We’re going full circle on yet another harrowing real-life crime. Walking in the footsteps of The Staircase (the documentary) and The Staircase (the drama) is now the double-kidnapping case of the teenager Jan Broberg in ‘70s Idaho.

As first documented in the Netflix documentary Abducted In Plain Sight, directed by Skye Borgman, the events have now been adapted into a new series called Friend Of The Family.

Starring Anna Paquin (True Blood), Jake Lacy (White Lotus) and an almost unrecognisable Colin Hanks, the series examines the distressing case of grooming and abduction again. It's a truly shocking story; not only was the man who kidnapped Jan Broberg a known friend to her family, but such was the manipulative power of the perpetrator, he went on to kidnap her for a second time.

It’s a story that beggars belief. Borgman even told Vanity Fair that during the editing process, she was so frustrated with the family and their actions that she took a six week break. Nick Antosca, the showrunner of A Friend Of The Family, however, told Deadline that we should have a little sympathy for the family: “It’s easy to judge the Broberg family’s story from the outside. Sometimes when people first hear it, they get defensive: How could these parents have let this happen? It’s a surreal story… I wanted to understand from the inside — to know what their lives felt like, to live in each family member’s experience, to see how they were caught in such a bizarre web, and help audiences understand too.”

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What really happened in the case of Jan Broberg?

In the mid-’70s, Jan lived with her religious family in Idaho, and a close friend of the family, Robert Berchtold, was also part of their Mormon church and seen as a pillar of the community.

Berchtold, who was married with children, harnessed a reputation as the “fun dad” of the family – they called him ‘B’ – and ingratiated himself into their lives to the point where Jan’s parents, Robert and Mary Ann, let him sleep in the young child Jan’s bed.

One evening when Jan was 12, she was taken horse riding by Berchtold, but they never returned home. Instead, Berchtold drugged and kidnapped her, and drove them thousands of miles away to a Mexican desert.

When Jan woke up, she was tied to a bed in a motorhome, and a tape recorder – such technology had only just become available – played a message telling her that she had been abducted by an alien. The voice on the recorder told her that the aliens were now in charge and she had to have a child with a man to save the planet: that man was the convicted paedophile Berchtold.

Speaking to BBC 5 Live in 2019, she said: “I literally did anything [the aliens] told me to do because they told me my little sister would be taken if I didn't fulfil the mission of having the child for their dying planet.”

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The brainwashing and grooming carried on long after Jan survived the five week ordeal, in which Berchtold abused her. She was too scared to tell her family what had actually happened, and who had committed these awful crimes against her. Staggeringly, Berchtold was once again let back into the family.

In the Netflix documentary, Robert Broberg says: “I never had an inkling that he had sexual designs on Jan. We weren’t really sure, even then, what a child molester was... I don’t know how we could have been so gullible when there were so many red flags.”

Berchtold was a “master manipulator” and a predator who hid in plain sight. After the kidnapping, it came to light that he had sexual encounters with both Robert and Mary Ann, and had blackmailed them into signing affidavits that claimed he had their consent to take Jan to Mexico with him. The grooming, the abuse and his hold over the family continued, until two years later in 1976, when Berchtold kidnapped Jan again, and her parents didn’t report her missing until two weeks later. They were in contact with Berchtold until she was found again – he had been pretending to speak with her on the phone and asking for updates on where she was.

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What happened to Berchtold and Broberg?

In the end, he only spent a few days in jail for kidnapping Jan for the first time. After the second abduction, he was transferred to a mental hospital for a few months, then in another separate case, was sentenced to just one year in prison for raping another child. He went on to stalk Jan as an adult – when she and her mother released their memoirs, Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story, in 2003 – and he died by suicide in 2015, just days after a court case in which justice might finally have been served for Jan.

Jan Broberg is now a successful actor and she, alongside her mum, is also executive producer on A Friend Of The Family. She told the BBC that she now wants to use her platform to warn others about the act of predatory abusers (“keep looking, instead of turning away”, she said) and said she hopes the retelling of her own story will help other survivors to feel "empowered to move forward with their own life and to fix what's broken.”

A Friend Of The Family will air on Peacock and Sky/NOW TV from October 7.

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