‘I was kidnapped and held in a soundproof box by my stalker'

Telegraph

a day ago

'Holy s---. This is like a horror film,' thought Samantha Stites when she found herself chained to the wall of a soundproofed pine bunker in 2022. Facing her was Christopher Thomas, the burly loner who had been stalking her for the past 11 years. 'Is he going to rape me and kill me in this room?' she asked herself. 'I can't fight my way out.'
She would spend the next 13 hours in the 'torture chamber' Thomas had built in a remote storage unit, eventually agreeing to have sex with her captor in exchange for a release that, she was aware, seemed 'highly unlikely'.
An hour earlier, the 30-year-old social worker had been asleep in her bed in the small town Elk Rapids, Michigan, when Thomas broke into her home. Woken by a creaking floorboard, she was reaching for the hatchet she kept under her bed when he overpowered her and began throttling her.
Describing that night with admirable composure in the three-part Disney+ documentary Stalking Samantha: 13 Years of Terror, she recalls telling her assailant: ''If you want to rape me, just do it,' but he said, 'I just want to talk to you, not here.'' Thomas then rammed a ball gag into her mouth and secured it by wrapping duct tape around her head multiple times, binding her wrists and ankles, blindfolding her and bundling her into the back of her own car. He told her he had taken her paddleboard too, because he was planning to fake her death as an accidental drowning at a local lake.
'For a long time afterwards,' Stites tells me via Zoom today, 'my heart would race if I smelt duct tape or lumber.' She would be triggered by 'the sight of somebody in handcuffs on TV. I'd think: 'I know how that feels'. Oh, and the smell of bananas. I don't think this made the cut in the documentary, but he asked if I wanted to take some food with me as we left the house. I asked for a banana'.
I worry that recalling such traumatic events is distressing for Stites, but she shakes her head. 'Actually, telling my story has been helpful in my healing process, in making it less scary and regaining some power,' she says.
'Never seen a stalking case as severe as this'
That story began in 2011, when Stites and Thomas were both students at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Stites had included the 'socially awkward' older student in conversations, but he quickly began bombarding her with texts asking her for dates. She refused politely at first, and then stated explicitly that she had no romantic interest in him, before blocking his number.
'There's a pervasive idea,' she says today, 'that boys should maybe keep trying. 'Oh, she'll come around.'' Stites shakes her head. 'We should be teaching them that no means no.'
Stites realised Thomas had 'become a threat' when he ambushed her at work with flowers, making a second attempt to hand her the bouquet at a bus stop on her way home.
'At that point,' she tells me, 'I was yelling at him on a street corner. There was no misconstruing me. Anyone who can't understand that is being wilfully ignorant.'
After graduation, Thomas began showing up in her hometown. When a friend spotted him coming out of her apartment, Stites applied for a personal protection order (PPO), a particular version of a restraining order in the US. In 2014, Judge Norman Hayes granted her a six-year PPO – the longest he had ever given at that time – and today tells the documentary team that he had 'never seen a stalking case as severe as this. He was obsessed, absolutely obsessed with her'.
A Netflix-inspired bunker
Stites moved on. She got a job, bought a house, joined a soccer team. But the minute Thomas's PPO expired in 2020, he resumed the stalking. He joined her gym and soccer league. She saw him in bars and grocery stores. Too canny to address or text her, he would stare at her and stick his tongue out. Her friends confronted him, but he ignored them. She applied for another PPO, which, astonishingly, was denied.
Stalking victims are 'often failed' by the legal system, says Stites. Although she later learnt that Thomas had been convicted for stalking another woman before he met her, his previous record did not show up on the system when she applied for a second PPO.
When he saw Stites was trying to have him barred from contact again, Thomas began building the bunker, in which he hid rifles and a crossbow. He was inspired by the Netflix series You, in which a handsome psychopath stalks and kills a different woman every series.
'I had watched the first season of that show too,' Stites shrugs. 'I watched it thinking the man was unwell, disgusting. Christopher had obviously watched it differently.'
Stites survived in Thomas's makeshift prison by using skills she had learnt as a social worker. 'We conduct motivational interviews to work out what might drive a person to make a change in their life.' Thomas was frightened of returning to prison, following his previous conviction, and she worked on that. Stites says she still 'feels badly' about 'taking skills I had learnt to help people and twisting them. As a social worker, your intent is to be honest and do the best for your client. I lied and acted in my own interest'.
Stites promised Thomas she would not turn him in if he released her. He said he couldn't trust her unless she had sex with him, and in desperation, she finally agreed. She tells the cameras that the experience 'was painful, I cried and I shook. I didn't want him to know I was disgusted and terrified. I didn't want him to get angry'. When her ordeal was over, he told her: 'You're the person I'm supposed to marry.' Astonishingly, he then drove her home.
'A powerful and terrifying experience'
Stites immediately called a neighbour, who drove her to the hospital, where she took a rape test. 'I remember asking myself, 'Are they going to believe me?' But I hoped there would be DNA evidence.' Six hours after she arrived at the hospital, Stites met a detective, who used her detailed recollection of her journey to locate Thomas's bunker and arrest him within 36 hours.
Police bodycam footage shows Thomas defiant in custody, claiming the incident was part of consensual sexual roleplay. But in 2024, he was convicted of kidnapping, torture and aggravated stalking, and sentenced (by the same judge who denied Stites's second PPO) to 40 to 60 years in prison.
Viewers will share Stites's frustration that the rape was dropped in exchange for a guilty plea. Today she stresses that 'nobody can give consent under those circumstances'. So, during her courtroom victim statement, she clearly names him as a rapist.
'That was a powerful and terrifying experience all at once,' she says. 'To say that with him standing so close to me, in front of his loved ones and that judge.'
'My body let me down'
These days, Stites says recovery is 'a work in progress'. She had to set up a crowdfunding page to survive financially. 'Accessing medical insurance and getting formal time off at my workplace was a complete nightmare.'
Thanks to exposure therapy, Stites can now cope with the smell of bananas and lumber 'without a heightened response'. But her sense of herself as physically strong and intellectually capable has shifted, 'because I was overpowered '.
'Owning back my body has been a process. There is still a disconnect. I don't, to some degree, like my body, because it let me down. It's a strange thing, I know other sexual assault survivors feel that.'
Her Christian faith was also rocked. 'I had moments in the bunker when I was talking to God. Especially when he left me alone. Ironically, those were more terrifying, because I thought: if he gets in a car accident, then I'm chained to a wall where nobody can find me.' She asked God: 'Why Me? Haven't I been through enough?'
Stalking Samantha ends with a grim statistic: one in three women will become victims of stalking at some point in their lives. Stites hopes that by telling her story she has enabled victims to learn the signs and take action if they feel threatened.
Her advice is: 'Document everything. I wish I had done that sooner. Get written proof, dates, times, photographs. Get other people involved and don't keep it to yourself. Tell your friends and neighbours: this is what this person looks like, this is what car they drive. Change your routines – I was really careful with that when he reappeared in 2020. I got additional security at home: locks and cameras.' These days, Stites has a couple of people with whom she shares her location via tracking apps: 'If I'd had that in 2022, they could have pinged my location at the storage unit.'
Now Stites is setting up a company to support stalking victims and run courses on stalking for social workers and police officers. 'There's not enough information readily accessible out there,' she says. 'I want to use my story as a platform to help others.'