Kelsey Stelting

INDEPENDENCE, KAN. ? Puzzling questions remained today about the reported kidnapping of a popular high school student in front of her own home after she went missing for more than 15 hours but turned up apparently unharmed less than a mile away.

Police and the FBI acknowledged the only leads they had came from interviews with 16-year-old Kelsey Stelting and a 911 call she made on her cell phone, telling police she had been forced at gunpoint into a white van. (Read the transcript of the 911 call.)

Authorities acknowledged they hadn’t ruled out a false kidnapping report, but they were treating the girl’s disappearance as a crime. They interviewed her for hours before she returned home early this morning, then began interviewing fellow students at Independence High School, where she is a junior, even though none of her classmates are suspects.

“We’re trying to get some information,” said FBI Special Agent Jeff Lanza. “It would be very inappropriate and much too premature to conclude that we’re doubting anyone’s story.”

Police, the FBI and the girl’s family declined to discuss many of the details of the case because of the investigation, including whether she escaped from her attacker. Police did release an audio file and transcript from the 911 call, in which a distressed Stelting told them, “I have been kidnapped. I have been taken from in front of my house.”

Kelly Cox, the girl’s mother, said authorities are simply being thorough in not foreclosing the possibility of a false report. However, she had no doubts about the incident.

“Every single one of us will tell you that Kelsey’s a very forthright young woman,” she said. “If you listen to that 911 call, and I think if you’re a mom or a dad, I think you hear in her voice the trauma, that she is afraid.”

Friends and acquaintances described the girl as bright, a good student, involved in activities at Independence High School such as softball, cheerleading, dance squad and student government. They said they didn’t see signs of trouble at home or school or anything to cause them to doubt that she’d been abducted.

“She’s one of our finest students,” said Principal Jim Runge. “She’s a tremendous person. I’d love to have her as my daughter. You have 700 like her, and you don’t need a principal.”

The teenager made her call at about 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, and police traced it to a cellular tower about 10 miles south of Independence, putting her less than 15 miles from the Oklahoma border. Yet, just before 10 p.m. Tuesday night, she walked up to a house a mere eight blocks from her home; the occupants called police.

Cox said a doctor examined her daughter thoroughly and found no injuries. Police and the FBI weren’t saying whether the teenager inflicted any injuries on the suspect.

“The only leads right now that we have on that vehicle or the suspect are the victim herself, and we’re still trying to confirm that information,” Police Chief Lee Bynum said. “We have no other outside leads that have led us to that vehicle or an individual suspect.”

As of mid-afternoon Wednesday, authorities hadn’t released a detailed description of the suspect, describing him only as a white male. Nor had they found the van, or her clamshell blue flip cell phone, which authorities believe was taken from the girl shortly after she made the 911 call.

“It may be the type of situation where it got left somewhere, dropped on the seat,” Lanza said.

In the 911 call, the teenager sometimes sounded near tears.

“I’m in a white van,” she told the dispatcher. “I don’t know which way I’m going. I can’t see out.”

She also said: “I was told – he put a gun to my head, and he told me to run or he would shoot me and my family.”

Authorities said the assailant forced the girl to run several blocks to a nearby lumber yard, apparently following her with a gun. Bynum said the lumber yard didn’t have surveillance cameras turned outside and that a nearby bank’s cameras didn’t capture any images on tape.

When the dispatcher asked whether the girl knew the man, she said: “I didn’t see him. He came up behind me.”

Reports of the girl’s abduction led her fellow students and others to paper Independence and the outlying area with posters and fliers with her picture. The Independence Daily Reporter printed and helped distribute about 7,500 posters, said Editor and Publisher Herbert Meyer.

“She’s resilient,” her mother said. “She is still very overwhelmed by everything – seeing the posters up, when we were en route last night, when she saw the posters and fliers, just the outpouring of love and concern.”

Stelting is a member of the Independence High School softball team, which won both games of a doubleheader at Iola on Tuesday night. The team was without Stelting and five other girls who were too upset to play.

“On the bus we said, ‘We are going to win two games for her and when we get home we are going to see Kelsey,”‘ said Chelsi Taylor, an 18-year-old senior who pitches and plays shortstop. “We knew Jesus was with her and all the prayers.”