Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted in 1991 at the age of 11 while on her way to school in South Lake Tahoe, California. She was found and freed 18 years later after a routine police interrogation of her captor, Phillip Garrido, revealed her identity. The length of her capture, along with Dugard’s own best-selling memoir, “A Stolen Life,” made this case international news for some time.
John Paul Getty III, grandson of oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty, was kidnapped in 1973 by gangsters in Italy and held for ransom. During ransom negotiations, Getty’s captors cut off his ear and sent it to his family, who eventually agreed to pay a ransom of $2.2 million. Nine of the kidnappers were apprehended, though several were released due to a lack of sufficient evidence. The ransom money was never recovered. John Paul survived the kidnapping and died in the U.K. in 2011, aged 54, after a long illness.
Between 2002 and 2004, bus driver Ariel Castro kidnapped three women in the Cleveland, Ohio area – Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. They were held for more than a decade until May 2013, when Berry managed to escape and contact police, leading them to the other women also imprisoned in the house. The case was an instant sensation, The women were freed, and Castro was found dead in his prison cell several months later while trial.
Kyoko Chan Cox, daughter of Yoko Ono and her second husband, Anthony Cox, was taken by her father in 1971 as the custody battle between the two parents came to a head. Cox took Kyoko to Houston, Texas, where they joined a religious sect. He changed her name to keep her identity hidden. Despite Yoko Ono’s efforts to find her daughter, including hiring private detectives and attempting to communicate with her through songs, such as “Don’t Worry, Kyoko,” the two weren’t reunited until 23 years later in 1994. When Kyoko contacted Ono, she was already married with children of her own.
The granddaughter of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the militant left wing group, Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1974. Though her father donated $2 million in food to people in the California Bay Area who were in need as a ransom, his daughter was not released. It wasn’t until she was arrested for the robbery of a San Francisco bank after being inducted and brainwashed by the SLA that she was found. She was initially sent to prison, but her sentence was commuted by President Lyndon B. Johnson after serving two years after it was determined that she had Stockholm Syndrome.
In 2002, Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped at age 14 by Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Breeze in Salt Lake City, Utah. She was held for more than nine months, forced to dress in white religious robes and enter into a polygamous marriage with Mitchell. She was eventually spotted, freed, and became an activist and journalist, creating the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to help prevent crimes against children.
Charles Lindbergh, the first person to fly across the Atlantic, had the heartbreaking experience of having his son snatched from his home in 1932 with only a ransom note left behind. After delivering $50,000 in ransom, Lindbergh and the authorities were led on a fruitless hunt for his son, Charlie, until his body turned up several months later. A man named Bruno Richard Hauptmann was found guilty of the kidnapping, and was sentenced to die the electric chair. He was executed in 1936. The Lindbergh kidnapping was known as “The Crime of the Century.”
Steven Stayner, 7, was kidnapped in 1972 while walking home from school in Merced, California. He was sexually abused by his captor, Kenneth Parnell, for held for seven years until he managed to escape and found his way to a police station, bringing along with him another kidnapped boy, Timothy Lee White. Stayner told authorities that he didn’t want White facing the same abuse that he suffered, and that helped him find the courage to escape. Parnell was convicted on two counts of kidnapping and died in prison in 2008.
Etan Patz disappeared at age 6, on the first day that he was allowed to walk alone to the bus stop to go to school. He became the first missing child to be featured on a milk carton in the U.S.. This was an important first step in child kidnapping cases getting national attention. Years later, informants said Jose Antonio Ramos had kidnapped and killed Patz, though it was never proven. May 25 — the day Patz went missing — is National Missing Children’s Day in the U.S.
Frank Sinatra, Jr., son of the legendary crooner by the same name, was kidnapped at the age of 18 in 1963 in Lake Tahoe, California. He was about to play a show, when a delivery man came by his dressing room and pulled a gun on him. Sinatra was blindfolded and driven to Los Angeles, where he was held until his father paid $240,000 for the ransom for his release. Conspiracies abounded that Sinatra had planned the whole thing to boost his career. The captors were caught and sent to prison, albeit on short sentences.
