Karen Palmer

And at this point, I was torn between having police there to grab him or

terrified that if he sensed police presence that he would do something to Amy or he would vanish, that he wouldn't show up.

You know, he kept telling me that if you don't do what I want, I'll take her again and I'll take Aaron too or I'll just kill everybody.

So I made the decision not to have the police there when I went to get her, and I went by myself.

The whole conversation was, did you mean what you said?

Do you promise?

You know what will happen if you don't keep your promise.

And, you know, this went on and on for several minutes until finally he did give her to me.

And I went rushing over to the car to open the back door and put her in her car seat.

And I heard him call my name.

So I looked over at him, and he had lifted up his shirt, and what he wanted to show me was the gun that he had tucked into the waistband of his pants.

It wasn't until getting Amy back and seeing the gun and realizing that it would never be over, it was never going to be over, that we decided, okay, that's it, we have to do it.

Vinnie had known of this bookstore out in the valley that was a survivalist bookstore.

And they sold things in there like, you know, how to live off the grid.

But they also had stuff on how to change your identity.

So we had this guidebook on how to assume a new identity.

We weren't even sure we were going to stay there.

But we kind of liked it.

We were in a motel, and we were wandering around the town, and it was within driving distance of Denver, so when it came time to look for jobs, if we couldn't find anything in Boulder, there was a big city nearby, so maybe we could find some employment there.

His New York State certificate was basically just a photostat where the top half of it was, you know, white typewriter type on a black background.