My Story (4 page)

“Move and I will kill you!”
he said again.

The police car passed. The man waited only a second before he pulled me up again, directing me across the road. On the other side was a trailhead that led up the side of the mountain. We started climbing up the trail.

The reality finally hit me. It was like a jolt to my heart, a stabbing pain in my chest: This isn’t a joke. This isn’t a nightmare. This is real! I’ve got to run!

But he was always right behind me, the knife always at my back. He held on to me with a tight grip that hurt my arm. The trail was steep around us, thick trees and rock on all sides.

If there had ever been an opportunity, that time had passed.

As we started climbing, I gathered courage. “Who are you?” I begged. “Why are you doing this? I have never done anything wrong.”

He continued pushing me up the mountain.

“Why are you doing this?” I begged again.

“I’ll explain to you later. When we get to where we’re going.”

We continued climbing. The night was dark. He forced me to hold a flashlight to illuminate our way. He held the knife in one hand, his arm always at my waist or shoulder.

“Do you realize what you are doing?” I pleaded.

“Of course,” he seemed to huff.

He had told me that he intended to hold me for ransom, but I didn’t believe that anymore. “If you let me go, I won’t press charges. I won’t let my father press charges on you,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.

He huffed again. The trail was getting steeper. “You don’t need to make me any promises,” he said in a sarcastic tone. “I know what I’m doing. I understand the consequences of my actions.” He didn’t sound crazy. He only sounded mean.

Up and up we climbed. The trail grew narrow and more difficult. Farther up, there were trees on every side. We climbed and climbed. I was getting tired and very thirsty. He stopped to drink, pulling a canister of water out of one of his bags. He didn’t offer me any. Not this time. Later he would, but I didn’t want to drink from his water anyway. He urinated, then we kept on climbing. A streambed joined the trail on our right. “Turn up the streambed,” he commanded. Though the trail continued, we left it and headed up the rocky streambed. The going became even more difficult. Boulders. So many trees. So much thick brush. Yet he was always right behind me, matching my every move.

I thought of the story of Moses and the parting of the Red Sea. I thought,
Okay, God, this isn’t the Red Sea. This is just some scrub oak. Could you please just part it so I can run away?
I kept looking for an opening, for any means to escape. But the man was right behind me. He had a knife on me. And if he wasn’t right behind me, he was in front of me and always holding tight.

So I kept on climbing.

It got colder. It was the middle of the night. I was praying and pleading for a way to escape, but there were steep slopes along the stream bed, walls of scrub oak on each side. It was hopeless and I knew it.

By then, I’d had enough time to consider another option that I hadn’t thought about before; something just as terrifying but not as likely to enter into the mind of a little girl. “Please,” I begged. “If you’re going to rape and kill me, please do it here. That way someone will find my body.”

“Keep moving,” he replied.

We kept on climbing. It was painfully slow. So dark. So steep. So many obstacles.

“Stop,” he commanded. I stood there in the dark. I listened as he urinated once again. He mumbled to himself. “We’re going to wait here until daylight.” He seemed to be thinking to himself. Was he getting tired? Were we really just going to sit there on the rocks until the sun came up?

I turned around to look at him. He was not very tall, with narrow shoulders and a slim chest. It was too dark to see much more than just the outline of his body, and his beard hid most of his face, but I could see his cheeks and eyes. Then it hit me. I remembered him! I had seen him once—no, twice—before. Once when I was shopping downtown with my mother. Sometime in the fall. She had given him a little money. She had given him my dad’s name and cell-phone number so that they could help him more. My father had hired him to do some handiwork. Just before Thanksgiving, I thought. I also remembered watching him from the upstairs railing that looks down on our front hall. He had looked up to see me watching him while he was waiting to get paid.

“Why are you doing this?” I pleaded. “My parents were only trying to help you.”

“You are my hostage,” he replied. “You’ll learn. I’ll tell you what you need to know when we get where we are going.”

“My parents never hurt you. Why are you doing this?”

“All will be made known in due time.”

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer.

“My parents will pay any amount of money to get me back. Anything you ask for.”

Again, he didn’t answer. Though he claimed I was his hostage, he showed no interest in talk of ransom or any money. He stood there in the darkness without responding in any way, the long knife in his hand. He gestured farther up the mountain. “My wife is waiting up there,” he said.

Might he only want a daughter? I wondered. The idea tumbled inside my head.

I soon discovered that being taken to be his daughter was an enormously optimistic hope.

He pointed up the mountain. It was steep. So rough. Looking at it, I realized we’d have to crawl in places. Dawn was getting closer now. The sky was still dark, but the eastern horizon was turning a hint of gray. Moving closer to me, he repeated, “If you try to run, I will catch you. Do exactly what I say, or I will kill you. I have friends. They will kill your family. Your little sister. All the others. If you try to escape … if you do
anything
that I don’t tell you, I will kill you and your family.”

I felt his breath upon me.

“Do you understand?”

I understood. And I believed him. He stared at me, then grunted. “Let’s go.”

I turned and started crawling up the mountain once again.

My younger sister, Mary Katherine, remembers being wakened by a nudge. But she figured it was just me and drifted back to sleep. Seconds later, she was jolted fully awake when she realized that I was climbing out of bed. Opening her eyes, she saw a stranger standing there! Taking her older sister. Holding a long knife to my chest!

A large, uncovered window let some light into the room, shadows of darkness cast by the stars and the moon. Mary Katherine watched what was happening through half-open eyes, pretending to be asleep, her heart racing in her chest. The man stayed very close to me, pushing me toward the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” she heard me ask. The answer was too muffled to really understand.
Hostage?
Maybe “hitchhike”? She didn’t know what he said. But she did pick up on “kill” and “your family,” and was even more terrified. She watched as I moved toward the bathroom, the stranger right beside me. The door shut. Light seeped into the bedroom from underneath the door. Very muffled voices. A few minutes passed. The light went out. The door opened. Quiet footsteps. A floorboard creaking. The sound of muffled movement in the hall.

And then quiet. Deadly quiet.

Mary Katherine was utterly petrified, frozen stiff with fear. And how could she not be! She was a nine-year-old girl who had just witnessed her older sister being taken from her bed by a stranger with a long beard and a knife, a man who had hissed and pulled and held her so close that she could not get away!

It was just too much to manage.

My nine-year-old sister lay underneath her covers, too terrified to even move. She hardly dared to breathe. She was in a deep state of shock, completely numb with fear.

An agonizing amount of time passed. She didn’t sleep. The grandfather clock chimed downstairs. Still, she didn’t move. More time passed. How long, she didn’t know. The shadows traced the movement of the moon across her bedroom wall. The clock chimed again. She poked her head out from the covers. Starlight and moonlight filtered into the room. Yellow. Dull. She reached across the blankets to the left side of the bed. The sheets were flat and cool. I was not there.

Finally, in a moment of courage, she grabbed her baby blanket, pulled it over her head, and bolted toward my parents’ room.

It was a few minutes before four in the morning.

I had been gone for hours.

*

Some question how Mary Katherine could have delayed telling our parents that I had been taken. What could she have been thinking! It was the obvious thing to do!

And yes, it might be obvious …
if
you are an adult and have the benefit of understanding the situation. And yes, it might be obvious if, at this moment, you don’t feel overwhelming fear.

But Mary Katherine was a child who had just had the most traumatic experience of her life. She thought that her own bedroom, inside her house, with her parents and brothers sleeping all around her, her older sister at her side, was the safest place in the world that she could be. She knew that her father always locked the doors and windows before he went to bed. She knew they had a security system. Yet a stranger had overcome all of these safety measures and gotten into their house. Then he had found his way into their bedroom.
How did he even know where they slept?
Once inside their room, he had pulled her older sister from her bed! He had threatened to kill her. Threatened to kill their entire family. He was holding a long and terrifying knife! Her older sister had gone without fighting!

How could any of this be?

Was someone with him? Were other killers inside the house?

It didn’t make any sense!

The only thing she knew was that she feared for her life.

And we have to keep in mind that she was
just a little girl
!

Adults think differently. We are rational. And we now have the benefit of hindsight, knowing what really happened on that night. We know that Brian David Mitchell had already taken me from the house, that he could no longer threaten my little sister. We know my parents had not been killed or injured, that they were sleeping in their bed.

But these things Mary Katherine didn’t know.

Lying underneath her covers, she had to wonder: Was the bad man still in the house? Was he lurking in the hall? He had said that he would kill our entire family. Were they dead already? If she ran into our parents’ bedroom, what horrible thing might she find there? Had he killed other members of our family? Was she alone inside a house where everyone else was dead?

It is impossible for us to appreciate the terrible fear she must have felt.

We also should remember that she was hardly the first one to go into shock after having experienced an overwhelming crisis. It is common. There are even examples of men in combat who have frozen up in fear, unable to do the task that they were trained to do. Sometimes they shut down, losing their ability to function in almost every way; mentally, emotionally, physically. Which is why their training is so important. Chaos leads to panic. Panic leads to fear. Fear can be debilitating to the point where the mind and body may shut down. During these times of gut-wrenching panic, a soldier’s training and preparation is supposed to kick in to protect them.

But Mary Katherine had not been prepared for such a life-and-death situation.

She was just a little girl.

*

Having gathered her wits about her, Mary Katherine finally raced into our parents’ bedroom, running to my father’s side of the bed. She spoke but didn’t manage to wake him, so she moved to my mother’s side.

“Elizabeth is gone,” she said in a quiet voice, her baby blanket still draped over her head. My mother opened her eyes. Mary Katherine had said it so softly, so matter-of-factly, that my mother didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t unusual for me to move into another room to sleep. Sometimes I would sleep downstairs on the couch or maybe on the floor in one of my brothers’ rooms. Surely they would find me there.

Hearing their voices, my dad sat up on his side of the bed.

“Elizabeth is gone,” Mary Katherine said again.

Mother sat up now, her face growing concerned.

“You won’t find her. A man came and took her.” She hesitated. “He had a gun,” she mistakenly concluded.

Both of my parents were instantly terrified. Something in the simple way Mary Katherine had said it made them realize that something was very wrong. And neither of them could ignore the look of utter fear upon her face.

My father raced to check the other upstairs bedrooms. Not finding me, he ran down the stairs to the main floor. My mother followed. Mary Katherine stayed right next to her, unwilling to leave her side. They searched frantically, my father running through the rooms in the front of the house. Hoping to find me sleeping on the couch, my mother turned on the lights in the family room. Of course I was not there. She fought a building panic. Turning to her right, she moved into the kitchen. Mary Katherine ran along beside her, never more than a step away. Mom turned on the kitchen lights and looked around. The smell of burned potatoes still lingered in the air. But there was something more now. Other smells. Damp grass. Canyon winds. The smells of the outdoors. Her eyes went straight to the cut screen.

Then she stopped, moving her hand to her mouth. Looking at it, she felt her heart freeze like a brick of ice inside her chest.

She knew instantly what it meant.

She let out a scream, yelling, “Call 911!” My dad came racing into the kitchen. My mom’s face showed nothing but fear and utter disbelief. Dad stopped in the middle of the kitchen and followed her eyes. He saw the open window. He saw the knife cut in the screen.

Mary Katherine’s words seemed to hang in the air between them.

Elizabeth is gone. You won’t find her. A man came and took her. He had a gun.

We climbed all night. It was a terrible struggle, going up the back side of the mountain without the benefit of any trail. It was climbing and crawling and moving through rough patches of weeds and thick trees. As the sky changed from black to gray to pink to light blue, the man became more and more agitated. More in a hurry. More anxious to get out of sight. As the sun broke, we were just crossing the highest ridge on the mountain. The sky was clear, with not a single cloud, and I suppose that you could see for miles. I was wearing a pair of red silk pajamas that I had been given by a friend of my mother’s. The man looked at my bright clothing in the growing light. “Someone is going to see you,” he said in anger.