Throughout Apple Valley, Ohio, the hunt is on for two women and two schoolchildren missing with a grizzly crime scene left behind at their home. There is blood everywhere. It is a race against time. Are they already dead?
Police have a suspect, Matthew Hoffman, in custody and are trying to get him to talk. Where are they? What has he done to them? They have every reason to be worried.
In a fetid, dark basement 13-year old Sarah Maynard had been found, her hands tightly bound and taped. With her legs trussed together, she had been thrown forced to spend 88 hours on a makeshift bed made of leaves. Piles and piles of leaves.
All Sarah has been able to see is a sliver of light thrown through a narrow slit in the door from the upstairs of wherever she was.
‘I am just a scared little girl, at this point. And I don’t know who is alive or dead.’
Matthew Hoffman, has warned Sarah: ‘Until I get ransom money for your family, you are trapped here.’
Forced to wear a makeshift diaper, denied light and hearing the scraping of vermin, drips from pipes, and her captor's brutal footsteps, Sarah’s mind goes to even darker places. ‘Is this man going to get me pregnant? Is he about to kill me?’
He has not killed her but what about the others? Expert teams use every trick in the book to get Hoffman to talk. One even dresses and makes her hair look like Sarah’s in case that ‘look’ is one Hoffman likes and will make him open up.
There has been a Vanishing in Apple Valley and Matthew Hoffman is the only who knows what has happened. As the hours tick by, Interrogators know - they will be dead for sure unless Hoffman talks.