EMOTIONAL RESCUE
On October 3, 1977, five-year-old Graziella Ortiz-Patino was kidnapped by Italian criminals. She was outside her home in Geneva, Switzerland, on her way to kindergarten, when two men grabbed her and knocked out her driver. Police later found the getaway car but no other trace of the girl or her kidnappers.
Graziella’s older brother, Nicolas, was nine at the time. “It was a big story in Geneva. It was the story,” he recalls. “Outside the house, journalists lined up … with their cameras [and] their zooms, in the trees, behind the fence, in the fence, in the garden. They were everywhere.”
Graziella’s father, George Ortiz, a wealthy, well-known art collector, went on national television to plead with the kidnappers to be kind to his daughter. He also asked journalists to stop phoning his home in case they clogged up the line when the kidnappers tried to call.
“Those 11 days were horrible,” Nicolas Ortiz says. “You can’t imagine. I mean, it was really, really harrowing.”
Finally, the kidnappers rang to name their price: US$2 million, paid in used bills. George Ortiz borrowed the money and paid the ransom. A few hours aft er that, Graziella was found alive on the side of a highway between Geneva and Lausanne.
Nicolas Ortiz says the ordeal deeply affected his parents. For a long time, his father could not talk about the kidnapping, he says.
