Some people live a life full of completely rational fears. They jump at the site of insects and rodents, they scream when they are near a snake, I don’t even blame the ones that shudder at the site of clowns. When it comes to me, I live in constant, all-consuming terror of being kidnapped, kept in someone’s basement or dirty spare room, and tortured in unfathomable ways for years and years while family and friends alike just accept that most likely I am rotting in the ground. Giving up the search, moving on while I am raped daily and time slowly passes me in my own personal hell.
I have been burdened with this fear since news broke on the case about Ariel Castro, the most evil man I could have never imagined before I opened up my laptop that fateful day when I was twenty-one. I couldn’t get enough of the story. I read as much as I could, becoming obsessed, buying the survivors books and diving into the mind of tragedy and hopelessness. The fear grew.
They knew this man, they were friends of his daughter. He tricked them into his house. He violated their minds and bodies. He treated them as less than people. For over ten years, he kept them hidden, fathering a child to one while constantly forcing abortions on another. He took their dignity, their humanity as if it was his to take. Monster.
I was in too deep. My fear had overcome me. There had to be more monsters… and there was. Josef Fritzl kept his own daughter locked up in an underground bunker he built himself for twenty-four years, fathering seven children with her, all by rape. He lied to everyone, saying she ran away, even taking some of the children upstairs in the house saying she has left them on the doorstep for them to deal with. Finally he was caught when one of the children became deathly ill and needed hospital. Twenty-four years.
Jacyee Dugard was kidnapped for eighteen years by Phillip Garrido and his wife. Tazed on the way to the bus stop at eleven years old. He kept her in his backyard and raped her repeatedly. Fathering two children with her. He would do drugs and rape her for hours and hours at a time without a break. She was thirteen when she first got pregnant. Police were supposed to keep an eye on Garrido since he was on parole for another rape and kidnapping. They never took a close enough look to see Jaycee. She was finally discovered after a slip up on Garrido’s part but after EIGHTEEN years.
I could keep going. There will always be the infamous cases like Elizabeth Smart and Shawn Hornbeck but there are so, so many that disappear. Some die and some live a lost life, years stolen by selfish people. My biggest fear will always haunt me, I will always double check the locks on the doors, I will always decline rides from anyone (even people I may know), and I will always look over my shoulder. But will it save me from the wolf in sheep’s clothing?