Let's see... the first time someone tried to kidnap me, I was maybe 3 or 4 years old. This was in southern California, at a drive-in movie theater. The second time was in a neighborhood in a small town in northern CA, a town that now has over 1,000 residents since it has grown tremendously since my family lived there in the 1960s. The third time was in another small town in northern CA, a slightly larger town that has also experienced explosive growth and is now almost 8,000 people. The third time, I remember telling friends that I had encountered the Zodiac killer, who was going on a murder spree in the Bay Area at the time (but I did not tell the police).
The crimes were committed in the 1960s and 1970s, but we didn't have instantaneous news the way we do now so were not as aware of them. I think that if you compare actual crime rates, they are lower now.
I was raised in the mountains of East Tennessee...I guess things were not as chaotic there as in California...I’m sorry for the experiences you had to go through...
There were a couple of famous unsolved kidnappings in Chicago in the 1950s, the Peterson-Schuessler boys circa 1955 and the Grimes girls around 1959. All of them found dead under suspicious circumstances.