Abduction Hoaxes

After going missing for several days, French actress Nicole Riche reappeared claiming that she had been kidnapped by "Puritans" who kept her in a room without food while they lectured her about the immorality of her life. Finally, she said, her captors abandoned her in the Fontainebleau Forest, where she was found and helped to safety by kindly gypsies. The police believed none of her tale, and rightly so. Her "kidnapping" turned out to have been an elaborate publicity stunt designed to promote Paris's infamous Grand Guignol theater. More…

Four days before her wedding, Jennifer Wilbanks of Georgia disappeared, sparking a nationwide search. She reappeared three days later in Albuquerque, New Mexico claiming she had been kidnapped, and subsequently released, by a hispanic man and a "heavy set white female." But during questioning by the police, Wilbanks eventually admitted that the abduction story was a lie. The truth, she said, was that she fled "because of the pressures of the wedding" and because "the list of things she needed to get done and no time to do it made her feel overwhelmed." More…