These despicable crimes will leave you shaking your head in disbelief. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re looking at infamous and shocking cases of minors who were forcefully taken, only to be discovered years later.
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00:00 I cannot believe it. This can't be true. This can't be true. It's a monstrous case.
00:05 Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at infamous and shocking cases of minors who
00:10 were forcefully taken, only to be discovered years later.
00:13 This is the place where JC was held prisoner for 18 years,
00:17 and where police say she was forced to raise the two children she had with the kidnapper.
00:21 Carlina White
00:24 This is such an incredible story, and the family tells us they never gave up hope that
00:28 she would come home one day.
00:29 In 1987, Joy White and Carl Tyson took their baby Carlina White to Harlem Hospital Center
00:35 in New York City as she had a fever. However, Ann Pettway, who was dressed as a nurse,
00:40 took the infant and disappeared.
00:42 I hope she's alright. I hope she's taking good care of my baby.
00:48 For 23 years, White was raised as Pettway's child. But after discovering her birth certificate was
00:54 faked, White was told by Pettway that her mother abandoned her. Not believing her tale,
00:59 White searched online databases for missing children.
01:01 She wasn't sure exactly why she belonged to that family. There was things like there
01:07 wasn't physical similarities and stuff like that.
01:09 There, she discovered images of herself and got in contact with authorities.
01:14 In 2011, a DNA test confirmed she was the missing victim, and she was reunited with
01:19 her biological parents. Pettway was sentenced to 12 years in jail and was released in 2021.
01:25 Alex Batty
01:27 The twists in Alex Batty's story are coming into focus.
01:31 After being raised by his grandmother, Susan Caruana, young Alex Batty was taken on a trip
01:36 with his mother, Melanie Batty, and her father, David, to Marbella, Spain. However, they never
01:41 returned to the UK. Melanie sent Caruana a video that detailed plans to live an alternative
01:46 lifestyle. In 2023, Alex was found walking near Toulouse, France.
01:51 I thought I should stop and ask him if he was okay or even just help him or at least
01:55 bring him back to a village, back to civilization.
01:59 He had left his mother and grandfather to return to the UK. For the past six years,
02:03 the trio lived nomadically across Europe, living in various communes with other families.
02:08 Alex was homeschooled and was made to work to earn money. Thankfully,
02:13 he was reunited with his grandmother.
02:15 This moment was undoubtedly huge for him and his loved ones.
02:18 However, at the time of writing, Melanie and David have yet to be located.
02:22 Gregory Jean
02:24 And I feel so thankful to God because without God, I don't think I would have been here.
02:28 In 2010, Gregory Jean Jr. and his brother Samuel visited their father,
02:33 Gregory Jean Sr. and stepmom, Samantha Davis. Yet while his younger brother was allowed to
02:37 return to Florida, Gregory was not and was forced to stay in Jonesboro, Georgia.
02:42 Even though his mom, Lisa Smith, alerted welfare agencies, the police weren't informed of the
02:47 incident. Gregory spent four years at his father's. During that time, he was kept home from school,
02:53 beaten and mistreated, while his step-siblings were given preferential treatment.
02:57 It concerns me as the police chief, more importantly as a father, you know,
03:00 no one wants their child or any individual to go through the situation that this particular
03:06 child went through.
03:07 In 2014, Gregory planned his escape by sending Smith a friend request on Facebook.
03:12 The police acted and searched the property, finding Gregory in a nook behind a false wall.
03:17 Gregory Jean Sr. and Davis were charged for their crimes.
03:20 They denied knowing the child existed, they denied knowing the child was in the residence,
03:26 they had no idea who the child was and why we were there.
03:28 Sun Wei
03:29 In 1995, little Sun Wei was walking home from preschool in Liangshan Yi, Sichuan Province,
03:35 China. However, he didn't return home. Instead, Sun was lured by a stranger with candy into a van.
03:42 He was then sold to a couple in Jieyang, Guangdong Province,
03:45 where his name and birth date were changed.
03:47 Free decades of a one-child policy in China and traditional family preference for sons
03:53 are factors believed to be contributing to many child kidnapping and trafficking cases.
03:58 Sun's parents, Sung Jung-hwa and Peng Lian-hui, didn't have a photo of their son,
04:03 making finding him difficult.
04:05 Jung-hwa traveled across the country, working odd jobs while searching for their child.
04:10 As a teen, Sun left the unkind couple who favored their biological daughter.
04:14 He was later persuaded by friends to upload his DNA to a missing persons database,
04:19 which led to a reunion with his biological parents 20 years after he vanished.
04:24 Kayla Unbehon
04:25 A family is in shock after a mother and daughter went on a camping trip but never returned.
04:30 In 2017, young Kayla Unbehon visited her mother Heather at her home in Wheaton, Illinois.
04:36 The next day, her father Ryan went to pick up his daughter, who he had full custody of.
04:41 Instead, both mother and daughter had vanished.
04:44 The search to find Kayla was unsuccessful, and there seemed to be little hope.
04:48 In 2022, Netflix's Unsolved Mysteries featured an episode on a taken child
04:53 that contained an age-progression photo of Kayla.
04:56 In 2023, a store owner in Asheville, North Carolina,
05:00 who had seen the episode, spotted a teenager who matched the image.
05:03 "The more we tell the story of these missing children and put their images out to the public,
05:08 the more likely that they're going to be recovered."
05:10 They called the police, who discovered it was Kayla, and reunited her with her father.
05:15 Heather was arrested and charged for her crime.
05:18 "What's most unusual is the ability to stay off the grid, if you will, for that period of time."
05:24 Stephen Stainer and Timothy White
05:27 In 1972, young Stephen Stainer was seized by Kenneth Parnell in Merced, California.
05:32 "When Stephen didn't make it home from school, his parents immediately were alerted."
05:38 For years, Stainer was horribly mistreated by Parnell as they moved around California.
05:43 When he got older, Parnell attempted to use Stainer to take another victim.
05:47 However, the boy sabotaged each attempt.
05:50 Using another method, in 1980, Parnell took little Timothy White.
05:54 Desperate to prevent White from suffering as he had,
05:56 Stainer escaped with White 16 days after he was taken.
06:00 "He literally said, 'I was not going to let that child go through
06:04 what I had already been through.'"
06:06 Parnell served five years in jail for taking Stainer and White.
06:10 He was later sentenced for an unrelated case to 25 years to life and died in 2008.
06:16 Sadly, Stainer passed away in a motorcycle accident in 1989,
06:20 and White in 2010 from a pulmonary embolism.
06:23 "Stephen was a national hero."
06:28 Steve Carter
06:30 In 1977, Mark Barnes' girlfriend, Charlotte Moriarty,
06:35 vanished with their son, Marks Panama Barnes, in Hawaii.
06:38 While Barnes reported the incident, he never saw the pair again.
06:42 Moriarty handed Marks to a stranger and gave cops a fake name and birth date for her child.
06:47 She then checked into a mental health hospital before disappearing.
06:50 In 2011, after reading about Carlina White's story,
06:53 Steve Carter in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, researched his own history.
06:57 After all, when he was four, Carter was adopted from an orphanage in Honolulu.
07:02 "We moved from Hawaii to Tennessee and then New Jersey when I was in the third grade
07:07 and didn't really think much about my adoption."
07:09 He visited the website missingkids.com and found an age-progression image of Marks
07:14 that looked like him.
07:15 "The first person that came up, the image looked very much like me."
07:18 What followed next was a year of piecing together a puzzling timeline of his own past.
07:24 Carter then had a DNA test that confirmed he was the missing child after 34 years,
07:30 leading to him reconnecting with his birth family.
07:33 "Carter says he's always known who he is and thanks to this sketch,
07:38 now knows more about who he was."
07:40 Elizabeth Fritzl
07:41 "How on earth can these things happen?
07:44 And in this particular case, how could he possibly get away with it for so long?"
07:48 In 1984 in Amstetten, Austria, 18-year-old Elizabeth Fritzl was asked by her father
07:54 Yosef to help install a door in the basement.
07:56 He then locked her up in this newly created prison.
07:59 For 24 years, Elizabeth was hidden, while Yosef told the community she had run off to join a cult.
08:05 Elizabeth was forced to give birth to her father's children several times.
08:09 In 2008, the eldest daughter Kirsten was taken to the hospital by Yosef.
08:13 His odd behavior and explanation for where her mother was concerned staff,
08:17 who alerted authorities.
08:19 When Yosef returned with Elizabeth, the police swooped in, and the truth was discovered.
08:24 "I cannot believe it, this can't be true.
08:26 This can't be true.
08:27 It's a monstrous case."
08:29 Yosef pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
08:33 "For 24 years, no one suspected the appalling crimes that were going on in there."
08:40 JC Dugard
08:41 "This is the place where JC was held prisoner for 18 years,
08:45 and where police say she was forced to raise the two children she had with the kidnapper."
08:49 In 2009, Philip Garrido was at the University of California, Berkeley,
08:54 to see the campus along with his two daughters.
08:56 However, their strange behavior led to Garrido's parole officer calling him to the office.
09:01 He arrived with the two girls and their mother, JC Dugard, who had vanished in 1991.
09:06 That year, the young Dugard had been seized by Garrido and his wife, Nancy,
09:10 as she walked to her school bus in Myers, California.
09:13 While people saw the seizure and there was a thorough search for her,
09:16 Dugard couldn't be located for 18 years.
09:19 In 2011, Garrido was sentenced to 431 years to life imprisonment,
09:25 while Nancy received 36 years to life.
09:28 Dugard wrote two books on her experience.
09:30 "It was not a day that I didn't cry.
09:32 I felt like there would never, ever be a day that I wouldn't cry again."
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09:52 MICHELE KNIGHT, AMANDA BERRY, AND GINA DE JESUS
09:55 "It was a night packed with emotion and drama. You see the people cheering right there.
10:00 It all began to unfold before sundown in Cleveland."
10:03 In 2002, 21-year-old Michele Knight vanished.
10:07 In 2003, teenager Amanda Berry disappeared.
10:10 In 2004, teenager Gina De Jesus was captured.
10:14 Each was taken from Cleveland, Ohio by Ariel Castro,
10:17 who kept them at his house and mistreated them.
10:19 "These young women who vanished as girls were so close by,
10:23 just blocks away from where they disappeared from in the first place."
10:26 In 2013, Berry managed to get the attention of neighbors,
10:30 who broke a hole big enough for her, along with her daughter, by Castro, to escape.
10:34 "It was May 6th when Berry yelled for help from behind a locked screen door,
10:38 bringing the world's attention to the Cleveland home where the trio had been
10:41 held against their will for more than a decade."
10:43 This led to authorities coming and saving Knight and De Jesus, too.
10:46 Castro was arrested shortly after the rescue.
10:49 He pleaded guilty to a litany of charges.
10:51 Castro was sentenced to life imprisonment plus 1,000 years without the possibility of parole.
10:57 However, he died by his own hand a month into the sentence.
11:01 [Music]