In the Kach case, however, authorities believe that the young girl, then just an eighth grader and unable to make an informed judgment, agreed to join her captor, and then, under what they allege to be his psychological manipulation, failed to find the will to escape until a full decade had passed. In that respect, says former FBI profiler Candice DeLong, there may be some similarities between the Kach case and Hooker's horrors so many years earlier. Though such cases are rare, when they do happen, often the captor exploits the victim's fears and vulnerabilities, and convincing them that their captors are in fact their caregivers.

Candice DeLong

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It is of course true that in some even rarer cases, the victims even become willing accomplices to their captors. In Australia in 2003, for example, authorities found Natasha Ryan, a teen who had disappeared and was feared murdered four years earlier cowering in a cupboard in the home of lover, a man some five years older than she. In fact, at the precise moment that Ryan was discovered, authorities in Queensland were literally in the middle of trying her accused killer. Needless to say, the murder charges against the man were dismissed. Authorities later determined that Ryan, who was just 13 when she vanished, had gone willingly to live with her boyfriend, and that she had in fact cooperated with his efforts to conceal her over the years, and only had second thoughts when it became clear to her that an innocent man might be convicted of murder because of her caprice.

Natasha Ryan

And in the days since Kach resurfaced, there have been some who have wondered whether there may be echoes of the Natasha Ryan story in Kach's tale. Some have wondered why she didn't simply break away from Hose earlier, why she remained alone, in his home, hidden away, even while he was at work or out of the house. By her own account, there were times when guests had been invited to Hose's home, and yet even while they were there, she remained silent, even going so far as to make sure that she didn't accidentally step on any loose floorboards that might creak and alert the visitors to her presence.

Hose's attorney, Jim Ecker, is among those who have raised those questions. Though Ecker declines to acknowledge that there was any relationship between Hose and Kach, he has challenged the authorities' version of events, insisting that the young woman was not held against her will.

Perhaps. But others, police and prosecutors in Allegheny County among them, contend that a girl like Kach, who was in her early teens and under the age of consent when she allegedly fell under Hose's sway, was every bit as much a victim as if she had been dragged from her bed.

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