TRUE KIDNAPPING STORIES: Historic Ransoms, Modern Escapes, and Stockholm Syndrome

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
It was dark all around him, except for a small
one meter hole a few feet ahead of him that
brought in faint light. He couldn't see anything else in
the room. He tried standing up, but he only felt
the ropes tied to his hands and legs on the
chair tighten. The door opened. After a few minutes, someone

(00:28):
switched on the lights. He saw three people enter, one
after another. They sat in three chairs kept around the
circular table before him. They were wearing black trousers, black suit,
white shirt, black tie, and black glasses. The person sitting
opposite to him, probably the leader, spoke, you've been kidnapped.

(00:55):
He was silent for a couple of seconds and then
burst out laughing. He laughed until he was coughing, and
there were tears in his eyes. What's so funny about
being kidnapped, the leader asked, in a serious tone. No,
I didn't laugh for that. I laughed because you chose
to kidnap a new and budding author. How much ransom

(01:18):
do you think you could extract out of a novelist?
Don't you guys do some research to identify the right
prospects before kidnapping, he said, and beamed. If you finished
your lecture. We'd like to clarify that we did not
kidnap you for money. Of course, we have that much
common sense, the leader said. Then why did you kidnap me? Why?

(01:43):
He asked. You are the author of the recently released
mystery novel, The Great Bank Robbery, aren't you, the leader asked,
his eyes widened and excitement, he said, yes, so you
were that one person who bought it. Did you read it?
Did you like it? Why don't you leave a positive

(02:03):
review for it? On? Stop it, the leader thundered. We
liked your plot and the research you've done on the
banking system. Besides, you're the only author of a bank
robbery mystery living in this city. Well, I did expect
some crazy fans, he said, with a smiling face. But
this is taking fandom to a whole new level. I mean,

(02:26):
you could have just walked into my house if you
had wanted my autograph. This kidnapping thing wasn't nonsense. The novel,
for your information, was dull and unengagingly written. It was
a hopeless mystery, the leader said, looking straight into his eyes.
Then why did you kidnap me? He shouted, unable to

(02:48):
hide his agony. If it isn't obvious to you yet.
We want you to write a full proof plan for
robbing the Royal Bank. The kind of information you have,
that should be easy, the leader said, and smiled. The
enormity of the situation struck him hard. Even the lack
of sales except that one copy, did not discourage him.

(03:13):
But this was walking into trouble. But the first time
he wished he hadn't written a bank robbery mystery. The
Harlequin romance might have been a better, safer choice. Welcome, Weirdos.

(03:41):
I'm Darren Marler, and this is weird Darkness. Here you'll
find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre,
unsolved and unexplained coming up in this episode. Don't take

(04:04):
candy from strangers. That warning stemmed from a real kidnapping
in eighteen seventy four, made even more history making by
being the first kidnapping in US history to demand money
for the child's safe return. I'll share true kidnapping stories
told by the victims, stories you've never heard because none

(04:26):
of them made the evening news. In some kidnapping cases,
the victim outsmarts their abductor. We'll look at a few
quick thinking abductees who's out of the box thinking and
determination to survive helped them to escape their captors. In
some cases of kidnapping, the victims have an opportunity to escape,

(04:49):
but don't they even try to help those who abducted
them in the first place. In many cases, this indicates
the victim is suffering from a terrifying type of brain
wall washing that we've come to know as Stockholm syndrome.
And we'll look at a few famous cases of it.
And a beautiful California co ed was kidnapped in nineteen

(05:12):
seventy four, and two months later she burst into a
bank with a machine gun. We'll look at how Stockholm
syndrome changed the nineteen year old wealthy heiress Patty Hurst
into a cold blooded bank robber. Now bolt your doors,
lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with

(05:33):
me into the weird darkness. Don't take candy from strangers.

(05:58):
Your parents may have told you this when you were young,
which you probably never considered. Where the caution came from.
The Graham origins of the phrase lie with a four
year old named Charlie Ross, who was abducted in eighteen
seventy four, the kidnapping of Charlie Ross shocked the nation.

(06:18):
Perhaps the child was targeted for his family's assumed wealth.
His father, Christian Ross, owned a fine house in Philadelphia's
ritzy Germantown area, though the family was actually in debt.
Whatever the motive, on July first, eighteen seventy four, Charlie
and his older brother Walter were playing in their front

(06:39):
yard when they were approached by two men in a
horse drawn carriage. The two men offered the boys candy
and invited them for a ride. They accepted, and later
that day Walter was returned to his parents, but Charlie
was not. Soon disturbing ransom notes began arriving at the home.

(07:01):
Charlie's panicked parents went to the police, and the Pinkerton
Detective Agency got involved in this search as the media
spread the story around the country. In the end, little
Charlie was never seen again, but his tragic tale left
a legacy. It was the first kidnapping for ransom to
receive substantial media attention in American history, and today a

(07:25):
major missing person's database still bears his name. On July first,
eighteen seventy four, a horse drawn carriage with two men
pulled up in front of the Ross's yard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Charlie Ross, age four, and his brother Walter Ross, age five,
apparently recognized the men. Supposedly they had stopped by the

(07:48):
house before and given the boys candy. This time, the
men gave the Rosses an invitation come in the carriage
and they would buy the boys firecrackers. Got in and
they went off to a local store, where Walter was
given twenty five cents to spend. But when Walter came out,

(08:08):
Charlie and the men stayed behind in the carriage and
they drove away. The chilling episode is said to have
inspired the often repeated phrase don't take candy from strangers.
After the two men sped off in a carriage with
his little brother on July first, five year old Walter
Ross was left behind in an unfamiliar part of Philadelphia. Thankfully,

(08:31):
Walter made it back home, though reports differ on how
he got there. Either his worried father found him or
a neighbor returned him safely. Either way, once Walter arrived
back at his parents' house, he told them about everything
that had happened. The very first known ransom note in
the United States was written concerning the return of Charlie Ross.

(08:56):
In twenty thirteen, twenty two letters were found in a
basement belonging to Bridget Flynn, a Philadelphia school librarian who
had several bins full of family heirlooms. All of the
notes were addressed to Christian Ross, Charlie's father, and asked
for twenty thousand dollars in exchange for the boy. The

(09:17):
very first letter, riddled with spelling errors, was dated July third,
eighteen seventy four, and read, mister Ross, be not uneasy,
you son Charlie Brewster. He all writ we has got him,
and no powers on earth can deliver out of our hand.
You will have to pay us before you get him

(09:38):
from us, and pay us a big cent too. If
you put the cops hunting for him, ya is only
defeating your own end. We has got him fit, so
no living power can get him from us live. If
any approach is made to his hiding place, that is
the signal for his instant annihilation. If you regard his

(09:59):
lit put no one to search for him. You money
can fetch him out alive, and no other existing powers.
Don't deceive yourself and think the detectives can get him
from us, for that is one impossible you hear from
us in a few days. The notes that came to
the Ross house after Charlie was abducted were insistent pay

(10:20):
the twenty thousand dollars if you want to see your
son again, but the family simply didn't have the money.
Despite owning a fine house, Christian Ross was in debt.
Over the next several years, the Ross family ultimately spend
sixty thousand dollars in search for Charlie, the modern day
equivalent of a small fortune. Charlie Ross's father, Christian Ross,

(10:45):
hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to assist in the search
for his son. The Pinkertons were known for their inexhaustible efforts.
In fact, their company motto was we never sleep, and
they had a large collection of mugshots and related information
about criminals. Why not rely on the local authorities. Christian

(11:05):
Ross had doubts that the Philadelphia police force had his
best interests at heart, and didn't think they were doing
enough to find Charlie. However, the Pinkerton's efforts also failed
to turn up any answers about the boy's disappearance. When
the kidnapping occurred, Sarah Ross, Charlie's mother, was in Atlantic City,

(11:25):
New Jersey, tending to her sick daughter. She was completely
unaware that her young son had been kidnapped, that is
until front page ads pleading for his return hit the
front page of the newspapers. The frantic woman returned home
to Philadelphia at once. Two men were fatally shot while

(11:46):
robbing at home in Brooklyn, New York, on December thirteenth,
eighteen seventy four. The last words from one of them
were a confession he claimed to be involved in the
Charlie Ross kidnapping. The other man died at the scene.
These two men were William Musher and Joseph Douglas, both

(12:06):
suspects in the abduction. The police had been searching for
them for some time. Mosher died right away, and according
to Douglas, only Mosher knew where Charlie was. Walter Ross,
Charlie's brother, was taken to the morgue to identify the bodies,
and he confirmed that they were the men who invited

(12:27):
them into their horse drawn carriage. The abduction of Charlie
Ross was the first such case to receive nationwide attention
thanks to the news media. Articles about him appeared in
national publications, including The Illustrated Newspaper, and local papers around
the country wrote about the shocking kidnapping. A record seven

(12:49):
hundred thousand flyers also were passed out with information about
the boy in the hopes that someone somewhere knew something
about the case. In addition the print media, Charles Plight
was popularized in song. Two tunes Bring Back Our Darling
and I Want to See Mama once More, kept his

(13:10):
story in the public imagination. Over the years, several boys
and men came forward claiming to be Charlie Ross. One
even took his claims to court. Gustav Blair, a resident
of Phoenix, Arizona, petitioned the court in his home state
to accept the fact that he was indeed Charlie Ross.

(13:33):
He claimed to have lived in a cave after his
kidnapping and said he only discovered his true identity after
he was adopted by a man who told him he
was Charlie Ross. The Ross family didn't contest the suit,
so Blair one. Of course, they didn't accept that he
was really Charlie and DNA testing didn't exist to prove

(13:54):
any family relationship between Blair and the Rosses. Only one
person was jail for supposed involvement in the kidnapping. William Westerveldt,
an associate of William Mosher's investigators, received a tip from
a criminal, Gil Moscher, William Mosher's brother, who claimed that
William Mosher and his friend Joseph Douglas resembled the kidnappers.

(14:18):
Westerveldt was a former NYPD officer who had been fired
for corruption. He was also Mosher's brother in law. Westerveldt
spent some time working as a double agent, gathering information
from Douglas and William Mosher, but at the same time
giving the criminals details about the police investigation. Ultimately, westervelt

(14:39):
was charged and convicted of complicity to commit the kidnapping.
Charles Ross was never found, though his family never gave
up searching for answers. His father, Christian Ross, passed away
in eighteen ninety seven at the age of seventy three.
His mother, Sarah Ross, passed away in nineteen twelve at

(15:00):
the age of seventy nine. The abduction of Charlie Ross
had major implications for not just his family, but the community.
In nineteen seventy five, Pennsylvania changed the charge of kidnapping
from a misdemeanor to a felony. It was the first
state to do so. Christian Ross wrote a book about

(15:22):
his son's kidnapping in eighteen seventy six. The book, The
Father's Story of Charlie Ross, the Kidnapped Child, A Full
and Complete Account of the abduction of Charles Brewster Ross,
was published by John E. Potter and Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The book included information about the case and had a
chapter on another missing boy, Freddie Leeb. The Charlie Project,

(15:48):
named for Charlie Ross, contains valuable information about missing persons,
including thousands of documents, digital flyers, and other resources. In
a way, it acts today as the newspapers did when
Charlie Ross went missing. It provides information and a way
to spread the word. When weird darkness returns, I'll share

(16:19):
true kidnapping stories told by the victims, stories you've likely
never heard because none of them made the evening news.

(16:50):
Many kidnapping victims, at least the high profile ones, have
their stories told in newspapers, on television, and in books. However,
this does and encompass everyone who's been kidnapped, which can
happen to the young and old at times when you
least expected. There are plenty of true abduction stories that

(17:10):
haven't been broadcast to the general public. The stories I'm
about to relate are all true, according to the Reddit
users who wrote them, the ones who lived through these
traumatic experiences. Not my own abduction, but my cousin was abducted.
She lives in Mexico. She was walking home after being

(17:32):
dropped off by the school bus when a van drove up.
Men wearing bandanas over their faces pulled her into the van,
tied her up, and placed a hood over her head.
They drove for a long time, according to my cousin,
and she was taken to and left at a barn
along with other kidnapped young women. She asked what was
going on and where they were, but the women wouldn't

(17:54):
answer her. She somehow got loose from her rope and
started to look for an escape. She found a wind
window and broke it with a chair. She urged the
other girls to come with her, but they were too
scared to leave. My cousin left them and she ran
non stop to the nearest town, staying off the roads
in case they were looking for her. Luckily, she found
a phone in the town and called her family. She's

(18:17):
safe now, but she could never remember where the location
of the barn was. She still feels guilty about it all.
When I was eleven years old, we lived in a
small villa behind a Canadian university. Just for reference, we
live in a Muslim country, Dubai Uae. When I was younger,

(18:39):
I was really into skateboarding and was skate in front
of our house. I heard my mother calling my name,
and as I picked up my skateboard, a white Nissan
patrol came flying down the street with the passenger door
wide open. I dropped my board and fled for the gate.
As I opened the metal gate, I felt a cold
hand grabbed my neck and try to pull me. I

(19:00):
grabbed the gate and forced myself through it, closing it
behind me. I was not abducted, but the feeling of
the cold hand still haunts me. Ten years later. My
mother would steal my sister and me away and hide
us from the rest of my family. Every time she'd
get upset with our father. She'd leave us with any

(19:23):
random person who would take us and leave. I remember
bits and pieces, but mostly just being scared and wanting
to go home. I couldn't have been more than three
or four years old at the time. It was bad
enough that my dad called CPS and gave up his
parental rights to the state, who had placed us with
our paternal grandmother. When I was about thirteen, my girlfriend

(19:49):
and I were walking home from the library during summer break.
We both had a few books and a beautiful day
in northern New Jersey, so we were very happy the
crossroads where she turned to go a few more blocks
to her house and I would go the opposite direction,
three blocks to my home. As we were standing on
the corner, just talking before we would have parted ways,

(20:12):
a sixties style red car pulled up at the corner.
A very attractive young blonde in his twenties asked if
we knew the location of Church Street. Where we were
standing at the corner, you could clearly tell Church Street
was about twenty feet on the other side of the
main road where we all stopped, so the question was odd. Furthermore,
Church Street was only a block long, was a one way,

(20:36):
and only had a large church and approximately four houses
on it. What would this guy in the cherry red
car need on Church Street. My girlfriend and I just
pointed to Church Street and said it's right there. Weird.
The gentleman then introduced himself and tried to initiate conversation.

(20:56):
He was articulate, attractive, and charming. Why was he talking
to us? He made jokes, asked us about what we
were doing, did we know where to get a soda, etc.
He told me that I had beautiful hair, long, wavy auburn,
and that he was a hairstylist. He said he'd like
to cut my hair for free and would like to

(21:17):
use me in a modeling show. He asked me to
come take some paperwork so he could give me some information.
Though my hair got a lot of comments, I certainly
was not model material. More weird. He kept talking, trying
to be over friendly, almost, and it just kept becoming
more creepy. He offered to buy us sodas and drive

(21:39):
us home since it was hot. After saying no many
times in many ways and trying not to give him
any real info, he finally drove slowly down Church Street.
My girlfriend began to run home her way, and I
wanted to get to my house asap. I remember thinking
that if he went around the block that he'd cut

(22:00):
up on me again alone, So I made the decision
to take a slight detour and go down Church Street.
It was risky since it was a very sparse street,
yet I figured at least he could not really turn
around on the one way street, and if he did,
I'd see him coming. I cut through the church complex
and made it home, where I told my dad what

(22:20):
had happened. The police came and took a report and
also talked to my friend. They mentioned that a gentleman
had attempted to speak with another girl on the other
side of town a few days prior, who matched the
car and physical description. I never found out more information
or heard anything else about it, but that scared team

(22:41):
me for a long time. I have a friend it
was kidnapped. He came home late one night and a
van pulled up right beside him and a few guys
grabbed him. They were planning on holding him for ransom,
under the impression his dad was rich. His dad did
pay the ransom, and he was dumped in some remote

(23:02):
part of the city and he had to find his
own way home, luckily uninjured. It happened a couple of
years back and to this day he refuses to go
out at night. You can see he still gets visibly
shaken whenever a vehicle passes or stops nearby him. My
friend and I were playing in a creek that ran

(23:23):
from her backyard to the next street over. I was
seven or eight at the time. We're playing around talking
when I just stopped. She confused kept asking what was
wrong because I just stopped in my tracks. This guy
in a green car had passed by and then backed
up to where we were to stop and stare at us.

(23:45):
He slowly started opening his door, then locked all of
them with the power button, but manually unlocked the passenger side,
the one facing us, which was weird to me. I
told my friend very quietly, on the count of three,
we run as fast as you can back home. One, two, three.

(24:08):
When we started to take off, I heard the man's
door shut and the car take off. We ran back
to our house through the woods like crazy, and told
her mom what had happened. By this time, we were
out of breath and crying. It was terrifying. I was
five and my family lived in a really poor part

(24:29):
of town. I was never allowed to play outside for
very long or in the dark. My only friend was
my next door neighbor, who was about my age. On
that day, my mom was really tired because of a
new baby and taking care of me and my two
year old brother. I begged to play outside with my neighbor,
and finally my mom said yes, as long as we

(24:51):
stayed in the yard where she could see me from
the window. About twenty minutes later, a green, beat up
plymouth stops in the road in front of our houses.
A white man leans over and asks us if we'd
seen a dog. My neighbor just stood in the yard,
but I couldn't hear so well, so I started walking
toward the car. I got about a foot from the

(25:12):
passenger door and saw another guy start sitting up in
the back seat. Then I heard a door slam and
turned to see my mother running with no shirt on.
She had just been breastfeeding my sister, running through the yard,
yelling for me to get behind her and my neighbor
to run home. The car sped off, the cops came,

(25:32):
and we moved several cities away. Years later, I found
out that they were two men my father worked with.
When the cops raided their house, they found all kinds
of gross costumes and journals of their plans. I remember,
for weeks after that, my parents made me sleep with them,
and even had my huge grandfather move in and sleep

(25:53):
in our living room. At the time, I was embarrassed
that the whole neighborhood saw my mom's boobs flying around.
But now I'm pretty proud. I was not kidnapped, but
a college roommate of mine was. While he was still
in Bosnia. He was part of an amateur football team

(26:15):
when he was fifteen. They were practicing in a football
field when several vans showed up and at gunpoint dragged
everyone into the vans. They were driven to a secluded
wooded area and held there for several days. I don't
remember what the kidnappers were after, if it was ransom
or something political. He told me that one night they

(26:37):
were sitting around the fire, he was looking at one
of his kidnappers and his head exploded. Soon another kidnappers
had explodes. The gunmen all get up and soon a
firefight ensues. Apparently the military had showed up with snipers.
It sounds amazing, but he was a very serious type
of person, the kind of person that you know seen

(27:00):
too much. My closest friend described an experience that haunts
her to this day, even as a mother now. She
was abducted from her job when she was fourteen. The
guy intended to rob the place, but he instead took

(27:21):
the money and her, blindfolding and binding her. He drove
around town telling her that he was going to end her.
Instead of crying, she calmly explained that he didn't have
to do that. The robber became very emotional, yet she
talked him through it. She told me that he bounced
from angry and frustrated to remorseful and inconsolable. They drove

(27:45):
around town for a few hours, all the while she
was blindfolded and her wrists were bound. By this time,
the police were looking for her, and by three am,
the robber decided to bring her back to work. The
police were waiting, and he was taken into to thee.
She suffered from incredible anxiety after that. For a long time,

(28:06):
being alone was almost impossible for her to do without
breaking down and crying. Even in college, seeing someone walk
in a crosswalk while she was waiting in a street
light made her hyperventilate. It got bad when she had
painkillers from her wisdom teeth removed. If the stress was
too much for her to handle, she would take a pill.
She confessed this to her boyfriend, who just flushed the

(28:28):
pills down the toilet. I'm absolutely amazed how she's turned out.
She's well adjusted and raising her two children without problem.
I couldn't imagine talking someone out of taking my life.
My sister is doing time for kidnapping, and here's her story.

(28:53):
She's a meth addict and rolls with a biker crowd.
One day, she gets a call from one of these
guys saying that they have a problem and need her.
So she goes to the address and it's a hotel.
She goes to the room and inside is two tied
up girls and a tweaked out biker. He tells her
that he's missing three ounces of glass and these three

(29:15):
are the only ones that have been in the room.
He doesn't want to physically beat it out of them
because they are chicks and he's on parole. My sister
tells him to gather all their possessions they had been
partying for a few days and put it in her trunk.
After that's done, she tells him to take it to
a safe house and thoroughly go through their things. So

(29:37):
off he goes, and then my sister starts interrogating them.
Both girls over eighteen, younger than twenty one. They say
they have no idea what's going on. The guy calls
and says there's nothing in their gear, so he comes
back to the hotel. They decide to get the girls
to the house and the interrogation gets intense. They go

(29:58):
to the house and the girls are handcut in the basement.
My sister and another old lady go to town on
these chicks. Nothing super bad but punching, spitting, verbal assaults,
et cetera. Well, a day goes by and the girls
don't have anything to say. The guy goes back to
the hotel and lo and behold, the dope was in

(30:19):
the vent in the bathroom. Guy goes back to the
house and they're going to let the girls go. The
girls are told not to say anything, and they agree
and are released. One girl takes off and goes right
to the police. The other girl asks if she can
stay and get high. Sis got two and a half
years and gets out in May of this year. I

(30:45):
have not personally been abducted, but when my mom was younger,
I think about nine years old she was abducted. She
used to walk to church on Sundays, which was about
a block away from her house. So she was on
her way to church when a man in a red
car pulled up beside her. He told my mom that
he was friends with her parents and they asked him

(31:06):
to drive her to church. Being a naive little girl
that she was, she believed him. She got in the
car with him, and it wasn't long before she realized
they were not going to church. He drove her to
these woods and they got out and he laid a
blanket on the ground. He told her to sit down
on it, and he told her that her parents had
asked him to talk to her about sex. She never

(31:29):
actually told me what he did to her, but she
said that she was molested. After he was done doing
whatever he did to her, he'd just got in his
car and left her in the woods all alone. He
told her that he was going to get something out
of his car and that he'd be right back. She
told me she wasn't scared or frightened at all until

(31:50):
she heard the car start and she knew that he
was leaving. She panicked a little, but then got up
and started walking back the way she came. She reached
her really busy road and followed it until she got
to a little neighborhood. She said there was a lady
checking her mail and ran to her. She told the
lady what happened, and the lady called my mom's parents,

(32:11):
and my mom's parents called the police. I was thirteen
and lived in a low income, run down area where
sex work was an everyday thing. From as young as
I can remember, I would regularly have random men asked
me if I wanted to earn some pocket money. One evening,

(32:33):
I was walking back from my friend's house, and a
couple of streets away from my house, I saw a
regular working girl that I always stopped to chat with.
Note that I grew up on the same street and
the sex workers were familiar faces to me, and I
would always talk to them anyway. This night, as I
turned the corner after speaking to the lady, a car

(32:53):
full of men and obvious sex workers stopped and two
women got out and walked toward me. I looked over
to the car and noticed the men had gone out
and were standing watching. One of the girls had a
glass bottle and smashed it on the wall and held
it up to me and told me to empty my pockets.
When I refused, she started grabbing me and trying to

(33:14):
pull me toward the car. The men were now opening
the back door for us. Then all of a sudden,
the girl I'd stopped and spoke to appeared out of
nowhere and grabbed me and ran home with me. My
dad took me to the police station, and the officer
told me this is usually how working girls end up
in the game. If they had succeeded, I would have
been taken somewhere and pumped full of drugs until I

(33:37):
was hooked and repeatedly assaulted to break me in. I
never saw the sex worker again, even though she was
a regular by my street. I worry all the time
about what's happened to her. I was about eight or
nine years old walking home from my best friend's house

(33:58):
back to my home. The guy pulled up beside me,
wearing a police uniform. Seemed totally legit, but who knows.
But he was driving a super crappy sedan, like one
of those old Buick like boat cars. He's really aggressive
and assertive, saying to get in the car that I
need to go with him right now. My dad's at

(34:20):
the hospital and sent this guy to come get me.
My mom was in an accident, but he's here to
take me tour. I totally lost my cool, felt super
sketched out, and I just burst out crying. And as
this guy shouting at me to get in the car,
I panicked and just started sprinting all the way home.
I get home and my dad is watering the garden,

(34:42):
cool as anything, and I'm completely losing my mind, absolutely hysterical.
He calms me down, here's the story, and calls nine
one one. He gave them the description, and sure enough,
they catch this guy with a thirteen year old girl
in the back seat who he managed to into going
with him. When my mom was younger, my sister, who

(35:09):
was a baby at the time, was almost stolen. My
dad was at security in the airport or something, and
my mom was trying to make my sister stop being
super fussy like most babies are. This nice looking young
woman came up to my mom and offered to hold
my sister so my mom could get the luggage. My mom,
who in her defense, was tired and jetlagged, gave the

(35:32):
lady my sister to hold. The woman immediately sprinted off
with my sister, but she was caught later by security.
My mom says she was super paranoid about anyone holding
us kids for the longest time. My brother was kidnapped
in broad daylight while he and my parents were out shopping.

(35:55):
This was in Chile, late eighties. I can't remember how
old he was exactly, but I want to say around
three or four. One minute he was there, the next
he was gone. The police got involved and they searched
for him for a good long while before he was
found a few blocks away. A lot of children were
kidnapped and sold off in those days. Luckily for my brother,

(36:18):
the kidnappers didn't get very far before they realized he
had a large birthmark by his eye that would have
made him worthless. It wasn't me, but my uncle was
abducted in Cobbo a few years ago. He was walking
through a back alley near Cobba Wabbo, which he knows
now that he shouldn't have been, and two guys walked

(36:40):
up to him from the front, pulled out screwdrivers and
started yelling at him. He was hit over the head
with something that knocked him out. Next thing he remembered
was waking up tied to a chair in some room.
He was able to get out of the rope and
hop out the window. All he did was run after that.

(37:04):
It almost happened to my now wife while she was
walking home one evening and decided to take a shortcut
through an alley. It was around five or six pm
and getting dark fast. All of a sudden, a man
approaches her from behind with a knife and guides her
toward a white van with no windows in the back,
where a second man was waiting. Once he slides the

(37:27):
door open, she sees a window of opportunity and yells,
that's my purse. I don't know you, and tomahawk kicks
him in the nuts. She runs NonStop for about five
blocks and culls me, gasping for air and screaming about
what just happened to me. A long story short, They
never found the perverts, and she now carries a compact
nine millimeter. I was friends with a guy in university

(37:55):
who was kidnapped as a child. Apparently in Taiwan it
was very common for children of wealthy families to get
kidnapped for ransom money, and this is what happened to him.
Although he doesn't remember much, he did tell me that
it took a couple of days for him to get rescued,
and he was treated fairly decently. Still, the experience must

(38:15):
have taken a toll on him, since he was a
little high strung and anxious, and he was overprotective of
his little brother, despite both of them being fully grown adults.

(38:38):
Coming up. In some kidnapping cases, the victim outsmarts their abductor.
We'll look at a few quick thinking abductees who's out
of the box thinking and determination to survive help them
to escape their captors. Plus, in some cases of kidnapping,
the victims have an opportunity to escape, but don't they

(38:59):
even try to help those who abducted them in the
first place. We'll look at a few of the most
famous cases of what has become known as Stockholm syndrome
when weird darkness returns. If you've ever tried to imagine

(39:35):
what you would do in a kidnapping situation, you probably
pictured yourself as one of those cool, calm, smart victims,
And though that's usually much harder than it sounds, the
following stories are of victims who did just that and
actually outsmarted their captors. These are victims who talked their

(39:56):
way out of danger, like Benedict Cumberbatch who s a
kidnapping attempt in South Africa. And then there are other
stories of quick thinking like the little girl who faked
an asthma attack to escape her would be abductor. All
of these cases are impressive feats of bravery and will
have you taking notes just in case you ever find

(40:18):
yourself in the same scenario. Here are a few amazing
survival stories of people who outwitted their captors. It was
every parent's worst nightmare. A twelve year old Rebecca Savarice
was able to think on her toes and out smart
her would be abductor. While walking alone to school in

(40:41):
nineteen ninety four, a man came up to Rebecca and
pressed a gun into her side. He commanded her to
walk to his car. Rebecca did as she was told,
but as they got closer, she pretended to lose her breath.
Her attacker was startled, giving her enough time to run away.
He was left holding her back pack and then jumped

(41:01):
in his car and took off. Eyewitness accounts eventually led
to his capture, and it turned out that he was
responsible for the deaths of at least three other children.
In two thousand and two, Michelina Luwandowska's fiancee attacked her
with a taser, bound and gagged her, and then buried

(41:22):
her alive. It's truly a tale of staying calm in
an insanely stressful situation. After waking up in a cardboard
box underground, Michelina was able to use her engagement ring
to cut herself free. Her fiance apparently committed the crime
because he wanted complete control over their three year old

(41:43):
son and had quote grown tired of her unquote. Michelina
says she was able to survive by thinking about getting
back to her child. Years before he became the crime
solving super detective Sherlock Holmes or so super hero crime
fighter Doctor Strange, Benedict Cumberbatch had to outsmart criminals in

(42:06):
real life. In two thousand and five, he was filming
the mini series The Ends of the Earth in South
Africa and was traveling back to his hotel after a
scuba diving lesson. The car ended up getting a flat
tire and when he actress Denise black and a friend
pulled over to fix it. They were ambushed by carjackers.

(42:27):
The men frisked them, tied them up, and forced them
into the car. After driving for a while, they stopped
and tried to force Cumberbatch into the trunk. Thinking quickly, though,
he told them that he had a medical condition that
would cause him to have a seizure if he were
forced into the small space. I will be a dead
Englishman in your car. Not good, he said. The ploy worked,

(42:50):
and the carjackers released Cumberbatch and his friends. He said
the ordeal inspired him to live a life less ordinary,
even in the middle of a horrifying nightmare. Jennifer Holiday
was able to keep her wits about her while driving
with her eighteen year old cousin Anna in East Texas.

(43:11):
The women were suddenly ambushed by gunfire. Jennifer had been
badly wounded in the arm, and the shooter approached the
car to inflict more damage. He shot Anna in the head,
killing her, and then dragged Jennifer into the woods to
assault and torture her. With no help in sight, Jennifer
knew her only chance at survival was to ask to

(43:32):
go to her attacker's house. He was clearly on drugs,
and if she could maintain control over him, she knew
she'd be able to get away. After arriving at the house,
she convinced him that he had actually saved her from
a car wreck. She was then able to call nine
one one right in front of him, and while keeping
her voice completely calm, made the dispatcher realize she was

(43:54):
in the presence of her attacker. Jennifer survived the ordeal
and the man was captured. In two thousand and eight,
a New York Times reporter and his translator escaped from
the Taliban, thanks in part to a board game after
being captured in Afghanistan while doing research for a book.

(44:15):
David Road, his translator to Here, and their driver were
held in Pakistan while their captors made demands to the US.
After seven months, their driver had turned against them and
they knew that they had to make an escape. To
Hear kept the guards up late one night playing Chika,
a game similar to Parcheesi, with the guards peacefully passed out.

(44:38):
Road and to Hear climbed over a five foot high
wall and used a rope that they'd hidden days earlier
to climb down and get away. When pirates decided to
hijack a fishing vessel owned by Hassan Khalil. They messed
with the wrong guy. Khalil's vessel and another ship were
overtaken by pirates near the coast of Yemen in two

(45:00):
thousand and nine. After trying to negotiate with the pirates unsuccessfully,
he hired a group of mercenaries. Khalil paid one pirate
ten thousand dollars with the promise of more money, and
was allowed to reboard the ship to check on his crew.
Once back on the ship, he and his crew attacked
the pirates with guns, knives, and tools. Eight pirates were

(45:22):
delivered to the authorities, while two were killed in the
speak attack. In two thousand and seven, a gunman took
over an Air Mauritania flight, demanding to be taken to
France to seek asylum for unknown reasons. The pilot, Amado
Mohammed Lemin, realized that the hijacker spoke no French and

(45:44):
decided to use that against him. He spoke over the
intercom in French, supposedly telling the crew and passengers to
prepare for turbulence. With the gunman off balance, the crew
had an opportunity to toss boiling water on him before
he was Overpaswer by ten people. The plane was able
to land safely and passengers were treated for only minor injuries.

(46:08):
This next story proves that anyone can be disarmed by
a celebrity. Johnny Wisemueller, who played Tarzan in twelve different
films and created the iconic characters ape like Yell, was
visiting Cuba during the revolution. While he and some friends
were out golfing, they suddenly found their cart surrounded by

(46:29):
rebel soldiers pointing guns at them. After trying to communicate
that he was the famous actor known for playing Tarzan,
Weismuller switched gears and let out one of his huge
Tarzan yells. The starstruck rebels put down their guns and
yelled Tarzan, Tarzan weise Mueller and his friends were escorted

(46:49):
back to their hotel completely unharmed. In this next case,
a kidnapper trusted his prisoner to set up a brand
new cell phone for him, and it totally backfired. Japanese
journalist Kosuki Sunioka was captured in Afghanistan in twenty ten.

(47:10):
After five months of captivity, he was losing hope of
ever getting home. Then, one of his kidnappers was having
trouble setting up his new Nokia and asked Sunioka for help.
Sunioka was able to convince him to get an Internet connection,
which he then used to tweet his location while quote
unquote setting up the phone. He was freed a few

(47:32):
days later, and in this story, the man showed absolutely
no fear in the face of danger and luckily it worked.
While in Seattle visiting his mother, the victim was riding
a city bus near the Central District area. He noticed
a suspicious teenager trying to hide his face, and when

(47:54):
the man reached his stop, the teen followed him. When
the man turned around on the street, the team pulled
again out of a paper bag. Unfazed, the man said,
what are you going to do with that pistol? He
threatened to fight back if he was robbed, and the
would be robber realized he was in way over his head.

(48:14):
He hid the gun and parted ways with the man
at the next street corner. Whenever terrible cases of kidnapping

(48:40):
or hostage taking come to light, people ask why didn't
they try to escape? Tragically, in many cases, hostages kidnapping
victims or members of cults cooperated with their tormentors and
even resisted the police sent to rescue them, even though
they faced unimaginable horrors through torture, dehumanization, and disconnection from

(49:06):
the outside world. Many of these victims have been labeled
brainwashed by the people who turned their world upside down.
Victims of Stockholm syndrome will later explain that they felt
completely unable to resist the criminals who kidnap them. Cult
leaders have also been known to exact similar brainwashing methods

(49:27):
on their followers to gain complete control over their subjects,
even to the point of inciting them to murder or
mass suicide. These are some of the most shocking stories
of people being brainwashed, where the men and women who
were victimized lost not only their free will, but their
humanity entirely. Let's begin with the incident which gave Stockholm

(49:52):
syndrome its name. It took place during a bank robbery
in nineteen seventy three at the normal Stari Bank in Stockholm, Sweden.
An escaped convict kept four hostages trapped inside the bank's vault.
By the second day inside the vault, police on the
scene started to have to deal with hostages who were brainwashed.

(50:13):
The hostages were on a first name basis with their
captor and responded to the police with hostility. When the
hostage situation finally ended, the four hostages hugged their captor
to protect him from police. They even collected money for
their captor's defense attorney. Months later, psychologists coined the term

(50:34):
Stockholm syndrome for the bond that was formed between the
hostages and their captor. The tragic story of fourteen year
old Elizabeth Smart captured the fears and sympathy of America
after she was taken from her Salt Lake City home
one night and wasn't found until nine months later, as
her captor, Brian Mitchell, moved her all over the country,

(50:57):
torturing and raping her. While Mitchell may not have purposely
taken lengths to brainwash Smart, the level of torture and
neglect she faced certainly had an impact after her rescue,
and during her testimony, she stated that she had opportunities
to escape while held captive, but chose not to take them.

(51:17):
At one point, Smart was questioned by a police officer
who had received a tip that she had been spotted,
but she chose not to scream for help or try
to run away. When questioned about this incident in interviews later,
she said, I was under threat of my life. I
was under threat of my family's life, and those two
threats right there are stronger than Chain's for me. It

(51:40):
is wrong for any person to ever judge someone in
any situation saying well, why didn't you try to run?
Why didn't you scream? Why didn't you try to do? Something?
That is so wrong and frankly offensive to even ask
that question. A man blamed with putting an end to
the idealism and hope of the nineteen sixty Charles Manson

(52:01):
stands out in this list because he did not kidnap people,
nor did he brainwash his followers into killing themselves, but
instead he convinced them to murder others in what became
known as the Manson family killings. Following two prison stents
for lesser crimes, Manson began collecting his followers, mostly women

(52:23):
with troubled pasts. He asked his followers to give up
their ego to demonstrate self sacrifice, and he told them
about the future of the family, living in an underground
paradise and then reappearing to seize control of the nation.
He sought to keep his group's gender ratio at five
to one so that the women could take care of

(52:44):
the men's every desire. Manson would hammer his ideas into
his followers heads, then consolidate his control by dosing them
with LSD, and then performing sermons to his drug adult audience,
preaching his racist, misogynist, and ultimately murderous beliefs. In the end,
Manson successfully convinced his followers that the only way to

(53:07):
bring about Helter Skelter, the eventual apocalyptic race war that
he believed would lead to his world takeover, was to
kill innocent people. The Family, as they were called, carried
out seven murders, including the murder of up and coming
actress Sharon Tate, who was pregnant at the time. As
a result, Manson was sentenced to death, later reduced to

(53:30):
life imprisonment after the death penalty was abolished in California. J. C.
Duggard was kidnapped in nineteen ninety one when she was
eleven years old and wasn't released until two thousand and nine.
Duggard's captor, Philip greg Garrido, filled Duggard's head with his
own insanity, telling her of the demon angels who let

(53:52):
him take Duggard so that she could help him with
his sexual problems that society condemned those being child mo
station and rape. He would also make Duggard listen for
the voices that he himself heard speaking to him from
within his house walls. While Garrito was already married, many
psychiatrists believed that in jc's mind, her relationship with her

(54:15):
twisted captor was similar to marriage, in part because the
pair had two children together. Duggard was so controlled by
Gerrito that when police arrived to investigate and arrest Gerrito,
they were met by JC, who introduced herself with her
false identity Alyssa. Police noted that while Duggard was aware
that Garrido was a sex offender, she said that he

(54:38):
was a changed man and was a great person and
good with her kids. When pressed for details, Duggard became
extremely defensive and agitated, demanding to know why she was
being interrogated, even lying to protect Garrito. She claimed to
be a formerly abused wife who was unhiding from her
violent husband at Gerrito's house. Police officer Ali Jacobs noted

(55:03):
that Duggard's two children ages eleven and fifteen, appeared to
be brainwashed by Grito as well, as they stared at
their father like God, adding they had this weird look
in their eyes, like brainwashed zombies. It was only after
Garrido's arrest that jac admitted I adapted to survive my circumstances.

(55:26):
In twenty fourteen, one hundred and forty eight Kurdish boys
were held hostage by the terrorist group known as ISIS
for five months in Syria. While Kurds and the Sunni
ISIS are sworn enemies, the boys were subjected to such
extreme brainwashing that even after their release, they still believed
many of the teachings they received from their captors. Following

(55:49):
his return, one boy, who gave himself the pseudonym John, said,
I must speak the truth. The Islamic state are right,
and all the things they taught me are true. He
then added, I am convinced they are right. The boys
were brainwashed with constant forced education about the ISIS belief system,
paired with a brutal torture, including being tied up and

(56:12):
having members of ISIS practice karate and kickboxing on the children.
They were also forced to watch videos of the infamous
Isis massacre videos. Jean explains that his liberal upbringing has
kept him from joining Isis now voluntarily, but admits that
he still holds the beliefs he was taught to be true.

(56:32):
Sometimes I'm confused in my mind, he said. But everything
they said they proved using passages from the Quran. In
a case that the FBI described as unparalleled in its brutality,
Colleen stan was subjected to such an unfathomable level of
physical and mental torture that a mental break was likely

(56:53):
the only thing her body and mind could do to
protect itself. After Cameron Hooker kidnapped Collie in nineteen seventy seven,
he kept her in a coffin sized box beneath his
bed for seven years. Hooker kept Colleen inside that box
for twenty three hours a day during the majority of
her captivity, forcing her into sex slavery. Hooker had such

(57:17):
control over her that she signed herself into sex slavery
voluntarily in nineteen seventy eight. She was referred to as Ka,
which served as her slave name, and was only allowed
to call Hooker master. The root of Hooker's control over
Colleen was his invention of the company, which he convinced

(57:38):
her was an evil organization that was watching her and
would torture and kill her family if she should go
against Hooker's wishes or try to escape. Colleen was so
afraid to go against Hooker that even when he brought
her back to visit her family, she didn't tell them
the truth. He left her alone with her family, but

(57:58):
she never said a word about her ordeal. She claimed
Cameron was her boyfriend and that she was happy. She
spent the night and the next morning posed for a
picture with her abuser before leaving with him again. Finally,
Hooker's wife, who had been a willing accomplice in Colleen's kidnapping,
grew guilty and helped Colleen to escape. Colt brainwashing has

(58:22):
also led to horrifying ends. Heaven's Gait was an American
religious millenarium group that believed that Earth was about to
be recycled by an alien race that was traveling in
a spaceship behind the hail Bob comet, and the only
chance to survive was to leave the planet immediately. The

(58:43):
group's leader, Marshall Applewhite, convinced the group that suicide was
not death, but a way to turn against the next
level when it is being offered. The group believed that
in order to reach the next level, humans would have
to shed every attachment to the planet. These attachments included family, friends, money,

(59:04):
and eventually their own bodies. Separation from their family and friends,
and the constant brainwashing or thought reform of repeated lectures
and drills about the next level desensitized the Heavens Gate
members to the idea of death and suicide. Stanton Peel,
a clinical psychologist specializing in addiction treatment and theory, compared

(59:28):
the cult and its form of brainwashing to drug addiction,
saying that while the group was ultimately destructive, it must
have also been gratifying, and their beliefs may even have
had a narcosis like effect, similar to drugs or alcohol.
In the end, thirty nine members of the cult killed
themselves in nineteen ninety seven, believing that it was the

(59:49):
only way to survive the impending apocalypse they were anticipating.
Ten year old Natasha Kampuch was kidnapped as she walked
to school alone for the very first time in Vienna, Austria.
A man named Wolfgang Pricklypil captured her and took her
to a secret cellar where she stayed for more than
eight years. During her time in captivity, she was beaten,

(01:00:13):
mentally abused, and even starved so that she would be
too weak to escape. Pricklepil played intense mind games with Compusche.
She recalled in an interview, one of the worst scenes
during my captivity was when he shoved me, wearing only
a pair of panties, half starved, covered in bruises, and
with my head completely shorn, in front of the front

(01:00:35):
door and said, come on, now, run, let's see how
far you get. She continued, I was so humiliated and
filled with shame that I couldn't take a single step.
He tore me away from the door, saying, so you see,
the world out there doesn't want you anyway. Your place
is here and only here. Pricklypil also convinced Composh that

(01:00:57):
the windows and doors of his home were boot trapped
with high explosives. Eventually, when Campuch was eighteen years old,
she seized an opportunity to escape. Her escape led to
Pricklypill's death, as he laid down on a railroad track
and killed himself only hours later, a true sign of
how much he had warped Compuch's mind. When she heard

(01:01:19):
of Pricklepill's death, she mourned for him. Eleven year old
Sean Hornbeck went out for a bike ride back in
two thousand and two and wasn't seen until four years later,
when he was finally discovered by police inside the hum
of his captor, Michael J. Devlin. For four years, Hornbeck

(01:01:40):
was subjected to abuse and molestation, despite the fact that
he could have easily escaped if not for the brainwashing
he was subjected to. During his imprisonment, Hornback even had
access to the Internet, which he could have used to
contact authorities. In an interview with People magazine, Hornbeck explained
why he didn't take his opportunities to escape. You're brainwashed.

(01:02:03):
It's as simple as that, he said. I know people
use that term a lot, but that's what happens to you.
It's like you're on autopilot, only someone else is controlling
all the switches. They control every little minute detail in
your life. Everything. And perhaps the most infamous case of
cult brainwashing, self proclaimed guru Jim Jones brainwashed nearly all

(01:02:27):
of his followers into committing suicide with the promise of
salvation and paradise. I covered the story of Jonestown more
in depth than a very recent episode of Weird Darkness.
I'll link to it in the show notes. Entire families
lived in Jonestown. The cults complex and the adult members
not only willingly took their lives, but killed their children

(01:02:47):
as well. Three hundred of the nine hundred nine people
who died were children. Children who didn't voluntarily commit suicide
were injected with cyanide. In the Haunting Jones Town death tapes,
leader Jim Jones can be heard telling his congregation, this
is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self destructive suicide.

(01:03:11):
The fact that they believed him enough to take their
own lives and those of their children is a sign
of how much power Jones had over his entire congregation.

(01:03:32):
Coming up. Perhaps the most famous case of Stockholm syndrome,
in which individuals who are kidnapped or taken hostage form
feelings of trust and affection for their captors is certainly
the case of Patty Hurst, the granddaughter of former media
mogul William Randolph Hurst. Patty was kidnapped in nineteen seventy

(01:03:53):
four by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. We'll look at
her story next on Wi Darkness. A beautiful California co

(01:04:26):
ed was kidnapped in nineteen seventy four, and two months
later she burst into a bank with a machine gun.
In the eyes of America, Patty Hurst quickly went from
a sympathetic victim to a criminal terrorist. But was she
truly guilty Patty Hurst images showed her aiming a gun,

(01:04:49):
barking orders in a bank robbery, and committing crimes next
to domestic terrorists, but many argue that Patty Hurst suffered
from the famous Stockholm syndrome. Patty Hurst was a wealthy
heiress like Barbara Hutton, the original poor little rich girl.
Yet the jurors in Patty's trial didn't go easy on her,

(01:05:11):
nor did they buy her claim that the radical leftists
in the Symbionese Liberation Army forced her to commit crimes.
And she definitely did commit a lot of crimes. Patty
robbed three banks, fired a gun on a crowded LA street,
and even made bombs to blow up the police. But

(01:05:31):
when the FBI finally captured Patty Hurst, she only weighed
eighty seven pounds and she lost a shocking eighteen IQ
points in just eighteen months. Patty Hurst isn't the only
hostage who was brainwashed, and shockingly, what happened to Patty
Hurst could have happened to just about anyone. Patty Hurst,

(01:05:54):
heiress to the enormous Hurst Publishing fortune, was violently kidnapped
on February fourth, nineteen seventy four. The kidnappers knocked on
her door around nine o'clock before they burst in with
guns drawn. They grabbed Patty, a nineteen year old college student,
and beat up her fiance. Finally, they threw Patty into
the trunk of their car and drove off. Patty Hurst's

(01:06:18):
kidnapping became one of the biggest news stories of the
nineteen seventies. In the two years that followed, she appeared
on the cover of Newsweek seven times, and Patty's kidnapping
was only the beginning. Soon her kidnappers were sending recorded
messages to the media demanding millions of dollars for her release,
and the story only got stranger after April fifteenth, nineteen

(01:06:42):
seventy four, when Patty Hurst burst into San Francisco's Hibernia
Bank wielding a machine gun. After she was dragged from
her apartment and thrown into the trunk of a car.
She was taken to a house where she was locked
in a closet and left there for days. Her hands
were bound, she was blindfolded, there was no light in

(01:07:03):
the closet. For ten days, Paddy barely ate. She had
no place to urinate or defecate except in the closet,
which was only three feet wide, and she didn't know
anything about the people who had kidnapped her. For a week,
no one talked to Patty except for one man who

(01:07:23):
would come in to record her for ransom messages. When
her kidnappers finally let Patty out of the closet, they
told her that she was going to rob a bank
with them. Patty Hurst was the granddaughter of William randolphurst.
Hurst was a businessman who built a media empire at
the end of the nineteenth century and then built an

(01:07:44):
enormous castle on the California coast in the twentieth century
that he named after himself. Orsonwell's classic film Citizen Kane
was based on Hurst's life, and it wasn't a coincidence
that Patty shared the last name of one of America's
richest businessmen. In fact, Patty was targeted by the SLA

(01:08:06):
because she was a hearst. The SLA hoped that the
Hurst family wealth and power would convince the police to
release two SLA members who had been arrested for killing
Oakland's first black superintendent. But Patty's family was not as
wealthy as her deceased grandfather. Her father took out a

(01:08:26):
loan of two million dollars to have his daughter released,
but the SLA refused to let Patty go. While the
FBI launched a massive search to find Patty Hurst, her
kidnappers were whispering to Patty that her family had abandoned her.
They told her that their organization, the Symbionese Liberation Army SLA,

(01:08:47):
wanted to help the poor. They demanded that her family
distribute seventy dollars worth of food to every hungry Californian,
which would have cost four hundred million dollars. When Randolph Hurst,
Patty's his father, donated two million dollars worth of food
to impoverished people in the Bay Area, Patty only heard
that her family had refused the demand. Suddenly, the terrified

(01:09:11):
teenager started to wonder if the SLA was right about
the capitalist state, But she also didn't have a choice.
She had been kidnapped and her captors were ordering her
to work with them or die. The leader of the
SLA was a man named Donald de Friese, code name Chink.

(01:09:32):
He'd been sent to prison in nineteen sixty nine after
robbing a bank. In nineteen seventy three, Defrieze escaped and
founded the SLA. Defrieze was the man who forced Patty
to record ransom messages he repeatedly threatened to kill his
teenage captive. He also gave her SLA political tracts to
read in her closet with a flashlight, and in April

(01:09:54):
of nineteen seventy four, Defrize told Patty that it was
time to make a choice. Pattyhurst later said, the Freeze
told me that the War Council had decided or was
thinking about killing me or me staying with them, and
that I better start thinking about that as a possibility.
Patty decided that she wanted to live, so she said,

(01:10:15):
I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs. She promised
to fight for the SLA, and they removed her blindfold
and told her that she was an SLA member. The
SLA released the next tape of Patty Hurst on April third,
nineteen seventy four. In the recording, Patty announced that she

(01:10:36):
had joined the SLA, she believed in their cause and
she was going to fight for the freedom of oppressed people.
In the tape, Patty said, I have been given the
choice of one being released in a safe area, or
two joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and
fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people.

(01:10:57):
I have chosen to stay and fight. Of course, the
tape wasn't completely accurate. Patty later said the recording was
scripted and she was forced to read it, and the
choice wasn't between fighting or being released. Her only other
option was death. Even after she taped the message, Patty

(01:11:18):
was raped by members of the SLA. Still in the
minds of many Americans, Patty had gone from victim to
terrorist and it was about to get worse. That's how
Patty Hurst found herself in the Hibernia bank holding a
machine gun on April fifteenth, nineteen seventy four. The SLA

(01:11:40):
needed money, and they needed to show off their newest recruit,
the high profile Heiress. In bank surveillance cameras, Hurst was
shown clearly holding a rifle. During the robbery, De Frieze
shot two people before successfully making off with more than
ten thousand dollars, but was Patty go guilty. In her autobiography,

(01:12:02):
she wrote, I sensed that I had, in fact crossed
over some sharp line of demarcation for me. Suddenly it
became plain there was no turning back, and the US
Attorney General agreed. After the bank robbery, he said that
Hurst was a common criminal. Suddenly she wasn't a victim.
She was a criminal that the FBI wanted to apprehend

(01:12:25):
by any means necessary. The FBI manhunt to rescue Patty
Hurst quickly turned into a search for the SLA, with
Patty as its newest member. The SLA was classified as
a domestic terrorist organization and their activities didn't stop with
robbing the Hibernia Bank. A month after the robbery, on

(01:12:46):
May sixteenth, nineteen seventy four, Patty Hurst was spotted again
in Los Angeles, but she didn't look like a victim.
She fired a gun on a crowded street outside of
a sporting goods store. Luckily, no one was injured. The
Next day, the LAPD surrounded a house where SLA members
were hiding. The entire saga was aired on live television.

(01:13:09):
As the police fired into the house and the SLA
returned fire, no one knew if Patty Hurst was inside.
Then the building burst into flames, killing six SLA members,
but Patty Hurst wasn't one of them. In fact, she
was watching the fiery shootout from a motel near Disneyland.

(01:13:30):
Patty Hurst spent the next year on the run from
the FBI with other SLA members. After watching six SLA
members die on TV, Patty was even more afraid she
had committed crimes with the SLA, and the FBI had
no idea if she was in the house when they
opened fire, eventually killing everyone inside. Clearly they weren't trying

(01:13:52):
to rescue her anymore. In her autobiography, Patty wrote, I
was convinced there was no way I would come out
in the open now without the police or the FBI
gunning me down as they had the others. The American
public had stopped seeing Patty as a victim. The day
after she helped rob the Hibernia bank, the homeowner removed

(01:14:12):
that God Bless you Patty sign from outside his house.
Patty herself may have even wondered if she was innocent
during those long months running from the FBI, and she
may have been right. As soon as she was captured,
she was put on trial for bank robbery. The FBI
finally tracked down Patty Hurst on September eighteenth, nineteen seventy five,

(01:14:34):
more than eighteen months after she'd been kidnapped. She'd been
on the run for over a year trying to avoid capture,
and she'd continued to commit crimes. After the initial robbery
of the Hibernia Bank, Patty robbed two more banks. She
fired shots on a street in Los Angeles. She helped
the SLA set off bombs in northern California. After the

(01:14:58):
FBI captured her, Patty was arrest stoed, and charged with
bank robberies and other crimes. By the following spring, she
was defending herself in court in what was quickly becoming
the trial of the century, But it still wasn't clear
if anyone would believe that Patty was innocent. Patty's trial
focused on a central question, was she really a member

(01:15:19):
of the SLA or had she only joined under duress.
No one denied that Patty had been kidnapped in February
of nineteen seventy four, but by April of that year,
images of Patty on Grainy Bank surveillance cameras were everywhere
in the media. Patty was holding a gun, she was
shouting orders. She was working with the same people who

(01:15:41):
had kidnapped her. Patty's lawyer argued that she was brainwashed,
that she was a victim of Stockholm syndrome. The head
of UCLA's psychiatry department testified that Patty had been markedly
damaged by the traumatic neurosis violently induced in her by
the SLA, or, in simpler terms, Patty was a victim.

(01:16:03):
She only committed crimes under the threat of death, and
there was serious evidence that Patty had suffered. She had
lost eighteen IQ points, she weighed only eighty seven pounds.
She was, according to an expert psychiatrist, a low IQ
low effect zombie. But the jury didn't believe Patty had

(01:16:24):
been brainwashed. They saw her as a criminal, a committed
member of the SLA, and the key piece of evidence
in her trial was a tiny monkey charm that Patty
was carrying when she was arrested by the FBI. One
of Patty's captors was a man named Willie Wolf. He
was one of the men who raped Patty while she

(01:16:45):
was being held in the closet, and according to other
SLA members, Patty fell in love with Willie. He gave
her the monkey charm before he was killed in the
LAPD shootout in May of nineteen seventy four. Patty kept
the charm for over a year. Was it proof that
she truly loved Willie? The jury believed it was. According

(01:17:09):
to one juror, everyone's heart went out to her. How
could you help it? We felt overwhelming sympathy for her.
But as soon as the jury heard about the charm,
everything changed. One female juror said, that was what changed
my mind. I really saw how much she was lying.
It just had to be lying through and through. In

(01:17:32):
nineteen seventy six, Patty Hurst was sentenced to thirty five
years in prison. Patty Hurst's case is the textbook definition
of Stockholm syndrome, where hostages began to identify with their captors,
often in order to protect themselves. In a matter of weeks,
Patty went from being a normal college student to a

(01:17:54):
captive locked in a closet where she was raped and
beaten to a gun wielding bank robber. Today, the shift
in Patty's behavior is understood as a response to psychological torment,
but at the time, Stockholm syndrome was relatively new. It
had only been identified in nineteen seventy three, and the

(01:18:14):
defense failed to convince the jury at Patty's trial. To
those on her side, Patty's conviction for bank robbery was
simply another way she was victimized by society. The SLA
was certainly guilty, but the FBI, the jurors, and the
American public were all quick to see Patty as a
common criminal rather than a teenage girl trying to survive

(01:18:37):
a terrifying ordeal. In nineteen seventy nine, President Jimmy Carter
commuted Patty's sentence, freeing her after twenty two months in jail,
and President Bill Clinton pardoned Hurst on his last day
in office. After such a bizarre and unfathomable couple of years,
it's understandable Paddy would want to retire from the public

(01:19:00):
and try to live something of a normal life, as
normal a life as a multimillion dollar heiress could have anyway.
Two months after her release from prison, she married Bernard
Lee Shaw, a policeman who had protected her during her
time on bail, and they remained married until his death
in twenty thirteen. Together they had two daughters, Gillian and Lydia,

(01:19:23):
the latter of whom married actor Chris Hardwick in twenty sixteen.
Patty released her memoir Every Secret Thing in nineteen eighty one.
It also appeared in a number of films made by
director John Waters, including Serial Mom, Cry Baby Peckers, and
Cecil B Demented. Nowadays, Patty often occupies her time with

(01:19:46):
dog related activities, having competed in a number of dog
shows where she has taken home top prize more than once.

(01:20:08):
Thanks for listening. If you like the podcast, please tell
someone about it. Recommend Weird Darkness to your friends, family,
and co workers who love the paranormal, horror stories or
a true crime like you do. All stories in Weird
Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and
you can find source links or links to the authors
in the show notes. The First US Kidnapping for Ransom

(01:20:32):
and True Stories of Abduction were both written by Amanda
sed lack Kevner. True Cases of Stockholm Syndrome was written
by Jonathan Sherman. The Brainwashing of Patty Hurst was written
by Genevieve Carlton. They Outsmarted their Kidnappers was written by
Christina Sanza and the fictional story that I began the

(01:20:52):
podcast with the kidnap was written by Rahesh K. Weird
Darkness theme by Alibi Music. And now that we're coming
out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little
light Galatians five, verses twenty two and twenty three. But
the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,

(01:21:19):
and self control. Against such things, there is no law.
And a final thought from Earl Nightingale, never give up
on a dream just because of the time it'll take
to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway. I'm Darren Marler.

(01:21:41):
Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

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