I spent a day with KIDNAPPING SURVIVORS

kidnapping the action of abducting someone and holding them hostage the first widely covered kidnapping recorded in u.s history can be traced back to the case of charlie and walter ross two little boys who were abducted in front of their house in 1874 for ransom kidnappings usually fall into three general types abductions by family members abductions by men for monetary ransom or physical exploitation and more rarely children abducted by women who intend to keep and raise them as their own my name is anthony padilla and today i'm going to be sitting down with kidnapping survivors to learn what it's really like to live through such a traumatic and earth-shattering event where these kidnapping survivors able to come out the other side of their heinous abduction with a newfound drive to experience all the joy that life has to offer or do they live every day deeply tormented by the sadistic evil they've experienced [Music] hello alicia hi jan hi anthony thank you so much for coming on and teaching me about the world of kidnapping survivors glad i'm here what do you consider yourself a survivor incredibly resilient motivational speaker an internet safety expert a missing a victim persons advocate and an abduction survivor i consider myself both of those things i consider myself also a thriver i like that you're not just a survivor you're a thriver yeah how old were you when you were kidnapped and do you recall the events that that actually led up to the kidnapping itself i remember when this new family moved into our into our neighborhood and uh we met them for the first time at church i was nine fast forward you know two and a half years of doing so many hundreds of activities with the family that has now become our best friends and like family the dad of this family would stop at our house and pick us up and take us all to school so this one morning he comes to the back door like he always did and he says hey my mom's there my dad's already gone to work and he says marianne i've got this uh client i have to go see about some furniture i arranged that i can take jan and we can go out there and i can teach her some more about horseback riding yeah what a great opportunity right yeah exactly it's a school night my mom's like no not today she has piano jan has piano after school it's a school night but of course i'm very persuasive she finally caved in okay all right you pick her up from piano i'll get her there and then make sure she's home i was 13 years old and this was back in 2001 and 2002. this was really the start of the internet entering the hall so i spent a lot of time online talking to my friends from school and most importantly i felt safe right your parents nearby you're safe i went into a chat room with my friends and somebody messaged me who i thought was a boy around my own age after about eight or nine months of this communication back and forth i agreed to meet him new year's day 2002 we were having a family meal i asked my mother if i could be excused from the table got up from the table and asked her if i could go upstairs to lie down and she said yes but instead i walked outside of my front door to meet this person who i thought was my friend i got in this car he handed me my allergy pill what looked like an allergy cook and i took it and off we went and the next thing i remember was i woke up in the back of a moving motorhome my wrists and my ankles were strapped to the bed and there was a like an intercom looking um i call it a box that was sitting by the pillow and that's i woke up to the sound of that voice you know they kept calling me female companion they never said my name they said that we've been watching you since you were born we know what kind of food you love we know your favorite candy bars we know what your you know this mission that you're supposed to accomplish to have a baby to save our dying planet i mean these words are coming out of this box over the course of two and three days and i i have i'm still like i don't even know what they're talking about i mean i just it just repeats itself over and over again the motorhome's moving i fall back to sleep in a deep sleep and then i wake up and the restraints are off of me and and the box is like you may get up and go to the bathroom and go to the fridge and get your you know tuna fish sandwich or whatever right i mean it sounds so funny in some ways but it was so it was so um effective and terrifying and and it was complete control you must have felt like you were just constantly in a dream state that was kind of the way it felt and so when they when i wa you know when they told me that now was the time that i would meet the male companion you know they've been calling me female companion for all these hours and hours of time and that i was to get up and i was to walk to the front of the motorhome and there i would meet the male companion and you had no idea who would be at that point right right i thought i had been kidnapped by a ufo and so when i go up to the front of the motorhome and here he is laying on the little motor home bed covered in blood cut i thought he was dead you must have had a huge sense of relief and seeing him then totally it was like not being alone in the world anymore and here was somebody that loved me here was somebody that could take care of me he played the part perfectly as he came out of this state and i'm like crying and i'm like oh he's not dead you know and he's covered with blood and he's looking at his hands and his arms and he's like what what was that white light did you did you remember seeing that light that white light that was coming out of the sky and i'm like no and he's like the car went out of control and i tried to save you and tried to open the window and oh i must have gotten cut by the glass and what's happening and so i told him what was happening and in this case you were the one in control because you knew more information than him yes that was exactly how he got that to happen i walked outside of my front door to meet this person who i thought was my friend in that moment this little voice spoke up and by that i mean my intuition not that i've heard voices but my intuition spoke up and it said alicia turn around this is dangerous go home now and for whatever reason i heard it that time i listened to it and i went to turn around and then i heard my name being called and the next thing i knew i was in the car and this man was squeezing my hand so tightly that i thought it was broken and he was barking commands at me be good quiet the trunk stand out for you and he drove five hours from pittsburgh pennsylvania to his house in virginia before we learned more about the world of kidnapping survivors then he turned on the light and blanketing the walls were all these torture devices if she didn't want to do the mission then i would her and then i would myself he forced me to look at him and he said this is going to be really hard for you it's okay to cry i just wanted to take a quick moment to once again thank all of you so much for keeping the comments on these videos so overwhelmingly empathetic as i cover topics that are sensitive like this one i've mentioned it before but the guests in these videos feel comfortable sharing their deeply personal experiences in part due to the outpouring of love and support you're all so wonderful at sharing and i just think you as a fan of this series are just the best there's no other way to put it seriously thank you i sound like a broken record but i don't care and of course check out the resources down in the description below to help prevent others from experiencing the traumas discussed in this video that's all i wanted to say now back to learning about the world of kidnapping survivors and i remember the sat down in the car stopping him dragging me in this house pulling me down a flight of stairs and at the bottom of the stairs there's this wooden door in the basement with a padlock on it he unlocked that padlock pushed me in his eye followed him behind and this room was pitch black you could see absolutely nothing and picked me up like i laid absolutely nothing and propped me on this table and he forced me to look at him and he said this is going to be really hard for you it's okay to cry and then he turned on the light and blanketing the walls were all these these torture devices and the media deemed this to be a dungeon and that's that's actually a very apt term for this was a dungeon this was somewhere to torture somebody after that he put a locking dog collar around my neck with another padlock and me for the first time over the next four days i was unbeaten and tortured in that basement people often ask me did you think he was going to kill you and it wasn't a question of if it was when i knew that he didn't have another another choice he had to get rid of me eventually can you remember the the fear that you experience throughout all that or or is it too painful like something that you've kind of you know pushed away to not have to think about not to experience that again i absolutely remember the emotions i remember that absolute total utter fear and helplessness i thought about my family and i knew that they were looking for me because they loved me and i knew that they were going to find me but i didn't think that they were going to find me alive and i remember feeling so helpless in that moment i i still get really emotional about this but that i couldn't comfort them were you almost feeling guilty for not being able to to let them know just pure helplessness that i wanted them to know that i was okay and that i loved them so much that i couldn't tell them that and i would probably never get to tell them that i i wanted to answer those questions for them it was just an impossible moment how were you eventually able to escape and become free again off we continued deeper getting deeper all i remember was the door got knocked down and people speaking spanish came in and grabbed him and grabbed me and put this in this little car by the time that they took us to this mexican police station and they put him somewhere in a holding cell and they put me in a little room a little small maybe six by eight foot room all of a sudden a police officer a guard of some kind came and got me out of the room and took me down to where he was being held in this very dark scene like it was down like in a basement or something but a cell you know and through the the bars of the cell he was able he was allowed to talk to me and he said i've been visited by the aliens zeta and zethra the aliens they've come to me here in the cell and they've said that we can't talk about three things and if we do we'll be vaporized oh boy we can't talk about them you know that they exist right we can't talk about you know any of the of the mission because i'm supposed to get pregnant and have a baby to save a dying planet then the third thing is that we couldn't talk about any of the relaxing pills that he would give me so at that point you still didn't know you were being kidnapped even when you were rescued oh no i had i i thought i had been taken by this ufo because i had a mission to perform and it was with him he needs to see me as a person because right now he sees me as an object and if he sees me as that person then it will be harder for him to kill me so that was my way of having power that was my way of fighting on the last day which i didn't know was the last day he said i'm beginning to like you too much tonight we're going to go for a ride and at that point i realized that this this game that i was sort of playing was working only too well he had become attached and he was going to have to kill me sooner every single moment really really really mattered because if i could get to the next moment then maybe i could get to the next and the next and the next and the next time passed and i had completely given up hope at this point i'd become sort of resigned to what was about to happen to me and i was brought back to awareness by these angry voices these these peoples something about guns and in my completely disoriented state i realized or thought that these were people who were coming to kill me i rode underneath the bed to try to hide for them he kept me chained to the floor by that locking dog collar so i dragged that heavy chain underneath the bed and tried to hide and i stayed as quiet as possible and then i heard somebody say movement over there and i watched these big groups walk from one side of the bed to the other side of the bed and this man command my crawl out put my hands up and i remember crawling out from underneath of that bed dragging that cold heavy chain behind me trying to put my hands up and cover myself and staring into the barrel of a gun and i thought this is the moment i'm this is it this is that moment that i'm going to die and then he turned around and i saw that law enforcement by what was written on the back of his jacket and all these officers rushed in cut that chain from around my neck set me free and gave me a second chance at life to go from that completely broken hopeless place to rescue is is a shock he was somebody who enjoyed hurting people he was a sadist and so he had actually live streamed what he was doing to me to other people and somebody who was viewing this video was able to recognize me as the little girl on the missing poster and relate that to the little girl in this horrible horrendous video and he ran out and called law enforcement and they were able to track him down through his ip address because of one of his screenings that he was using and it was an absolute complete total miracle something that i say a lot and survivors say this a lot is i am so lucky how long were you held captive i was held captive for four days and he was going to kill me on the day that i was rescued and that has been such an interesting point over the years because people ask me that and i swear to goodness so often their response is four days that's not that bad what that's not a response you don't say that to someone who's experienced the most traumatic thing in their life for four full days it's so strange it felt like okay am i supposed to be happy about that yes maybe it was a short time why are we adding all of these other things to make it seem less bad or more bad it was bad and that's just the way it was absolutely downplays it for people who are going through it the first time the kidnapping was i was found five weeks you know five and a half weeks later in mazatlan mexico and then there was almost a two-year period in between that time and the second kidnapping the second time that i was kidnapped i was missing for almost four months so in total almost two and a half years then yeah that i was being controlled i mean i was home for i was brought back home right but i was home right and i wasn't myself because i was totally brainwashed this whole time and now i'm turning 16 which was the magic number that i was supposed to have the child to save the dying planet and that if i didn't then of course terrible things would happen my sister would be taken and whatever the summer that i was turning 16 i had decided that i would i would tell my little sister what was going to happen and if she didn't want to do it do the mission then i would kill her and then i would kill myself i have this thought now before i kill myself or susan i better make sure that this is real that was the first time you doubted it but because i had that doubt i started to do very small things to test to see if anything bad would happen i accepted an invitation to go to a school dance i'd never accepted i'd avoided boys this whole time i'm turning six i was 16 by now and i've never been on a to a school dance and i just remember going to bed and just going this isn't real nothing's happened and it was you would think it would just be a feeling of relief but it wasn't it was a feeling of where did my four i've lost four years of my life every single emotion that had been bottled up for four years for a quarter of your life at that point all came out that's exactly right i never thought of that way but there were a lot of emotions and that was really that's when i started to talk you didn't know you were being kidnapped ever until way after the the actual events had even happened that's right have you felt like you were able to get any kind of closure after you were kidnapped it may be a resolution it may be an end to that particular segment but it is not it is not closure and last year he was released early and i remember i screamed this blood-curdling scream and i dropped my phone and my husband ran into the room and he's like oh what's wrong right he's freaking out and i hey i just picked up the phone and i handed it to him and he read what happened and he said i gotta call your mom and he called her and then i heard her do that same scream and it made me think about is that the scream that she did that night that i was missing that she couldn't find me and that she felt that sort of tear and pain again you relived it it's it's not something in the past it's still in your head like it was like it's currently happening it hurts and you recognize it but you keep on with your day that you it doesn't completely take you down that you're able to have those healthy coping mechanisms to get back up and keep going it's okay if it knocks you down right that you get back up again so that's really the process of moving on it's not getting closure it's not having it be something that's just in the past it's being able to allow yourself to feel those feelings when you feel them but then to move on with your day that you recognize it that you don't bury it that you don't hide it because it will pile up pile up pile up pile up and then it's here and then you have a bit of a breakdown and yeah people don't understand why watching a movie or doing this or doing that hurt you so much but it's because it's been building up and building up and building up building up and you haven't hoped do you feel the person who kidnapped you received a fair punishment oh no not at all he only spent 19 days in jail for all of this 19 days 19 days that was the sum total of his jail time he spent time in a mental hospital but he got released from that early as well because of course he he manipulated all of those doctors and people that he was now healed and fine and he was great absolutely not but because this was the first case people couldn't understand it he actually did a plea bargain and was able to plea out of many of the charges and it brought it down to nearly nothing it was 19 years and seven months and you would be perfectly honest when i was a teenager i was like oh my gosh in 19 years i'm gonna be an old woman and it seemed really far away yeah and it's not after the second kidnapping he's best friends with this this little girl's mom who was a single mom a psychiatric nurse he's her daughter under her nose from the age of 10 until she's 17 and at age 18 she tells a friend at school she's going to kill herself and the friend calls the mom and the mom basically drags it out of her daughter what are you talking about you're going to kill yourself what mission are you talking about you failed seven other little girls who are now women who were abused by this same man she's the only one of the seven that i know that was that had those brain washing tapes they did take him to court he was convicted of a child then went and spent less than a year in jail so 19 days for you less than a year for another instance of a almost identical story and because of that that lack of proper punishment it just happened again and again and again if you don't cut off access by putting this person in jail or that they have to live out their life in a facility or whatever then most likely they will perpetrate again and i do believe that he will go on to to offend again and that there's only so much that i can do about that that that i have to sort of take my hand off of that and let let the system do it and that was it's very difficult especially because they released him early and made this colossal mistake in many ways i actually faced him again in court i went and i gave a testimony and it was i i say it's one of the hardest things that i've done and it was walking into that room but when i was in that room i felt empowered he's back in prison and he is going to finish his sentence and going to be released on my birthday next year so and then that is something that i will have to deal with in the future that this is this is real that my birthday will come along and it's it's strange because when you have something that is traumatic that you're not looking forward to but you have something positive you're like wishing for this positive thing at the same time this negative thing is right there and it's going to make this other thing kind of suck that's going to be a really hard day and i will figure it out i will get through it i'm hoping that i'm on a stage somewhere speaking to a group of somebody so that i can i can make it better how has your day-to-day life changed since being kidnapped i was 13. i asked you how has your life changed since you were 13. yeah everything yeah i mean everything right yeah like if i i don't have a bedtime right how does it feel knowing that your story has impacted so many people there's so many laws that have changed and you've you've saved potentially hundreds thousands of lives there's really no number you can't really know how much of an impact it made i know for me specifically my parents even referenced your story they mentioned it to me and it made me more aware of the dangers it's so amazing to know that the work that i've done actually counts for something that it's not just me speaking into an empty room hoping somebody listens but that it's not only being heard it's being listened to and it's being applied what do you think should be done to prevent others from going through the experience that you had we teach children to wear their seatbelt to look both ways before they cross the street to not touch that pot because it's hot right but when it comes to online safety or or sexual abuse it becomes a very uncomfortable conversation and it is an uncomfortable conversation but that doesn't mean that you don't have it that means that it is absolutely necessary to have because this sort of crime thrives in darkness and secrecy so we need to shine a light on it and empower children it's not about making them afraid of the world it's about empowering them to make good decisions you have to be paying attention first of all so that you notice you know not just normal teenage angst but you notice things when when something is amiss you have to be on the front lines of defending those your children because they're not going to talk they're not going to tell you the manipulators are adults do you think it's important to have conversations with children frequently and let them know that this is something that needs to be talked about if something like this is happening in today's climate and world and with the kids having a cell phone they're already on the internet they already know so much that you know that i don't know if they should or they shouldn't it doesn't matter they just do you better be talking you better be talking and you better be able to honestly carry a conversation on i had a 22 year old come up to me after a speech that i gave at a university and she said i didn't know that i wasn't the only special one that grandpa had i didn't know until a cousin after grandpa had died said something about how he missed grandpa and another one of my girl cousins said well i don't miss him i don't miss being grandpa's special one and she said i looked at her and i said what did you say she said oh nothing i just grandpa always told me i was this special one and she said no grandpa told me i was his special one and then they start talking and what that meant was grandpa's gonna get in bed and gonna do because you're his special one right and they find out there's six girls cousins that have all been grandpa's special one from you know until they hit about age 16 or 17 and then it stopped and then they move on to the next one it's so disheartening to note how frequent this happens and this girl who's now 22 she said it stopped when i was 16. but i didn't know that there was anybody else i didn't know any of my cousins this is now what four five six years later that i hear my cousin say this that we start talking and then we find out they're fine six of our girl cousins we go to tell the four parents of the kids you know grandpa's children this is what grandpa was doing to us two of the parents believe them and the other two don't and she said my whole family is ripped apart and i feel like i don't have a family anymore because i brought up this terrible thing and the reason we can't fix it is because we can't talk about it and we don't know what to do if we have us if we suspect somebody in our family close to us is abusing how do you react when you get people who hear about your story and then respond by saying things like i would have never let that happen to me or you know it was so easy to escape why didn't you just do x y and z please do not ever say anything that is fruitful or victim blaming if you have nothing nice to say say nothing i i i think about that a lot try it sometime i dare you to this day people will say horrible things about me in comments people will say well how do your parents not know i blame your parents their parents fall they will attack and try to take this person down because they don't think about them as a real person right don't bully survivors they have so much to go through already that that piece of support from the community is necessary what i generally try to try to say is well i can understand your outrage i'm outraged too but you know what have you ever bought something that you got talked into and then regretted it have you ever done something um maybe when you were younger with a boy to make them like you that then you wish you hadn't done i give examples that just go straight to the point yeah we have all been manipulated even something as simple as an instagram ad that pops up and you say you know what i do want that thing you were manipulated into getting something or you were manipulated into believing you wanted that thing and it's just simple examples like that and then people start to understand and they they start to look at things differently and i said because if you can't see that this could happen to you then you missed the point of why we told and shared our story so honestly if there's anyone watching who has survived some form any form of kidnapping themselves or manipulation in that sense is there anything that you would want to say to them to know that healing takes time that you may feel literally a hundred percent one day and then the next unable to get out of bed and be in a much darker place and that is okay do not question yourself do not judge yourself take your time with yourself you've fallen down before and you got back up that strength is still in you there is a way to choose to opt out of your past experience and opt in to the rest of your life your mental health and healing is it matters and it's important and you deserve it and you can have it you deserve it and i think that there are a lot of people that probably feel like they don't deserve happiness after going through something like that and there's probably a lot of blaming you know self-blaming for allowing themselves to go through that you got to keep fighting for yourself and for your mental health and if it costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time and you have to go through various relationships to get there so be it all right you got five seconds to shout out or promote anything you want directly into camera go follow me on instagram and twitter and we'll keep you informed about abducted in plain sight the book that's coming out and how you can help save kids you can follow me on facebook twitter instagram and then also my website which has lots of videos different safety tips so i hope everybody is subscribing to anthony padilla's channel here because he's doing these amazing people that are coming in and giving the information that i think is going to save the world and i really appreciate you thank you so much jan i feel like i understand the world of being a kidnap survivor just a little bit more thank you i appreciate your time after spending the day with these incredibly brave kidnapping survivors i've come to understand just how much strength and resilience one must possess to not only experience being held captive but also to possess the immense courage required to discuss these horrifying and vulnerable experiences on camera in front of millions of viewers see you later bye guys press the like what would lockdown be without the internet i don't know we'd be knitting or something i don't even know i'd be knitting you'd be knitting yeah he would be able to share what you knitted it's so nice so many interviews i don't get to laugh you need a little comic relief every once in a while absolutely and it's so nice to be able to just laugh i love it

Channel: AnthonyPadilla

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Length: 31min 38sec (1898 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020