

Within hours, Baron County had become the center of a national story. An amber alert went out immediately, blasting across every phone in Wisconsin and beyond. Jaime’s face, that shy smile, those bright eyes, those braces appeared on gas station windows, highway billboards, and social media feeds from coast to coast.

 But the FBI arrived from their Milwaukee field office. Within hours of the call, the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation joined. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children added Jaime’s name to their database. Baron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald stood before the cameras in the gray October morning light and said the words that would echo across the country for months.

 Jaime is missing and endangered. We believe she was home at the time. He asked anyone with information to come forward. His voice was steady, but the weight behind his eyes said everything. and barren Wisconsin. This small town of 3,000 people that most of the country had never heard of refused to stand still. On October 18th, just 3 days after the attack, my hundreds of volunteers were already out combing the land around Highway 8, looking for any trace, any clue, any sign of where Jaime might have gone. By October 23rd, nearly 2,000

volunteers had shown up. Many driving in from as far away as Minneapolis, walking shoulderto-shoulder through frozen fields and dense woods. Drones with infrared cameras swept from the air. Cadaavver dogs worked alongside search teams in rotating shifts. Deputies set up checkpoints on Highway 8, stopping vehicles and asking drivers one simple question.

 Did you see anything that night? The reward climbed fast. The FBI offered $25,000 for any information leading to Jaime’s location. The Jenny O Turkey store, the company where Jim and Denise had worked matched it. $50,000 total. A billboard stretched across the entire Midwest carrying Jaime’s photo. Tractor trailers rolled down interstate highways with her face printed on the side panels.

 Tips flooded in from all over the country, over 3,500 of them by the time it was over. Investigators chased every single one. A sighting in Miami of a girl matching Jaime’s description turned out to be nothing. A suspicious vehicle in Jainsville led nowhere. Theories swirled. human trafficking, a family grudge, a stranger’s obsession.

 Every path was followed. Every path went cold. In November, deer hunting season arrived in Wisconsin, and the sheriff’s department sent a direct appeal to the more than 4,000 people who had been issued hunting licenses across the county, asking them to report anything that seemed out of place.

 clothing, weapons, in anything that just did not look right. On December 15th, a Christmas tree 16 ft tall was set up at Riverview Middle School, Jaime’s school, and people gathered around it in the cold. They called it the tree of hope. Her family stood there and released balloons into the gray winter sky. Jaime’s aunt, Jennifer Smith, the woman who would later become her legal guardian, stood before cameras on October 24th and spoke directly to her niece wherever she was.

She said, “Not a moment goes by when we are not thinking of you and praying for you. Molly is waiting for you. We love you to the moon and back, and we will never stop looking for you.” The holidays came and went. New Year’s arrived and Baron kept the lights on and the ribbons on the trees and the candles in the windows. Three months had passed.

The national coverage had quieted. The ground searches had scaled back. But the question that hung over this community, over this whole country, never changed. Where is Jaime? Is she even still alive? The answer was yes, and what she was doing to stay that way. That was something no one outside that remote cabin in Gordon could have known.

If you are still watching at this point, drop a comment right now with the words, “I am still here.” Let’s see who is truly following this story all the way through. Because what comes next, what Jaime endured and what she did to get herself out, this is the part that will stay with you.

 When Patterson arrived at his family’s remote cabin in Gordon, Wisconsin, deep in the woods, no close neighbors, the the kind of place where sounds disappear into the trees. He brought Jaime inside and cut the duct tape from her wrists. He made her hand over the clothes she was wearing. He burned them in the basement fireplace along with the tape and his gloves and everything else that could tie him to that night.

 He gave her a pair of his sister’s pajamas to change into. Then he showed her where she was going to live. Under his bed, not near his bed, not beside it, under it. In a space barely large enough to breathe, barely 2 and 1/2 in off the floor at its lowest point. Cramped, dark, suffocating. Patterson packed heavy plastic storage bins on either side of her bins filled with weightlifting equipment, barbells, plates, weights, so that if she tried to move them, they would make noise.

And if she made noise, well, he had made himself absolutely clear about what would happen. Bad things, he told her. Bad things would happen. He threatened her constantly. He controlled when she ate, when she drank water, when she was allowed to use the bathroom. There were stretches of up to 12 hours at a time when she got none of those things.

 12 hours hidden in a space barely large enough to turn over with no food, no water, no bathroom access, just darkness and silence and the sound of her own breathing. His father came to visit the cabin on Saturdays. On those days, Patterson would turn the radio up loud enough to drown out any sound Jaime might make, any cry, any movement, any attempt to be heard.

 He believed he had thought of everything. He believed he was untouchable. He told investigators after his arrest that he knew she was just terrified of him. Those were his exact words. At Christmas time, Patterson left the cabin to visit his grandparents in Superior, about 45 minutes away. He left Jaime under the bed for hours, alone in the cold, in the dark in Wisconsin in December, and Patterson grew more and more confident over those weeks and months.

 So confident, in fact, that he never installed extra locks on the doors, never reinforced the windows, never put additional barriers between Jaime and the outside world beyond the bins of weights and his own threats. He believed she was broken. He believed he had won. He told investigators later that he trusted her, that she would not try to get out.

 This is where Jake Patterson made the biggest mistake of his life. Because while he was growing confident Jaime Clauss was doing something extraordinary, she was watching. She was studying. She was learning his patterns. When he left, how long he was usually gone, how he behaved before a visit from his father, what time of day he let his guard down the most.

She was doing all of this quietly, carefully, invisibly, under a bed in a remote Wisconsin cabin while the whole country was out there searching for her and slowly losing hope. She told investigators later that she went into survival mode. Those are the words she used. Stay quiet. Stay still. Stay alive. Find the moment.

 The moment came on January 10th, 2019, 88 days after the night Patterson had shattered her entire world. He came into the room and told her he was going to be gone. He said he would be away for 5 hours, maybe to apply for jobs, maybe to visit family. He put her under the bed as usual. He stacked the bins of weights against her as usual.

 He told her to stay put. And then he walked out the door and drove away. The moment Jaime Clauss heard that car leave, she started moving. She pushed the bins slowly, carefully, inch by inch in the dark, making as little noise as possible, even though he was gone because 88 days of living under constant threat, had rewired every instinct in her body toward silence.

 She pushed the bins aside. She crawled out from under the bed. She was alone in a cabin she barely knew, in a town she had never heard of, with no phone, no idea exactly where she was, and no plan beyond the burning, desperate certainty that she had to go right now before he came back. The only shoes she could find were a pair of Patterson’s sneakers, oversized, way too big for her feet. She grabbed them.

 In her rush, in the adrenaline and the fear and the desperate urgency of that moment, she put them on the wrong feet. She did not stop to fix them. She walked out the door into the Wisconsin winter. 18°, no coat, no gloves, no phone, just open road and frozen ground and the most ferocious will to live that you can imagine in a 13-year-old girl who had spent nearly three months being told she was owned.

She walked down that road, wind cutting through her thin clothes, the cold biting at every inch of exposed skin, until she saw a woman ahead of her walking a dog. The woman’s name was Jean Nutter. She was a retired social worker who lived in the area. When she saw this thin, disheveled teenage girl walking toward her on the road, barely dressed, shaking, shoes mismatched, eyes wide.

She stopped. And then Jaime spoke. Her voice was trembling, but the words were clear, deliberate. She had been practicing them in some corner of her mind for 88 days. I am Jaime Clauss. He killed my parents. I want to go home. Jeanna Nutter recognized that name the moment she heard it. Ja’s face had been on every news broadcast, every social media feed, every billboard for 3 months. Jean did not hesitate.

 She wrapped her arm around the girl, kept her calm, and walked her as fast as she could to the home of her nearby neighbors, Peter and Kristen Kasinskus. Kristen Kasinskus opened the door, took one look at this child standing on her porch, and called 911. Her voice on the recording is calm and urgent.

 She said, “I have a young lady at my house right now, and she says her name is Jaime Clauss.” Jaime sat on the couch wrapped in a blanket. And while the Casinska’s family gave her food and water and warmth, she told them everything she could. The cabin, the man’s name, Jake Patterson. He lived just a few doors down that same road.

 Deputies raced to the scene. A patrol car on its way to the Kasinska’s home noticed a red vehicle heading in the opposite direction toward the cabin. Something fired in the deputy’s memory. They ran the plates. The car came back registered to a Katie Patterson. Same last name as the suspect Jaime had just named. They pulled the car over.

 Jake Patterson stepped out. He did not run. He did not fight. He did not even look surprised. He looked at the deputies and he said three words. Why? I did it. He later told investigators he had thought about Jaime while he was out that day and decided he should head back. He said he never would have been caught if he had planned everything perfectly.

 He also told investigators that he thought he had Jaime under control, that she would never try to escape, that he was certain of it. He was right that she was terrified. He was catastrophically wrong about what that meant. Jaime Lynn Clauss, 13 years old, 88 days in captivity, half starved and half frozen, had just walked herself to freedom, and in doing so, she had walked her captor directly into handcuffs.

 The reaction when the news broke was immediate and overwhelming. Baron, Wisconsin. This town of 3,000 people that had carried this grief for nearly three months erupted and people who had never met each other embraced on the street. Church bells rang. Social media flooded with her name over and over and over. Jaime. Jaime.

 Jaime. Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald stood before the cameras and his voice, which had been so measured and controlled for months, finally cracked with something that sounded a whole lot like awe. He said, “It is amazing the will of that 13-year-old girl to survive and escape.” “Amazing!” Jaime’s aunt, Jennifer Smith, who would become her legal guardian, arrived to bring her niece home.

 The reunion was private as it should have been, but photographs emerged from that day. Jaime wrapped in a blanket surrounded by family, her aunt’s arms around her, and every single person who saw those images felt something profound. Investigators moved swiftly once Patterson was in custody, and he confessed almost immediately, waving his rights and talking to investigators from the Wisconsin Department of Justice with a detail and a calmness that left detectives stunned.

 He walked them through every step, the planning, the Walmart trip for the mask, the research on the shotgun, shaving his head to avoid leaving DNA, stealing the license plate, driving to the house twice before, the 4-minute attack, the drive north, burning her clothes, hiding her under the bed. He told them he had picked the Mossberg shotgun because it was widely manufactured and would be harder to trace.

 He described aiming at Denise Clauss’s head because he knew that was the best way to ensure she could not survive. He said all of this calmly, methodically, as if he were recounting a project he had completed at work. Di also told them he had thought he would never be caught. He said that after the first two weeks passed without an arrest, he genuinely believed he had gotten away with it.

 He told investigators he never would have been caught if he had planned everything perfectly. The only flaw in his perfect plan was that he underestimated a 13-year-old girl. In March of 2019, Patterson wrote a letter to a reporter at a Minneapolis news station. In it, he expressed his intention to plead guilty, saying he did not want Jaime and her family to have to go through a trial.

 He also claimed the murders were mostly on impulse directly contradicting his own detailed confession about 12 months of planning. On the back of that letter written in bubble letters like a child were the words, “I am sorry, Jamie.” Ah, March 27th, 2019, Jake Thomas Patterson appeared in court and pleaded guilty to two counts of firstdegree intentional homicide for the murders of James and Denise Clauss and one count of kidnapping.

 As he was led out of the courtroom, he turned toward the camera and shouted two words at it. By Jaime. The audacity behind those two words said everything about who this man was. everything about why Jaime had needed to save herself because this man was never going to show her mercy. Not then, not ever.

 The courtroom in Baron County on May 24th, 2019 was packed to capacity, family, law enforcement, community members who had been living with this case for 7 months, reporters from across the country. They everyone gathered to hear the final chapter read aloud in a court of law. Jay, now 14 years old, was not present in that courtroom.

 She was represented by a statement that was read on her behalf by the family’s attorney. And when those words were spoken into that silent, packed room, they landed like something heavy and permanent and true. He thought that he could own me. But he was wrong. I was smarter. I was brave and he was not.

 He thought he could make me like him. But he was wrong. 14 years old, 88 days under a bed and she stood in that courtroom in spirit if not in body and she told the world the truth. Her aunt Jennifer Smith spoke directly to Patterson through tears with her voice breaking but her words absolutely clear. She said, “You took everything from us, but you did not break us.” Jaime is proof of that.

 Judge James Babler addressed Patterson before sentencing. He [clears throat] told him that what he had done was not impulsive. It was not a moment of madness or a loss of control. It was calculated. It was planned and it was carried out with cold precision. Jake Thomas Patterson was sentenced to two consecutive lifetimes in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders of James and Denise Clauss, plus an additional 40 consecutive years for the kidnapping of their daughter.

 He will never be eligible for parole. He will die inside those prison walls. He is currently incarcerated at Dodge Correctional Institution in Walpen, Wisconsin. When the gavl came down, barren Wisconsin exhaled. In the weeks and months that followed, the Clauss family home, the scene of so much horror, was quietly demolished.

 The bank that owned the property had it torn down after consulting with relatives. The ground where that house stood was left empty. Some wounds do not need to be preserved. Ja went to live with her aunt Jennifer Smith, who had custody of her. She returned to school when she was ready. She went back to dance lessons when she was ready.

 She rebuilt her life on her own terms, in her own time, largely away from cameras and reporters and the relentless appetite of a country that wanted to watch her heal. One year after her abduction, she issued a public statement through the family attorney. She wrote, “I would really like to thank everyone for the kindness and concern that people from all over the country have shown me.

 I am very happy to be home and getting back to the activities that I enjoy. I love hanging out with my friends and I feel stronger every day.” She received the $25,000 reward that Jenny O Turkey Store had pledged for information leading to her discovery because in the end she was the one who found herself. She was honored by Wisconsin state legislators who recognized her as a hometown hero.

 Kidnapping survivor Elizabeth SM, who had herself been held captive for nine months in 2002, spoke publicly about Jaime and said she was aed and impressed by her courage. Baron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald, 5 years after her escape, marked the anniversary by writing publicly. 5 years ago today, a 14-year-old girl showed the world that you never give up hope.

 She has become an advocate for other missing and exploited children. She has carried everything that happened to her and she has chosen deliberately and with remarkable grace to turn it into something that helps others. She rarely speaks publicly. She does not owe anyone her story. But in the few moments she has allowed the world to hear from her directly, she has been unambiguous about who she is and what she survived.

 Here is what this case leaves us with. It leaves us with the reminder that evil does not announce itself. Jake Patterson had no criminal record, no prior incidents, no history of violence that anyone knew about. He was invisible to every system designed to catch people like him. Right up until the moment he decided to stop being invisible, there was no warning.

 There was no way for Jim and Denise Clauss to know. It just happened in 4 minutes on a Monday night in October. That is a terrifying truth, but it is the truth. This case also leaves us with the image of a community at its absolute best. Baron, Wisconsin is a small town, 3,000 people. And those 3,000 people along with thousands more from all over the state and beyond spent months walking frozen fields and hanging ribbons on trees and lighting candles in windows and saying her name.

 2,000 volunteers on a single day in October. The tree of hope in December. Balloons released into a gray winter sky by people who had never met this girl and loved her anyway. That is also a truth worth holding on to. And above everything else, this case leaves us with Jaime, a 13-year-old girl who watched her mother die with her arms still wrapped around her.

 No, who was bound and thrown in a trunk and driven through the dark to a cabin in the middle of nowhere. who spent 88 days in a space barely large enough to breathe with no food, no water, no light, threatened constantly, isolated, completely hidden from a world that was desperately searching for her and who chose every single day to survive.

 She did not wait to be rescued. She observed. She studied. She waited. She chose her moment with the patience and the precision of someone twice her age, three times her age. And when that moment came, when he drove away and told her he would be back in 5 hours, she pushed those bins aside, crawled out from under that bed, put on his shoes in the wrong order, walked out into the Wisconsin winter, and she went to find help. She found it.

 And then she stood in a courtroom through the words of a statement read by someone else. And she looked at the man who had taken her parents, who had tried to take everything from her, who had told himself he could own a human being. And she told the world the truth. She was smarter. She was brave. He was not. He thought he could own her. He was wrong.

If you made it to the end, like this video right now. Share it with someone who needs to hear about real strength. Subscribe to Cold Case Model and hit the bell. Say their names. James Clauss, Denise Clauss, Jamie Clauss. We are not done. More cases are coming. We will not look