On Palm Sunday a decade ago, a girl named Leah hopped out of bed, put on a new lavender dress and headed for church.
She was 12, exuberant that day, as she prepared for her debut in the handbells procession at Charlotte's Memorial United Methodist Church.
After her rehearsal, Leah disappeared.
She was snatched away, raped and brutalized while people scoured the city, searching for a little girl and a man in a white van.
Leah is 22 now. She wants Charlotte to know she's faced challenges but is flourishing -- going to college, waiting tables uptown, enjoying a full life.
The city's outpouring of kindness, she says, was crucial in her recovery. So were her family, her faith and the counselors and police who came to her side.
"I didn't get to thank everyone for everything they did," says Leah, a vibrant woman who wears bold colors and highlights her hair with streaks of red and blonde.
"Even the people who just prayed. They don't realize what that did. ... I just want to say to Charlotte: Thank you for all the comfort you gave me."
Now, Leah wants to help young people facing trauma by telling her story.
She wants her last name kept out of the public eye because she knows kooks and stalkers are out there. But she's proud of who she's become and where she's headed.
"I want to inspire people to keep going. There will be bumps in the road that you've got to get over and keep going. Keep driving."
A man approaches
It was April 5, 1998, a sunny but cool morning.Leah skipped breakfast and left early with her dad to rehearse her handbells.
She was a social kid, a sixth-grader, always chatting with friends, always on the go. She was helpful, too, something ingrained when you're the oldest child, and the daughter of a nurse.
Rehearsal was short, and Leah and her best friend Alyson were walking through the Sunday school wing when a man approached. He was in his 40s, tall, with close-cropped hair and pitted skin, but looked pretty average to them.
"I need some help bringing flowers into the sanctuary," Leah remembers him saying.
Both girls agreed to assist.
I only need one of you, he said.
Leah volunteered.
When they reached the parking lot, the man told her the flowers were just a short drive away at his shop. Leah worried a little. She'd never seen the man before, but she ignored her instinct, thinking: Church is safe.
She climbed into his van.
Minutes later, they passed Leah's mother as she drove toward the Central Avenue church. That made Leah uneasy, so she asked to go back.
The man pulled over, grabbed Leah, and forced her into the crevice behind the front seats. He tied her down with the seat belts and rope. Then, he covered her eyes and nose with a blindfold.
Leah burst into tears.
She pleaded and blurted questions.
She prayed. "God, please let me get home."
Leah couldn't see a thing, so she listened for clues.
Tires rolling over a bridge. Tires on gravel. The sound of traffic not far from wherever the van had rolled to a stop.
Leah's sobbing and blindfold made it hard to breathe. She pleaded as the man yanked a bow from her hair -- then unclasped the gold chain with a cross from around her neck.
In his arms, he carried her into a vacant house. He put her face up on a bed, then tied her hands and feet to the frame. He cut off her new dress.
"Please let me see my parents again," she prayed.
"Please let me see my family."
Search and anxiety build
Back at Memorial church, the search started small just 20 minutes after Leah disappeared.
As people settled in for the 11 a.m. service, Leah's mother Dee slid into the pew next to her husband and recalls asking: "Where's Leah?"
"She's back there, with the procession."
"No, she's not."
The couple left the sanctuary and checked bathrooms and classrooms and closets throughout the cavernous church. Others joined them as the procession walked into the sanctuary without Leah, and the Rev. Ned Owens began preaching.
A woman walked in and whispered to Owens, who then turned to the crowd.
"Has anybody seen Leah?"
In a pew up front, Leah's friend Alyson stood: I saw Leah going with a man to get flowers, she said, and started to cry.
By early afternoon, TV and radio were repeatedly telling Charlotte a girl was missing. Be on the lookout for a man in a white van.
Church members handed out fliers with Leah's picture. Strangers joined the hunt as they heard the news. Police set up roadblocks and called in a helicopter. They combed through 400 names on North Carolina's sex offender registry.
Detective Walt Bowling took the kidnapping personally. He had a son Leah's age, and he'd seen enough to know the earliest hours of a search could make the difference between life and death.
"We knew the first 24 hours were crucial," Bowling recalls. "In the community and in the Police Department, there was an outpouring of energy to try to locate her."
Police stopped hundreds of white vans. The one they wanted was parked outside a vacant house in a rural area off Charlotte's Mallard Creek Church Road.
Inside that house, Leah drifted in and out of consciousness.
She begged him to stop. She promised him money.
"I just wanted to live," she recalls.
He put something sharp against her throat and told her what to do.
If you don't, he warned, you won't go home.
Leah bargained with God. "I'll do anything. I'll be a good girl ... Let me see my family."
She worried she'd be in big trouble if she ever got home. She was enraged, too, that this man had taken the cross her parents had given her, and the hair bow her grandmother made.
After five hours, as afternoon waned, Leah felt new panic when the man dressed her in a sweatshirt and cutoffs and loaded her back into his van.
She remained blindfolded, but this time, he hog-tied her arms and legs and duct-taped her mouth. He drove a ways, into Lincoln County, then dumped Leah 25 yards off secluded Furnace Road.
"Stay here. I'll be back," Leah remembers him saying.
She could see a sliver of ground if she tipped her head back and peered beneath the blindfold. She saw a road but couldn't untie herself. So she crawled on bare knees, panicked that the man might return. She also worried about snakes. She told herself to get close to the road but not so close a car might hit her.
A car whizzed by. The driver saw Leah tied up but thought it was a joke.
Then, he remembered the news.
As he turned around, a red pickup came along and stopped.
At 5:45 p.m., Leah had been found.
And her Samaritans had a cell phone.
"Daddy, it's me," Leah recalls saying as she sobbed over the phone.
Her father, standing in the kitchen, fell to his knees.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for going with him," she said.
"Leah, don't worry about it. We're coming to get you. I love you."
Celebration, and a trial
Charlotte celebrated Leah's return. Palm Sunday prayers had been answered.Cards and gifts poured in.
"Tell Leah she is my hero," one card said.
"You are a brave young lady and an inspiration to all of us," said another.
City Manager Pam Syfert wrote: "I am so relieved that your daughter is back home ... Trying to recover from this ordeal will take some time, but I could tell from the news reports that you are a strong and loving family."
There were so many stuffed animals, Leah could barely walk in her room.
"There were cards and flowers and food and people coming by and calling," she remembers. "The police came by... and gave me stuffed animals, too. I definitely felt like I was special."
Three days after her rescue, Leah got a black lab-chow puppy she named Emma. It was the same day Robin Wayne Martin was arrested, thanks to an anonymous caller's tip.
Martin worked as a delivery man for a printing company, and had grown up in Leah's church but quit. He'd been convicted a year earlier of molesting an 8-year-old girl in Virginia. He was freed on bond while awaiting sentencing.
Martin's mother still attended Memorial church, and had been in Sunday school the day her son snatched Leah, the pastor recalls.
The church rallied behind Leah -- and tried to console Martin's mother, too. The Rev. Owens counseled them both.
"I wanted (Leah) to know there were still trustworthy people in the world ... and that she did not bring this on," Owens recalls.
Leah's mom says: "Our church family was there for us. They were watching Leah, making sure she was safe."
The trial lasted three weeks. Family and friends filled Mecklenburg's biggest courtroom.
Leah's mother held her hand as she waited to testify.
On the witness stand, Leah swiveled in the chair, holding her floppy-eared stuffed dog George, as she answered lawyers' questions for hours.
She looked directly at her attacker and told jurors the things he had done. She never shed a tear.
Martin's lawyer didn't ask about the assault, but instead quizzed the girl about whether she had the right man.
Were you sure when you picked his photo from a lineup?
"I was positive," Leah testified.
The jury found Martin guilty of kidnapping, rape and taking indecent liberties with a child, among other crimes.
Then 42, Martin got 48 years in prison. No parole.
One juror was so moved, she went to Leah's church on a Sunday after the sentencing and gave Leah a new gold cross.
Struggles turn to growth
Leah can't say what it takes to overcome trauma. She only knows what got her through.
The kind but steady hand of her parents ranks first, she says.
They stood by, battling guilt and fear, as Leah ventured back into the world, soon to be a teenager.
"We had to make Leah feel secure but not suffocated," her mother says.
"They always let me know they were there," Leah says.
Coping meant throwing herself into opportunities. Swimming lessons, lifeguarding, baby-sitting, piano and clarinet.
There were struggles.
Her darkest moments came in nightmares and flash memories.
There were humiliations, too.
Kids at school sometimes stared and whispered.
"You're that girl, right?"
"No, that wasn't me," she'd tell them.
"I didn't want to have to deal with those questions. I just felt uncomfortable. I felt like an outcast."
Leah was so unhappy as a freshman at Butler High School, her parents wrote a letter to get her transferred to Independence, where she had more friends.
Teenage rebellion hit Leah hard. She drank, tried drugs, sneaked out of the house and got her lip and navel pierced.
Going away to college at Appalachian State was a turning point. It gave her freedom she craved and distance to appreciate all her family had done.
"Leah came through this with such grace," says Charlotte therapist Jan Keny, who counseled Leah for three years. "She came through something that would have undone most adults.
"She wasn't going to let what happened define her in a negative way."
Leah was brilliant during the abduction, Keny says. "She kept herself alive. She talked to him. He was assaulting her and she was making herself a person -- not just an object."
Talking through feelings and a solid support network were critical in her recovery, Keny says.
Just as important, says Leah, was the kindness of so many strangers.
She keeps all those cards and letters in a cardboard box and re-reads them sometimes.
"I don't think all these people realize what they still do for me," she says. "Sometimes I cry when I read them. It can be very emotional. I feel happy. It gives me hope. I feel good that people care."
Leah's finishing school at UNC Charlotte, studying geography, and hungry for travel. She's not sure about her career, but she knows she wants to help other people. "I have so many things I want to do. I survived for a reason."
A year or so ago, as Leah took orders at Charlotte's Fox & Hound restaurant, a man at a nearby table stopped to listen.
Walt Bowling knew that raspy voice.
It was the girl he and Charlotte had searched for that Palm Sunday years ago.
Bowling was the detective who'd helped capture her attacker.
The two hugged. And chatted. What struck him most was Leah's smile.
"I knew she was still that special girl. I could see she was happy. I realized that despite everything she'd gone through, she loved life. And she enjoys people. She was Leah."
How we did this story
The Observer conducted extensive interviews with Leah and her family, friends, therapists in Charlotte and at Duke University, police and prison officials. Reporters reviewed court documents, dozens of cards and letters, and covered the story of Leah's abduction as well as Robin Wayne Martin's trial. The quotes of 10 years ago are the speakers' best recollections. Martin declined to be interviewed for this story.
