Top 5 Fascinating Kidnappings

5. Nina von Gallwitz

In December 1981, Nina von Gallwitz, the eight-year-old daughter of a bank officer from Cologne, Germany, was kidnapped while walking to school. Her parents agreed to the kidnappers’ demands, and attempted to pass the ransom to them. The kidnappers were exceptionally careful and skittish; they bailed out on the Gallwitzes’ first few attempts to ransom their daughter when circumstances weren’t to their liking. Fortunately, after every unsuccessful attempt, the kidnappers made contact again, giving Nina’s parents new instructions, sometimes in recordings of Nina’s own voice. (The kidnappers also raised the amount of the ransom demand, eventually to the sum of 1.5 million Deutschmarks.)
Finally, in May 1982, the Gallwitzes successfully passed the ransom to the kidnappers by throwing it from a speeding train. Three days later, Nina, weak but otherwise okay, wandered into a highway rest area. She reported being confined in a small crate or box for extended periods of time, but was otherwise unharmed. She had spent five months in captivity.
Due to the care—dare we say “professionalism”?—of the kidnappers, few clues were discovered. The only notable exception was the discovery of several thousand Deutschmarks from the ransom in a forest some twenty-five miles from Cologne. Nina’s captors have never been apprehended.
4. Anthonette Cayedito


Anthonette Cayedito, a nine-year-old Navajo girl, was snatched from her family’s home in Gallup, New Mexico, in April 1986. According to Anthonette’s sister, a man claiming to be their uncle grabbed Anthonette, pulled her into his car, and drove away.
Several people reported sighting Anthonette in the days following the kidnapping. She also may have called 911 in 1987, in an attempt to escape her captors.
The most frustrating possible missed opportunity took place in Las Vegas, Nevada. A waitress there reported seeing a young girl traveling with an unkempt man and woman. The girl kept dropping her fork on the floor and grabbing the waitress’s hand when she brought fresh silverware to the table. After the group had left the restaurant, the waitress discovered a note written on a napkin, placed under the girl’s plate: “Help me. Call the police.” When shown a picture of Anthonette, the waitress said that the girl had strongly resembled her.
Anthonette has never been found. No one knows the identity of the girl, who might have been Anthonette, nor of the couple she was traveling with.
3. Carlina White

Carlina White was born on 15 July 1987. She was nineteen days-old when her parents took her to Harlem Hospital Center in New York City for a high fever. She was receiving intravenous antibiotics, when a woman posing as a nurse removed the IV and abducted her. Hospital workers had noticed the woman hanging around the hospital for several weeks, but no one knew who she was.
The city of New York offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to Carlina’s return. Her parents sued the hospital, and eventually received a large settlement.
Carlina was raised by a woman named Ann Pettway, who told the girl that her name was Nejdra Nance. The pair first lived in suburban Connecticut (less than an hour from Carlina’s former home), then Atlanta, Georgia. During her teen years, several factors made her doubt that Pettway was her mother. Carlina noticed that she did not physically resemble her mother for example, and Pettway’s explanations for her inability to get a social security card, or produce a birth certificate, were unconvincing to Carlina.
In 2010, now in her early twenties, Carlina found photos on the Internet of herself as an infant, pre-kidnapping, and saw a strong resemblance between those pictures and the pictures Pettway had of her as a small child. She also saw a strong resemblance between the old pictures of Carlina White and her own baby daughter. She contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and through them was able to confirm her identity and make contact with her birth family, twenty three years after her abduction.
Ann Pettway turned herself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in January 2011. She told agents that she had kidnapped Carlina after suffering a series of miscarriages, and despairing of ever being a parent.
2. Patty Hearst

Patty Hearst is the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst. In February 1974, at age nineteen, she was kidnapped from an apartment she shared with her fiancée. Her kidnappers were part of a guerrilla group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. (The name “Symbionese” refers to “symbiosis,” living together in interdependence and harmony.) The SLA initially attempted to trade Hearst for the freedom of jailed SLA members. When this failed, they demanded that the Hearst family donate hundreds of millions of dollars of food to the needy in California.
The Hearsts immediately donated $6 million dollars of food to groups that fed the poor in the Bay Area. The SLA refused to release Patty, claiming that the food was of inferior quality.
In April 1974, the SLA released a tape on which Patty Hearst said that she had joined the group and shared its rejection of capitalism and western values. She said she was taking the name “Tania,” after the name of Che Guevara’s comrade Tamara Bunke, and made subsequent communiqués under that name. Later that month, she was photographed in security footage shot during an SLA bank robbery; the photograph of the heiress, toting an M-1 carbine while shouting orders at bank customers who had become her captives, is one of the iconic pictures of Vietnam War era America.
A shootout in Los Angeles, and subsequent police siege, led to the deaths of many of the members of the SLA. Hearst was arrested in the fall of 1975, along with several of her SLA surviving comrades. She served twenty one months of a seven year sentence. President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence and in 2001, she received a full pardon from President Bill Clinton.
1. Charles Lindbergh Jr

Four years after his famous trans-Atlantic flight, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindberg, had their first child, Charles Jr. On the evening of 1 March 1932, the baby’s nurse put him to bed. She heard a noise outside the house later that evening and when she went to check on Charles Jr, he was not in his crib.
While looking for the boy, Charles found an envelope on the windowsill. When police opened it, they found a ransom note, filled with misspellings. The kidnapper demanded $50,000, and promised to contact the Lindberghs after two or three days to instruct them on how to ransom their child. Police found some physical evidence—a footprint in the dirt below the nursery window, a home-made ladder that had been left in the bushes—but they failed to secure the scene. The evidence’s value was compromised, as it had been trampled by media and police.
Further instructions arrived a few days later, but instead of passing this note on to the police, Lindbergh gave it to an acquaintance who claimed to have mob connections. Due to Lindbergh’s fame, organized crime figures (including Al Capone) offered to help the Lindberghs recover their son. Two more ransom notes arrived in quick succession; the ransom had increased to $100,000, due to the Lindberghs involving the police.
One month after the kidnapping, Condon (followed by Lindbergh) went to deliver the ransom. The package included gold certificates, which (because the government was about to withdraw them from circulation) would be easier to trace than cash. Condon’s contact sent him on a wild chase across Manhattan. The path ended in St Raymond’s Cemetery, where a man accepted the payment and gave Condon a note, indicating that Charles Jr was being held on a boat called “The Nelly,” on Martha’s Vineyard. The mysterious man said that the child was accompanied by two women who did not know his identity. Lindbergh raced to the island, but found that there was no boat there by that name.
Six weeks later, a truck driver found Charles Jr’s body in the woods only a few miles from the Lindbergh home. The body was badly decomposed; the apparent cause of death was a severe skull fracture. The discovery of the dead child prompted the United States Congress to make kidnapping a federal crime; this made for the speedy involvement of the FBI in the investigation of kidnappings.
Two years later, one of the gold certificates from the ransom turned up. It had a number written on it in pencil; agents determined that the number was from a license plate, and traced the certificate to a gas station. The attendant remembered the man who had passed the certificate had behaved suspiciously, so he had written down the man’s license plate number. That man proved to be Bruno Hauptmann, a small-time crook who had emigrated from Germany.
Searching Hauptmann’s apartment, police found a drawing of plans for a home-made ladder like the one found at the Lindbergh residence. They found John Condon’s phone number and address written on a wall of the apartment. Police also found a small piece of wood, of the same kind as the ladder, bearing tool markings that matched markings on the home-made ladder.
At Hauptmann’s trial, the prosecution presented their strong circumstantial case. Both Lindbergh and Condon testified that Hauptmann was the man who received the ransom in St Raymond’s Cemetery.
While he maintained his innocence throughout the trial, Hauptmann was convicted and sentenced to death. He refused a last minute reprieve, because he would have been required to confess to the crime. He was executed in New Jersey’s electric chair on 3 April 1936, four years, one month and two days after the kidnapping.
source