Amazing kidnapping story

[Homicidalheathen]

Do you think the increasing of time spent for kidnapping and assault lead to more deaths? Cause if you let someone go now, you will spend more time...thus odds are you would then most likely kill them...?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/31/...ain538761.shtml

(CBS) In the summer of 2002, which was filled with terrifying child kidnappings, the daring escape of Tamara Brooks and Jacque Marris delivered hope.

Police have called this case a blueprint for survival.

Just over a year since they were abducted, Jacque Marris, 17, reveals stunning details about the chances she and Tamara took to survive - and the decisions they made that bought them time.

Correspondent Peter Van Sant reports on the dramatic events that forever changed the lives of these two women on this 48 Hours Investigates interview which first aired Jan. 31, 2003.

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In some ways, Jacque Marris is a typical California teen. The oldest of three children, she was a determined student, a cheerleader and a surfer.

In other ways, though, she was also remarkable. This is her story.

"I was alive. I had my life back. And the bad guy was dead," says Jacque. "I know how close I was to death."

Jacque’s incredible story of survival began on Quartz Hill, a popular hangout overlooking the city of Palmdale, Calif.

It was after midnight, and Jacque was nearing her curfew, enjoying the view with Frank Melero. Then, out of nowhere, Melero says he felt a gun to his head.

Holding that gun was Roy Dean Ratliff, a fugitive wanted for rape. He demanded money and ordered Frank Melero and Jacque Marris to put their heads down. They smelled alcohol on his breath and heard duct tape unwinding.

“One second, he was calm, and then out of nowhere he starts getting mad!” says Melero. “He was like, ‘You think I’ll kill you?’ And I was like ‘Yeah, you’ll kill me. You got the gun, you’ll kill me.’”

Ratliff taped Melero to the driver's seat. He then started taping Jacque but the tape ran out. Blindfolded and hobbled, she was led to a Bronco parked nearby.

Once inside the back seat, Jacque Marris saw a pair of legs. At first, she thought it was a dead body. But the legs belonged to Tamara Brooks, a 16-year old honor student who was alive.

The two girls had never met.

When the Bronco drove off, Melero freed himself and called for help on his cell phone. He saw another guy, Eric Brown, who also had been taped up.

"He told me he was going to kill but he didn't want to," says Brown, 18, who was with Tamara when the abduction took place. "He wanted the truck."

Ratliff had carjacked Brown’s Bronco and taken Tamara hostage. He later drove the two teenagers just a few miles from Quartz Hill.

"Imagine your worst nightmare," says Jacque.

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According to Det. Fred McNutt, Ratliff was armed with two guns and ammunition. Police later confirmed that both girls were sexually assaulted.

Ratliff promised to take the girls back to Quartz Hill, but he didn’t. They drove for 30 minutes or more in the dead of night. When they finally stopped, they were allowed to remove their blindfolds.

Ratliff’s behavior shifted from extreme cruelty to seeming kindness. "He would become very caring and compassionate and then seconds later he might be holding a gun saying, 'I'll kill you if you don't do this,'" says McNutt.

At one point, Jacque’s door was left open a crack. She had a chance to escape but refused to leave Tamara behind: “I didn’t know what he was gonna do to Tamara, if he would hurt her, more than he already had.”

When they started driving again, Jacque silently grabbed Tamara’s hand. They dared not speak, so Jacque spelled out words on Tamara’s palm, one letter at a time.

Her first words: “Need a plan.”

Tamara wrote back: “knife”

Eric Brown kept a bowie knife in his Bronco, and the girls decided that Jacque would try to use the knife the first chance she got.

“There was no way I wasn’t going down without a fight, because that would have been stupid of me," says Jacque. "How can you not fight for your life?"

Lying across the back seat, her hands tied, Jacque watched one mile bleed into the next. There was a rope around her neck - binding her to Tamara Brooks.

Just after daybreak, they pulled onto a remote dirt road in the Mojave Desert, 130 miles from Quartz Hill.

Ratliff loaded and fired two guns into the empty canyon. "We had to do something," says Jacque, who thought he was going to kill them. "Then or you know, never."

Ratliff then turned his attention to the knife in the car. He ran his fingers over the blade, but before he had a chance to use it, a night of heavy drinking took its toll, and he fell asleep.

"This is the time to do whatever we're going to do to get away," says Jacque.

Jacque and Tamara struggled to get free from the rope and duct tape that bound them. Jacque actually licked hers off: “If you lick duct tape, it’s not adhesive anymore and it just comes off.”

Ratliff was asleep, with a gun in his lap. If they ran, he could easily shoot them. But Jacque saw the knife on the console, and a bottle of whiskey on the front seat.

Silently, they mouthed a plan of attack. Jacque would stab him, and Tamara would hit him with the bottle.

"I'm so scared. What if he wakes up," says Jacque. "What happens if this doesn't work? Is God ever going to forgive us for this?"

Silently, the girls got hold of the knife and whiskey bottle. Jacque hesitated, not sure she could stab Ratliff.

But then, Ratliff's eye flickered.

(CBS) “I thought he was waking up," says Jacque, when she saw Ratliff's eyes flicker. "And so I just did it real fast. And then he actually woke up."

"Tamara smashed him in the head with the whiskey bottle. And then since his door was open, that, that little crack, he, like, fell over," adds Jacque.

"So we kicked him out. I threw the knife at him, and Tamara threw the whiskey bottle at him."

Jacque and Tamara locked the doors, rolled up the windows and then realized that Ratliff still had the car key - and both guns.

Bleeding profusely from the knife wound in his neck, Ratliff threatened to kill them if they didn’t open the door. He began shooting over the car.

"We couldn't go back," says Jacque. "We couldn't take back what we had just done and we were going to suffer for what we tried to do to him."

Somehow, Jacque and Tamara convinced him not to kill them: “We started talking to him about God, If he was to kill us, if God would ever forgive him for what he was about to do.”

“After we started mentioning God and stuff, he, like, calmed down a little bit," says Jacque. "And he was like silent for a couple moments.”

With Ratliff still armed, the girls had no choice but to let him back in the Bronco. By now, they had been with him for about nine hours.

About 130 miles away, police were leading a massive effort to find the girls. Freeway billboards flashed a description of the Bronco. These signs were part of a new warning system called “Amber alert,” designed to quickly notify the public when children are abducted.

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As the search intensified, a distraught woman walked into a police station, handed over a photo and told police that her husband, Roy Dean Ratliff, could be the kidnapper.

“She’s a mother. She cared. She cared about those girls," says Kevin Seymour, a psychologist and friend of the Ratliff family.

“He was very kind to my children. He was a good man when he wasn’t drinking. But alcohol was real poison for this guy.”

Ratliff, the father of two, had been in and out of prison since he was a teenager for nonviolent crimes. But Seymour says Ratliff was always trying to turn things around. He once worked as a gardener at a child care center, and said it was a great reward to hear the children laugh.

“The children at the child care center loved him. When he drank, he became violent and he felt unable to control that,’ says Seymour.

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Meanwhile, Ratliff continued driving and got back on the highway, his neck still bleeding.

“He kept telling me to watch his neck, and tell him when to wipe," says Jacque. "It was bleeding real bad still and the blood would just like pour down, and I’d tell him to wipe so he’d wipe.”

Jacque remembers Ratliff playing a song about suicide, and telling the girls he didn't care if he died or not.

Milton Walters, a highway worker, heard reports about the abduction that morning. Just about 11 a.m., Walters was shocked to see a white Bronco coming his way on Highway 178.

“I looked right at him. Right through the passenger side window and he kinda had, like, a crappy little smile on his face and kind of nodded at me as he went by,” says Walters, who called police on his cell phone.

Helicopters and planes raced to the area. But in the vast desert, they couldn’t find the Bronco.

Back in the Bronco, Jacque and Tamara felt the truck go off the road. They had a sickening suspicion that Ratliff planned to kill them and dump their bodies in the brush.

"They were excess baggage. He had to get rid of them," says Sheriff Carl Sparks. "He had stopped that Bronco because he had found the place where he wanted to do it."

Suddenly, Jacque and Tamara heard a helicopter overhead. It got louder. But they were also worried, because Ratliff said he would kill them if the police ever showed up.

“We were hoping that the helicopter would go away,” Jacque says. It didn’t.

Kern County deputies James Stratton and Larry Thatcher followed the helicopter to an isolated stretch of land in the Mojave Desert.

For the first time, they came face to face with Roy Dean Ratliff. “I drew my weapon,” Thatcher says. “I yelled at him to get his hands where I could see ‘em. He hollered back at me, ‘No ... way’”

Ratliff drove off into the brush, fast. “He just turned to the left real fast,” says Jacque. “When he turned, the Bronco almost flipped. And then he got stuck on a rock."

The deputies ran down the hill toward the Bronco. They didn’t know where the two girls were. But Jacque and Tamara, who were lying in the backseat, saw the officers.

“He jumps on the back of the seat and he had his gun in his hand. I thought he was gonna kill me right then,” says Jacque. “Because his gun was loaded and he had it right by my head.”

“He was shouting out at the cops, ‘I have the girls. You better not shoot or else they’re gonna die.’”

With about six feet separating the cops from Ratliff, the two deputies put their lives on the line.

Within seconds, Ratliff pulled the trigger, shooting out the window. The deputies shot back. “The bullets were just flying everywhere,” says Jacque, who suddenly was in the midst of a deadly gunbattle.

“Once I made sure of my target, I lined up my sights straight on him and I squeezed the trigger,” says Stratton. “The glass looked like it fell like rain drops, and he looked at me with the sense of ‘You got me!’”

A bullet fired by Thatcher killed Ratliff.

“When I was finished firing, then I can see the Bronco rocking and definitely can hear some screaming,” says Stratton. “It’s just like a newborn baby… you wanna hear your child screaming. Because when you hear that, you know they’re alive.”

Seventeen bullets hit the Bronco during several seconds of intense, smoky gunplay. It is a miracle that Jacque and Tamara got out alive.

“It was just an indescribable feeling of, like, just relief,” Jacque says. "Like life actually existed again."

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It was nearly a year ago since Jacque and Tamara were freed from their nightmare.

Since 48 Hours Investigates last brought you this story, Jacque has graduated from high school. She starts cosmetology school in the fall and is currently working part-time.

So far, Jacque has received letters from strangers - some from rape survivors, others who are inspired by her courage.

Jacque fills every minute of every day, pouring herself into coaching her sister’s cheerleading team, juggling schoolwork and a job. She leans on family and friends, but what happened in the Bronco can never be erased.

“If I wouldn't have done it, I would've regretted it forever," says Jacque. "Even if things did turn out the way they did, I would still have rather fought back."

Police believe fighting back is a key reason why Jacque and Tamara are still alive.

“I know now what I can overcome," says Jacque. "I know now, if I set my mind to something, I can accomplish it.”

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There's a new effort under way to help solve some of the most dangerous child kidnapping cases - quickly.

This spring, President Bush signed a measure creating a national "Amber alert" system to help find abducted children by notifying the public in those critical early hours.

Both Tamara Brooks and Jacque Marris were among the kidnapping survivors who attended the ceremony at the White House.

For Tamara and Jacque, two young women who have become symbols of hope, their message is literally "never say die." They want it known that we all have an extra supply of resiliency and courage to make it through the darkest hours.