Elizabeth Ann Smart was kidnapped at age fourteen on June 5, 2002, by Brian Mitchell from her home in the Federal Heights neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah. She was held captive by Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, and later, in San Diego County, California. Her captivity lasted approximately nine months before she was discovered in Sandy, Utah, approximately 18 miles (29 km) from her home.
Baby M was the pseudonym used in the case In re Baby M, 537 A.2d 1227, 109 N.J. 396 for the infant whose legal parentage was in question.
Gary Michael Heidnik was an American murderer and serial rapist who kidnapped, tortured and raped six women, murdering two of them, while holding them captive in a self-dug pit in his basement floor in Philadelphia between 1986 and 1987. He was sentenced to death and executed by lethal injection in July 1999, currently the last person to be executed in the state of Pennsylvania. Heidnik was one of the inspirations for the character of Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
Megumi Yokota is a Japanese citizen who was abducted by a North Korean agent in 1977 when she was a thirteen-year-old junior high school student. She was one of at least seventeen Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The North Korean government has admitted to kidnapping Yokota, but has said that she died in captivity. Yokota's parents and others in Japan have publicly expressed the belief that she is still alive in North Korea and have waged a public campaign seeking her return to Japan.
Beulah George "Georgia" Tann was an American social worker and child trafficker who operated the Tennessee Children's Home Society, an unlicensed adoption agency in Memphis, Tennessee. Tann used the home as a front for her black market baby adoption scheme from the 1920s to 1950. Young children were kidnapped and then sold to wealthy families, abused, or—in some instances—murdered. A state investigation into numerous cases of adoption fraud led to the institution's closure in 1950. Tann died of cancer before the investigation made its findings public.
Babies are occasionally switched at birth or soon thereafter, leading to the babies being unknowingly raised by parents who are not their biological parents. The occurrence has historically rarely been discovered in real life, but since the availability of genealogical testing of DNA has been discovered more frequently. The phenomenon has been common as a plot device in fiction since the 18th century.
Kelsey Ann Smith was a woman from Overland Park, Kansas who disappeared on June 2, 2007, and was murdered that evening. The story was featured in the international media, including on America's Most Wanted, before her body was found near a lake in Missouri on June 6, 2007.
Child abduction or child theft is the unauthorized removal of a minor from the custody of the child's natural parents or legally appointed guardians.
Fetal abduction refers to the rare crime of child abduction by kidnapping of an at term pregnant woman and extraction of her fetus through a crude cesarean section. Dr. Michael H. Stone and Dr. Gary Brucato have alternatively referred to this crime as "fetus-snatching" or "fetus abduction." Homicide expert Vernon J. Geberth has used the term "fetal kidnapping." In the small number of reported cases, a few pregnant victims and about half of their fetuses survived the assault and non-medically performed cesarean.
Linda Taylor was an American woman who committed extensive welfare fraud and, after the publication of an article in the Chicago Tribune in fall 1974, became identified as the "welfare queen". Accounts of Taylor's activities were used by then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, for his 1976 presidential campaign onwards, to illustrate his criticisms of social programs in the United States. Her criminal activities are believed to have extended beyond welfare fraud and may have included assault, theft, insurance fraud, bigamy, kidnapping, and possibly even murder.
The lost children of Francoism were the children abducted from Republican parents, who were either in jail or had been assassinated by Nationalist troops, during the Spanish Civil War and Francoist Spain, and later from random citizens or girls confined in the notorious Women's Protection Board. The kidnapped children were sometimes also victims of child trafficking and forced adoption.
Abducted: The Carlina White Story is a Lifetime television film about Carlina White, who was abducted as an infant by Ann Pettway from a New York hospital and solved her own kidnapping and reunited with her biological parents 23 years later. The case is reported to be the first known infant abduction from a New York hospital. On July 30, 2012, Pettway was sentenced in a New York court to 12 years in prison for kidnapping Carlina. The movie premiered on October 6, 2012.
Zephany Nurse, is a South African woman who was abducted from Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa on 30 April 1997, when she was two days old. Nurse was reunited with her biological parents, Morne and Celeste Nurse, 17 years later, after DNA tests confirmed her identity.
Baby Snatcher is a 1992 American made-for-television drama film directed by Joyce Chopra, starring Veronica Hamel and Nancy McKeon. It tells the true story of the abduction of Rachael Ann White from her grandmother's home on February 19, 1988, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and her recovery four days later.
Kamiyah Teresiah Tasha Mobley was abducted from a Florida hospital on July 10, 1998, when she was only eight hours old. In January 2017, she was found alive in Walterboro, South Carolina. DNA testing proved that she was not the daughter of Gloria Williams, her abductor. She had been raised under the name Alexis Kelli Manigo.
On February 19, 2018, at 5:30 pm, 110 schoolgirls aged 11–19 years old were kidnapped by the Boko Haram terrorist group from the Government Girls' Science and Technical College (GGSTC). Dapchi is located in Bulabulin, Bursari Local Government area of Yobe State, in the northeast part of Nigeria. The federal government of Nigeria deployed the Nigerian Air Force and other security agencies to search for the missing schoolgirls and to hopefully enable their return. The governor of Yobe State, Ibrahim Gaidam, blamed Nigerian Army soldiers for having removed a military checkpoint from the town. Dapchi lies approximately 275 km northwest of Chibok, where over 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014.
Autonomies is an Israeli dystopian drama miniseries created by Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky. The story is set in an alternate reality of present day Israel, a nation torn and divided by a wall into the secular “State of Israel”, with Tel Aviv as its capital, and the “Haredi Autonomy” in Jerusalem, run by a Haredi religious group. The series stars Assi Cohen, Rotem Sela and Shuli Rand. Keshet received its Israeli premiere on Hot 3 on 6 September 2018. The series received its world premiere on 1 May 2018 at the Festival Séries Mania in France. The series was also the centrepiece of the New York Jewish Film Festival in January 2019.
On April 27, 1964, a one-day old infant, Paul Joseph Fronczak was kidnapped from Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. A woman dressed as a nurse had entered the hospital room of Dora Fronczak and told her the doctor needed to examine the baby, and Dora handed the baby to the unknown woman, who left the hospital with the baby and never returned.
