Friday, February 16, 2007

Loan sharking

In his brilliant book: "The Gift of Fear" - you can read more about it here - Gavin De Becker also refers to what a criminal might do or say to get to his victims.
One of those things is what he calls "Loan Sharking"; offering some kind of help or assistance in order to have the intended victim to perceive some sort of "debt". This help can be anything from carrying bags, or like in this incident, fixing a flat tyre.

Story:
It was late September, 1995, and a 22-year-old woman was leaving a shopping mall in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. About the time she noticed she had a flat, a man approached her and offered to fix it.

The man fixed the flat and then asked the woman for a ride.

Perhaps understandably, the woman was willing to return a favor, but as she and the good Samaritan drove she realized he didn't seem to have any place to go. When the young woman refused to drive any further, the man held a screwdriver to her throat.

Luckily, she escaped and was able to flag down another motorist. The abductor took off in the woman’s car.

The good Samaritan turned screwdriver-wielding kidnapper was a man, recently arrested as a suspect in kidnapping a missing 13-year-old girl, called Kaitlin.

Kaitlin disappeared from the small community that sits between Baton Rouge and New Orleans on Thursday, February 1. She apparently vanished just after getting off her school bus.

The suspect is related to the girl by marriage and lives with his wife in a mobile home behind the girl's family residence.

Source

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