“Help me, I am Amanda Berry ... I have been kidnapped and I have been missing for 10 years.” With those words, the 27-year-old alerted the world to her plight—as well as to two other missing women. On Monday night, Berry broke through the door at the house where she is believed to have been held captive. Her screams got the attention of a passer-by, neighbor Charles Ramsey, who helped her pull out of the door. Berry had been missing since 2004, when she disappeared after leaving her job at a fast-food restaurant. When she told Ramsey her identity, he scarcely believed it—he later told reporters, “I thought that girl was dead.” Berry went to Ramsey’s house to call 911, where she identified Ariel Castro, 52, as her captor. Police found two other women at the house, Gina DeJesus, now 23 and missing since 2004, and Michelle Knight, a 32-year-old who disappeared in 2002. The three women all disappeared near the same location, and Castro’s two brothers also have been arrested in connection with the kidnappings. Also at the house was a 6-year-old girl, believed to be Berry’s daughter, although it’s unclear where she was born and who the child’s father is. Sources said Tuesday that all three women are believed to have been raped and that there were five pregnancies between them in the years they were held captive. The other babies did not survive.
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In 2009, investigators came to the house of Philip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, after receiving a tip that Garrido, a registered sex offender, had been distributing leaflets at the University of California, Berkeley, with two young girls. After a brief interrogation, police told Garrido to return the next day—and he did with the two girls, his wife, and another woman identified only as Alyssa. Police separated Garrido and the women, and it wasn’t until Garrido confessed to an 18-year-old kidnapping that “Alyssa” gave her true identity: Jaycee Lee Dugard, who had vanished in 1991 when she was just 11 years old. Dugard had been held in backyard tents at Garrido’s house, despite police making dozens of visits to the house over the course of 18 years. Dugard had been kept as a sex slave, giving birth to two daughters in a shed. While in captivity, Dugard made a list of things she dreamed about, and seeing her mom again was at the top of the list. Just two days after being rescued, Dugard had an emotional reunion with her mother. Now Dugard is the author of the bestselling memoir A Stolen Life, and runs the JAYC Foundation, which aims to help families recover from abduction and other trauma.
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Elizabeth Smart was 14 years old when an abductor burst into her family’s home in Salt Lake City and took her. She later testified that her kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, held a knife against her neck and told her that he would kill her entire family if she screamed. That night, she later testified, he tied her down and raped her. Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, held Smart captive for nine months as they wandered through California and Utah. Mitchell claimed to be a fundamentalist street preacher who had been told to take “seven sisters” as wives—and he repeatedly sexually assaulted Smart as he held her captive, telling her she was his wife. They hid in broad daylight by disguising Smart in veils and wigs. The Smart family had hired Mitchell as a day laborer while he went by the name Emanuel, and Smart’s 9-year-old sister, Mary Katherine, had connected the dots between the man who took Smart and the day laborer. By March, Mitchell and the two females had traveled back to Sandy, Utah—just miles from Salt Lake City. A stranger recognized Mitchell from America’s Most Wanted and called the police. At first, Smart denied who she was, telling police her name was Augustine Mitchell and saying, “I know you think I’m that Elizabeth Smart girl, but I’m not.” Eventually, Smart revealed her true identity and was reunited with her family. Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison in 2011. In court, Smart told him, “I know you know exactly what you did…you took away nine months of my life that can never be returned, but in this life or the next, you will be held responsible for those actions.” Today, Smart runs the Elizabeth Smart Foundation, which is dedicated to preventing future crimes against children. She is also a correspondent for ABC News, specializing in child abductions.
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Elisabeth Fritzl’s case differed from so many of the others, since she was held captive in her own father’s house in Austria for 24 years. When Elisabeth was 18 years old, her father, Josef Fritzl, lured her to an underground cellar. He had been sexually abusing her since she was 11 years old. Fritzl then locked the door, leaving Elisabeth underground in a 380-square-foot space. Over the next 24 years, Fritzl returned to the cellar on average every three days to rape Elisabeth. Fritzl’s wife, Rosemarie, believed that Elisabeth had run away to a cult—Fritzl even had Elisabeth write a letter to that effect—but Rosemarie had filed a missing-person’s report anyway. While in the tiny dungeon, Elisabeth gave birth to seven children, one of whom died just days after he was born and who her father later cremated in a wood-burning stove. Fritzl took three of the children when they were toddlers and told Rosemarie that Elisabeth had left them to be raised by her parents. The whole plot unraveled in 2008, when Elisabeth’s 19-year-old daughter, Kerstin, who lived solely in the dungeon, fell ill. Elisabeth begged her father to take Kerstin to a hospital, and when Elisabeth helped her father carry Kerstin to the car, she got her first glimpse of sunshine in 24 years. She returned to the dungeon and Fritzl told the hospital that Elisabeth had abandoned Kerstin—but authorities at the hospital grew suspicious and Elisabeth managed to convince her father to allow her and her other two dungeon children to visit Kerstin in the hospital. They were detained at the hospital, and Fritzl eventually confessed to the imprisonment and led authorities to the dungeon. Today, Elisabeth lives with all six of her children under a different name, and Fritzl has been sentenced to life in prison for rape, coercion, and murder of the baby. In the meantime, Elisabeth and her children are undergoing therapy, with some suffering from genetic defects as products of incest. On a more hopeful note, Fritzl’s sister-in-law has said Elisabeth has reunited with her mother.
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Carlina White was just 19 days old when she developed a high fever and her parents, Joy White and Carl Tyson, took her to a Harlem hospital in 1987. The baby seemed to recover after a few hours, and her parents left her there briefly while Joy went home to get some things. At 3:40 a.m., the hospital discovered Carlina was missing. Authorities spent 23 years pursuing bad leads, before a young woman named Nejdra Nance, or Netty, came forward saying she was the missing girl, and she had been raised by a woman named Ann Pettway. Netty first became suspicious of her parentage when she needed her birth records after she became pregnant, but Pettway didn’t have them and eventually told Netty that her birth mother had “left and never came back.” But Netty couldn’t give up the quest to find her birth parents, and she frequently searched missing babies from 1987. She eventually found a photo of Carlina White, and saw the resemblance to her own daughter, Samani. White and Tyson, who had split a year after she disappeared, were contacted to give DNA, and they reunited with Netty before the results even came in. Although the first reunion between Netty and White was joyful, Netty and Tyson got off to a rocky start. And things got worse from there—Netty became uneasy about the treatment of Pettway, who had raised her and whose family she still considered her own. There was also resentment over a trust that White and Tyson had kept for 21 years but had liquidated in 2008, although Netty insisted that was just a “misunderstanding.” Netty was estranged for a while from White and Tyson, but she has since been making tentative steps, although she admits her “unconditional love” for the woman who raised her has made it difficult. “I know they want justice,” Netty told New York magazine of White and Tyson. “I’m willing to forgive her. And I still have love for her ... but now I know who I am. That’s the main thing—just find out who you are and where you came from.”
Clarence Davis/NY Daily News via Getty (left),Julia Xanthos/NY Daily News via Getty (right)
Just days before Katie Beers’s 10th birthday in 1992, the Long Island girl vanished from an arcade that she had visited with John Esposito, a family friend. She left a message on her godmother’s answering machine saying she had been kidnapped by a man with a knife. Over the next few weeks, horrifying details of Katie’s home life began to come out. She had lived with her godmother, Linda Inghilleri, for nearly all of her life—and Inghilleri’s husband, Sal, was convicted in 1994 of two counts of sexual abuse for molesting Katie. Esposito was a neighbor of Katie’s mother, Marilyn Beers, in Bay Shore, known as “Big John” to Katie. For 17 days, Esposito held Katie hostage in an underground bunker, about the size of a coffin with a television at one end. By the time the police found her, she was so terrified she had thought they were more men who had come to torture her. While she was in captivity, Esposito sexually abused her, bringing her soda and candy to keep her quiet. After she was freed, Beers went to live with a foster family in East Hampton, the eastern end of Long Island. She stayed with that family for the rest of her childhood, later saying that’s how she learned about a normal childhood. Now Beers is 30, married, and a mother to two children in Pennsylvania. In December 2012, she published a memoir, Buried Memories, which she wrote with CBS reporter Carolyn Gustoff. “Being abducted was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me in my life,” Beers told Newsday in 2012.
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Sabine Dardenne was 12 years old when she was snatched in 1996 while riding her bicycle to school in Belgium. She was taken by serial killer Marc Dutroux and an accomplice. Dutroux “chained me to the bed by my neck,” Sabine told the Belgian newspapers Le Soir, La Dernière Heure, and Vers L’Avenir. “I stayed there two or three days.” Dutroux then moved her down to a tiny cellar, where she spent nearly 80 days in captivity. “According to him, he was saving my life,” Sabine said. She was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Dutroux, who told her that her family and friends had forgotten about her. Sabine said in a 2005 Guardian interview that she survived by being “strong-willed.” Months after she was abducted, he brought in 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez, telling Sabine he had “brought her a friend.” Six days after Laetitia arrived, the pair were rescued. When they were rescued, police found the bodies of four other girls who had been abducted by Dutroux. Two of the earlier victims, 8-year-old girls Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, are believed to have starved to death in 1995 while Dutroux was in prison on a theft charge. Dutroux’s wife said the other two victims, An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrecks, 19, abducted in 1995, were buried alive. Dutroux’s French accomplice also was buried alive. Dutroux’s trial was held up for a number of years, but he was eventually convicted in 2005 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Sabine, meanwhile, has published the bestselling book I Chose to Live (original title: J’avais 12 ans, j’ai pris mon vélo et je suis partie à l’école). In court, she was asked if she had anything she wanted to ask Dutroux. Facing Dutroux, she said, “I would like to know, coming from the man who has said I was pigheaded, why he didn’t liquidate me.” Sabine laughs at his response, saying, “He was just so pathetic.” As for her current life, Sabine insists not much would be different if “that little shit-for-brains hadn’t crossed my path.”
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At the age of 11, Missouri boy Shawn Hornbeck disappeared while riding his bike in 2002. Shawn was held in the home of pizza-parlor employee Michael Devlin, and Shawn later described his time with Devlin as so terrifying that it would “send psychiatrists insane.” Devlin told people Shawn was his son, although Shawn had spent his first month with Devlin bound to a futon and the subject of constant sexual abuse over the years. After five years, Devlin kidnapped another boy, William “Ben” Ownby, who was 13 at the time. The teens were discovered in Devlin’s apartment after police connected Devlin’s car with one at the scene of Ownby’s kidnapping four days earlier. Authorities say Shawn possibly suffered from Stockholm Syndrome over the years, especially since some witnesses reported seeing Shawn had relative freedom and Devlin was even teaching him how to drive. Devlin was convicted to 74 life sentences and was stabbed in prison in 2011—with two knives named “Shawn” and “Ben.” He survived the attack.
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Natascha Kampusch left for school in March 1998 from her family’s home in Vienna, but she never made it to school or back home. Two friends reported that they saw her grabbed and pulled into a white van. “When he grabbed me, I just wanted to scream, but my voice would not come—my vocal cords had just stopped working,” Natascha said later of her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil. Although just 10 years old, she said she wondered if he would rape her. Priklopil took her downstairs to a cellar instead and held her for eight years. Over the years she was held captive, she was raped by Priklopil—although investigators have often wondered if he was part of a pedophile ring. In August 2006, at the age of 18, Natascha escaped, running 200 meters before knocking on the door of a neighbor’s house and saying, “I am Natascha Kampusch.” That evening Priklopil confessed to the kidnapping and then committed suicide by lying in front of a train. Natascha has long believed to have suffered from severe Stockholm Syndrome, and she admitted in 2010 that she pities Priklopil. Natascha has written a book about her time imprisoned, called 3,096 Days in Captivity (original title: 3096 Tage), and she has bought the house where she was held captive, saying it was a big part of her formative years.
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When he was 7 years old, Steven Stayner was approached by a man while walking home from school in Northern California. The man was an acquaintance of Kenneth Parnell, who would hold Steven hostage from 1972 until 1980. Parnell, a child molester, had Steven pose as his son and gave him a different name. Over the course of the eight years he was held, Steven said Parnell sexually assaulted him more than 700 times, although Parnell claimed that number was higher. For at least a year, a woman lived with them—although she claimed she had no idea that Steven was not Parnell’s son. When Steven was 14, Parnell and a teenage friend of Steven’s kidnapped a 5-year-old boy named Timmy White in California. With the appearance of the younger boy, Steven decided to escape with Timmy, and the pair took off during the night while Parnell worked as a night-security guard. Police spotted the two boys wandering and picked them up. Parnell was arrested and later sentenced to eight years and eight months in prison. He was paroled after five years, but was sentenced to life in prison after trying to persuade a nurse to bring him a young boy. A movie about Stayner, called I Know My First Name Is Steven, was released in 1989, shortly before Steven died in a motorcycle accident.
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A grandson of the billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, John Paul Getty III, who went by Paul, was living alone in Italy at the age of 16 when he disappeared in July 1973. Two days later, his mother, Gail Harris, received a ransom request for about $17 million. She had little money, and the abductors, later revealed to be Calabrian criminals, told her to “get it from London,” a reference to Paul’s grandfather. Police were initially skeptical, and J. Paul Getty refused to pay the kidnappers, saying, “If I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” Three months later, the kidnappers cut off Paul’s ear and mailed it along with a lock of his hair to a Roman newspaper. Photographs of Paul without his ear and a letter in which he begged with his family to pay the captors appeared in a different newspaper. The kidnappers lowered their ransom demand to $3 million. Paul’s grandfather paid $2.2 million—the minimum that his accountants said would be tax deductible—and Paul’s father paid the rest, although borrowed from J. Paul Getty, who put 4 percent interest on the money. In December 1973, a malnourished Paul was found at a service station after being released. Two members of the Calabrian Mafia were eventually convicted of his kidnapping, but other members of the organization were freed. Paul was never able to escape the demons of his kidnapping—he once called his grandfather to thank him for paying the ransom and his grandfather refused to come to the phone. In 1981, Paul suffered a massive drug overdose that left him paralyzed and unable to speak. He died in 2011 at the age of 54.
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Even the FBI calls Patty Hearst’s kidnapping “one of the strangest cases in FBI history.” On Valentine's Day in 1974, a group of armed men and women grabbed the 19-year-old Hearst, beat up her fiancé, and left with the Hearst family heiress in the trunk of their car. The abductors were the Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, a group of hardened criminals who wanted to launch a guerrilla war against the U.S. government. After Hearst’s abduction, the SLA demanded millions of dollars in food donations in exchange for her release—although they had bigger plans for her: to turn her into their poster child. They went to work brainwashing Hearst to make her a member of their army, and within a few months, she was photographed wielding an assault rifle at a bank robbery in San Francisco. Hearst was eventually captured on Sept. 18, 1975, after more than a year with the SLA. Despite her claims of brainwashing, she was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison in connection to the robbery. She served two years before being pardoned by President Jimmy Carter.
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