Why Abducted in Plain Sight Really Is That Disturbing

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What is there left to say about Abducted in Plain Sight?

The 2017 documentary that saw new life when it landed on Netflix in January has set the internet a-chattering with its twisted tale of an entire family that fell prey to a charismatic conman 45 years ago. While the inclusion early on of commentary from all five immediate members of the family shows that Jan Broberg, her sisters and her parents physically survived what happened, the web spun for them by their friend and neighbor Robert Berchtold still feels increasingly inescapable as the story unfolds.

How they managed to untether themselves from Berchtold’s clutches takes up only about 20 minutes of the 90-minute film, and there are plenty of unanswered questions—not least of them being how this man was walking around free—but also about how the Brobergs, particularly dad Bob and mom Mary Ann, really pieced their relationship back together, and whether they did it successfully or not.

But the story of how Berchtold infiltrated their lives, all in pursuit of a then 12-year-old Jan Broberg, may be enough for one sitting.

“This kind of abuse is so icky and so close to home, it’s really hard to look at,” Jan acknowledged in a recent interview with E! News.

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

There are a lot of layers hiding in plain sight in Abducted in Plain Sight, particularly one that isn’t really probed but is one of the most glaring.

That is the fact that, when Berchtold, whom Jan affectionately called “B” at the time, disappeared with her after taking her to go horseback riding one afternoon, her family waited five days to contact authorities.

Mary Ann Broberg explains that she waited at the behest of Berchtold’s wife, Gail, who pleaded with her not to call the police. Mary Ann recalls being alarmed—both she and her husband felt there was something not right about all the attention Berchtold paid to their eldest daughter—but still confident that he wouldn’t actually hurt her.

So…

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The Brobergs were part of a tight-knit community in Pocatello, Idaho, and they were devoted members of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Mary Ann was the church chorister. When the Berchtolds—Gail, Robert and their five children—moved next door, the husbands bonded over being business and family men (so Bob Broberg said), the wives naturally gravitated to each other and the kids got along great, too. There was “a best friend for everyone” between the two families, Jan remembered. 

But as relayed in Abducted in Plain Sight, Berchtold soon started paying special attention to the three Broberg girls, Jan, Karen and Susan, particularly doting on Jan, who came to think of him as a second dad. All the girls thought of him as the playful, fun-loving adult male who’d always be up for games. (It takes a minute to adjust to the pervasive reenactments, shot in a way to resemble what ’70s-era home movies might look like.)

In hindsight, that was nothing but Berchtold ingratiating himself into their lives. Jan and Karen shared a basement bedroom and Berchtold, who owned a furniture store, built a wall that gave the girls their own bedrooms. More importantly to him, it gave Jan privacy.

Of course, the Brobergs didn’t know that Berchtold had been convicted of raping a child and had spent time in prison (inexplicably, less than a year)—or that the Church of LDS had “reprimanded” Berchtold in January 1974 for his behavior involving another young girl. There was no such thing as a national or state sex offender registry that was available to the public yet. In the wake of what happened to Jan, six women would come forward to her declaring themselves to be past underage victims of Berchtold.

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Then you find out that Jan, prior to being kidnapped, had on at least one occasion spent the night at the Berchtolds’ house and, she recalls in the film, woke up to find her underpants pulled down and B’s hands on her—to, as he explained, calm her because she was tossing and turning. 

She convinced herself that he was telling the truth.

Jan also went on vacation with the Berchtolds to Seattle in June 1973 and recalls waking up, groggy (Berchtold apparently drugged her on numerous occasions, telling her it was allergy medication), and seeing a naked Berchtold standing by the bed.

But the real bombshell isn’t that Berchtold revealed himself to innocent 12-year-old eyes (and jogged the suspicion of willfully blind adult eyes) that he was a creep before taking Jan. It’s that, before he kidnapped their eldest daughter, Berchtold seduced both of Jan’s parents, details that were left out of the book Mary Ann eventually wrote about their ordeal. Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story was what initially drew the attention of Abducted in Plain Sight director Skye Borgman.

Mary Ann recalls being flattered by Berchtold’s compliments about her body and other flirtatious remarks and, eventually, at a church function in Utah they wandered off from the crowd and made out. But that was the extent of it at the time, she said.

Exponentially more shocking was Bob Broberg’s recollection of being in the car with Berchtold one day while his friend was lamenting that he couldn’t stand his wife anymore. Bob says that Berchtold then asked him for “relief”—and he complied. 

Berchtold would go on to hold that intimate act over Bob’s head. No mention is made of whether it ever progressed beyond that one encounter which, considering Bob’s professed devotion to his church and family, left him wracked with guilt and shame.

“We asked him,” Borgman told Vulture recently. “We looked in the court transcripts. We tried to find that out, and the answer is we could never really figure it out for sure. [In the car] is the only time that he remembered it happening, but this is a story that happened 45 years ago. There are always memories that you can alter by just believing that they were different, so I don’t have a good sense of if it continued.

“But I think it may have happened more than once. I really don’t know for certain if it did, and I don’t know that it really would have made all that much difference. I think that Bob Broberg would have felt as much guilt if it happened once or if it happened twice.”

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Jan was taken on Oct. 17, 1974. FBI special agent Pete Welsh caught the case on Oct. 22, 1974, and would be on it for the next several years.

Right away, the FBI discovered that the Berchtold family motor home was missing from the storage unit where it was usually parked. Soon they found Berchtold’s abandoned Ford Maverick, the driver’s side window broken and a bit of blood on the inside of the car. There was one set of footprints leading away, leading Welsh to believe he had carried Jan into the motor home.

They stayed off the radar for 35 days. All the while, Berchtold was busy brainwashing Jan, playing her tapes that wove a whole fantastical tapestry about being half-alien, and that it was her job to save a planet on the verge of destruction. He also raped Jan, while diligently working to convince her that he loved her and everything they were doing was part of some master plan. Of course, she was instructed that, if she told anybody about any of it, particularly the part about Berchtold having sex with her, her father would be killed, Karen would go blind and Susan would be taken away.

On Nov. 20, 1974, Berchtold called his brother Joe Berchtold, and asked him to contact the Brobergs to get their permission for him to marry Jan, because the marriage they had apparently entered into in Mexico (where the federal age of consent is 12) wouldn’t be considered legal back in Idaho.

Joe, who says in the film that his brother “was always a sexual pervert,” enlists the FBI to trace Berchtold’s whereabouts, and they caught up with him and Jan in Mexico.

Because of the fake plot Berchtold had immersed her in, Jan insisted she wasn’t raped. Mary Ann says that a doctor’s examination revealed that her hymen was intact (Jan explains that he would only insert about an inch of his penis into her) and Jan seemed far more concerned about what was going to happen to B than anything else. Meanwhile, their “marriage” was annulled.

Berchtold was indicted on kidnapping charges. But on Dec. 24, 1974, Gail Berchtold presented Bob Broberg with some papers to sign—agree to no longer participate in the case against her husband, or else they would expose their “dirty laundry,” i.e. Bob’s homosexual liaison with Berchtold, for the world to know.

The shame of being exposed proved too great, so the Brobergs agreed to state that their daughter “was not taken by force or against her will, nor was she held or confined against her will at any time while in the company of the defendant,” and that Berchtold may have been under the impression that he had their consent to have Jan with him.

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