He Stalked Her for 12 Years. Then Came 14 Hours of Sheer Terror Inside a Soundproof Bunker By Liam Quinn

A Michigan woman lived through a nightmare when she was stalked for years by a man who later kidnapped and tortured her.

Now, after her stalker was sentenced to decades in prison, Samantha Stites is telling her story.

Speaking to ABC News ahead of a Hulu documentary series about the case, Stalking Samantha: 13 Years of Terror, Stites says she first thought her stalker was just “lonely.”

“At first I think he is just lonely and for some reason finds me an approachable person to talk to,” Stites told the outlet. “And then at some point, it kind of changes.”

According to Michigan prison records, Christopher Thomas, 41, is currently serving a minimum of 40 years behind bars, and faces a maximum of 60 years.

Prison records show that that Thomas pleaded guilty to kidnapping, torture and aggravated stalking in December 2023.

ABC reported that Thomas first started stalking Stites in 2011, when he went to the same Christian group she attended while she was a college student.

Thomas eventually began following Stites for years, going so far as to place GPS trackers on her car.

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Then, in 2022, WPBN reported, Thomas was arrested after he kidnapped Stites and held her in a soundproof storage unit for almost 15 hours. Stites was able to escape after convincing her captor to let her go by promising not to report the crime, ABC reported.

Thomas was sentenced in 2024 after pleading guilty in December 2023.

“Justice is a funny thing. It doesn’t necessarily come in the form of prison years,” Stites said, according to ABC. “I can’t ever go back to before I was kidnapped. And that’s something I had to grieve. But knowing that I’m finally turning the page on this and that I should feel safe with him off the street and that I am protected meant a lot. I felt free.”