Elizabeth Shoaf was only 14 years-old when she was kidnapped back in 2006, and for the next ten days, nobody knew what had happened to her. Thankfully, Elizabeth had a lot of fight in her, and she wasn’t about to let her kidnapper get the best of her.

Elizabeth was walking home from school one day when a man claiming to be a police officer approached her and said that she was under arrest. He handcuffed her and led her into the woods, but she soon learned that he was not a cop at all. Instead, he was 36 year-old Vinson Filyaw, an unemployed construction worker who had been looking for someone to kidnap.

“He just walked out in camouflage and told me he was the police and that he needed to talk to me,” Elizabeth remembered. “And then I walked over and he handcuffed me behind my back.”

The man had told her that her 12 year-old brother Donnie had already been arrested.

“Then he put like a fake bomb. I didn’t know it was fake, because he told me it was real. But he put it around my neck,” Elizabeth said. “I was confused. I was like, kind of angry, because he had told me he had my little brother with the other people. And then that angered me, because I’m just protective over my brother.”

Vinson continued to lead Elizabeth deeper into the woods.

“He was asking me just like the oddest questions,” she said. “If I had a phone and if I was a virgin and–Of all things for a police to ask me, that’s when I kind of was wondering what was going on. And then he said that I was a smart girl and I should have figured it out. And then that kind of got me scared. That’s when my heart started pounding because I knew something was wrong.”

After more than an hour of walking, they reached Vinson’s underground lair, which was accessible by a trap door in the ground.

“He told me to go down a ladder and get into the bunker,” Elizabeth said. “He had like a rifle and a belt that had guns and I saw a Taser in it. So I knew he was really equipped to do anything, if I acted stupid or whatever.”

Once they were down there, he had Elizabeth take off her clothes and he proceeded to rape her, something he did often during the next ten days.

“More than two times every day. Between two and five times a day,” Elizabeth said. “All I remember is that it hurt, of course. And I had looked off to the side to one of the shelves that was there. And I was looking’ at it like– there was, like, a propane tank and dishes and stuff on it.”

Elizabeth was kept in the lair naked and chained by her neck, and she was sure that she would die there.

“It was, like, dirt walls and then over the walls he had some kind of sheet of some kind of fabric,” Elizabeth said of the lair. “And then he just had, like, his own little homemade bed and homemade shelves and a retarded toilet. It was a broken plastic chair over a bucket. It smelled muggy. Really, really muggy. In the afternoons, and then at nighttime it’d be really cold. I would sit there for like hours. Just thinking.”

Elizabeth even watched coverage of herself on the news.

“I watched my mom and my sister and my aunt, and all the other people I saw on the news,” Elizabeth said. “And just watched like them talk about how I was missing. And they wouldn’t put an Amber Alert out for me. It made me angry, because they thought I was a runaway.”

Though Dan and Madeline Shoaf were worried about Elizabeth, Sheriff Steve McCaskill refused to put out an Amber Alert for her because he was convinced that she had simply run away.

“Well, you know, any time a young person is missing a lot of times they just run away,” McCaskill said. “You know, they just get mad about something. But you know — you’ve got to cover all bases.”

Dozens of officers and volunteers were still looking for Elizabeth, and at times, she could even see them.

“I could actually see their shadows walking across the door above me. And I’m just sitting there while they’re right above me,” Elizabeth recalled. “And it’s — I didn’t say anything, but he just came up to me and told me that I needed to be quiet and if I said anything, all he had to do is Taser me and it’d knock me out.”

Elizabeth thought about killing Vinson, almost doing it one night.

“He had a pellet pistol,” she recalled. “And while he was sleeping, I grabbed it. And I pulled the trigger to his head but it got jammed. And I couldn’t– I didn’t want to un-jam it, because then he’d hear it. So I just put it away and cried.”

In order to survive, Elizabeth pretended to be in love with her captor.

“I always would do what he told me to do,” she said. “And like he’d always call me baby. So I’d call him that back. And he’d tell me he loved me, and I told him I love him. Which is– I’d act like I really liked him and I wanted to be with him. I didn’t like it. But I did it anyways. Whenever we would walk through the woods, like to the water hole or back to the bunker, I’d just pull out a few strands of my hair and leave, it like on the ground or on the tree branches, thinking that maybe a dog or some — like a police dog would sniff it.”

Vinson bought it, and he started taking Elizabeth out of the bunker more and more. Finally, she noticed that he had a cellphone, and she came up with a plan.

“He’d sit there and text message his wife or girlfriend and that kind of gave me the idea of text messaging my mom,” Elizabeth said.

“When he was like real, real deep in his snoring that I knew he was asleep, I would start text messaging,” Elizabeth recalled. “For three days I did. I wrote so many that like some of them were long text messages and some of them were just short. It always told me it didn’t [send]. Every time I’d send it it said it failed cause of the signal.”

One night, Vinson caught her texting, but she acted like she was playing games on his phone. Finally, one of the texts went through, and Madeline received a text from an unknown number that read, “Hey mom, It’s Lizzie. I’m in a hole.”

Madeline knew it was her right away, as she always calls her daughter Lizzie.

“I just knew it was her. I mean, I knew it was her, just the mannerism of the text,” Madeline said. “You just sit there and you know how your child talks to you … I was like “my God.” You know, I said, “Don, this is her.””

The police traced the phone to see where it was coming from.

“We were able to come together with the marshal service and triangulate between the three cell towers in the area and get the number,” the sheriff said. “And when the number came back that’s when the big break came.”

Police already knew about Vinson, and they started showing his face all over television. This backfired on them, as all it did was scare Vinson.

“He was just asking me like if he should pack stuff and he should start leaving or if he should stay and wait it off to see if they never find me,” Elizabeth said. “And I just told him that he needed to pack his stuff and leave while he could because the police were going to get him. And I didn’t want him in jail. And I acted like I wanted him to be safe.”

Once Vinson was gone, Elizabeth was free to flee the bunker. When she opened the hatch, she immediately heard the search dogs looking for her.

“I started yelling like “hello” and I yelled it like 10 times and then somebody finally yelled my name back,” she said. “And then that’s just like a big, big relief I just like fell down and started crying.”

The police rushed Elizabeth to the hospital and went to tell her parents that she was alright.

“All of a sudden I seen something coming up the road,” Madeline recalled. “I said, is that one of the police officers? When he said that he had her, it was my whole life started again, it was like, my heart just started beating again. And of course, I saw her, I couldn’t stop it. I just jumped on her. You know? I just had to give her a hug and kiss her.”

Vinson was later arrested and sentenced to 421 years in prison. For Madeline, however, this is not enough of a punishment.

“I don’t think he should be allowed to live that long,” she said.

As for Elizabeth, she has no intention of forgetting what happened to her.

“It’s like, for some reason I like to think about it and people think I’m weird for wanting to think about it,” Elizabeth admitted. “But I just think of it because I don’t want to forget it, because that’s something I accomplished that a lot of people might not have. And it makes me feel good to know that I got to get through something like that.”