Wasn’t this an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit?
I had a trundle bed when I was a kid. Never kept anyone in it, though.
Anyone else have a trundle bed?
Here’s a helpful illustration from Ik3a.
Just in case any of the comments on the child’s looks were serious…
Hands up: Who looked gorgeous in their school picture as a child? Yeah, thought so.
Fucked up, but man are you people funny…
For those who are curious for the real story - there is a strange family dynamic going on here. The suspect is the girl’s stepfather’s uncle; the mother is 32 and the stepfather 22; the mother was sure that her neighbors were ‘out to get her’ and felt all along that the girl was nearby and ‘abducted by someone who knows me’, and was a suspect along with the stepfather. She’s got 2 other children from 2 other fathers. The police have held Shannon for additional questioning (i.e. softly softly trying to figure out what the hell happened) but she was apparently not sexually abused or assaulted. She was kept for 24 days, and has been asked if she wants to go home or not (it’s her choice, apparently, under a child protective order). It’s a whacked-out story, for a lot of reasons. The gallows humor I can fully understand - it’s like a UK version of Jerry Springer but even more sad because of the little girl. And it’s also one of many stories in the press right now - it’s a bit of a glurge of missing white girl stories just now.
I did. I only became ugly later.
(That’s a lie - I’ve always been hideous.)
It’s a good thing they didn’t have to call the Bureau of Investigation.
Your link describes her as a “mother-of-seven.”
Sorry, mistyped. You’re right.
It’s entirely inappropriate that I’m laughing at your linked advertisement’s suggestion, “Ideal for when the kids stay over!”
edit: I mean, that’s a little too helpful, if aspiring abductors are reading the IKEA site.
Sailboat
I knew I’d seen this somewhere before. And I vaguely remember watching something similar on an episode of A Current Affair or Unsolved Mysteries or a similar show when I was a kid (maybe the early 1990’s?) where a woman told about how she’d been kidnapped by a man and his wife while hitchhiking, and had been held for years in a cabinet under their bed, and that she had basically been kept as a sex slave, and that he told her (this is what really freaked me out as a kid) that he had a network of friends all over the country, and if she ever escaped, his friends would bring her back and he would cut off her arms and legs and pelvis and use her long hair to hang her up from a ceiling hook, like some kind of potted-plant-human-torso being held up by fancy long-hair-macrame. So she was too scared to flee and endured years of rape and torture while being kept in the cage/cabinet/box/whatever under his bed.
Thankfully, it seems like this little girl wasn’t sexually abused or tortured. I hope that turns out to be true.
And I really hope the story I heard was exaggerated, but I have no idea who the kidnapped woman was.
Sadly, it’s true and not exaggerated.
Hoooooooly crap, not only was it not exaggerated, it was actually far worse than I remembered. I appreciate you posting this, but now I kinda wish I’d never mentioned it. Although me not knowing about it wouldn’t mean it didn’t happen… but at least I wouldn’t feel so ill now. I just really hope this Shannon Matthews girl didn’t go through anything like that. And thank goodness she wasn’t kept for seven years.
I hope this thread is recent enough to avoid zombie resurrection status.
The latest in a series of twists in this case, including the stepfather’s arrest for possession of child pornography, is that the whole kidnap may have been staged. If this turns out to be the case, the mother is in very deep shit, because the W Yorks. police spent about £5 million on one of their biggest missing person hunts ever.
Man, what a mess. I can’t honestly imagine how desperate and/or stupid you’d have to be to stage the phony abduction of one of your own children, but if that is what really happened (and it really is starting to look that way), then there’s certainly evidence of a generous portion of stupid.
I mean, all rights and wrongs aside, you’re faking the abduction of a child. When it quickly ramps up to a full search, the whole place is going to be crawling with coppers, poking into everything. Anyone with a grain of common sense would realise it would be a good idea to dispose of anything that could incriminate in any way.
Sheesh.
Sheesh indeed. Apparently (according to the,ahem, Metro…) the Madeleine McCann fund organisers were approached for money to help search for Shannon in a particularly clumsy and illiterate manner - the implication being, I guess, that the whole abduction was a botched attempt to defraud money from the (presumably kosher…) McCann abduction fund.
Looks like the police might get to the bottom of this; sofa, so good…
Several people at work have commented on the fact that it now looks like the Dewsbury Five were attempting to cash in on the celebrity status of the McCanns. Looks like it backfired on them.
but not a top drawer one.
How messed up is this family? I feel sorry for the girl, and at first I was glad she was all right. I still am, but how “all right” can she be? Sure, she wasn’t molested or beaten, but her mind and her role models are harm enough.
The other story–good god. I am sick now. I’m not a religious person, but stuff like that shows me there is true evil in the world. 