Latest news with #SamanthaStites
Yahoo
8 minutes ago
- Yahoo
He Stalked Her for 12 Years — Culminating in 14 Hours of Terror Inside a Soundproof Bunker
Samantha Stites is speaking out about her experience after surviving a kidnapping in 2022 NEED TO KNOW Samantha Stites spoke to ABC News ahead of Hulu's Stalking Samantha: 13 Years of Terror, about her harrowing experience Christopher Thomas pleaded guilty to kidnapping, torture and aggravated stalking in December 2023 Thomas is serving a minimum of 40 years in a Michigan state prison A Michigan woman lived through a nightmare when she was stalked for years by a man who later kidnapped and tortured her. Now, after her stalker was sentenced to decades in prison, Samantha Stites is telling her story. Speaking to ABC News ahead of a Hulu documentary series about the case, Stalking Samantha: 13 Years of Terror, Stites says she first thought her stalker was just "lonely." "At first I think he is just lonely and for some reason finds me an approachable person to talk to," Stites told the outlet. "And then at some point, it kind of changes." According to Michigan prison records, Christopher Thomas, 41, is currently serving a minimum of 40 years behind bars, and faces a maximum of 60 years. Prison records show that that Thomas pleaded guilty to kidnapping, torture and aggravated stalking in December 2023. ABC reported that Thomas first started stalking Stites in 2011, when he went to the same Christian group she attended while she was a college student. Thomas eventually began following Stites for years, going so far as to place GPS trackers on her in 2022, WPBN reported, Thomas was arrested after he kidnapped Stites and held her in a soundproof storage unit for almost 15 hours. Stites was able to escape after convincing her captor to let her go by promising not to report the crime, ABC reported. Thomas was sentenced in 2024 after pleading guilty in December 2023. "Justice is a funny thing. It doesn't necessarily come in the form of prison years," Stites said, according to ABC. "I can't ever go back to before I was kidnapped. And that's something I had to grieve. But knowing that I'm finally turning the page on this and that I should feel safe with him off the street and that I am protected meant a lot. I felt free." Read the original article on People
Telegraph
a day ago
- Telegraph
‘I was kidnapped and held in a soundproof box by my stalker'
'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.'
The Sun
12-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
My stalker was inspired by Netflix show to kidnap & chain me to wall in torture chamber… I struck dark deal to survive
WAKING to a creaking floorboard in her bedroom, Samantha Stites was about to reach for a small axe hidden under her bed when she was suddenly attacked. Intruder Christopher Thomas gagged her, tied her up and bundled her into a car before driving her to a bunker in a storage unit - where he kept her chained to a wall. 14 14 14 But this horrific kidnap, in October 2022, was no random attack. Thomas had been stalking Samantha for over a decade, after becoming obsessed with her when they first met at Grand Valley State University in Michigan in 2011. And his terrifying plot to kidnap, rape and murder her was inspired by watching hit Netflix show You, which saw its deranged main character Joe Goldberg, played by Penn Badgley, torture women in a glass box hidden in the basement of his New York bookshop. Recalling the horrifying moment Thomas forced her into a custom-built soundproof bunker in a rental storage unit, Samantha said: 'He takes off my bandana, I'm in this torture chamber. 'Holy s***, this is like a horror film. Is he going to rape me and kill me in this room? I can't fight my way out.' Samantha had to summon every ounce of strength to survive and escape. Fighting for her life, she was eventually forced to strike a dark deal - to have sex with her sick captor in return for her freedom. In a gripping three-part Disney+ documentary Samantha bravely shares her story for the first time, recounting years of fear and astonishing resilience. Featuring never-before-seen police interview footage, CCTV surveillance from the storage unit and disturbing images and videos recovered from Thomas' phone, Stalking Samantha also includes powerful testimony from her friends and the investigators who helped bring her attacker to justice. Thomas's dark obsession took hold the moment he laid eyes on her, 11 years before the attack. Obsessed stalker faked pregnancy, swerved car into ex & bombarded him with messages in relentless campaign of harassment 14 After their first meeting Samantha turned down repeated requests for dates, but he refused to take no for an answer and became increasingly persistent. Several years older than her and socially awkward, Thomas bombarded Samantha with lengthy emotionally charged messages, insisting: 'I want you to be part of my life.' He nicknamed her Jellybean and quoted passages from the Bible, suggesting their relationship was God's plan. She said: 'Every time I saw him I was more and more scared.' Her former roommate Charissa Hayden explained: 'He was a nobody, a sad, lonely guy. She felt sorry for him and was nice to him. He took that and ran away with it.' Samantha's childhood friend Patrick Bruening added: 'He showed up with flowers at her work and I thought that was a huge red flag. "He thought he was her knight in shining armour. Not at all - he was creepy.' Although pathetic Thomas continued to harass Samantha, she ignored him for months until she finally snapped one day when he approached her at a bus stop. 'On the inside I was flaming mad, the angriest I've been because I thought we were past all this,' she recalled. She told Thomas: 'I've told you I don't want to see you, I don't want to speak to you, I don't want flowers, just leave me alone. 'I've told you multiple times, I've blocked you. I don't want to see you, I don't want to talk to you." She adds: 'I think he was surprised that I wasn't flattered. But he knows very clearly what my wishes are and doesn't care.' Another friend, Robin Trierweiler, said: 'All I wanted to do was shake her and say please take care of yourself. 'It seems like she's in danger and it's frustrating to watch her downplay that. It's not a normal situation, it's a hazard.' Drastic action 14 After graduating from college, Samantha returned to her home town of Elk Rapids, a small close knit community, where she thought the ordeal was behind her. But soon Thomas turned up there too, and even applied for the same internship she was starting. 'I just feared that I would never be free of him,' she said. 'I felt scared and threatened.' When he was spotted coming out of her apartment in 2016, Samantha took drastic action and applied for a personal protection order - banning him from all contact. Judge Norman Hayes, who granted the order for six years, recalled: 'I was really concerned. I've never seen a stalking case as severe as this. 'He was obsessed, absolutely obsessed with her. He's going to do something very severe - either rape, kill her or kidnap her. I was really concerned. I've never seen a stalking case as severe as this... He's going to do something very severe - either rape, kill her or kidnap her Judge Norman Hayes 'At the time it was the longest personal protection order I had ever granted.' With Thomas legally banned from making contact, Samantha's life gradually returned to normal. She trained as a social worker and bought a house, but in September 2022 - as soon as the restraining order expired - she spotted Thomas lurking as she played football. 'I stopped dead in my tracks,' said Samantha. 'I worry that he's coming after me in a vengeful way wanting to hurt me for denying him all those years ago.' Thomas also joined Samantha's gym and football league, but technically he had not done anything wrong and her request for another personal protection order was denied. Gagged and bound 14 14 14 Lying in bed in the early hours of 7 October 2022, Samantha jumped as she heard a floorboard creak. 'My heart starts racing, my mind shoots to the hatchet I kept under my mattress,' she said. 'In a second somebody storms into my room and jumps on to me. I start screaming and I feel his hands around my throat and he begins to choke me. 'It gets tougher to breathe and I think he's going to kill me. I recognise immediately it's Christopher. In a second somebody storms into my room and jumps on to me. I start screaming and I feel his hands around my throat and he begins to choke me Samantha Stites 'I say, 'If you want to rape me just do it,' but he said, 'I just want to talk to you, not here.' 'He shoves a ball gag in my mouth, pulls out black gorilla tape, puts it around my head and hair multiple times. I feel like a prisoner.' Thomas handcuffed and blindfolded Samantha, and bundled her into her own car, along with her dog. She added: 'Once we leave my house the likelihood of me surviving goes down drastically - this really becomes a fight for my life.' Chilling plan Once they reached the bunker Thomas revealed his chilling plan for them to spend two weeks holed up together. He gave Samantha pyjamas, told her to use a bucket as a toilet and then chained her to a wall. Then he calmly explained that he intended to fake Samantha's death by leaving her paddle board in a nearby lake so people would assume she had drowned. She said: 'On the inside I'm freaking out - there's no way we're going to just talk for two weeks. Is he going to rape me and kill me? Will I see daylight again? 'I need to stay focused, I can't fight my way out - this guy is faster and stronger than me. 'Christopher is a psychopath, he is someone I can't use normal logic with. I try not to react with disgust. On the inside I'm freaking out - there's no way we're going to just talk for two weeks. Is he going to rape me and kill me? Will I see daylight again? Samantha Stites 'He talks about the TV show You, about a good-looking young man who becomes obsessed with a young woman, kidnaps her and keeps her in a glass room - which he says wasn't logistically possible, he looked into it. 'In the show he ends up murdering her.' Thomas gave Samantha a football shirt with her name on the back - which he'd bought when first he asked her out 11 years earlier. Over the next 13 hours Samantha begged him to let her go, promising not to go to the police. She said: 'I try to convince him we can be friends, and what he's done isn't a big deal. 'I said, 'As a social worker, I'm good at keeping secrets,' but he says, 'What will convince me is if you sleep with me.' 'I told him, 'I'm seeing somebody, I don't want to sleep with you,' but he said, 'That's the only way I can trust you.' 'I think this person is capable of killing me, he holds the key to my life. 'I don't see anything sharp I could hide and stab him with, not a screwdriver I could take the locks off the door, there is no way out of this. If I say no is he going to rape me anyway? 'I say, 'You promise me if I sleep with you, you'll let me out tonight?' He looked me in the eye and shook my hand. His integrity is important to him, I was banking on that." 'Dead inside' At the time, she thought the actual rape would be over quickly. She adds: 'This guy hasn't had a girlfriend in a long time, this might be a quick endeavour. 'But then he says, 'I masturbate 12 times a day so this might take a while.' I felt myself go dead inside. It 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 Samantha Stites 'I felt myself go dead inside. It 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. 'He said, 'That's all I've wanted for so long, you can't imagine how long I've wanted that. You're the person I'm supposed to marry.' 'My stomach turns just thinking about that, but I said, 'I've held up my end of the bargain, you need to let me go'.' Astonishingly, Thomas agreed and drove Samantha home. 14 Within 36 hours he had been arrested, having chemically burnt the skin off his head and body in a desperate bid to conceal evidence. Cops then discovered he'd had a tracker on Samantha's car for months, and found more than $5,000 worth of receipts for tools and equipment he bought to create the lair - where he also hid rifles and a crossbow. It also emerged that he had been arrested for stalking a former colleague in 2009. Although he claimed Samantha participated in 'role play', Thomas was convicted of kidnapping, home invasion, torture, aggravated stalking and four counts of criminal sexual conduct. He was sentenced to 40 to 60 years in prison. In a call to his mother from prison, he admitted he had thought about Samantha every day for 12 years. Samantha has chosen to share her story to help other women avoid harm. "I would want other women or people in general to know how to identify those signs that somebody is potentially stalking you or is at risk of harming you in some way," she says. "Knowing some things that you can do, places you can go to get help, and really advocating for yourself if you've got a gut feeling that something's wrong, it likely is and really pursuing that. "I felt like I did that to the best of my ability." Stalking Samantha is available on Disney+ from August 19. 14
