Abducted in Plain Sight

A documentary set in Idaho. The Broberg family live in Pocatello. A mother, a father, three girls. Their neighbour Robert Berchtold is very close to them. They met at church, they holiday together, and he is in the house as though it were his own. In 1974 twelve-year-old Jan disappears. He has taken her. He keeps her in a trailer, drugged, and plays her a story about a mission she has been given from space. From there the documentary opens its real subject: why the family could not stop it. What emerges is this: he had formed a relationship with the mother and the father separately. He bound them both to him and both hid it for years. The abduction happens not once but twice. The family does not cut him off after the first. The narrative frames this not as an accusation but as an explanation, and that is the most argued-over thing about it. What the narrative is interested in is not abduction but trust: the documentary describes how every mechanism protecting a child was disabled one by one, and every one of them was disabled voluntarily. The speakers are the family themselves. Jan Broberg, her mother and her father sit for the camera and tell all of it. The structure is conventional. Interview, reconstruction, archive footage and chronological telling. The legal outcome is small. He served very little and walked free for years. The film screened at festivals in 2017; it spread when it went onto a streaming platform in 2019. Skye Borgman directed. Who it is for: anyone who watches true crime documentaries and work that looks at family psychology. Who it is not for: anyone wanting an easy watch; the subject is heavy and the narrative's approach to the parents badly unsettles some viewers.