Abigail Hernandez

Case background and investigation

On the afternoon of October 9, 2013, 14-year-old Abigail "Abby" Hernandez disappeared while walking home from Kennett High School in the Conway area of North Conway, New Hampshire. When she failed to arrive home, her family reported her missing, prompting one of the largest and most sustained missing-person searches in the state's history. Investigators found few leads, and for months the case remained a mystery that gripped the small Mount Washington Valley community.

Unknown to searchers, Abby had been abducted by Nathaniel E. Kibby, a local man who had forced her into his vehicle and taken her to his property in Gorham, New Hampshire. There he confined her in a modified soundproofed storage container, where she was held captive and repeatedly assaulted over the following months. Abby later described surviving by staying calm, complying strategically, and gradually building a measure of trust with her captor.

After 284 days, Kibby released Abby on July 20, 2014, dropping her near where she had been taken. She walked the remaining distance to her mother's home and was reunited with her family after roughly nine months in captivity. Her return, alive, stunned the community and reinvigorated the investigation.

State and federal authorities arrested Kibby in late July 2014, and the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office charged him with kidnapping. Over the following months additional charges were filed as investigators built the case. In May 2016, rather than proceed to trial, Kibby pleaded guilty to seven felony counts, including three counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault, kidnapping, witness tampering, second-degree assault, and criminal threatening. He was sentenced to 45 to 90 years in state prison, with mandatory sex-offender treatment. Prosecutors said the negotiated resolution spared Abby from having to testify in detail about her abuse at a public trial.

Abby Hernandez survived her ordeal and, in the years afterward, chose to speak publicly about it to raise awareness. In September 2018 she gave a widely viewed interview to ABC News' "20/20," recounting details of her captivity and how she stayed alive. She later served as an executive producer on the Lifetime film "Girl in the Shed: The Kidnapping of Abby Hernandez," which premiered on February 26, 2022. Kibby remains incarcerated. The case is closed by conviction; Abby Hernandez survived and has become a public advocate for awareness of abduction and abuse.