11 Famous And Terrifying Cases Of Stockholm Syndrome And Hostage Brainwashing

Whenever terrible cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking come to light, people ask, why didn't they try to escape? Tragically, in many cases, hostages, kidnapping victims, or members of cults cooperated with their tormentors and even resisted the police sent to rescue them, even though they faced unimaginable horrors.

Through torture, dehumanization, and disconnection from the outside world, many of these victims have been labeled "brainwashed" by the people who turned their world upside down. Victims of Stockholm syndrome will later explain that they felt completely unable to resist the criminals who kidnapped them.

Cult leaders have also been known to exact similar brainwashing methods on their followers to gain complete control over their subjects, even to the point of inciting them to murder or mass suicide.

Read some of the most shocking stories of people being brainwashed, where the men and women who were victimized lost not only their free will, but their humanity entirely.

A man blamed with putting an end to the idealism and hope of the 1960s, Charles Manson stands out in this list because he did not kidnap people. Nor did he did brainwash his followers into killing themselves, but instead, he convinced them to murder others, in what became known as the Manson Family Killings.

Following two prison stints for lesser crimes, Manson began collecting his followers, mostly women with troubled pasts. He asked his followers to give up their ego, to demonstrate self-sacrifice, and he told them about the future of the family, living in an underground paradise and then reappearing to seize control of the nation. He sought to keep his group’s gender ratio at 5:1, so that the women could take care of the men’s every desire.

Manson would hammer his ideas into his followers' heads, then consolidate his control by dosing them with LSD and then performing sermons to his drug-addled audience, preaching his racist, misogynist, and ultimately, murderous beliefs.

In the end, Manson successfully convinced his followers that the only way to bring about “Helter Skelter,” the eventual apocalyptic race war that he believed would lead to his world takeover, was to kill innocent people. The "Family," as they were called, carried out seven murders, including the murder of up-and-coming actress Sharon Tate (who was pregnant at the time). As a result, Manson was sentenced to death, later reduced to life imprisonment after the death penalty was abolished in California.

The tragic story of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart captured the fears and sympathy of America after she was taken from her Salt Lake City home one night and wasn’t found until nine months later, as her captor, Brian Mitchell, moved her all over the country, torturing and raping her.

While Mitchell may not have purposefully taken lengths to brainwash Smart, the level of torture and neglect she faced certainly had an impact. After her rescue, and during her testimony, she stated that she had opportunities to escape while held captive, but chose not to take them.

At one point, "Smart was questioned by a police officer who had received a tip that she had been spotted, but she chose not to scream for help or try to run away." When questioned about this incident in interviews later, she said,

I was under threat of my life, I was under threat of my family's life. And those two threats right there are stronger than chains for me. It is wrong for any person to ever judge someone in any situation saying, "Well, why didn’t you try to run? Why didn’t you scream? Why didn’t you try to do something?" That is so wrong and, frankly, offensive to even ask that question.

In perhaps the most infamous case of cult brainwashing, self-proclaimed guru Jim Jones brainwashed nearly all of his followers into committing suicide with the promise of salvation and paradise.

Entire families lived in Jonestown, the cult's complex, and the adult members not only willingly took their own lives, but killed their children as well - 300 of the 909 people who died were children. Children who didn’t voluntarily commit suicide were injected with cyanide.

In the haunting Jonestown death tapes, leader Jim Jones can be heard telling his congregation, “This is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide.”

The fact that they believed him enough to take their own lives (and those of their children) is a sign of how much power Jones had over his entire congregation.

Cult brainwashing has also lead to horrifying ends. Heaven’s Gate was an American religious millenarian group that believed that Earth was about to be “recycled” by an alien race that was traveling in a spaceship behind the Hale-Bop comet, and the only chance to survive was to leave the planet immediately.

The group’s leader, Marshall Applewhite, convinced the group that suicide was not death, but a way “to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered.” The group believed that in order to reach the Next Level, “humans would have to shed every attachment to the planet.” These attachments included family, friends, money, and eventually, their own bodies.

Separation from their family and friends, and the constant brainwashing (or “thought reform”) of repeated lectures and drills about the “next level” desensitized the Heaven’s Gate members to the idea of death and suicide. Stanton Peele, a clinical psychologist specializing in addiction treatment and theory, compared the cult and its form of brainwashing to drug addiction, saying that while the group was ultimately destructive, it must have also been gratifying and their beliefs may have even had a narcosis-like effect similar to drugs or alcohol.

In the end, 39 members of the cult killed themselves in 1997, believing that it was the only way to survive the impending apocalypse they were anticipating.

10-year-old Natascha was kidnapped as she walked to school alone for the very first time in Vienna, Austria. A man named Wolfgana Priklopil captured her and took her to a secret cellar where she stayed for more than eight years. During her time in captivity, she was beaten, mentally abused, and even starved - so that she would be too weak to escape.

Priklopil played intense mind games with Kampush. She recalled in an interview, "One of the worst scenes during my captivity was when he shoved me, wearing only a pair of panties, half-starved, covered in bruises and with my head completely shorn, in front of the front door and said, ‘Come on now, run. Let’s see how far you get.'"

She continued, "I was so humiliated and filled with shame that I couldn’t take a single step. He tore me away from the door, saying, ‘So you see. The world out there doesn’t want you anyway. Your place is here and only here.'"

Priklopil also convinced Kampusch that the windows and doors of his home were booby-trapped with high explosives. Eventually, when Kampusch was 18 years old, she seized an opportunity to escape. Her escape lead to Priklopil’s death, as he laid down on a railroad track and killed himself only hours later. A true sign of how he much he had warped Kampusch’s mind, when she heard of Priklopil’s death, she mourned for him.

Perhaps the most famous case of Stockholm syndrome – in which individuals who are kidnapped or taken hostage form feelings of trust and affection for their captors – is certainly the case of Patty Hearst. The granddaughter of former newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, Patty was kidnapped in 1974 by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.

Hearst stayed with the SLA for over a year, and after being put into isolation and tortured by the group, she shockingly grew sympathetic to their cause. Nineteen months after her capture, she was found to have joined the left-wing terrorist group, participating in robberies, propaganda announcements, and other illegal activities.

Eventually, she was captured by the FBI and charged just like her captors. At the time of her arrest, Hearst weighed only 87 pounds and was described by Dr. Margaret Singer as a “low IQ, low affect zombie.” She was given an IQ test, and it revealed that her IQ had dropped a massive 18 points within the 19 months of her captivity, and Dr. Louis Jolyon West, a brainwashing theorist, stated after a 15-hour interview with Hearst, that she was a “classic case” of brainwashing. Nonetheless, she was found guilty of her crimes sentenced to 35 years in prison in 1975, only to be pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped in 1991, when she was 11 years old, and wasn't released until 2009. Dugard’s captor, Phillip Greg Garrido, filled Dugard’s head with his own insanity, telling her of the “demon angels” who let him take Dugard so that she could help him with his sexual problems that society condemned - those being child molestation and rape. He would also make Dugard listen for the voices that he himself heard speaking to him from within his house’s walls. While Garrido was already married, many psychiatrists believe that in Jaycee’s mind, her relationship with her twisted captor was similar to marriage, in part because the pair had two children together.

Dugard was so controlled by Garrido that when police arrived to investigate and arrest Garrido, they were met by Jaycee, who introduced herself with her false identity, “Alissa.” Police noted that while Dugard was aware that Garrido was a sex offender she said that he was a “changed man,” and was “a great person and good with her kids.”

When pressed for details, Dugard became "extremely defensive" and "agitated," demanding to know why she was being "interrogated," even lying to protect Garrido. She claimed to be a formerly abused wife who was in hiding from her violent husband at Garrido's house. Police officer Ally Jacobs noted that Dugard’s two children, aged 11 and 15, appeared to be brainwashed by Garrido as well, as they stared at their father “like God,” adding, “They had this weird look in their eyes, like brainwashed zombies.”

It was only after Garrido’s arrest that Jaycee admitted, “I adapted to survive my circumstance."

11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck went out for a bike ride back in 2002 and wasn’t seen until four years later, when he was finally discovered by police inside the home of his captor, Michael J. Devlin. For four years, Hornbeck was subjected to abuse and molestation, despite the fact that he could have easily escaped if not for the brainwashing he was subjected to. During his imprisonment, Hornbeck even had access to the Internet, which he could have used to contact authorities.

In an interview with People Magazine, Hornbeck explained why he didn’t take his opportunities to escape. “You’re brainwashed. It’s as simple as that,” he said. ”I know people use that term a lot, but that’s what happens to you. It’s like you are on autopilot, only someone else is controlling all the switches. They control every little, minute detail in your life. Everything”

In a case that the FBI described as unparalleled in its brutality, Colleen Stan was subjected to such an unfathomable level of physical and mental torture that a mental break was likely the only thing her body and mind could do to protect itself.

After Cameron Hooker kidnapped Stan in 1977, he kept her in a coffin-sized box beneath his bed for seven years.  Hooker kept Stan inside that box for 23 hours a day during the majority of her captivity, forcing her into sex slavery.  Hooker had such control over Stan that she “signed” herself into sex slavery voluntarily in 1978.  She was referred to as “K,” which served as her slave name, and was only allowed to call Hooker “Master.”

The root of Hooker’s control over Stan was his invention of “The Company,” which he convinced Stan was an evil organization that was watching her and would torture and kill her family if she should go against Hooker’s wishes or try to escape.

Stan was so afraid to go against Hooker that even when he brought her back to visit her family, she didn't tell them the truth;

He left her alone with her family, but she never said a word about her ordeal. She claimed Cameron was her boyfriend and that she was happy. She spent the night, and the next morning posed for a picture with her abuser before leaving with him again.

Finally, Hooker's wife (who had been a willing accomplice in Stan's kidnapping) grew guilty and helped Stan escape.

In 2014, 148 Kurdish boys were held hostage by the terrorist group knows as ISIS for five months in Syria. While Kurds and the Sunni ISIS are sworn enemies, the boys were subjected to such extreme brainwashing that even after their release, they still believe many of the teachings they received from their captors.  Following his return, one boy (who gave himself the pseudonym Jan) said, "I must speak the truth. The Islamic State are right, and all the things they taught me are true.” He then added, "I am convinced they are right."

The boys were brainwashed with constant forced education about the ISIS belief system paired with brutal torture, including being tied up and having members of ISIS “practice karate and kick-boxing” on the children. They were also forced to watch videos of the infamous ISIS massacre videos.

Jan explains that his liberal upbringing has kept him from joining ISIS now voluntarily, but admits that he still holds the beliefs he was taught to be true. "Sometimes I am confused in my mind," he said. "But everything they said they proved using passages from the Koran."