Jan Broberg on A Friend of the Family and the Real-Life Bob Berchtold

When Jan Broberg shared the story of her stranger-than-fiction kidnapping in the 2017 documentary Abducted in Plain Sight, she did not anticipate the charged response it would elicit. Her saga was admittedly complicated: When she was 12 and living in Idaho in the 1970s, a close family friend and neighbor who was decades older, Bob Berchtold, drove off with her one day, having told Broberg’s parents he was taking the child horseback riding. Berchtold managed to keep her captive with an elaborate ruse—claiming they had been abducted by aliens, and that Jan needed to cooperate with “the aliens’” (i.e. his)… Read Full Article