From the air, the 265 acres of the Hanson brick mine look benign. If Elizabeth Shoaf had been taken here, alive or dead, there was not a sign of it from up here.

The same place on the ground was an overgrown mass, all but impenetrable..

David Thomley: It's just so thick,, we had horseback, we had people on foot. We had ATVs. Two of the three won't make it in here. So our manpower to use on foot would have taken days or weeks.

But Captain David Thomley knew they didn't have days to look. They might not have hours to find Elizabeth alive now that they knew that text message had been linked to a man police feared could be morphing into a serial killer.

Capt. David Thomley: At that point, we were feeling more and more like Vinson was the person we were looking for. Just terrified.

It was at first light. David Thomley walked toward the thickest part of the wood, and that's when he heard it:  a voice crying out for help.

Capt. David Thomley: I knew it was her, I could feel it was her. I would have walked thru hell on a Sunday to get to her.

And there she was, through the trees.

Thomley: I've been asked many times what it felt like to come out of the wood line and see her standing there. And...

Keith Morrison: Make you kind of emotional.

Now, just remembering the moment, he is overcome. Because the fact is, he'd been looking for a dead girl. A body.

Keith Morrison: So what'd you do when you saw her?

Thomley: I don't know if you could call it a run in my shape. I ran as fast as I could. I went up to her and put my arm around her and told her I’ve been looking for her everywhere.

Then, there was a frantic rush.

An ambulance arrived.

The sirens wailed her off to the nearest hospital.

And Captain Thomley got himself quick as he could up the road to Elizabeth’s house to see her mother Madeline.

Madeline Shoaf: All of a sudden I seen something coming up the road. I said, is that one of the police officers?

Madeline and Don had been out all night, searching. And she saw the captain and she knew.

Madeline Shoaf: When he said that he had her, it was my whole life started again, it was like, my heart just started beating again.

Don was asleep, exhausted.

Don Shoaf: I feel like I shut my eyes and she come flying in the room, "They found her!"

Madeline Shoaf: We couldn't make it to the hospital fast enough. Go! Dude, pass the light, pass these people…

Keith Morrison: He's a cop, right, isn't he supposed to be able to speed?

Madeline Shoaf: Yeah, put your light on, do something, get us there. That's all I could think of: just getting there.

She was in the emergency room. They put her in a private area.

Madeline Shoaf: And of course, I saw her, I couldn't stop it. I just jumped on her. You know? I just had to give her a hug and kiss her.

Yes, and what's more, she seemed OK. Or at least alive, with no obvious injuries -- like some latter day version of Little Red Riding Hood, snatched from the jaws of the wolf.

Where had she been? What had happened to her?

Gingerly, carefully, Elizabeth’s parents  and the Kershaw County Sheriff's Department asked about the dreadful events of her abduction and listened to a story more horrific by far than anything imagined in a Grimm’s fairy tale.

She wanted to talk, the adults discovered. It was harder for them to ask than for her to answer -- as it was initially when we finally met Elizabeth.

Understated, shy, with a captivating smile, Elizabeth told us, hour by hour, about her long, terrible, journey.

Elizabeth Shoaf: It will come up and I think about it. I don't want to forget it though.

It was a Wednesday afternoon when she stepped off the school bus and watched her friends go off in a car. She walked on alone, up her own driveway, 50 yards from her house.

Keith Morrison: This is where he popped out of the woods.

Elizabeth Shoaf: Yes.

Keith Morrison: Right there?

Elizabeth Shoaf: He came through here.

She didn't know his name was Vinson. She saw that he was wearing a sheriff's badge.

Elizabeth Shoaf: He just walked out in camouflage and told me he was the police and that he needed to talk to me. And then I walked over and he handcuffed me behind my back.

Keith Morrison: Did he look like a policeman?

Elizabeth Shoaf: Yeah, because he had like camouflage pants on and a green shirt. And then he had like a fake badge. But I thought it was real.

He told her it was something about marijuana, that her 12-year-old brother Donnie was already under arrest. And now she was, too.

Elizabeth Shoaf: Then he put like a fake bomb. I didn't know it was fake, because he told me it was real. But he put it around my neck. And then he--

Keith Morrison: What did he say it was?

Elizabeth Shoaf: A bomb.

Keith Morrison: Were you terrified?

Elizabeth Shoaf: I was confused. I was like, kind of angry, because he had told me he had my little brother with the other people. And then that angered me, because I’m just protective over my brother.

But instead of marching her back down the drive to a police car, Filyaw led her away from the road.

Elizabeth Shoaf: He was taking me around the house and around the pond.

Keith Morrison: And through the woods.

Elizabeth Shoaf: Yeah. He was asking me just like the oddest questions. If I had a phone and if I was a virgin and--

Keith Morrison: If you're a virgin?

Elizabeth Shoaf: Yeah. Of all things for a police to ask me, that's when I kind of was wondering what was going on. And then he said that I was a smart girl and I should have figured it out. And then that kind of got me scared. That's when my heart started pounding because I knew something was wrong.

Of course, it was about to get much worse.

Vinson led a shackled Elizabeth through woods and trails for an hour, doubling back, circling around, throwing off her sense of direction.

And then he stopped her, and bent down and picked up a piece of ground.

Then she realized it was a trap door. There was a bunker down there.

Keith Morrison: What did he say to you then?

Elizabeth Shoaf: He told me to go down a ladder and get into the bunker. He had like a rifle and a belt that had guns and I saw a Taser in it. So I knew he was really equipped to do anything, if I acted stupid or whatever.

Inside, he closed the door and turned on a battery powered light. Now Elizabeth understood why he asked if she was a virgin.

Elizabeth Shoaf: He pretty much just raped me.

Keith Morrison: Right away?

Elizabeth Shoaf: Pretty much.

Keith Morrison: Force you to take off your clothes?

Elizabeth Shoaf: Yes.

Keith Morrison: How often did he rape you?

Elizabeth Shoaf: More than two times every day. Between two and five times a day … All I remember is that it hurt, of course. And I had looked off to the side to one of the shelves that was there. And I was looking' at it like-- there was, like, a propane tank and dishes and stuff on it.

Keith Morrison: You just stared at that?

Elizabeth Shoaf: Yes. Stared at it and cried.

Keith Morrison: Do you think you'll ever forget that shelf?

Elizabeth Shoaf: No.

Keith Morrison: Kept in that bunker, underground. Naked.

Elizabeth Shoaf: Chained.

Keith Morrison: Chained? Chained where? How?

Elizabeth Shoaf: There was a chain that was like a long, a big chain or whatever that was hooked to like the roof part of the bunker. And he just had it down. And then wrapped it around my neck and locked it.

Keith Morrison: What did you assume at that point?

Elizabeth Shoaf: That I was kidnapped. And that I was probably going to die.

But killing her quickly didn't seem to be her kidnapper's plan.

Video   An unforgettable sound Capt. David Thomley makes an amazing discovery in the search for missing 14-year-old Elizabeth Shoaf. Dateline NBC

He'd outfitted the bunker to keep them going for weeks.

Elizabeth Shoaf: It was, like, dirt walls and then over the walls he had some kind of sheet of some kind of fabric. And then he just had, like, his own little homemade bed and homemade shelves and a retarded toilet.

Keith Morrison: A retarded toilet?

Elizabeth Shoaf: Yes.

Keith Morrison: What do you mean, a retarded toilet?

Elizabeth Shoaf: It was a broken plastic chair over a bucket.

Elizabeth could see a stove, food, and heard Vinson talk about his water supply -- a stagnant pond near the bunker. There was even a battery-operated TV.

Vinson watched the news coverage of the abduction.

He told Elizabeth: You'll never be found.

Elizabeth Shoaf: I watched my mom and my sister and my aunt, and all the other people I saw on the news. And just watched like them talk about how I was missing. And they wouldn't put an Amber Alert out for me.

Keith Morrison: How did that feel?

Elizabeth Shoaf: It made me angry, because they thought I was a runaway.

The next day it seemed to Elizabeth that deputies had figured out she'd been abducted and she was about to be rescued.

She could hear helicopters flying above the trees and footsteps trampling above.

Elizabeth Shoaf: I could actually see their shadows walking across the door above me. And I’m just sitting there while they're right above me. And it's--

Keith Morrison: You could see their shadows on the door of the bunker?

Elizabeth Shoaf: Yes … I didn't say anything, but he just came up to me and told me that I needed to be quiet and if I said anything, all he had to do is Taser me and it'd knock me out.

And soon the helicopter thumped far away, and footfalls vanished from the ground overhead.

Those searchers had seen nothing. In fact, the footsteps belonged to volunteers not trained deputies, who might have noticed something amiss.

Vinson told her: If someone got close enough to find the bunker, his booby traps would get them.

Keith Morrison: Tell me about those booby-traps.

Elizabeth Shoaf: They were all pretty much on the way towards the water hole. And he showed me that one thing he had in the ground. It was between these two trees and it was shocking bullets that were, like, pointed upwards. And if you step on it, it will shoot you in your feet.

He kept her there in his bunker and day three became four then five. The perpetual darkness left Elizabeth disoriented until she lost track of the time of day or night.

Elizabeth Shoaf: It smelled muggy. Really, really muggy. In the afternoons, and then at nighttime it'd be really cold. I would sit there for like hours. Just thinking.

Keith Morrison: Thinking what?

Elizabeth Shoaf: About my boyfriend and my family. And friends. And just cry. Because that was all I could do.

In the deafening silence of the dank smelly bunker, Elizabeth realized Vinson was right: the bunker was so well hidden, the search, obviously a failure.

She would not be found. She would die there, unless...

Gradually the idea took form and became solid.

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