A Stolen Life: A Memoir

This summary section includes Chapter 18: “Birth of a Second Baby,” Chapter 19: “Raising the Girls in the Backyard,” Chapter 20: “Nancy Becomes ‘Mom,’” Chapter 21: “Pretending to Be a Family.”

On November 12, 1997, Jaycee goes into labor shortly before midnight. She walks across from “next door” to the “studio,” where Phillip and Nancy are asleep, pausing to marvel that she is free to move across the property. However, she knows the bonds that tie her to her captors are invisible. Her subsequent delivery goes smoothly, and Phillip chooses to call the new baby girl “Starlit.” Jaycee comments on Phillip’s belief that he’s cured of his sexual urges: “Phillip says that with God’s help he is coming to understand the voices that he hears, and God has cured him of his sexual problem. I will believe that when I see it” (102-03).

After the second baby arrives, Jaycee is given more freedom. During the day, Phillip is on the road because of business, but he uses a CB radio to keep in constant contact with his “family.”

Jaycee and Phillip have a dispute about sending the girls to school when they get older. She says, “For eighteen years I had been taught that schools are bad […] but when I consider who I heard all this stuff from, a kidnapper, rapist, pedophile, narcissistic, pervert, I can only come to one conclusion.