A Wisconsin man will spend the rest of his life in prison for kidnapping 13-year-old Jayme Closs and killing her parents. Twenty-one-year-old Jake Patterson was sentenced Friday in Barron County. He pleaded guilty in March to two counts of intentional homicide and one count of kidnapping. He admitted to abducting Jayme in October and killing her parents, James and Denise Closs. The teen was held captive in a remote cabin for 88 days before she escaped. Patterson was sentenced to life in prison without release on each homicide count and 25 years in prison on the kidnapping count. The sentences will be served consecutively.
Patterson wrote that he fantasized “about keeping a young girl, torturing her and controlling her.” Patterson’s writings were summarized by Judge James Babler shortly before he sentenced Patterson to life in prison without any chance of release. Babler said Patterson had written that “fear of hell” initially stopped him, but he stopped believing in God and began looking for an opportunity. Patterson wrote that he drove around looking for a girl to take but soon realize that wouldn’t work, then conceived of doing it in a home invasion. Patterson told investigators he carefully planned and carried out his attack in October on the Closs family home near Barron. Babler called Patterson “the embodiment of evil.”
