UPDATED May 3rd, 2018
Stranger than fiction, real life has brought some particularly twisted kidnapping tales to prominence. It seems unfathomable, for example, that more than 300 school girls were kidnapped in Nigeria; or that a man as sick as the late Ariel Castro could hold three young girls (and a baby!) hostage in his basement for almost a decade.
There are all sorts of missing persons stories. Some victims are rich or famous, and others are taken for ransom. Others are simply unlucky and end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Though it’s the last thing anyone wants to talk about, it’s important that we learn from the past. “The abduction of a child is a tragedy. No one can fully understand or appreciate what a parent goes through at such a time, unless they have faced a similar tragedy,” says John Walsh who lost his son, Adam Walsh in the eighties, igniting a new awareness about missing children. Here are 10 missing persons cases that shook the world.
