A new Channel 5 documentary centres on Stephanie Slater, a real estate agent from Birmingham who Michael Sams abducted in 1992. Tonight (February 28) at 9 o’clock, the premiere episode will show under the title The Girl in the Box: The Kidnapping of Stephanie Slater.
The show recounts the events surrounding the kidnapping of Stephanie Slater, who was taken hostage by Sims and held for a sum of seventeen hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Sams, who had previously abducted and killed Julie Dart in July 1991, remains behind bars.
Sams, at age 81, is one of the oldest inmates in England and Wales, and he has a parole hearing scheduled for next month, as reported by the Grantham Journal. What became of Stephanie Slater, the woman he allegedly kidnapped?
What happened to Stephanie Slater?
In January 1992, Michael Sams abducted Stephanie Slater, an employee at Shipways estate agency in Great Barr, and held her for ransom. Sams freed her after receiving a ransom of £175,000; while £150,000 of the ransom was retrieved, the whereabouts of the other £25,000 remain a mystery to this day.
Under the guise of a prospective buyer, Michael Sams met Slater in Great Barr’s Turnberry Road to tour the home she was selling. Sams was really using a fictitious identity. But, when she got there, Sams abducted her and held a knife to her throat.
She was tied, gagged, and placed in a coffin-like box thereafter. Sam let her out of the crate solely to feed her. Sams freed Stephanie Slater by dumping her off two blocks away from her home after he received the £175,000 ransom he had sought. Despite a large-scale police effort, Sams was able to collect the funds.
Source: The Sun
Sams kidnapped 18-year-old sex worker Julie Dart from Leeds in July 1991. Sams killed Dart and abandoned her body in a Lincolnshire field after demanding a ransom of £140,000, which he subsequently acknowledged he had no intention of collecting.
For her part, Stephanie Slater wrote about her trauma in 1995 and claimed that while in Sams’s captivity, Sams raped her. She said that she waited to tell her mother about the heart ailment because she didn’t want her to worry.
Sams vehemently rejected the rape allegation made by Stephanie Slater, saying instead that he and Slater had a mutually consenting sexual encounter. His attempt to file a libel suit against Slater was unsuccessful. Stephanie Slater left her profession as an estate agent in 1993 and relocated to the Isle of Wight after she was kidnapped. She then became an advisor to police departments on how to best assist abduction survivors. As a result of cancer, she passed away at the age of 50 in August of 2017.
