There’s been a social media storm these last 24 hours

For those who haven’t heard, there’s a woman who claims she is Jennifer Klein who disappeared in 1974. This story has been floating around the internet for about a month, but yesterday there was a YouTube video published where the woman claimed she had DNA testing done and it proved her identity.

This woman also claims her abductors were members of a Satanic cult and that they kidnapped Kurt Newton and Etan Patz (who both disappeared in the 1970s, across the country from Jennifer) as well. She says she was brainwashed and didn’t start remembering what happened until after she was injured in a car accident.

As for what I think, well, I didn’t write this editorial but it pretty much sums up my own position on the matter.

Hopefully the truth will come out over the next few days or so. Until then, that’s all I’ve got to say.

Kurt Newton

I found this anniversary article of four-year-old Kurt Newton‘s disappearance from a remote campsite in Maine, near the Canadian border. He’s been missing for 35 years this month. Also, a 1979 article about the same kid and his parents’ search for him in the years following his disappearance.

That poor family. I sit there imagining them licking all those stamps and sealing all those envelopes, sending posters to every school superintendent in the country. And that colossal search effort in the woods — it looks pretty certain he was kidnapped, it seems like if he had been in the woods they would have found him, with all the searchers and bloodhounds and helicopters. The abduction theory wasn’t considered for weeks, until after the search effort was exhausted. I can’t blame the cops there — Kurt vanished from a very remote wilderness area, no one saw or heard anything suspicious, and people simply weren’t as aware of child kidnappings as they are now. But of course by the time they got around to thinking of that possibility, Kurt and whoever took him were both long gone. The abduction conclusion here was reached more through process of elimination than anything else.

I wonder if his parents are still alive, or if they had any more kids after his disappearance, or if they ever gave up hope. I wonder, if he is still alive, whether he remembers them at all or has some vague sense of unease about his origins.