Kidnapping History

Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellin cartel. Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar’s henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, García Márquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor.

It's been eight years since Will Travers was thrown back in time. Now, at the height of his success, Will faces his greatest challenge. His son, while serving in the Texian army in California, is kidnapped. Weighing his duty to Texas against his duty to his family, Will resigns and recruits a few good men to accompany him in tracking down his son's kidnappers who have demanded a king's ransom or else! In a race against time Will chases the kidnappers across the continent, following their trail across seas and jungles. Failure will cost him more than just his family, it will cost him the ...

From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of 15 adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots.

"I was present at the Frog Lake Massacre and escaped by the slim margin of one hundred paces the fate that overtook my hapless fellows. For months afterward the unexpected report of a gun put my heart in my mouth, painted savages plunged in my dreams at early dawn through belts of dark firs upon my flying footsteps, bullets sang in my ears or found their mark in my flesh, and I awoke gasping and unable in the first few seconds of consciousness to convince myself that it was not all a horrible reality. Looking back on that now distant date and thinking over the flow of perilous turns in ...

Bologna, 1858: A police posse, acting on the orders of a Catholic inquisitor, invades the home of a Jewish merchant, Momolo Mortara, wrenches his crying six-year-old son from his arms, and rushes him off in a carriage bound for Rome. His mother is so distraught that she collapses and has to be taken to a neighbor's house, but her weeping can be heard across the city. With this terrifying scene - one that would haunt this family forever - David I. Kertzer begins his fascinating investigation of the dramatic kidnapping.

In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated a woman's claim that, aged four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire, right up until as recently as 1970. Many were told that their parents were dead, and parents were told that their children had been adopted.

Caught between Camorra gunrunners selling to ISIS and Nigerian drug gangs along Italy's picturesque coast, each year thousands of refugees and migrants are lured into their underworld, forced to become sex slaves, drug mules, or weapon smugglers. In this powerful expose, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau follows the weapons trail, meets the trafficked women trapped by black magic, the brave nuns who try to save them, and the Italian police who turn a blind eye as the most urgent issues facing Europe play out in broad daylight.

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre “Tania.”

Revolution's End fully explains the most famous kidnapping in US history, detailing Patty Hearst's relationship with Donald DeFreeze, known as Cinque, the head of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Not only did the heiress have a sexual relationship with DeFreeze while he was imprisoned, she didn't know he was an informant and a victim of prison behavior modification.

Lucie Blackman - tall, blond, 21 years old - stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000 and disappeared. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave. The seven months in between had seen a massive search for the missing girl involving Japanese policemen, British private detectives, and Lucie’s desperate but bitterly divided parents. Had Lucie been abducted by a religious cult or snatched by human traffickers? Who was the mysterious man she had gone to meet? And what did her work as a hostess in the notorious Roppongi district of Tokyo really involve?

El oyente recorrerá el laberinto del los acontecimientos en la noche del 26 de septiembre, sus trampas, su oscuridad y la luz. Entrará en la Normal Rural "Raúl Isidro Burgos", escuchará las intensas voces de sus estudiantes....

Amelia Earhart once noted, "In my life I had come to realize that when things were going very well indeed it was just the time to anticipate trouble." And so it would be with America's other famous aviator. Charles Lindbergh had spent the first 30 years of his life escaping multiple plane crashes, becoming a hero across the world, and starting a family, but his luck ran out in an awful way in March of 1932.

We often think of slavery as a southern phenomenon, far removed from the booming cities of the North. But even though slavery had been outlawed in Gotham by the 1830s, Black New Yorkers were not safe. Not only was the city built on the backs of slaves; it was essential in keeping slavery and the slave trade alive.

This book delves into some of the most famous kidnappings and abductions in history. From the Lindbergh baby case in the 1930s to more recent high-profile cases like the abduction of Jaycee Dugard, the book covers a wide range of incidents. With background information on the victim, details on the actual kidnapping or abduction, and an examination of the investigation and aftermath. The book also covers other infamous cases such as the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the Hillside Strangler's victims. The book is a deep dive into the criminal mind and the inner workings of these cases, and the ...

He pulled off what some deem the crime of the century: skyjacking a commercial jetliner, collecting a ransom of $200,000, parachuting off the aft stairs of the Boeing 727 into the night, and simply disappearing. Since November 1971, “D. B. Cooper”—no one knows his real name or identity—has become a figure of enduring fascination and obsession. The FBI pursued him for over forty years, before closing the case and leaving it unsolved. Unsolved, perhaps, but much admired. D. B. Cooper’s exploit over the skies of the American Northwest has inspired books, films, and endless speculation.

If you’re a fan of true crime, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the big-name cases: Ted Bundy, BTK, David Berkowitz, Christopher Watts, Diane Downs, Casey Anthony. The list of well-known, notorious cases throughout history is seemingly endless. Books, websites, podcasts, streaming television series, and magazines are filled with their abhorrent tales of mayhem. They’re some of the most foul killers the world has ever known. In this volume, you’ll find 12 assorted true crime stories ranging in date from the 1950s to 2020.

For most of the 20th century, the name Hearst was most closely associated with one of America's most famous (and infamous) newspaper magnates, William Garrison Hearst, whose life was the inspiration for Citizen Kane. But in the 1970s, his granddaughter Patricia made headlines thanks to a series of events that would wind up being one of the most bizarre chapters of the 20th century.

Chris Thomas is not yet 30 years old when he finds himself managing the immense pressure, eccentric personalities, and extenuating circumstances of an international story, where one small misstep could adversely impact the search for a missing teenager and the reputation of her family. Now, 20 years later, Thomas takes listeners behind the scenes, providing new details, perspectives, and commentary on finding Elizabeth Smart.

In the summer of 2017, twenty-two-year-old Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind vanished. A week after she disappeared, police arrested the white couple who lived upstairs from Savanna and emerged from their apartment carrying an infant girl. The baby was Savanna’s, but Savanna’s body would not be found for days. The horrifying crime sent shock waves far beyond Fargo, North Dakota, where it occurred, and helped expose the sexual and physical violence Native American women and girls have endured since the country’s colonization.

For twenty years, the Taliban was the number one enemy of Western forces in Afghanistan. But it was an enemy that they knew little about, and about whose founder and leader, Mullah Omar, they knew even less. Armed with only a fuzzy black-and-white photo of the man, investigative journalist Bette Dam decided to track down the reclusive Taliban chief a decade back.