My friend told me this incredible kidnap story that sounds like a thriller plot. According to her this really happened, although I could not find any reference to this particular case on the internet. Since the story was incomplete, I filled in a lot of the blanks. It’s called artistic license or fiction. Not to be confused with real life. Or as Mark Twain said: don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

A young man, let’s call him Joey, in upstate New York who was with a small gang of misfits was a bystander in a liquor store heist by his friends. A struggle ensued and a store employee was killed. Afraid of being implicated, Joey ran to the home where his girlfriend, Naomi, was babysitting a small girl. Being just 18 himself and Naomi 16, they acted on impulse. Joey told her of the heist gone wrong and in order to evade the subsequent police hunt they decided to run at a moment’s notice. Joey thought it a good idea to take the toddler along and pretend they were a young family and were able to slip under the radar. They headed north and made it across the Canadian border as a young family. This was in 1999, before 9/11, when border security between the US and Canada was relatively lax.

Somehow the young make-believe family ended up in a small community in northern Alberta where Joey, who looked older than his years, took on several menial jobs over the years and eventually became the manager of a gas station that also had a gas bar and restaurant. He was able to keep the three of them financially afloat. Eventually they were able to buy a small bungalow in a cul-de-sac and proceeded to live a very quiet, middle-class life, respected by the neighbours and the community to which they now belonged. The young girl which they named Leslie went to school and grew up like any other child, firmly convinced that her two guardians, Joey and Naomi were her parents.

Back in the town where they escaped from with the kidnapped child, the tragedy for the young family, whose child was torn from them, continued. The mother and the father never came to terms with the sudden loss of their child and it tore both of them apart.  She committed suicide after her husband left her for another woman. Meanwhile, the grandfather, the woman’s father, never gave up the belief that his missing grandchild could be found. He was well known at the local police station where he kept pestering the officers, as well as the FBI and state police about keeping up the relentless search for his abducted grand-daughter. They did have fingerprints and DNA of the young babysitter but were unable to match it to existing data bases.

Leslie was now sixteen and played soccer in the local girls’ team. They were invited to a tournament across the border, in the US. The mother and daughter thought nothing of it and joined the team in a bus-ride to the USA. An unfortunate locker-room theft of a purse brought the local police in and all the girls on the team as well as their handlers – including Leslie’s mother – who were part of the tournament and within range at the time of the theft were fingerprinted along with their personal data.

The purse was not found and after the tournament everybody went back home to their towns on both sides of the border. The following week Leslie came home from school to find her suburban street full of police cars and she witnessed both her ‘parents’ led from the scene in handcuffs. 

Unable to comprehend the magnitude of the allegations as well as refusing to let go of her attachment to the two people implicated in her kidnapping all those years ago, Leslie refused to co-operate with child welfare services both in Canada and the US. She also refused to meet her biological grandfather or have anything to do with him. She became catatonic and withdrew into her protective shell and didn’t utter another word for months. 

Diane Sandhill, a young psychologist, was brought in to coax the young woman into co-operating and talking to authorities and child welfare people. After many sessions Leslie broke down and the process entered a period of grief and convalescence. While being left unattended one cold November morning Leslie disappeared for the second time in her young life. To this day she has not been found.