Most Famous Child Kidnappings We Can’t Forget
John Swart / AP Photo
It’s a certain kind of horror story, one that’s all too easy to translate to your own life, if you’re a parent. The child at the bus stop. The one who was riding her bike. The teen, or the infant, asleep in bed.
While the equation is more or less the same — an innocent child, met with evil or greed — the results vary. Some return scarred but alive. Many don’t. And still others don’t make headlines at all. Perhaps the only silver lining is that the kind of kidnapping or child abduction we fear most, by a stranger, is the exception. They account for less than 1 percent of all missing children.
Still, these are the stories we just can’t shake. Not only do they tell the cruelties of child kidnappings but also the heroic acts that led to systems (like the AMBER Alert) now in place to help missing persons.
Jayme Closs
Date of Disappearance: Oct. 15, 2018
Date Found: Jan. 10, 2019
The Story Behind the Kidnapping
“It was the situation every parent fears — and one that experts say is exceedingly rare: a targeted attack on a child by a total stranger,” wrote Matt Furber and Mitch Smith in The New York Times. The disappearance of 13-year-old Jayme Closs, and the murder of her parents, in their rural Barron, Wisconsin, home, baffled law enforcement when it happened on Oct. 15, 2018.
Then, after 88 days, Closs escaped captivity and got help from a woman who happened to be walking her dog nearby. Closs had been held by 21-year-old Jake Patterson, a local loner who painstakingly planned her abduction after seeing her at a middle school bus stop. Patterson has since pled guilty to homicide and kidnapping.
Amanda Berry
Date of Disappearance: April 21, 2003
Date Found: May 6, 2013
The Story Behind the Kidnapping
On May 6, 2013, three separate missing persons cases were solved at once, when Charles Ramsey heard a woman screaming for help, broke down the door of the shabby house next door in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood and let the woman, Amanda Berry, call 911.
Berry was one of three abducted women being held captive by Ariel Castro in his basement. She disappeared the day before her 17th birthday and was featured on “America’s Most Wanted.” During her captivity, Berry gave birth to a daughter, Jocelyn. Castro was confirmed as the father. After pleading guilty to 937 different charges, Castro hung himself in prison. The home on Seymour Avenue — known as the “House of Horrors” — has since been replaced with a garden.