Even making allowances for the religious element, the backwater small community, the 1970s innocence (although really? an FBI agent who hadn’t heard of paedophilia in the 70s?), there’s something more to this story. It just doesn’t add up that Jan aged 12 could have been taken to an unknown place by a close family friend for weeks on end, with no communication with her family, hunted by the FBI, ending up “married” in Mexico, and then for the parents to keep this man in their lives while Jan is spouting stuff about how she really does want to be married to him. It just doesn’t add up.
Grooming and manipulating can’t go that far, surely? They’re not so stupid, are they? No parent of 3 can be that stupid.
He held more than a homosexual encounter and an affair over them. They basically pimped their daughter out to them. It was either a church thing (they were seeking religious nirvana through sacrificing their daughter) or there was dirty money involved.
The only credible part to me was when Jan was relating the story about how her dad held his family in his arms while his flower shop was burning, telling them they were all he needed in his life. I believed her totally. But those are the words of a man on his knees, with nothing left in his life other than his family. Not of a man who’s seeing his business premises aflame and thinking of the hassle of putting in an insurance claim before he can get on with his life. If he had really been in his knees by Jan’s disappearances, wtf was he doing letting the man in their lives after the first kidnapping?
It’s all so messed up and so incomplete.