A 25-year-old California woman has been reunited with her mother after a decade of being held captive by the mother's former boyfriend. Her mother had thought the two had run away together.
This week, Twitter and Facebook's highly visible #BringBackOurGirls campaign highlighted the plight of 276 Nigerian girls who were kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram. One problem: the most visible images used in that campaign are pictures of girls that aren't Nigerian. Or kidnapped. Or even technically girls…
The number of students missing from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Nigeria is still in question after education officials reported that 85 students were kidnapped during an attack on the school on April 14, but local parents have countered that the number is closer to 234.
Margaret Talbot's piece in the New Yorker this week might be called "The Extraordinary Resilience of Elizabeth Smart" but a better title might be "How Elizabeth Smart Did the Impossible." The piece explores how Smart managed to get through her abduction and become that much more than an abduction victim forever…
The curious case of a kidnapped pony in Italy is really an example of the sort of once-in-a-lifetime story that really reward the dedicated news cyclist. While attending the 47th annual National Horse Fair in Italy, Charlie, a 63 cm-tall pony billed by his apparently inattentive owners as the world’s smallest pony,…
Last night, just a month and change into serving his life + 1,000-year sentence for kidnapping three Cleveland women and keeping them captive under hellish conditions for a decade, Ariel Castro committed suicide in jail. After I heard the news, I felt a range of awful, base emotions, none of which made me feel good…
It’s hard to say what’s more disheartening about the way some people in the media — both social and regular old-person media — have been casting Hannah Anderson, the 16-year-old kidnapping victim whose mother and brother were allegedly tortured and killed by James Lee DiMaggio before he took Anderson to a remote…
The law enforcement search for James Lee DiMaggio, the man accused of kidnapping 16-year-old Hannah Anderson from San Diego County, ended like a scene lifted out of the Manhunter reel yesterday when FBI agents shot and killed DiMaggio in, the LA Times explains with an ominous flourish, “the Idaho wilderness.” …
Ariel Castro, the man accused of kidnapping, imprisoning, raping, and torturing Gina DeJesus, 23, Michelle Knight, 32, and Amanda Berry, 27, for a decade, was indicted on 329 criminal charges on Friday by a grand jury.
It'll come as a surprise to nobody anywhere ever to learn that the psychopath who kidnapped, imprisoned, raped, and tortured three women for ten years reportedly has a history of repeatedly abducting his daughters and threatening to kill his wife and daughters.
The Cleveland police just released the 911 call from Amanda Berry, one of the three women who went missing about ten years ago and was amazingly rescued on Monday afternoon.
This is the most upsetting thing I've reported on in, well, a few days, I guess.
A Brooklynite police are describing as "a total moron" admitted to faking (poorly) his own kidnapping in order to get out of explaining a two-week disappearance to his girlfriend. Rahmell Pettway apparently has learned exactly zero of the hundreds of sitcom lessons about how lying only compounds your problems, forcing…
A woman who kidnapped a 19-day-old girl from a Harlem Hospital was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Monday, marking the final installment of a more than 20-year saga that is among the longest non-parental abductions in which a missing child was finally reunited with family. In February, Ann Pettway pled guilty to…
Utah Tea Party activist and prominent fund raiser Greg Peterson owns a beautiful 5 bedroom, 5 bathroom 3,000 square foot cabin in the ruggedly gorgeous area outside of Salt Lake City. Over the years, with the help of his fancy cabin, Peterson has proven himself an adept host — entertaining and gladhanding with the…
Siri can be used for many purposes — from telling Zooey Deschanel that when water falls from the sky, that's called "rain" to claiming she doesn't know who Samuel L. Jackson is (seriously! Ask her! She'll lie!) But did you know that Siri can also be a malevolent entity worthy of her own series of R. L. Stein books?
Tonight there is finally a bit of good news and a resolution to the manhunt that followed a tragic murder and kidnapping in Tennessee. It began on April 27th, when a woman named JoAnn Bain and her three daughters were reported missing by JoAnn's husband and the stepfather of the girls. On May 5th, the bodies of JoAnn…
On Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed a law that bars state funding from going to any organization that provides abortion services. This means that Planned Parenthood, which doesn't use state money for abortions, will be deprived of funds they would have used to provide all manner of sexual health services,…
A 7-year-old girl is safe and sound after a man attempted to kidnap her earlier this week in the toy aisle of a Walmart in Georgia. Brittney Baxter was looking at toys when a man started talking to her and then grabbed her, covering her mouth. She kicked him and screamed until he let her go, which you can see on this…
Recently in two widely-reported missing children stories, both sets of parents complained that the police were treating them like suspects, not victims. Now it turns out that at least one girl's mother was right, and tragically, it seems there's little chance that the case will end with the girl's safe return.
