Elizabeth Smart

At first glance, the alleged imprisonment of Tanya Kach seems to echo other high profile crimes in the past where girls or young women have been abducted, held prisoner and forced to serve the sexual whims of their captors. There are, for example, some parallels to the case of Elizabeth Smart, the teenager who was abducted at knifepoint as she slept in her family's sprawling home in an affluent Salt Lake City neighborhood. Her alleged kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, a self-described "prophet", aided by his common-law spouse, Wanda Eileen Barzee, seized the young girl to make her his second wife, and exploited her as they traveled from place to place for nine months before Smart finally escaped.

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Brian David Mitchell

Wanda Barzee

Both Mitchell and Barzee have been declared mentally unfit to stand trial and have been committed to psychiatric care in Utah. There are also the tales of horror committed by Charles Ng and Leonard Lake who among their other crimes, abducted and raped women, then killed them. And there is also the bizarre case of Cameron Hooker, who was convicted a generation ago of kidnapping a young woman and holding her, with his wife's help, as a sex slave for seven years, forcing to live for a time in a box under his bed.

Cameron Hooker

But there are significant differences as well. Ng and Lake, for example, were, as authorities later described them, predators, motivated by a seemingly insatiable lust for blood. And Mitchell and Barzee were both clinically insane. What's more, they didn't seduce Elizabeth Smart, she didn't go with them voluntarily, and by all accounts there was never a moment in her nine months of captivity when she could have escaped. Hooker too kidnapped his victim, and though later in her captivity, she was given enough physical freedom that she might have escaped, her captor had so compromised her will that she could not at first find the strength to do so.

Charles Ng

Leonard Lake

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