When 14-year-oldElizabeth Shoaf got off her school bus and began the short walk home in Lugoff, South Carolina, on September 6, 2006, Vinson Filyaw, posing as a police officer, approached her.

Elizabeth was placed under custody by Filyaw, who then handcuffed the adolescent and led her into the woods behind her home. After forcing her to walk for over an hour until she lost her bearings, he discovered a door leading to an underground bunker, which he told her to enter.

The bunker, only 4 feet wide and 20 feet long, was located close to Filyaw's trailer and less than a mile from her own house. It had a makeshift bed, two homemade grenades, a flare gun, shelves constructed from branches, a small propane tank for cooking, a small battery-operated television (which Filyaw used to keep up with the police inquiry into Elizabeth's disappearance), and a hand-dug toilet.

After forcing Elizabeth to strip naked inside, Filyaw bound her neck with an explosive cord. Elizabeth was imprisoned and raped three to five times a day for the next 10 days.

Elizabeth could hear a helicopter and the voices and footsteps of people looking for her as they moved through the woods outside the bunker during the first few days of her ordeal.
Elizabeth made friends with her captor, engaging him in conversation until he relaxed and started talking to the young girl. After he finally began letting her walk outside for a short while, he even trusted her enough to take the chain off her neck. Elizabeth would remove hair strands during these periods and attach them to branches in the hopes that search dogs would discover them and detect her scent.