Unraveling The Shocking Stories Of Kidnapping Survivors: Amanda Berry And Beyond

Some news stories are hard for us to believe; others we would rather not believe. When news appeared about the escape of Amanda Berry from an unassuming house in Cleveland in 2013, after 10 years of imprisonment, many of us had both of these reactions simultaneously: How could this happen for so long with no one noticing? and How could someone do this to another person? It is indeed difficult to fathom not only how episodes of kidnapping and abuse could go unobserved for such a long time but also how a publicly friendly neighbor could be so privately inhumane.

Over the years, there have been other instances where young women have been kidnapped and their lives altered by forces beyond their control — sometimes by a disturbed individual, sometimes by a misguided organization, and sometimes by even a family member. We recall the cases of Berry and a few other victims below:

Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus

Gina DeJesus, left, and Amanda Berry, 2015.

Between August 2002 and April 2004, Berry (age 16), Michelle Knight (21), and Gina DeJesus (14) were abducted after accepting a ride home while walking on Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. The perpetrator was former bus driver Ariel Castro, who raped, tortured, and starved his captives over the course of a decade. Berry gave birth to a daughter while in captivity, with Knight also reportedly impregnated multiple times.

The three were discovered in May 2013, after Castro left the house and Berry screamed for help at the front door. After neighbors kicked the door in, Berry ran across the street with her 6-year-old daughter and called 911, summoning authorities to rescue the other two. Castro was indicted on 329 charges, including 177 counts of kidnapping and 139 counts of rape. However, one month after he was sentenced to life in prison plus 1,000 years, he was found hanging from a bedsheet in his cell.

The three women managed to rebuild their lives and cope with the trauma of their experiences. Knight authored two books, Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, A Life Reclaimed and Life After Darkness: Finding Healing and Happiness After the Cleveland Kidnapping, while Berry and DeJesus teamed up to pen Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland. Berry also became the host of a local news station's missing persons segment, and DeJesus founded The Cleveland Family Center for Missing Children and Adults not far from the house of horrors they endured for many years.

Elizabeth Smart

In Salt Lake City in 2002, while she slept in the bedroom that she shared with her sister, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped at knifepoint. She was dragged into the Utah woods and held prisoner by Brian David Mitchell, who referred to himself as Immanuel, and his wife, Wanda Barzee. Mitchell starved the girl, force-fed her drugs and alcohol, and raped her daily in an attempt to brainwash her into believing that he was a prophet. Mitchell and Barzee roamed Utah and California for almost nine months with Smart in tow before they were discovered and arrested.

The key to breaking the case was Smart's sister. Terrified, she had stayed still during the kidnapping, but she saw the man and recognized him as a former handyman hired by the Smarts. Police identified Mitchell, and his photograph was shown on the TV show America’s Most Wanted. Less than a month later, Mitchell and Barzee were caught, and Smart was returned to her family.

Despite her harrowing experience, Smart quickly picked up her life where it had left off. She finished high school, attended Brigham Young University, and became a noted advocate for kidnapping survivors. After helping to author the United States Department of Justice's 2008 handbook for kidnapping survivors, You Are Not Alone, she launched her own foundation for victims and published a memoir, My Story. The activist later introduced a podcast series and formed the Smart Defense initiative to empower women to fight back against would-be attackers.

Jaycee Dugard

In 1991, Jaycee Dugard, only 11 years old, was kidnapped outside of her home in South Lake Tahoe, California. Her stepfather witnessed her abduction and immediately contacted the authorities, but Jaycee could not be located. She had been transported almost 200 miles away to the town of Antioch, where she was held prisoner by a convicted rapist named Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy. For the next 18 years, Dugard would be their prisoner and would end up bearing two children by Garrido.

Like Mitchell, Garrido felt he had religious justification for his actions. "The Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the whole world," he wrote. While distributing fliers related to his new church, God's Desire, on the University of California campus at Berkeley, campus police asked him to register his organization. They soon discovered Garrido's criminal record, which led them to Jaycee's rescue.

Dugard would reunite with her family and attempt to reclaim her life, establishing the JAYC Foundation to help trauma victims. In 2011, she published the memoir A Stolen Life, a wrenching account of her years of captivity, and followed in 2016 with Freedom: My Book of Firsts.

Patty Hearst

The University of California at Berkeley was the site of Garrido’s capture; it was also the site, 35 years earlier, of the highest-profile kidnapping in American history. Except for the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, no other case has inspired as much media attention and commentary as the abduction of Patty Hearst.

Granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, Patricia Campbell Hearst was 19 when she was kidnapped at UC Berkeley by revolutionary activists the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) on February 4, 1974. While held by the SLA, Hearst was indoctrinated into their radical ideology, eventually adopting it as her own in taped messages to the media. She renamed herself Tania and was seen taking part in a bank robbery in San Francisco and a shoot-out at a sporting goods store in Los Angeles.

The FBI pursued and finally captured Hearst on September 18, 1975. She denied joining the revolutionaries, saying that she was drugged and coerced; nevertheless, she was found guilty of participating in the bank robbery and sentenced to prison. President Carter reduced her sentence in 1979, and President Bill Clinton pardoned her in 2001, granting her official absolution. Hearst, who compiled several screen credits and wrote a mystery novel in the years after her release, went on to success on the competitive dog show circuit. She remains a controversial figure, and some critics still consider her not entirely blameless in the crimes committed by the SLA.

Kyoko Chan Cox

Yoko Ono is most famous for being the wife of John Lennon, but before she met Lennon, she had been married twice before. Her second marriage, to filmmaker/musician/art promoter Anthony Cox, resulted in the birth of her daughter Kyoko in 1963. Kyoko became the subject of an intense custody battle and subsequent abduction in the early 70s.

Ono and Cox divorced in 1969 and fought for two years over custody of Kyoko. (Ono wrote a song about the situation called "Don't Worry, Kyoko.") In 1971, the court ruled against Cox, and in violation of the order, he took Kyoko and disappeared. He joined the Living Word Fellowship, a cultish Christian group known as "The Walk." Kyoko, renamed Rosemary, lived an underground existence throughout most of the 70s, until Cox left the church. Kyoko, primarily raised by Cox even when her parents were together, admitted that "it was painful losing my mom," but that she loved her father and chose to stay with him.

In 1980, Cox contacted Ono to express condolences for Lennon’s death. Ono admitted publicly that she would not seek to prosecute Cox for violation of the court order. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Kyoko, reportedly married and working as a teacher, was reunited with her mother.

Elisabeth Fritzl

Cox’s abduction by her father, although unfortunate, is benign compared to the story of Elisabeth Fritzl, the victim of one of the most horrifying cases of abuse and imprisonment by a family member on record.

Sexually abused by her father Joseph from the age of 11, Fritzl was lured into a specially prepared cellar in her house