Kidnapping cases were exceptionally difficult to handle because the hostages' safety had to be monitored at all times. In most cases, there would not be a scene like in television dramas, with kidnappers holding hostages and confronting the police. Such standoffs generally resulted from crimes of passion, where hostages were grabbed at random on the street. Most premeditated kidnappers chose to hide their hostages away.
Or rather, if they did not have a foolproof place to hide hostages, they would not choose this method of crime. After all, a living person was not necessarily easier to deal with than a vault door, much less several of them. Even if children were smaller and less capable of resisting, they were not that easy to hide.
In this situation, the usual methods of fighting violence with violence were useless. Or rather, even if they found the culprit, they could not simply kill him, because they had to find the hostages first.
Barry had previously read about a case where a married couple kidnapped a backpacker and demanded ransom from his family. When the family refused to pay and called the police, the local police shot the couple outside their house.
They had assumed the hostage was hidden inside the house, but even after tearing the entire place apart, they found nothing. About two months later, they found the body in an abandoned water tower in the neighborhood. The couple had locked him inside the water tower and fed him water and food at irregular intervals.
The most desperate part was that the couple had left him roughly a week's worth of water and food, and during that week, he had eaten, drunk, and relieved himself inside the cramped water tower. When they finally found him, half his body was submerged in excrement.