Now there are a lot of evil people in this world and most times we are lucky not to run into them. But what happens if we do in this horrifying case, this girl was just walking home from school when she got kidnapped and locked up in a shipping center for nine months.
We just didn’t see anything suggestive to us that something she had done had caused her disappearance.
Abigail Hernandez or Abby was born on October 12, 1998, to Zenya and Reuben Hernandez. She’s described as a cheerful, kind, and happy young girl who loved animals and made friends with anyone she met. When her parents divorced, Abby and her elder sister Sarah stayed with their mom in North Conway, New Hampshire. Abby attended Kenneth High School where she studied German and robotics and loved listening to Classic Rocks and hanging out with her boyfriend, Jimmy Campbell. She was also very athletic and would go hiking with her mom on the weekend. The day of October 9, 2013, started like any other. It was just a few days to her 15th birthday and Abby was super excited about celebrating it with her friends and family. Abby and Jimmy usually rode the bus home together after school, but on this day Abby wanted to drop by the store, so she decided to walk. She never made it home. When Zhenya came home from work that evening, she was surprised to find that Abby had not yet returned from school. She called Abby’s boyfriend Jimmy to check and see if she was with him, but Jimmy had not seen her since she left school that day.
None of Abby’s other friends knew where she had gone. Zenya was worried that something bad had happened to her daughter.
I think it was okay. She had an injury, broke her leg. Appendicitis who know got hit by a car. They called the hospital at that time. I said no, they have not seen her.
Zenya was now going crazy with worry. She immediately called the police and filed a missing person report. The search for Abbey began almost immediately. Soon the FBI was brought on the case, with agents going door to door in the small neighborhood as part of their investigation. Missing person fires with Abby’s picture were distributed around the town as friends and neighbors came in to help at what was supposed to be her 15th birthday party. Her family and friends held a vigil to pray for her safe return. But days went by without any news and people started wondering whether she had run away from home. Some even claimed that they had seen her and Jimmy at a drugstore buying a pregnancy test kit before she went missing. Could she have found out that she was pregnant and decided to run away? Investigators brought Jimmy in for questioning and he denied that ever happening. He told the police that he saw Abby that day walking down the street while he was on the bus and asked the driver if he could get off and walk with her. However, the driver refused because it was against school policy. So Jimmy just texted her and she replied with a heart emoji that was around 250.
03:00 p.m. And 14 minutes later, Abby’s cell phone signal disappeared about a mile from her house. What could have happened to her?
We just didn’t see anything that was suggested to us that something she had done had caused her disappearance.
The last Article sighting of Abby was from the school surveillance camera, which captured her leaving school that day, and she did not carry any belongings to indicate that she planned to run away from home. A month went by without any news from Abby, and her mom was losing it. She could hardly eat or sleep or do anything else other than search for her little girl.
One of the things about tragedies like that is that surprise. The sun gets up in the morning and life goes on.
And then one day, just when she was beginning to think she’ll never hear from Abby again, a letter came in.
Dear Mom, I miss you and love you more than you can imagine. I’m sorry I did this. I’ve seen the newspaper and TV reports and to answer your questions, yes, I’m alive.
She went on to say that she missed her mom but would not tell her where she was. Can you imagine how her mom must have felt all along? She thought her daughter did not run away, and now she gets such a letter. She was really confused and did not know what to believe anymore. But although the handwriting and DNA confirmed that the letter was written by Abby, there was just something off about it.
It sounded like the goal of the letter was to say, I’m okay now. Leave me alone. That was a real curveball.
Authorities were worried that releasing the letter to the public might put Abby’s life in danger in case she had sneaked out the letter. So they waited a month before finally making it public. And the reaction after this revelation was just crazy. A lot of people started saying they knew it all along that she was not in danger and that she was just an attention seeker. And guys, it’s insane how people who hardly know you can be so quick to judge you. But I think the saddest part about this is when Abby’s dad started believing the rumors. He started thinking that maybe Abby ran away because of the situation at home and even offered to take her custody. In an open letter on Facebook, he wrote Abby, you must understand my reason for wanting custody. Since a letter was received from you, it became obvious that you ran away. And that raises the question, what did you run away from? Only you can answer that, but I’m guessing that you ran away from your home life. But for Zenya it just didn’t make any sense for Abby to want to run away. So even after reading the letter, she still felt that her daughter was in danger.
And she was right. On July 21, four nine months after her disappearance, Abby walked into her family’s home wearing the same clothes that she had when she went missing, and as it turned out, she had been kidnapped. Abby was having trouble walking because her new boots, which she had gotten as an early birthday present, were hurting her feet. So when someone offered her a ride, she readily accepted it, not knowing that it would be the beginning of a long nightmare. As soon as Abby got into the car, the driver took out a gun and threatened to shoot her if she screamed or tried anything. He then handcuffed her and broke her cell phone before driving to a remote area in the woods.
He said, if you try to scream or try to escape or make any effort to escape, there will be consequences.
At this point, Abby knew that the only way that she was ever going to get out of this alive was by complying and doing everything she was told. The man took her to his home in the woods and locked her up in a soundproof shipping container. For months, he did some pretty despicable things to her, even forcing her to wear a shock collar and call him master. But through it all, Abby kept hope alive by praying for strength to survive her ordeal.
And I remember praying to God, and I remember I never said a man in my mind. I never wanted to end my prayers because I didn’t want God to leave me.
When her captor forced her to write a letter to her mom, she tried sneaking in some secret messages by imprinting them into the paper with her fingernails, but he figured it out and she was punished for it. However, she was allowed to try again, and this time the letter made it to her family. I can’t even imagine the kind of hell that Abby went through for nine months, but she somehow managed to keep herself alive by playing along with her captor’s sick and twisted mind, she got him to trust her and even offered to help him with his illegal business of creating counterfeit money. This worked in her favor, and he started opening up to her, telling her about his life and how he went to Juvy as a teenager. He also started giving her books to read to keep her busy, and that’s how she came to know his name, Nate Kibbe, which she found written on a cookbook he had given her.
Part of how I gained his trust, I guess, as I went along with whatever he wanted to do.
On the evening of July 20, Neat was afraid that the cops would come knocking on his door because of his counterfeit business. He had paid someone with the counterfeit money and the person told him that she’d given him up to the authorities. So Nate was on the edge and did not want the cops to find Abby with him. Now, guys, this is where the miracle comes in. In most cases, kidnappers would usually kill their victims to hide the evidence, but luckily for Abby, that’s not what happened. Nate took her to his car and drove her to North Conway, the place where he had picked her up nine months earlier. After making her promise not to say anything about him to the cops, he let her go.
We’re looking up and laughing, just being so happy. I never thought it would happen to me, but I’m free.
She walked the rest of the way home, and in chilling footage captured by the surveillance camera at her home, you can see the moment when she walked to the door of their house for the first time in nine months. You can just imagine her mom’s reaction when Abby suddenly appeared at home at the door.
And I said, Mom, I remember she said, Abby. And then I remember she ran out. She said, Abby. And then she ran to me and we just hugged each other.
