Stephanie Lavoie
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Well aware that her daughter was once one of them.
Lindsay's experience was so painful, she's not yet ready to talk about it on camera.
I beat myself up every day for not finding some way of preventing it.
The nightmare began in August of 2000 when 14-year-old Lindsay simply disappeared from the middle-class neighborhood where she lives with her mother, stepfather, and brother near Tampa.
I just wanted to die because I knew I'd never see her.
I just knew she was probably going to be dead.
Remarkably, Lindsay was found here in the port city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece.
And the story of how she got here is enough to make every family in America throw its computer right out the window.
Like many 14-year-olds, Lindsay was an internet junkie, spending hours a day on the computer her mother had bought only six months before.
She's very free spirit and just likes to enjoy learning new things and seeing new things.
It's like all these people email me and I don't know who they are.
But Stephanie couldn't believe her eyes when she saw who Lindsay was talking to and what they were saying.
These are just all the emails that I have that I printed.
The letters were from a man in Greece named Khan.
Lindsay's new pen pal longed, he wrote, to be her husband, to be father to her children.