It took just a few minutes into this 2023 documentary for me to be dumbfounded that I had never heard about this chapter in American history, when an entire school bus of children and their driver, 27 people in total, disappeared mid-route on a hot summer day in 1976 in the small California town of Chowchilla.
What unfolded from there and the motivation behind the kidnapping are beyond imagination. In fact, those responsible for the crime were inspired in part by the Clint Eastwood movie “Dirty Harry.”
In this documentary, from CNN Films and streaming on Max, we hear from some of the abductees, who recall the experience in great detail. Unlike many other such stories, we learn quickly that no one died in the ordeal, but that doesn’t make the decades-long fallout less tragic.
The trauma was so acute that the survivors were able to help catapult the field of child psychology forward. “Chowchilla children are heroes,” Lenore C. Terr, a child psychiatrist who has studied the victims in depth, said in the film. “And they continue to teach us what childhood trauma is.”
For this three-part 2024 docuseries from ABC News, Tina Marie Risico — who survived a nightmarish nine days with the serial killer Christopher Wilder in 1984 before he made the astonishing decision to release her — sits down to tell her story for the first time.
As part of a brazen coast-to-coast string of abductions and murders, Risico, then 16, was kidnapped from a shopping mall near her home of Torrance, Calif.
Wilder, who posed as a photographer and had embedded himself in circles where he was often surrounded by girls and young women, had told Risico he could help her become a model.
From there, he raped and tortured Risico, and forced her to participate in a brutal crime involving Dawnette Sue Wilt. We also hear from Wilt in the series, which is available to stream on Hulu and Disney+.
There’s a lot to examine here, but what stuck with me was how the public’s mood around Risico quickly soured when she opted out of the media’s demands for a perfect victim. Her behavior in the aftermath resulted in Risico becoming the target of skepticism and even suspicion that she was Wilder’s accomplice.
Documentary film
When I first heard of this story about the kidnapping of Jan Broberg, it seemed on the surface like many other stories of abductions: a child is taken by someone close to the family — in this case Robert “B” Berchtold — and, after an expansive manhunt, is eventually brought home, though forever changed. But my curiosity grew when I learned that the yearslong saga, which began in 1972, had inspired a dramatized 2022 mini-series starring Jake Lacy and Anna Paquin.
The mini-series in part stemmed from this 2017 documentary from the director Skye Borgman, based on the book “Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story,” by Jan’s mother. The documentary includes interviews with Broberg, her sisters and her parents, as well as the lead F.B.I. special agent who had worked on the case.
This bizarre tale is made more disorienting because her parents were exceedingly naïve, to the point of complicity. When Berchtold, a predator of the highest order, entered the orbit of their tightknit, churchgoing Idaho community, there was no limit to the chaos he was able to sow.
Every revelation in this film is more jaw-dropping than the one before, and it’s a story so unnerving, I’ve never quite been able to shake it.
Podcast
Perhaps the most culturally impactful child abduction of the 1980s was that of Adam Walsh, who was 6 years old when he was taken from a shopping mall near his family home in South Florida in 1981. When his severed head was found in a drainage canal a couple of weeks later, it stoked the “stranger danger” panic that was bubbling up in the United States.
Adam’s father, John Walsh, went on to co-found the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 1984 and to host the long-running program “America’s Most Wanted.” But it would take decades for his parents to get closure, primarily because of the gross mismanagement of the case by local law enforcement.
In under 30 minutes of this prolific podcast, hosted by Ashley Flowers and her best friend from childhood, Brit Prawat, we learn what transpired from the day Adam went missing to the sprawling effects of his murder, which led to systems that are still relied upon today.
Podcast
I included this entry in a previous installment of this streaming list, one that focused on some of the scariest stories across true crime, but the abduction here is so shocking and had such far-reaching repercussions, it bears repeating.
In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped on a dead-end country road in his small Minnesota town. The incident fueled the already fast-growing national paranoia that pedophiles were snatching up America’s children. The search that followed was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history, though the investigation was egregiously mishandled — as the host Madeleine Baran, an investigative journalist, and a team of reporters make clear over nine episodes and two bonus episodes of this American Public Media podcast (it found a new home at The New Yorker in 2023).
For 27 years, there were no answers, but a couple of weeks before this season was set to debut, in 2016, Wetterling’s remains were discovered, changing everything and placing the case breathlessly in the present.
