Police investigating the disappearance of a 20-year-old girl received a harrowing email from her captor.
In 2017, British model Chloe Ayling jetted to Milan, Italy, for what she believed to be a photoshoot. However, in a devastating turn of events, Chloe was drugged and abducted by the man who had been emailing her agent and posing as a photographer named ‘Andre Lazio’.
Chloe had been kidnapped with the intention of being auctioned and sold on the dark web, but fortunately the young woman lived to tell the tale. Ultimately, Chloe’s captor started to get feelings for her and she used this to talk him into releasing her.
Meanwhile, police in both Italy and England were working hard to try locate the model before she was auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Chloe Ayling was kidnapped in 2017 (chloeayling97/Instagram)
On the day of the deadline, police received a gut-wrenching email that left one investigator feeling like he’d ‘failed’.
The email simply read ‘she’s gone mate’, implying that Chloe had already been sold. At this time the police were unaware that Chloe was still somewhat safe.
One of the investigators on the 2017 case took part in a new BBC docu-series, albeit anonymously.
The series is called Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping and the first episode aired on BBC last night (August 4).
Speaking in the tell-all documentary, the investigator recalled the moment he received the email informing him that Chloe had supposedly been sold.
He said: “There was a single email that came in around 3am that just said ‘she’s gone’. She was going to be sold into the sex industry. You don’t know where she’s going to be held or for how long, what’s she’s going to endure… You think, well there’s no coming back from that.”
“That moment was terrible,” he continued. “It was probably the lowest ebb in 30 years. I’d been given a responsibility and I’d failed. It’s not an easy thing to admit but it’s true.”
But Chloe hadn’t been sold and the next day the investigator found out that her kidnapper had taken to her to the Milan consulate instead.
While she was told to end any investigations into her abduction, Chloe went on to the tell the authorities everything about her captor, who was later identified as Łukasz Herba.
Almost a year on from the scary ordeal Łukasz went to trial and was found found guilty of kidnapping Chloe. He was sentenced to almost 17 years behind bars.
Featured Image Credit: BBC
Topics: True crime, Crime, News, UK News, BBC
Niamh Shackleton
Woman who was kidnapped to be sold on the dark web reveals key details she believes saved her life
Chloe Ayling was kidnapped in Milan in 2017 — but there were suspicions that she wasn’t telling the truth about the ordeal
Eight years on from her kidnapping, Chloe Ayling is still refuting people’s claims that she lied.
In April 2017, Chloe, who was thought to be 19 at the time, went to Paris, France, for a photoshoot booked by her former agent, Phil Green.
She was hired by someone called ‘Andre Lazio’, but the plans for the shoot were cancelled while Chloe was still in France as a result of the devastating terror attack that unfolded on the Champs-Élysées boulevard that claimed the lives of three police officers.
A couple of months later, Andre approached Phil again to book Chloe for the same shoot but in a different location: Milan, Italy.
Chloe flew to Italy as planned, and the day after her arrival, she traveled to the location where she was told the photoshoot would take place.
But no such shoot happened, and when Chloe arrived, she was drugged and abducted instead.
British model Chloe Ayling was kidnapped in 2017 (chloeayling97/Instagram)
The British model was then held hostage for several days, and her captor told her he’d been hired by a criminal organization called ‘The Black Death’.
Once Chloe was abducted, her captor — who referred to himself as MD — was supposedly told to auction Chloe off as a sex slave on the dark web.
MD emailed Chloe’s agent informing him of this and demanded that he pay $300,000 for her safe return.
Phil rushed to inform the English and Italian police about the ordeal, who were against the clock to try to locate Chloe before the day of the auction. At first, there was cynicism about the kidnapping and whether it was real or not, as some suggested that Chloe had orchestrated it to boost her career — but the police soon discovered that the threat Chloe was facing was very much legitimate.
While the authorities were investigating the matter, Chloe ended up becoming her own savior, something she explains in the new BBC docu-series, Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping.
Chloe recalled a particular moment where ‘things changed’ with her captor, MD, who police later identified as Łukasz Herba.
She spoke of her calm demeanour during the terrifying ordeal, something she thinks may have worked in her favor.
“I always remained calm,” Chloe recounted in her new documentary. “With anything that happens, it’s like, so this has happened and what can I do about this? If the answer is nothing and it’s out of my control then I have to just accept it.”
She went on to say that she believed that panicking in the situation she was in would have only made things ‘worse’.
Chloe continued: “In that moment, I knew I needed to rely on myself, and that was when I got the first ever inkling that he liked me in any way.
“I had no clue before. I thought may he liked me as a person because I was not throwing a fit, but this was the first time I thought ‘wow, things have changed’.”
Łukasz Herba was convicted of kidnapping Chloe (Polizia di Stato)
Chloe shared that her captor tried to kiss her, and while she ‘wanted to please him and be nice to him’ so she stayed safe, she couldn’t quite bring herself to kiss him back.
“I just said, ‘I don’t really feel up for that right now. I’m not in the right mind set,'” Chloe recounted. She further implied at the time that something could happen between them if she were released.
Chloe continued to play on this until six days after her kidnapping, when she managed to convince her captor to let her go.
On July 17, Łukasz took Chloe to the Milan consulate. While one of the terms of her release was to end any police investigations into her disappearance, the British model told the authorities everything.
Then in June 2018, despite people’s suspicions that Chloe lied about the incident for publicity, Łukasz was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 16 years and nine months in prison.
The first episode of Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping debuts on BBC on August 4.
Featured Image Credit: chloeayling97/Instagram
