FACTBOX-High-profile U.S. kidnapping cases


Reuters | Updated: 11-01-2019 21:40 IST | Created: 11-01-2019 21:40 IST
FACTBOX-High-profile U.S. kidnapping cases

Jayme Closs, a 13-year-old Wisconsin girl who apparently fled her kidnapper nearly three months after her parents were found fatally shot and she disappeared, was expected to be reunited with relatives on Friday.

Here are other recent high-profile cases of victims escaping their captors in the United States:

AMANDA BERRY, GINA DEJESUS AND MICHELLE KNIGHT

Ariel Castro kept three women imprisoned in his fortress-like home in Cleveland, Ohio, for about a decade. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were all in their teens or early 20s when they disappeared. They were rescued in 2013 after Berry's cries for help were heard, startling neighbors. Castro sexually had abused the women, and Berry's then 6-year-old daughter, fathered by Castro, was also rescued.

Castro was sentenced to life in prison later in 2013, and hanged himself in his cell before the year was out.

ELIZABETH SMART

Elizabeth Smart was 14 when she was taken at knife-point in 2002 from the bed she shared with her sister in their home in Salt Lake City, Utah. Brian David Mitchell, a homeless self-styled preacher, took Smart to an encampment in the nearby foothills, where she was chained by her ankle to a tree, raped, and forced to look at pornography and drink alcohol.

Smart was rescued about nine months later after a passersby saw her walking down a street with Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, in a Salt Lake City suburb.

Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison. Barzee, who was convicted as a co-conspirator, was released from prison last September after serving 15 years.

JAYCEE DUGARD

Jaycee Dugard spent 18 years in captivity in northern California after she was snatched from a street near her home in South Lake Tahoe in 1991 when she was 11 by a married couple, Phillip and Nancy Garrido. Phillip Garrido raped her, and she gave birth to two daughters during her captivity.

Dugard was rescued in 2009 after Garrido, a convicted rapist, aroused the suspicions of police while proselytizing at a college campus. Garrido was sentenced to life in prison, and his wife was sentenced to 36 years to life.

KALA BROWN

By tracing her last known cellphone signals, police found Kala Brown chained inside a locked container in a storage shed in rural South Carolina in November 2016, two months after she went missing with her boyfriend. Brown told police that she watched her captor, Todd Kohlhepp, shoot her boyfriend, whose body was found in a shallow grave on the property.

Kohlhepp was sentenced to life in prison for killing at least seven people.

KATIE BEERS

Katie Beers was two days shy of her 10th birthday when she was kidnapped in 1992 by John Esposito, a family acquaintance, and held captive in a coffin-sized space under his home on New York's Long Island. Police found her 16 days after seeing her with Esposito in surveillance camera video from a local arcade.

Esposito was sentenced to between 15 years and life in prison in 1994. He was found dead of natural causes in 2013. (Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Scott Malone and Jeffrey Benkoe)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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