Woman Saw 12-Year-Old Girl Being Abducted, Then Tailed the Kidnapper for 8 Miles: 'Just Didn't Seem Right' By Virginia Chamlee 183

A headline that could have turned heartbreaking ended in heroics when a general store co-owner witnessed an abduction — and tailed the kidnapper for eight miles until police showed up.

On Jan. 16, 2002, 12-year-old Megan Van Cleave was walking home from school in Clarkston, Wash., when a 25-year-old man named Brian L. Nollette Jr. approached her, flashing a gun and forcing her into his Ford Crown Victoria.

Kim Heimgartner, 33, happened to be driving by when she witnessed the girl getting into the car. While she didn’t see the gun, she told PEOPLE later that year: “In my gut, it just didn’t seem right.”

What happened next was described as “an eight-mile game of cat and mouse,” while Heimgartner drove down winding, desolate roads and called police on her cell phone.

Meanwhile, in the car, Van Cleave was met with silence when she asked Nollette what he planned to do with her, the tween told PEOPLE at the time. Van Cleave told her captor that it was her sister’s birthday the following day, and that she was hoping to buy her balloons.

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Heimgartner, a mother herself, kept up her pursuit of the Ford until law enforcement officers ultimately closed in.

Nollette stopped the car as the cops turned on their lights, telling Van Cleave he would make her “a deal,” and allow her to escape, adding, “Since tomorrow’s your sister’s birthday, get out and get away as fast as you can.”

As Van Cleave told PEOPLE at the time: “I ran like crazy.”

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After Nollette was arrested, officers discovered what they “identified as a torture kit” in his possession, with court documents detailing how a search yielded “a suicide note on the dashboard, a black rucksack on the front passenger seat, and a set of chef’s knives in a carrying case on the floor behind the passenger seat. Inside the rucksack, he found ammunition, two disposable cameras, a roll of duct tape, wire cutters, candy, breath mints, dice, and a bag of black plastic ties.”

Nollette was ultimately convicted of first-degree kidnapping and second-degree assault.

As Van Cleave’s father told PEOPLE shortly after the arrest: “What would have happened if Kim hadn’t listened to her gut?”

Heimgartner, meanwhile, took her own heroics in stride, saying at the time, “I’m nosy. But this time it paid off.”