Kriti Mehrotra
It was in May 1980 when everything turned upside down for the Stauffer family as matriarch Mary Stauffer and her daughter Elizabeth “Beth” Stauffer were abducted in broad daylight. They were actually held captive for 53 days, as explored in both Investigation Discovery’s ‘Your Worst Nightmare: High School Revenge’ as well as Lifetime’s ‘Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story,’ before they managed to escape. However, it’s undeniable that what they endured during this period was torture, so we can’t help but wonder about not only the aftermath of it all but also the survivors’ current standing.
Mary and Beth Stauffer Were Abducted at Gunpoint After a Salon Visit
As devout Christians determined to follow the path of God, the Stauffers were very well-regarded in their community of Roseville, Minnesota, especially as they were also family-oriented. While patriarch Irv Stauffer served as a pastor at the local church, his wife, Mary Stauffer, was a teacher who had given up her career long ago because his profession and their missionary work required them to move around a lot. It was only then that they started a family, welcoming two beautiful kids in the early to mid-1970s – first came Elizabeth “Beth” Stauffer, followed by Steve Stauffer 2-3 years later.
However, by the time 1980 rolled around, the family had decided to move to the Philippines for four years to continue their missionary work at the church they had helped build there some time prior. They were all excited about it, so on the morning of May 16, around 5 days before their flight, 36-year-old Mary brought 6-year-old kindergartener Steven for a haircut at a local salon. She dropped him off at home before taking 8-year-old Beth for her haircut in the late afternoon, all the while planning to finish some small chores alongside her after they were done at roughly 4:30 pm.
Little did the mother-daughter duo know they would be abducted at gunpoint from the parking lot almost as soon as they exited the salon. A strange man had come from behind and pointed the weapon at them. Therefore, Mary did what the assailant ordered her to do while also trying to calm Beth because she knew that fighting or panicking would not help either of them when there was a firearm pointed at their heads. The stranger subsequently drove them to his home, which was merely a mile away from their own, before chaining them up in a 21-inch-wide and 4-foot-long closet in the basement.
The Perpetrator Was a Former Student of Mary Stauffer
According to reports, neither Mary nor Beth recognized their kidnapper, that is, until he himself told the former that he was one of her 9th-grade math students 15 years before, Ming Sen Shiue. She honestly did not remember him, but the 29-year-old electronic shop owner jogged her memories by talking about the class in detail until she was left shocked because she didn’t recall anything alarming about him. She had no idea that he had been obsessed with her since she had taught him, or that he had tried to abduct her at least four other times before he was eventually successful on that sunny day.
Ming actually indicated to Mary that his actions were revenge because she had derailed his life by giving him a B, costing him his college scholarship, and forcing him to join the army. He even went as far as to assert that he had fought in the Vietnam War, where he had allegedly become a prisoner of war, yet it was all an elaborate lie to play with her emotions. In reality, he attended the University of Minnesota and then ended up owning and operating his own successful electronics shop – he never failed academically or fought in any kind of war.
As for what Ming actually did in the name of revenge, he killed a 6-year-old named Jason Wilkman, who had witnessed him abducting Mary and Beth, before torturing the duo for 53 days. Not only did he play manipulative mind games by saying he would kill them as well as their entire family if they tried to escape, but he also repeatedly sexually assaulted Beth while videotaping it. As if that’s not enough, there were times he even used Beth to control Mary and have her be physically affectionate to him – he did so by threatening the little girl’s life.
Mary and Beth Stauffer Escaped Using Their Own Wit
While the entire ordeal was extremely harrowing and traumatizing for both Mary and Beth, the former relied on her faith to help her get through it, whereas the latter was lucky to be young. In fact, the 8-year-old fortunately never fully grasped what was happening, even if she was terrified most times, because she had her mother by her side and didn’t really witness Ming’s assaults. The 36-year-old would even tell her daughter stories from the Bible to keep her hope of freedom alive, that is, until she saw an opportunity for them on July 7, 1980.
Ming was at work when Mary realized that the long metal chains connecting her and Beth were secured to nothing but a hinge pin inside the small basement closet, so she tried to remove it. Surprisingly, the pin “came out as if it were greased,” driving her to not waste any time and immediately make her way upstairs alongside her daughter, where she saw a cable phone and dialed 911. She was scared that their assailant would soon return, but she was calm in identifying herself to the police, telling them the situation, and then waiting to be rescued by them for good.
Initially, Mary and Beth waited for the authorities by the front door, but they moved to the backyard a few minutes later, as they were still terrified about the idea of Ming coming back. That’s where they were found by local deputies, shortly following which their assailant was apprehended from his electronics store – he was charged with kidnapping and murder. Only then did it come to light that he had even broken into Mary’s in-laws’ home 5 years prior, thinking it was hers, and held them at gunpoint before threatening to kill them if they ever told anyone, so they didn’t.
Mary and Beth Stauffer Have Moved On From the Past
Although Ming continued to terrorize Mary and Beth even after he had been arrested and was detained, they remained undeterred in their fight for justice as they ensured to testify against him. Not only had he allegedly offered an inmate $50,000 to kill the mother-daughter duo so they could not stand up against him in court, but he also tried to attack the matriarch himself during his trials. While Mary was testifying when he was in court for two federal kidnapping counts in the fall of 1980, he jumped out of his chair and charged at her, but security managed to stop him before he got too close.
However, Mary was not as lucky while she was testifying during Ming’s state trial for Jason Wilkman’s murder in early 1981, as he managed to slash her face with the knife he had snuck in. She required 62 stitches for this wound, yet it all worked out in the end because he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison before his term was changed to life in prison in 2010. Coming to what happened to Mary and Beth, they did indeed relocate to the Philippines with their family after everything, enabling them to have a sense of normalcy and really move on from the past. Since then, though, Mary and Beth have preferred to remain rather well removed from the limelight for privacy reasons, but we do know they are still a tight-knit family that stands by one another through thick and thin.
Mary and Beth Stauffer Are Currently Leading Comfortable, Happy Lives
From what we can tell, Mary retired from all missionary work in 2009, so in her early 80s, she currently leads a comfortable and cozy life alongside her loving husband, Irv, and other loved ones. In 2019, she actually told Fox News, “Tragedy doesn’t need to define our lives. We can go on with life. God has been so good to us. (My daughter and I) have been able to go on with our ministry, with our lives, with our family. We have had a wonderful life after the kidnapping too.” She continued, “It’s very easy to let the tragedies of our lives define us or become the thing that… creates who we are, but they don’t have to… It can be a thing that happened in our life. It can be something that helps us grow.”
As for Beth, in her early 50s, she is now a mother and a grandmother herself, so she is consciously focusing on her present rather than her past in every sense of the term. In other words, while she is married with a family of her own, she has deliberately not shared her new last name publicly to maintain a private life for all of them. Although she did stand in front of the parole board in 2010 to ensure Ming was denied release from prison, telling them that no matter how many years had gone by or how hard she had worked to keep the past away, the incident still haunts her. It is a part of her history. Nevertheless, she did candidly tell Inside Edition in 2019 that “by having a wonderful life afterwards, in some ways, it’s the best way to not let him win,” so that’s precisely what she and her mother have done.
