Kidnapping or abduction is the unlawful abduction and confinement of a person against their will. Kidnapping is typically but not necessarily accomplished by use of force or fear, but it is still kidnapping if a person is fraudulently enticed into confinement. There must be movement, however, not only false imprisonment.
Jacob Erwin Wetterling was an American boy from St. Joseph, Minnesota, who was kidnapped from his hometown and murdered on October 22, 1989, at the age of 11. The identity of his abductor remained a mystery for nearly 27 years.
Junko Furuta was a 17-year-old Japanese high school student who was abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered. Her abuse was mainly perpetrated by four male teenagers, Hiroshi Miyano (18), Jō Ogura (17), Shinji Minato (16), and Yasushi Watanabe (17), and took place over a 40-day period starting on 25 November 1988. In Japan, the case is known as the "concrete-encased high school girl murder case", as her body was discovered inside of a concrete-filled drum. The prison sentences served by the perpetrators ranged from 7 to 20 years. The brutality of the case shocked Japan, and it is said to be the worst case of juvenile criminality in the country's post-war history.
Jessica Marie Lunsford was an American nine-year-old girl from Homosassa, Florida, who was murdered in February 2005. Lunsford was abducted from her home in the early morning of February 24, 2005, by John Couey, a 46-year-old convicted sex offender who lived nearby. Couey held her captive over the weekend, during which she was raped and later murdered by being buried alive. The media extensively covered the investigation and trial of Couey.
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.
Etan Kalil Patz was an American boy who was six years old on May 25, 1979, when he disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. His disappearance helped launch the missing children movement, which included new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing children. Several years after he disappeared, Patz was one of the first children to be profiled on the "photo on a milk carton" campaigns of the early 1980s. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25—the anniversary of Etan's disappearance—as National Missing Children's Day in the United States.
Jessica Lyn Keen was a murder victim killed in Foster Chapel Cemetery in West Jefferson, Ohio. Her case was profiled on the television program Unsolved Mysteries and On the Case with Paula Zahn as well as Dead Silent on Investigation Discovery.
Michael John Devlin is an American criminal convicted of kidnapping and child sexual abuse of two young boys, Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby. He is serving 74 life sentences plus 2,020 years at Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri. His life sentences are 30 years each; his total sentence is 4,240 years.
Theodore "Ted" Roosevelt Patrick, Jr. is an American deprogrammer and author. He is sometimes referred to as the "father of deprogramming."
Brianna Zunino Denison was a college student who was abducted on January 20, 2008, from a friend's house in Reno, Nevada. Her body was discovered on February 15, 2008, in a field near a Reno business park after being raped and murdered. A man named James Biela was convicted of the murder.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Idaho.
Robert Black was a Scottish serial killer and paedophile who was convicted of the kidnap, rape and murder of four girls aged between 5 and 11 in a series of crimes committed between 1981 and 1986 in the United Kingdom.
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.
Martin Ney is a convicted German serial killer and sex offender.
Jessica Lynn Heeringa was a 25-year-old woman from Norton Shores, Michigan, who disappeared from the Exxon gas station where she was working on the night of April 26, 2013.
Chan Seng Onn is a Singaporean judge who presently serves as a Senior Judge of the High Court of Singapore. Formerly a prosecutor, Chan had previously served as a High Court judge from 2007 to 2022.
Robert J. Sigg is an American media executive and owner of Colorado-based Performance One Media, which is the holding company for Real America's Voice and WeatherNation TV. Sigg's career in media began with Turner Media Group and outdoor sports channel In Country Television.
Life imprisonment is a legal penalty in Singapore. This sentence is applicable for more than forty offences under Singapore law, such as culpable homicide not amounting to murder, attempted murder, kidnapping by ransom, criminal breach of trust by a public servant, voluntarily causing grievous hurt with dangerous weapons, and trafficking of firearms, in addition to caning or a fine for certain offences that warrant life imprisonment.
