I Was Abducted at Gunpoint During Running Practice
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And all of a sudden, I felt this pull from behind, like a snake had come around my neck, only it was somebody's arm. I didn't know who it was. But just like that, I realized I was being kidnapped. This first sexual assault was when it was really dark. My hands are bound. He eventually buried me under some brush for a while. And I remember through a little sliver of the pile, which I was under, I saw the blue sky. And that's where my attention was mostly focused, not on the bugs. or anything that was crawling all over me. My captor eventually unburied me. I was on my stomach. I had my hands over my head. And I look over my shoulder, and they say, never look back. I look over my shoulder, and he was taking aim at me with this gun.
Hey, I'm Julian Morgans, and you're listening to What It Was Like, the show that asks people who have lived through big, dramatic events what it was like.
Hey everyone, welcome back. This week we've got a true crime double feature. Two stories about women who were abducted as kids, one who was three years old and the other one was in her teens, and the very different ways that they've each healed from that experience. So I'm going to be honest, I'm a little reluctant to just always do true crime. You know, if you listen to this show, we do a lot of true crime, but I sometimes wonder if it's gratuitous. You know, are we giving people a balanced narrative diet or are we just kind of doing the commercial thing that we know works? So is this okay? I'm honestly not always sure. But the reason that we're going to run these two stories today is that at their core, they're about healing.
They're about two women who lived through unimaginable horror that got woven into their identities as they grew up. And I think there's a universal question in that. How do you move on? And these two women have answered that question in completely different ways. So in today's main episode, this episode right here, I'm speaking with Maggie Malloy. And she was 15. She was at running practice near her home in Ohio when a man forced a gun into her back and told her to follow him. I'm not going to spoil what happened, but it was brutal and she ended up getting shot multiple times in the head. Yet she somehow survived. And she's since moved on via a lot of therapy, but also thanks to her faith. She's a deeply spiritual woman, as you're going to hear.
And then in this week's subscriber episode, I'm speaking with Laurie Poland. And in 1983, when she was three years old, she was playing in her front yard when a man pulled up in a car and offered her candy. And she wasn't seen again for several days. Laurie's story became part of her past in the same way as Maggie's. but she's healed in a very different way. Less spiritual, more clinical. She's trained as a therapist and she co-founded a program to help people work through trauma. And she has some really fascinating thoughts on the neuroscience of all of this. So that's this week's true crime double feature. Two stories of abduction and two very different paths through survival and healing. And hopefully something in both of them that we can learn from.
Something that makes all of this true crime truly worthwhile. So let's get into it. Here's Maggie Malloy. Hey Maggie, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
So let's start with a little bit of a sense of where you grew up and what you were like as a kid.
Okay, well, I hate to start by dropping the four-letter S word, but here it goes. Snow. Snow. I grew up in what I consider to be a little snow globe, a little town in... northern Ohio, about an hour north of Columbus, called Galleon. And wherever you grow up, that's your place, that's your palace, that's your piece of the world, that you have that invincibility that nothing can touch. So in my little snow globe, I was a pretty happy-go-lucky kid. I was the youngest of three, raised by a single mom, go single parents. They're amazing. And She worked very hard to take care of us, but she let us be kids. And I was very fortunate just to have a great family, two older brothers and friends.
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