right. i would have gotten you out already if it had been you. right. even in the worst possible situation, i knew that some of those things did not come from him, that he was writing what he was told to write. that was very clear to me. she was desperate. all she had was a household checking account, they put the cars, the ranch, the savings accounts in eduardo s name. try as she might, she couldn t touch it. i felt so helpless. i wanted to do something. i wanted to take him out of that hole and so she began selling things. first to go, the spanish horses eduardo loved so much, sold for a fraction of their value. we had lots of rabbits so i started selling rabbits. i sold sheep. i sold machinery. everything i could sell, i sold. all the fire sale prices? mm-hmm. all of it made hardly a dent. they wanted $8 million, she raised $20,000. in her ad she begged the kidnappers to understand she
anything, really, beyond our what was in our checking account. the fact of the matter was the valsecas were house poor. they had put everything they had into the ranch and at recession prices, even if she could sell it, she would get a small fraction of $8 million. there in the dining room, jayne showed the e-mail to her afi agent and realized he was not surprised. you know, jayne, you have to realize that this is the way this works. you re going to be learning the ropes here. they re always going to demand a lot more than even they know they will get in the end. they hope to get that amount. but this is where we start negotiating. the kidnappers set the rules. jayne must respond to their e-mails in the want ad section of a specific newspaper, her first ad they demanded, would go in the animals and pet section and read, buy a chow chow dog, austin, vaccinated with complete pedigree, 8,000 pesos, meaning, of course, $8 million to buy back eduardo.
they wouldn t answer my calls or return my messages. lots of people, she discovered, didn t want to get involved. why? well, that they somehow, by helping me, they would expose themselves to this sort of a thing somehow. at the ranch, eduardo s grown children from an earlier marriage, desperate also, did everything they could to help but they didn t have that kind of money. and so they felt very alone in their little family circle as they tried to keep hope going at the ranch. i want you to look at the camera and give a message to your daddy because he s going to see this when he gets back. that i love him so much and he s the best dad in the whole wide world and i know he s coming back soon. and then quite literally in the depths of their despair, something completely unexpected. two individuals who jayne had not approached for loans went to her separately and wrote big checks.
i had to communicate what was happening to the kidnappers because if they didn t let me place at least one last ad, it would look like i had lost interest and i was no longer communicating. i had to now beg the woman on the phone to, please, allow me to place one more and i would never do it again. the negotiation switched to another paper. but then the phone calls began. i thought it would be someone disguising their voice and that s what i had been trained for. the agent had warned her it might happen, even prepared dialogue for her to memorize and kept this erase board handy so he could prompt her. but it wasn t the kidnappers who got on the phone. i was shaking. i didn t know what to do. it was eduardo, but the things he said, this could not be the man she loved. but it was. and then he started calling me names. you re such a how could you do this? it s my money. it was more of the same i had been getting in the letters they had forced him to write. she turned to
end of story. but it didn t go that way. no, it didn t. jayne says the police tried one escape highway, no other. and no eduardo. he had been kidnapped. these people carried this whole operation out with such precision and such surprising professionalism, which seems a strange word to even use. how long did it take? seconds. they were cool as cucumbers. but that was just the first clue. on the ground beside the suv in which the kidnappers abandoned jayne was another. inside an envelope, addressed to jayne. the first thing that went through my mind was well, i realized they spelled my name correctly. my name is jayne, spelled with a y, so it was really scary to see on the envelope they had actually spelled my name right. nobody spells your name right? no. and inside the envelope? the ransom note says senora, go home, open this e-mail, with this password and