'Elizabeth's been taken at gunpoint!'

The phone ringing in the early morning dark hadn't initially alarmed Chris. As an engineer who buys energy for Duke Energy, he's used to fielding phone calls at odd hours. But the look on his wife Ingrid's face as she handed him the phone did alarm him. "I'll be right over," Chris had told Ed as he leaped out of bed. Ingrid wasn't as fast. "I was scared," she remembered. "If I went over (to Ed's house), it would be true and, more than anything, I didn't want it to be true. I heard Chris fiddling in the study. 'What are you doing?' I asked. 'Getting my gun,' he said. 'If I see him, I'm going to kill the son of a bitch.' " Within minutes, Chris and Ingrid left their house in Centerville, about fifteen miles from Ed and Lois's, hugging their eighteen-year-old daughter Alicia on the way out, and asking her to watch their younger kids.

My sister Angela and her husband, Zeke Dumke III, likewise left teenagers, their seventeen-year-old daughter, Elise, and sixteen-year-old son, Mitchell, in charge. Their oldest son, twenty-year-old Zeke IV, was in Bolivia waiting for the rest of the family to join him. Zeke and Angela had arranged a family trip to Bolivia to help build a well in a poverty-stricken village as a summer service project. They had their shots, their passports, and their airline tickets. They were supposed to leave the next day. Now Angela and Zeke were driving through the dark to Ed's house, flashlights beside them.

"I got the call a little after four and you could just hear the fear and the panic in Ed's voice," Angela said. "It was very palpable. I knew it wasn't something little. 'Elizabeth has been taken at gunpoint,' Ed said. 'Get up here and bring a flashlight.' I kept thinking something's not right. I knew it was Ed. I knew it was fear. There was such great angst in his voice. But it didn't make sense that someone came into their home with a gun and then Ed called me to come look for Elizabeth in the mountains. So we checked on all our kids first because I had the thought that somebody might be trying to get us out of our house. I checked all the doors. Even though Zeke and I are fanatic about locking the house, I found doors were unlocked. It was probably because I was gardening so late, but later, when I heard people criticizing Ed for the open window, I thought, nobody's perfect."

As Zeke and Angela were driving, Ed called them again to make sure that they were on their way.