A British woman who escaped the clutches of a notorious killer after he kidnapped and raped her, then held her hostage in a wheelie bin for eight days, has been hailed for her incredible bravery.
Real estate agent Stephanie Slater was 25 when she was abducted by Michael Sams after he posed as a house buyer in January 1992.
For eight days he kept her prisoner in a makeshift coffin, boxed inside a green wheelie bin on the floor of his workshop in Newark-upon-Trent in northern England.
Sams, who was later found to have murdered 18-year-old Julie Dart after using similar means to imprison her, only let Stephanie out for an hour a day to eat and go to the bathroom.
She was blindfolded the entire time.
After raping her and eluding a police cordon to pick up a £175,000 (at that time around $A420,000) ransom from her employers, Sams unexpectedly let Stephanie go.
Her shock release was a testament to Stephanie’s tenacious drive to survive, it has been revealed in a new BBC podcast, The Kidnapping of Stephanie Slater.
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The young real estate agent went to great lengths to make it out alive, “befriending” Sams in a bid to show him she was “human”, and reciting old TV episodes in her head while trapped inside the wheelie bin as a way of keeping calm.
“Don’t get me wrong, I was terrified every single time I spoke to him,” Stephanie – who died aged 50 in 2017 following a short cancer battle – said in an interview after being released, the audio of which has been used in the podcast.
“I thought, ‘I hope I don’t say the wrong thing and make him angry.’”
Sams had meticulously planned the abduction in the months before he snatched Stephanie as a way to make enough money to escape his failing business and third marriage, The Sun previously reported.
While inside the makeshift coffin that was stuffed in a bin laid flat on the floor, Sams tied Stephanie’s hands above her head and tied them to a metal bar under heavy bricks and rocks.
“He said: ‘If you pull your arms down to try to escape, the boulders will crush your skull in,’” Stephanie explained.
After holding her at knifepoint, then driving her 110km while blindfolded to his workshop, Sams called her office to demand cash.
“Stephanie’s been kidnapped. A ransom demand will be in the post tomorrow. If you contact police, she will die,” he told her boss.
He then forced her to strip naked and raped her.
“I just lay there like a dead thing,” Stephanie said.
“He said: ‘I can’t believe you are so calm.’
“I was mentally detaching myself from what was happening to me.”
However, Stephanie’s employer did contact the police who engaged in an elaborate scheme with the press to keep the abduction under wraps until she was freed.
After a bungled attempt to snare Sams with ransom money, which saw him make off with all the cash, he did the unexpected and drove Stephanie home – dumping her two streets from her front door.
“He pulled up the car; he said, ‘I’m sorry about everything, you were the innocent victim,’” she said later, theBBC reports.
“Then he said, ‘Don’t look back at the car.’ I fell out on to the pavement and the door shut behind me and he drove off at speed. When I opened my eyes, I was partially blind.
“The pressure of the blindfold for eight days and nights had damaged my eyes. All I could see were the swirling orange street lamps. And I could hardly walk.”
Despite Stephanie being home, police still needed to catch Sams, and they had one vital piece of evidence.
During a phone call to Stephanie’s boss he forgot to disguise his real voice, a recording of which was played on British TV show Crime Watch, which was quickly identified by his ex-wife.
Bizarrely, her tip was initially ignored because she revealed Sams only had one leg after losing it to cancer, but once they looked into it properly police knew they had their man.
Once in custody, police were also able to link him to the murder of Julie Dart, who Sams had kidnapped six months before Stephanie.
Sams was given four life terms in 1993 for murdering 18-year-old Julie and kidnapping Stephanie.
Afterwards a conversation he had with police was secretly recorded. This was released to the public for the first time in July 2022 in the Discovery+ documentary, Michael Sams: Kidnapper Killer.
“When I went out to kidnap Julie Dart, there was only one intention, and that was to kill her,” Sams stated, according to a report by The Sun.
“There was no intention whatsoever to keep her alive.”
Her remains were discovered on a farm, bundled in a sheet, 10 days after she’d gone missing. Who killed her had remained a mystery until Stephanie was abducted.
“To this day I believe I am alive because I didn’t fight him,” Stephanie told The Sun in 2011.
Three times married Sams is now 81 and still behind bars. He had eight years added to his sentence for attacking a female probation officer with a metal spike while in prison in 2005.
Most recently, his request for parole was denied, with officials stating he was “too dangerous to set free”.
You can listen to the entire BBC podcast, The Kidnapping of Stephanie Slater, here.
