Nearly 50 years after she was first kidnapped, Jan's story is the subject of a limited true-crime series on Peacock.
Nearly 50 years after she was first kidnapped and brainwashed, Jan Broberg’s harrowing story about being abducted not once but twice by the same man is now the subject of the Peacock limited true-crime series A Friend of the Family. Not only that, but that man – Robert “B” Berchtold – manipulated her family, driving a wedge between her parents, Bob and Mary Ann, who couldn’t fathom that their charismatic neighbor would upend their lives.
It’s a harrowing saga that is almost too wild to believe, but it happened the same way it could have happened to anyone else. And that’s why Broberg, who serves as producer alongside her mother, wanted to bring this cautionary tale to the screen.
“We were a loving, trusting, educated family. We were not stupid or careless. So, how could this happen in our neighborhood, where we knew everyone, and everyone was a friend? The truth is that most predators are not strangers but people we know – people who can build trust, create special friendships, and separate family members psychologically,” Broberg shared in a statement ahead of the series’ debut on Peacock.
“As little girls, we talked and we listened around the dinner table every night. Mom and Dad were always there. We were so safe, so loved, so carefree. Then, in 1972, we met the nicest new family at church, with children who matched us in age. A deep friendship ensued. Over several years, our families did hundreds of activities together: church parties, family dinners, boating and snowmobile trips, sleepovers, game nights, movies and barbecues. Then on a normal afternoon, the father kidnapped me – and from age 12 to 16 I was sexually assaulted and severely brainwashed by this man who I trusted,” she continued.
“This story will make you talk, shout, cry – and it will make you angry. Good… Our story is relatable because so many families have direct experience with this sort of abuse,” she concluded.
While Broberg said the scripted drama starring Mckenna Grace and Jake Lacy and led by showrunner Nick Acosta has “captured the heart of how good people can be manipulated and their children victimized,” A Friend of the Family is not the first time she’s recounted her story.
In fact, her family’s experiences were the subject of the 2019 documentary, Abducted in Plain Sight, which became a massive hit on Netflix, with audiences shocked and awed by what had happened. And it was during that time, Broberg sat down with ET to dig deeper into the kidnappings and explain why her parents weren’t to blame.
Why Jan thinks her family’s story has captured people's attention:
First of all, because it is such a dramatic story and when you take seven years and put it into a 90-minute documentary, all of sudden you're just seeing these big shocking pieces, so you don't have as much context, maybe, to understand them. But because it feels as if people are thinking about their own children and their own families… [And] that's the tricky part because grooming and manipulation is so subtle that we don't think this kind of thing could happen to us and yet somewhere deep inside we’ve all been conned or we've all had some brush with somebody taking advantage of us to some degree – maybe not as dramatic – and we realize our kids are so innocent and so vulnerable.
Why Jan defends her parents against accusations that they should have done more to protect her:
First of all, they would have done more if they had seen more. So, the first thing I wanna say is when you put it in context, [it took] two and a half years to build ultimate trust with individual members of a family. It is something that happens slowly but it happens because you're frequently with those people. I want people to put themselves in my parent's shoes. First of all it's the ‘70s. They don't know what a pedophile is, so there is some nativity there. But my parents weren't stupid. You have to imagine the person that you would sign paperwork to say, “If I die, you take care of my kids.” That's how close we were to this family.
So, people don't want to believe that they aren't seeing something that's in their own family or in their own congregation or in their own neighborhood but that's because we have a bias. [This is a] person we trust and love, so we’re not going to see the little subtle warning signs because we don't want to. So, that's really the crux of that story. If you were to read all the court documents and you were to hear me talk on some podcasts that I'm preparing and you would understand how grooming and manipulation happens and you would be able to put yourself in that place.
This is the person you trust most who's become like your second father, who you've done hundreds of activities with their family together, who’s taken his own son horseback riding. That you're gonna now go on this thing and maybe my dad's gonna come out with his son later in the day. It is not some out of the blue thing. He'd taken me horseback riding before, taken my sisters, taken his sons.
I remember years ago going, “It is so obvious. The signs are right there.” But nobody wants to see it because he’s your favorite uncle, the favorite school teacher, the favorite guy at church that you're doing the service projects with, and that's who this guy was.
What Jan’s parents did after she went missing the first time:
My father called the sheriff's department that night when we didn't show up back at home. They were looking for a car accident. They don't think that their best friend, he’s like a brother to my dad.
They called the sheriff's department. They describe the car, his wife comes over to the house about nine o’clock, like, “What can we do? Where are they?” His wife is standing in the kitchen, mom and dad are calling the sheriff's office. “No, we don't have any reported cars but we'll put out an APV. We'll look to see if we can find this car, maybe there's been an accident.” The next day, it's about, “Well, I’m gonna call all of our relatives because maybe he went down to you know Bingham City or somewhere else.” And you're still looking at this person, this is someone who would never hurt your child. Kidnapping has not even entered anybody's mind. And then they do call the FBI office and it's an answering machine in Butte, Montana. It was closed.
They don't know where he's taking me. Oh, they have no idea it's a true FBI manhunt. They have no idea where he's taken me… Eventually he called his brother and his brother knew where they were and then they listened to the coins in a phone booth and they figured out where the area was and then with his brother’s help.
What happened after she returned from Mexico:
We talked about this so much and, of course, he has a whole story about it. Okay, first of all, he's calling my mom every single day after we're back. My dad is like, “He can't come into our house.” Nobody is thinking he ever abused me. That's just not in the realm of possibilities.
So, he has this whole story he said, “They would not let me come back across the border if I did not have her married to me.” [And that’s] not in the documentary. There's only pieces. That's what I'm saying, you missed all the context, all the additional information… But he had my mom come and he said, “This is why because you wouldn't come with me, Mary Ann. You're the one I’m in love with. You’re the one I want to be with. But yes, I did something wrong and I kinda had a mental breakdown but I had to marry her or they would have separated us and who would she have been with if I wasn’t married to her?” …I mean he had a story for everything.
He was never allowed back into my home. My dad didn't want anything to do with him. It was just my mother who he had been working on for maybe three, almost four years… So, basically they didn't forgive him. The affidavits that they signed they retracted four days later. That's not in the documentary. So, there are certain things that you don't know because you didn't get the whole story.
But what does happen is that my mother, who has had a crush on him, has been infatuated with him for many years, now finally he really does the dirty work on her. He gets her to come down. He's talking to her about all these things. It took her about four times of being with him. We all wanted to go down to see them, they had moved away and so she'd take all of us and we'd all go and we'd spend the night on the trampoline with all of our friends. The kids, they're all our best friends. And so, when she realized it, it was about eight months after, in between the two kidnappings.
But after the first kidnapping, my dad said, “I'm divorcing, you cannot take our kids. I don't know what's wrong but there's something wrong with this whole picture and this guy for sure.” And my mom, it shocked her into reality and then she knew she was like, “This has been a halfhearted thing and I think he's really after Jan.” It took her longer but she got there too and still nobody is thinking he's ever abused me.
In the meantime, I’m still doing the mission. He's still, you know, meeting with me. I’m going wherever I have to go and he'll show up there.
How Jan’s father felt all these years later:
My dad was such a good man and he was so embarrassed that we never thought he would talk about it on camera ‘cause it was just that one experience. But then of course, he accused him of many other things. And I think he took the guilt and shame of that to his grave. He did something that then had him over a barrel. i don't think he ever fully forgave himself. Even though I worked really hard and tried to help him see, “You were groomed and manipulated too.”
How the Brobergs overcame all these revelations as a family:
For me, I was a tiny little girl. I didn't hit puberty till I was almost 18. That kind of molestation and rape as a child is something that is hard to describe how it affects your life but also how you have choices and, of course, you need counseling and therapy and you need a lot of good people around you. Luckily, I had a good family. I still held onto some faith and some belief that there was good in the world. And that hope in a bigger picture and higher purpose and power, those were all key things to my healing. And then once you start realizing you have something that might help somebody else, then there's also therapy in that. It’s therapeutic, it's healing to tell people your story and to see them open up and for them to then start to share.
What happened to Berchtold’s wife, Gail, during all of this:
By the second kidnapping, she had filed for a divorce. So, she divorced him and took her kids and moved so that was part of it. But they were still, of course, in touch and, of course, he was part of the family.
How she reacted when she found out that Berchtold killed himself in 2005:
Well, it was the ultimate betrayal when you realize that everything that happened to you, there was no truth in any of it. So, first you have that feeling and then that day I cried. I screamed. I was so mad that he never had to serve any time, real time. He was convicted for rape of a child about nine years after me and he'd already started grooming that girl before he took me the second time. And her mother was a psychiatric nurse, not a dumb person. So, I'm just saying, it never ended his whole entire life. I knew of others. And to never really spend any time paying for what you did or to admit it, even to admit it that would have been something but he never acknowledged it and I know at least seven other people and I'm like that's hard.
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