Kidnappings

Abductions, captivity and the searches that followed.

48 cases

The Gorton Confession

On an April afternoon in 1996, forty-eight-year-old James Patterson Smith calmly walked into a Manchester police station to report that his teenage girlfriend, Kelly Anne Bates, had drowned in his bathtub — but the crime scene brought seasoned officers to tears.

The Toolbox Killers

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris met behind prison walls, then bought a windowless 1977 GMC van they nicknamed 'Murder Mac' — and began cruising the Pacific Coast Highway toward a fire road in the San Gabriel Mountains.

The Stolen Cradle

In September 2000, two expectant mothers met by chance in a Walmart and discovered they were neighbors — days later, Theresa Andrews vanished along with the Jeep Wrangler she had arranged to sell to a mystery buyer.

Models Inc.

On June 28, 2007, Paige Birgfeld drove home from a picnic with her high-school-sweetheart ex-husband and vanished — and the search for the Grand Junction, Colorado mother of three uncovered a secret life no one around her suspected.

The Photo Shoot

Jamie Reynolds told seventeen-year-old Georgia Williams he needed a model for a 'fake hanging' photo shoot at his Wellington, England home — an art project he had carefully planned for while his parents were away in Italy.

The Girl in the Box

In 1977, twenty-year-old hitchhiker Colleen Stan turned down rides that looked like trouble before accepting one from a clean-cut young couple with a baby — a decision near Red Bluff, California that would swallow seven years of her life.

The Repo Man

Repo man Mike Adams kept his Frisco, Texas showplace in flawless order — labels facing forward, a couch no one could sit on, handguns sorted by caliber — and his fixations turned menacing after Nicole Leger and her teenage son moved in.

The Glamour Girl Slayer

Long before he posed as a professional photographer hiring Los Angeles models, Harvey Glatman was a bullied Denver kid with a disturbing childhood fascination with rope — an obsession that never let him go.

A Walking Shadow

Nineteen-year-old Myles Fukunaga worked eighty-hour weeks to keep his family afloat in 1929 Hawaii, but when the Hawaiian Trust Company came collecting back rent once again, his quiet desperation fixed on a plan inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case.

Captain Cash

London heroin dealer Ken Avery — 'Captain Cash' to the underworld — lost everything when he turned informant, so he changed his name to Ken Regan and fixed his ambitions on a wealthy Heathrow freight importer named Amarjit 'Neil' Chohan.

God Chose Us

Two days before her high school graduation, Shari Faye Smith's little blue Chevette sat idling at the end of her family's long South Carolina driveway, the driver's door open and the mail scattered — and seventeen-year-old Shari was gone.

The Canal Killer

In February 2001, two boys fishing in London's Regent's Canal snagged a duffel bag weighted with bricks — the first of six bags divers would recover, holding a woman whose missing head, hands, and feet made her nearly impossible to identify.

The Broomstick Killer

Doted on by his pistol-packing mama in tiny Rosebud, Texas, Kenneth McDuff grew from small-town bully into one of the most sinister figures in Texan history — a killer handed unprecedented leniency by the very system meant to stop him.

Bloodthirsty Parolee

On New Year's night 1977, thirteen-year-old Bruce Kim left a party at a run-down Centralia, Washington apartment building and never came home — a murder so obscure the author knows it only because he grew up a few blocks away.

Mom, I'm a Monster

On October 5, 2012, ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway started her ordinary morning walk to school in Westminster, Colorado and vanished — while the man who had attacked a jogger at nearby Ketner Lake months earlier was still unidentified.

The Alligator Theory

On the morning of his sixth wedding anniversary, Mike Williams set out alone to hunt ducks among the stumps of Lake Seminole and never returned — and with no body to recover, investigators reasoned the lake's alligators had left nothing to find.

The Kičevo Monster

In sleepy Kičevo, Macedonia, three older women were beaten and strangled between 2005 and 2008 — and mild-mannered local journalist Vlado Taneski covered the murders with an uncanny eye for details no reporter should have known.

Unlucky 13

On Friday the 13th of April 2012, Brittany Killgore was packing to leave Fallbrook, California when Marine Louis Perez offered a Hornblower dinner cruise in San Diego — an evening entangled with Dorothy Maraglino, a woman who despised her.

Divine Justice

In a Pacific Northwest decade haunted by vanishing girls — several later confirmed as Ted Bundy victims — fourteen-year-old Kathy Devine's 1973 disappearance near Olympia sat unsolved for decades, filed under the wrong killer.

The Amish Killer

Ed Gingerich never fit the plain, machine-less life of his Old Order Amish community, so Bishop Rudy Shetler arranged a marriage to his niece Katie — a match that ended in the tragedy of March 18, 1993, one so dark much of Rockdale Township's Amish moved away.

Cold Storage Killer

After a Morrissey concert in June 1991, Denise Huber's gray Honda Accord was found abandoned on the Corona del Mar highway with a flat rear tire, just miles from her Newport Beach home — and for three years there was no trace of her at all.

The Werewolf Butcher

In September 1994, nine-year-old Penny Davis wandered off along Patterson Creek near tiny Tonasket, Washington and vanished without a trace — the beginning of a case that led to a man who believed himself a werewolf.

Consumed by Desire

When eighteen-year-old Heather Gibson tried to break up with Chad Wiersma, he drove her to a remote spot outside Kalamazoo and threatened to kill her and her family — the opening act of an obsession that would not let go.

Saving a Soul

Devout Tom Pendergast made it his God-given mission to rescue wayward boys, so when he found six-foot-four teenage runaway Carl Eder sleeping in a coat closet at the Mission Beach Ballroom, he brought him home to his wife and children in El Cajon.

The Jacksonville Monster

Struggling mother Rayne Perrywinkle thought the kindly stranger offering a $150 Walmart gift card for her daughters' clothes was an answered prayer — but 'Don' was a man a Jacksonville girl had once hidden from inside a playground slide.

Dead in the Water

Jo Rogers and her daughters Michelle and Christe left their Ohio dairy farm for their first real vacation, snapping photos from a hotel room overlooking Tampa Bay — days before the Coast Guard began pulling bodies, roped to concrete blocks, from the water.

Blue Mist #22

On a snowy January morning in 1972, eight-year-old Shelly Mickelson climbed into her trusted neighbor Robert Moorman's Chevelle for a lunch her mother never approved — the start of a story that would end at the Blue Mist Motel in the prison town of Florence, Arizona.

The Family Murders

In 1972, Bevan Spencer von Einem was hailed a hero for rescuing two men thrown into Adelaide's River Torrens. Seven years later, sixteen-year-old Alan Barnes stuck out his thumb on Grand Junction Road to hitch a ride home — and never arrived.

The Killer Cop

When a sheriff's cruiser stopped teenage hitchhikers Nancy Trotter and Paula 'Sue' Wells on Florida's Treasure Coast in July 1972, Deputy Gerard Schaefer lectured them about the creeps and kidnappers out there — then kindly offered the girls a ride to Jensen Beach.

Fossil Creek

Konstantin Simberg arrived in Phoenix from Russia dreaming of the America he'd seen on MTV — fast cars, easy money, beautiful girls. Then he fell for Kseniya, a dancer at Christie's Cabaret, and his American dream began a dark slide toward a place called Fossil Creek.

Where is Heather?

Peering through his new high-powered telescope over the Ohio River, Tim Walthall watched a young woman set up her beach chair on the Kentucky shore — then witnessed something that sent him racing for the phone. The search for Heather Teague never truly ended.

Limb From Limb

Ashley Young was compassionate to a fault and believed in second chances. That generosity led her to Jared Chance — a bully with thirty-eight brushes with the law in his first ten years of adulthood, and the man the author says would destroy her.

The Christmas Tree Farm Murders

Ed and Minnie Maurin, in their eighties and famous for the Christmas luncheon at their Ethel, Washington tree-farm home, were missing when friends arrived to set up the 1985 party. Inside the locked house, bank statements lay scattered across the bathroom floor.

Death in the Cornfield

Sierah Joughin pedaled her purple bicycle home through the cornfields outside Metamora, Ohio, after a lazy July afternoon with her boyfriend Josh, promising to call him that night. By 9:30, her bedroom light was on — but Sierah was nowhere to be found.

Missing in Mississippi

Annie Laurie Hearin, wife of one of Mississippi's wealthiest men, vanished from her Jackson mansion one Tuesday afternoon in 1988 — leaving behind her shoes, purse, car, and the medication she couldn't survive without. A ransom note pointed to twelve names.

The Vanishing

During a family night program at a St. Paul church in November 1981, six-year-old Cassie Hansen asked her mother for permission to use the bathroom just steps away. She never came back — and an abduction inside a sanctuary changed how the city thought about safety.

The House on Chipman Street

After a Saturday night dinner date in January 2007, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom lingered in a Knoxville apartment parking lot, unaware of the shadows moving between the cars. The carjacking that followed became one of Tennessee's most horrific crimes.