Endless Thread - 'I Was Abducted'

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

Monique has always known she was abducted as a child, but specific details about what happened, and why, have been elusive. It wasn’t until she posted to Reddit that she found real leads and painful memories started flooding back.

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I always knew about the kidnapping. I always knew that it happened to me. I would have like really vivid dreams. I would have like anxiety about going to the beach. I hated the beach. Just certain triggers that would just remind me of my kidnapping. This is Monique. I was born in Oxnard, California.

I do attend community college out here. And I do a lot of odd jobs just to kind of provide for myself. Monique is 20. She's a student. She's got a boyfriend. She works odd jobs to make ends meet. Every day. She wakes up at 6 or 6.30 in the morning. She goes to class. She gets out at 3. She works on homework or takes a nap.

Then she goes to work one of her part-time jobs at 6 p.m. until about 11. Then she goes home, maybe a little more schoolwork, bed. Then she gets up and does it all over again. The routine of a college kid. A lot of Monique's life has not been routine. and the evidence of that is in a special folder on her desk. It contains a police report with her name on it. Up until a few weeks ago, Monique had been looking for that police report for 15 years,

even though she might not have realized it. It's at the center of a mystery she's trying to solve. A mystery about a day she's just starting to fully remember again. So I was five years old, And we were living in Sadakoy. And I used to play with this little girl that would come over once in a while. And we were playing in the front yard. And this guy came up.

And I knew this guy. This guy was always around. It was like my mom's friend. Maybe her boyfriend, I don't really know. And he was like, oh, your mom needs you. come in the car with me. We have to go to your mom. And, you know, I was a little kid.

You know, I've seen this guy before. So I was like, okay, yeah, he's a friend. We got in the car. We started driving, and we drove right past my mom, and she was on her bike. And she immediately turned the bike around, started chasing after us, yelling. And, you know, I was so confused. I was like, what was, I really didn't know what was going on. because I thought we were going to see my mom.

And he ended up telling us, well, we're going to have a fun day. We're going to go to the beach. And as we were driving to the beach, he had a couple of porn magazines, and he ended up giving us the porn magazines and making us look through it and kind of like suggesting that we do that. You know, I was just looking at a magazine. know, I thought it was like weird. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't have that concept of what that was. So I was just really confused.

Some of this story, Monique has always known. Other parts have come back in bits and pieces over the years. For parts of her abduction, she seems to remember feelings, more than specific details. We ended up going to the beach and spending quite a lot of time there. And, um, We were playing in the water. We didn't really care about anything. I thought I was safe. I thought I was in good hands. Then he did take us back to his car, but he made us get undressed.

And I don't really remember what exactly happened. I think that's just the way of my brain kind of protecting myself from remembering that horrible time. By the end of the day, he kind of just dropped us off at a park and said, oh, I have to go to work, stay here. And, you know, we were both cold. We just got back from the beach, our clothes were soaking wet. And it was getting later. And so we decided to just try to find someone to help us. What happened next is another blurry part of Monique's memory about the abduction.

but she thinks she and the other girl crossed the street from the park and started looking for help. They started crying. Eventually, they found an adult and got to the police. An Amber alert that had gone out was lifted. We were so hungry. We ended up going to Carriage Jr., and they gave us like this, they bought us like these kids meals with like the star-shaped nuggets.

And I feel like that, wow, that's kind of useless information because I don't remember anything else, but I remember those like star-shaped nuggets. And after that, I was just, you know, reunited with my mom. But she actually told me, oh, you're going to be on the news. Stay up and watch it with me. And I ended up just falling asleep because I was so tired and just so exhausted and just really confused.

This story, awful as it is, is incomplete. For 15 years, all Monique has had are the fragments. She hasn't known the name of her abductor or the other girl. Part of the reason is that she's estranged from her family, and her abduction is a touchy subject. Regardless, she is on a mission to solve the mystery of what happened to her. I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

I'm Amory Severson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston. NPR station. One of the reasons that Monique needs to solve this mystery of a day in her life when she was five years old is that almost nobody in her family will talk to her about it. Which makes more sense when you learn that Monique's family has been caught in a cycle of violence.

My mom, she was abused by my grandma. She was kicked out. She was really depressed. She actually tried to kill herself when she was younger. she didn't have the best life growing up. And I think that kind of, she never got help for it. Monique says that before she was born, her mom was using cocaine on the weekends. But cocaine is expensive.

And soon, her mom's habit led to other habits, meth, more drugs. Monique says her mom went from having a life full of possibility to a life full of illegal drugs. And not to say like she's not a good, great person. She always tries to make the best of out of everything. She's always tried to be the best mom she could be for me. But there's just so much,

so many things she's been through. So I don't, the reason we don't talk anymore, it's not because I hate her or like I don't love her. It's more like after a while she has to help herself.

This is a familiar refrain to anyone who has been close to drug addiction. Eventually, the final battle of an addict often becomes a very lonely one. Because people around them who love them have to draw clear lines. But it doesn't happen overnight, especially when the person who ends up being responsible for drawing those clear lines, is really just a kid. When my mom told me she was selling drugs,

I knew that I couldn't tell anyone. because we made it clear like you're not like she said you don't tell anyone I could get in trouble for this so I knew that it wasn't like that was something that was supposed to be kept a secret and I did keep it a secret but I really had nothing else to compare to like all my friends were my mom's friends too so they were all going through similar things so it was kind of normal Monique has a god sister Sophia, who was one of her closest friends. The other day, we were talking to each other, and I was like, you remember when, you know,

like I would come over with my mom, and then your mom and my mom would go into their room and lock the door and being there for hours? It just, we just realized, like, oh, they're probably doing drugs together, and that's why they were in that room and we weren't allowed to, like, talk to them. And, like, even if we knocked on the door, like, being hungry,

It was like, we're busy right now. We'll feed you later. We'll do something later. Monique doesn't know if her mom's drug addiction played a role in her being abducted. What Monique does know is that right after this happened, her mom made a big move, from California to Iowa. Monique doesn't know why. She's wondered if it had to do with child protective services,

or maybe her mom wanted to get them both away from this guy who abducted her. She never got any real answers about her abduction. But maybe she wasn't asking as many either. When you're a kid and something gets swept under the rug, sometimes you move on to other things. And it's not until you're older that the nagging questions return. Monique says she and her mom stayed in Iowa, picking up work wherever they could,

from kindergarten up until just before sixth grade. Then one day, her grandmother died. Monique and her mom went back to California for the funeral. And her mom suggested they move back to California then and there. Monique says this is around when her mom's drug use jumped to a new level. My mom started getting really heavily into drugs, and that resulted in my aunt actually getting custody of me. And it was a huge change from going, you know, from always hopping around

to actually being in a set place for about, like, I want to say like five, six years of my life. It was nice, but at the same time my aunt, wasn't like my mom. It was kind of like I was walking on very thin ice all the time. Like I had to be really careful what I say, how I express my emotions, and how I just carry myself. Is that because your aunt was basically suggesting that you wouldn't necessarily keep staying with her if you, you know, did the wrong thing or something? I go to therapy now because of this. One thing that I'm learning to understand and kind of process is that when you're a kid, you're going to make mistakes.

You're going to get in trouble. You're going to get grounded. But for me, it seemed like I wasn't allowed to make mistakes. We didn't really trust each other. It was just getting picked up from school and not being talked. to or not being asked about your day. And then as soon as your cousins are in the car, your aunt is like, oh, how was your day? What did you do at practice?

What was this? It's kind of just makes you feel not worthy of that love and affection and kind of search for it elsewhere. This home life is what led to Monique running away when she was 17. She stayed with her other aunt in Las Vegas, who agreed to take her in up until she turned 18. In the meantime, she got her GED, several months before the rest of her classmates graduated. Through all of this, Monique was finding her way. But the stuff that she went through as a kid, the remaining questions about her abduction, it was all still there. I don't have good communication with my family.

My family, including my mom, like my mom was really honest with me about her selling drugs, but I feel like this whole kidnapping thing was she felt like it was all her fault, and my family felt like it was all their fault too. So they just completely didn't bring it up. It was never brought up unless I brought it up. And when it was brought up, it was kind of like a taboo thing to talk about. So I didn't really talk to anyone about this. And eventually, not talking about what happened to her

caught up in a way that considering family history felt all too familiar. About two years ago, I had like this kind of like mental breakdown and I ended up trying to kill myself and it was a failed suicide attempt. So I ended up in the mental hospital. And after the whole breakdown in the mental hospital, I couldn't take care of myself. I couldn't shower. I couldn't eat. I couldn't get up out of bed.

And that whole experience made me. realized, like, I really have good friends because all my friends came to visit me when I was in the mental hospital. All of them, like, was so supportive. Like, I would call them and they would pick up the phone and talk to me during the times I was allowed to have the phone. And I'm really grateful because my god sister actually moved from Las Vegas to live with me. You know, she helped me get a job. She helped me take care of myself again. She made sure I ate. She made sure I took my medication. Make sure I went to therapy was taking me to my therapy sessions. Like she really helped me and honestly all of my friends have that attitude and it's really, to be completely honest,

more than my actual family has shown me. Monique's more positive outlook in recent months is definitely because of her friends. It's also because she knows much more about what happened to her. And that is because of her post on Reddit. More in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science,

we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team.

Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Monique has always known she was abducted. And through therapy, Monique has realized that knowing the full story about what happened to her is an important part of moving past it.

But getting the full story has been impossible. Her memories are incomplete. She was only five when she was kidnapped. And since the memories are traumatic, digging into them has also been really scary. On top of that, Monique's not on the best terms with her family, and nobody in her family is willing to talk about it. Monique's friends, on the other hand, have wanted to talk about it. I was with my friend Alyssa, we were just like talking about everything, about our lives.

And I'd mentioned, like, the kidnapping. And she's like, do you even know who this guy is? is like do you think he's in california still like do you know what happened to you like like just asking me questions that no one really asked me before and it kind of made me like think like actually i don't i don't know this guy like i don't know where he is i don't know the dates that it happened i don't know why i got kidnapped i don't know any of this and so we spent like maybe two three hours just googling like two girls kidnapped found out park, dates, like everything that we could to just try to find something.

And we didn't. There was nothing there. But that same night that Monique and her friend Alyssa had been trying to find information online with no luck, Monique did something a little radical. I'm new to Reddit. I think I started like last year getting into Reddit. But she says all of her friends love Reddit and send her stories about how people solve all kinds of mysteries on Reddit. So why not try asking for help there? The title of her post reads, I was abducted as a child. It was posted to the Reddit Bureau of Investigation Community, which is described as, quote, using the power of the internet to solve

real-world problems. Monique's post was just a few paragraphs, describing the town she was in when it happened, some other vague details, and it closed with this statement. Quote, I'm hoping that finding out more about this case will bring me peace and help with my healing. I hope that one day I could be reunited with the girl who was abducted with me. But that may never happen. I'm desperate for any help,

guidance, advice. She wrote the post and went to bed. When I woke up, it was crazy. It was just so many responses, so many private messages from just complete strangers. Like, people I don't know.

I was blown away by the whole community. Monique got a lot of love and support, including a private message from a redditor who related to parts of Monique's story. This was one of those cases that definitely caught my eye. Let's just say that. Kat Ramzinski has some experience in real estate. So in addition to offering emotional support and advice, she also helped Monique take some immediate next steps. Step one, try to find the address of the house Monique and her mom were living in when she was taken from the front yard. Let's find the house. Let's do a background check on your mom. Let's look up the entire area and newspapers.com. Let's go look at old periodicals and anything

we could find from that time about kidnapped children. Kat's ingenuity got the ball rolling for Monique. She decided to ask her godmother for more information. It wasn't until after Reddit that I was able to actually go to my godmother. She told me like, yes, like this could have been really dangerous. dangerous. Like, your mom owed him money, and if she didn't get the money that something bad was going to happen to you, and she was telling me, like, I honestly didn't believe that he was going to do anything, but we were, that's why we didn't even do the Amber Alert until way later, like maybe two or three hours after. The possibility that her mom owed this guy money was a revelation for Monique. It also made

her mom's refusal to talk make more sense. I had my god-sister call her, and she refused to talk about it. She got so mad. She was like, no, none of that happened. I don't want to talk about it. And just hung up and hasn't spoke to my god sister, even tried to reach out to me since then. Dead end.

But another reditor reacting to Monique's post, a librarian, found an actual lead. I'm a helper. That's why I'm in education. It's why I like librarianship. I hate the idea of somebody not being able to help heal themselves because somebody's keeping information from them. And I know that sounds like Mary Poppins of libraries, but it's kind of why we all do what we do.

This Mary Poppins of Libraries, known as pseudonym on Reddit, also had a useful tool at her disposal. Access to Paywall newspaper databases. And just looked up a few different search terms. I think I looked up Amber Alert, I looked up the city that she was in at the time in a date range, and it pulled up about 40 different newspaper articles, and I just read through the bits and pieces that they had available,

and one of them just sounded just like her. In the span of a lunch break, Pseudo-Nimp found what Monique had been searching for for years, among some old clips of the Ventura County Star newspaper, not searchable in the newspaper's own archives, but in this separate database. She ended up finding, like, six pages just about the kidnapping and actually provided a name too.

The name of her abductor. Also, a date, May 13, 2005, and a description of the kidnapper's car, a dark blue 1995 Honda Civic. Small forms of validation for vague memories from 15 years ago. When I got the article and the age just matched up, the location matched up, and then I had a name,

it was like this sense of kind of relief. Like, oh, my goodness, like, I'm not crazy. This happened. This, like, it kind of made it more real. And when I actually searched his name and I saw his picture, my body started shaking. His face was familiar. it was like my body kind of remembered.

And I was also realizing a lot of things and thoughts that I have that were tied to that specific incident with the porn magazines. Until recently, after this all came out, I was like, wait, to not all males keep porn magazines in their car? It made me realize there's so much stuff and, like, trauma and, like, experiences that I've been through that I kind of just normalized. And it was like, now what do I do? This was a good question.

Monique's abductor got off with a slap on the wrist 15 years ago. He pleaded guilty to one count of child endangerment, a misdemeanor. Basically, he was found at fault for dropping the children off in the park and leaving them alone. His case was originally treated as a kidnapping. But investigators found that, quote, the mother had omitted important information about her relationship with the defendant. Which begs the question, what exactly was her mom's relationship to this guy? Regardless, this was difficult for Monique to learn.

You know, I've been living with this for 15 years, and this is something he did in a matter of a day, and it's still stuck with me for 15 years. That's not fair. And he just got off with child endangerment, a misdemeanor. That's not fair at all. After processing this new information and her own new memories about the incident, Monique wanted justice, but she didn't really know how to go about getting it. Thanks to the advice that Reddy gave me, they were telling me to go to the local police station

like the Ventura County and ask for your records, and they will tell you all this information. They'll give you the case number. And they told me, they're like, we don't have these files about this, this case because he got let go on a misdemeanor. They're kind of not accessible anymore. Ventura County PD did give Monique the original police report from the day she was abducted, but her case file, with all the information about the police investigation, that's a different story.

They told Monique they throw out case files for misdemeanors after 10 years. So Monique has now given new interviews to law enforcement in hopes that police will investigate her abduction further. One complexity, she's still trying to figure out, though, a missing piece of this story, the other girl. On the police report I provided, you know, that didn't have the other girl's name. It doesn't even have my mom's name because of privacy reasons. It only has my name. But they said once the case is reopened, there's a possibility that I might get to talk to this other girl who was with me.

She was maybe like two years older than me, so I'm sure she might remember a lot more than I do. But at the same time, I'm really scared to even talk to her about it because what if she doesn't remember at all? Maybe something even worse happened to her that she does remember. And by me talking to her and having a conversation with her, you know, it will trigger things that just might have been better off not addressed. for her because, you know, everyone's different. It's not clear what Monique's legal options are from here. It's still early. But there are a few things worth noting.

One, it'll help a lot if someone else can corroborate her story. If her family won't talk, the other girl who was abducted might be the only person left. Two, it's highly unlikely that police could dredge up physical evidence of what happened to Monique 15 years ago. But they can look into the abductor to see. if he has a pattern of similar offenses. And now that we know the name of Monique's abductor, we can find out that he has been a registered sex offender in California. He's been in jail for a separate, more recent crime.

He's out now, living in the same area, according to the information online. Legal matters aside, there's something else Monique is focused on right now. She's coming out of a long period of being too hard on herself. It's something she's changing. She's doing the work. Monique also wants to help her friends do the work, friends she's made in recent years who have supported her through tough times.

I know a good amount of my friends have similar stories to me, but there's a lot of people who are really scared to just take that first step. And it is scary. It's not easy. It's really scary. It's really stressful. But I'm hoping by sharing my story that more people, no matter how long ago it was,

that people go and seek help. Because when you keep that in for so many years, it just eats you up. Do you think you'll ever try to patch up your relationship with your mom, or is it pretty much up to her? What are your thoughts on that? I hope one day we could repatch our relationship and just be talking again. She always tried her best. Like, I want to make this clear.

I'm being really open about this just because, you know, this was my childhood. but we had this very open, honest communication with each other at one point. For as of right now, like, it's all up to her. You know, I can't stop my life for her right now. I have a lot of goals. I have a lot of plans. I have a lot of dreams.

And she had the time to get better. And she had the time to, I don't know, get back on her feet. and it's always just been kind of excuse after excuse, broken promise after broken promise. And I'm just kind of tired of being disappointed. For now, Monique's focused on her next semester at college. Doing the odd jobs she needs to stay on her own feet because the traditional safety net, family, isn't really there.

And she's revisiting her case. It's all part of her ending a cycle of pain created by generations of abuse and neglect in her family. A lot of the things that I've been through, I've always kind of blamed myself. Like, I was like, well, this happened because I did this. My aunt treats me this way because I'm not good enough. I got kidnapped because I was dumb enough to go in the car.

I believe that I deserved absolutely everything bad that's ever happened to me. And now I'm trying to be a lot kinder to myself. You know, my goals and my dreams in life is just to be happier, to live life. I want to go to different countries. I want to go to Europe. I want to go everywhere. I want to finish college because, you know, my family doesn't think that I'll finish college. They all think that I'm going to end up like my mom, like a drug addict.

And it's not only to prove them wrong, but it's also, it's for myself as well. Like, I'm still going to prove them wrong. I'm doing great right now. I'm doing everything I can that I, by myself. I just have a lot of people to prove them. prove wrong. If you've experienced child abuse of any kind, you can call the Child Help National Child Abuse Hotline at 800-422-4453. To report information about a missing child, contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 800-843-5678. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR

station in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer. Iris Adler is our executive producer. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus. Editing help from Kat Brewer, extra production assistance from James Lindberg. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit. Thanks to Oxidated for this week's artwork.

It's called Overflow. You can find that at our website, WBUR.org.org slash endless thread. For reactions to this episode or ideas for future episodes, check out our official subreddit. You can find that at endlessthread.reddit.com. Or you can always shoot us an email to Endless thread at WbUR.org. My co-host and producer is Amory Siebertson. I'm senior producer and co-host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.