Woman Kidnapped By Serial Killer Tells How She Escaped

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

One night in September 1992, Jennifer Asbenson was in great distress. The 19-year-old Californian girl had missed the bus and couldn't get to work. Jennifer worked at a center for children with disabilities and was afraid of losing her job. When a man in a car offered to take her, the young woman had her doubts but accepted. "I thought, 'This is commanding by God,'" Asbenson, now 45, told PEOPLE.

Analyzing the man's physique, which was slim and not scary, she thought she could defend herself if he tried to do something wrong to her. The man took her to work that afternoon and then invited her to breakfast the next morning but she was not interested so he gave her the wrong phone number.

When she finished working she saw the same man parked outside and offered to take her home. She accepted because he had done nothing to her the previous time. Then she would regret that decision. Her story is told in the upcoming episode "Monster in the Desert" by People Magazine Investigates, which will air on Monday, February 4 at 10 pm ET on Investigation Discovery.

The young woman had unknowingly ridden in the car of serial killer Andrew Urdiales, a former member of the United States Navy who had already killed four women in California. Less than two blocks from her workplace, the man had a fit of anger because she had given him his wrong phone number and threw his head against the dashboard of the car, then took her to a deserted area of the desert. There he tried to abuse her sexually.

Asbenson managed to escape and ran but the man grabbed her by the hair and forced her into his trunk, grabbing the road again. The young woman had her hands tied and knew that if she could not escape he would kill her. That adrenaline made her manage to untie her hands and open the trunk. When the car stopped, she ran away. When she looked back she saw that Urdiales was chasing her with a machete in his hand. "It was like a horror movie," she recalls.

Seeing a truck on the road, she asked for help. Two Navy officers took her in her truck to a gas station, where she called the police. Urdiales fled and killed four other women in Illinois and California. The man later confessed to killing 8 women in total. Asbenson had to heal from that traumatic experience he recounted in his autobiography The Girl in the Treehouse. "I feel very lucky to be alive," she acknowledges.