Also, there was a TV plea that the mother made in ‘91. She said, “You may like her, but we love her.” What an odd thing to say when your daughter has been kidnapped.
Actually, it sounds like the plea of a woman who is desperately hoping her daughter was taken by someone who just wants a child to raise, rather than someone who will rape and kill her.
Maybe not. I believe that it's considered very valuable to "humanize" the victim in cases like this. The parents should use the child's name often and show pictures of the victim, including pictures with the family.
The object is evidently to create in the perpetrators mind an empathy for the victim in the hopes of keeping the victim safer.
The situation that would be "safest" for the victim would be if the perpetrators were "child-stealers" and not a serial-killing rapist. There have been many cases of child-stealing by woman or couples who can't have or don't have children of their own. Even new-borns have been stolen by such persons.
By treating the circumstances as if the case was one of such child-stealing, the parents may have hoped that whoever took the child would modify their behavior to be more consistent with this less lethal type of crime.
Unfortunately, some kidnappers are not motivated by a dysfunctional idea of building a "happy family".