Barron County Sheriff's Department via AP
Jayme Closs' parents were found dead in their home on October 15, 2018 — their 13-year-old daughter Jayme was nowhere to be found.
She was found three months later over an hour away from home. She approached a woman walking her dog and was eventually able to get in contact with the police.
While many missing people, tragically, stay missing or are presumed dead, sometimes they reappear after a few weeks, months, or even years.
Here are nine more children who eventually returned home.
13-year-old Closs went missing from her Wisconsin home on October 15, the same night her parents were found fatally shot inside. Closs herself was quickly ruled out as a suspect.
For months, authorities "pursued thousands of tips, watched dozens of surveillance videos and conducted numerous searches in the effort to find Jayme," and "led officials to recruit 2,000 volunteers for a massive ground search on October 23," to no avail.
However, on January 10, Closs was found outside the small town of Gordon, about an hour away from her home. According to CNN, Gordon resident Kristin Kasinskas was at home when her neighbor pounded on the door and explained that she had found Closs. The neighbor said that Closs approached her while she was walking her dog, and was so unnerved that she refused to say her name.
A suspect in the deaths of her parents and her kidnapping has already been taken into custody. Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald announced at a press conference on January 11 that 21-year-old Jake Thomas Patterson is being held on the charges of homicide for the murder of Closs' parents, as well as for her kidnapping.
Smart was 14 years old when 48-year-old drifter Brian David Mitchell broke into her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, on June 5, 2002. He took her to an encampment in the woods outside of Salt Lake City, and introduced her to his wife and accomplice, Wanda Barzee.
For nine months, she was repeatedly abused and raped.
Apparently, Smart was taken into public by Mitchell and Barzee a few times, wearing a wig and a veil. Once, they were questioned by the police, but claimed the veils were due to religious beliefs.
The breakthrough in the case came in October 2002, when Smart's sister Mary Katherine, who had witnessed the initial kidnapping, suddenly recognized the voice of her sister's kidnapper as a man named Immanuel that the family had employed briefly to rake leaves and do some roof repair. A sketch of Immanuel was publicized, and eventually led to the arrest of Mitchell and Barzee in March 2003. Barzee was later sentenced to 15 years in prison, but released in September 2018. Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison.
Dugard was grabbed off the street ner her home in South Lake Tahoe, California, on June 10, 1991, when she was 11 years old. Her captors were Phillip Garrido and his wife Nancy Bocanegra. Garrido had previously been in jail for 12 years for the rape of another woman.
Dugard was kept in a shed in the backyard of Garrido's home, three hours away from her home in Antioch County, California. Garrido and his wife abused her and raped her for years, resulting in two daughters.
Garrido was caught when he showed up at the UC Berkeley campus with his two daughters in 2001 to request permission to hold a special event. His erratic behavior led to a police officer to request a meeting with him, Bocanegra, Dugard, and the two children. Although Dugard introduced herself as Alissa, the truth was eventually revealed by Garrido under questioning.
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