NAKED and blindfolded, with her hands tied behind her back, Lisa McVey vowed to make it out alive as her kidnapper raped her over and over again.
The 17-year-old was tortured for 26 hours by serial killer Bobby Joe Long – who murdered ten women in eight months – but she calmly talked him into letting her live and gathered clues which would lead to his arrest.
Just hours earlier, she had been planning to take her own life – but incredibly, the horrific ordeal gave her a new determination to survive.
The kidnap and rape of the Florida teenager, whose clear-thinking led to Long’s arrest in 1984, is the centre of the new film Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey – on Netflix from Tuesday.
Long, who is thought to have raped over 50 women before he began killing his victims, was executed in 2019.
“When he released me and drove off, I took off my blindfold and saw this amazing oak tree," she says.
"I had wanted to die before and now I wanted to live, I got a second chance at life.”
Naked victims left in bizarre poses
Bobby Joe Long’s crime spree began after a bitter divorce, in 1980, from the mother of his two children.
Known as the ‘Classified Ad Rapist’, he trawled the small ads in newspapers looking for women who were selling domestic appliances.
If he found a woman alone at home, he asked to use her bathroom before sexually assaulting and robbing her.
Long carried out around 50 rapes in Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Dade County before moving to Florida.
But after a brief spell in prison, for assault, the serial rapist progressed to murder.
His first victim, 20-year-old Artiss Ann Wick, was raped and strangled on March 27 1984 and dumped in a field, naked and tied.
Over the following eight months, life became a relentless search for the next victim, as Long drove around in his Dodge Magnum car, persuading women to get in or forcing them at gunpoint.
He would then drive them to a deserted location, where he raped and killed them before leaving their bodies – bound and posed in bizarre positions – to decompose.
Some were strangled, some their throats slit and one was shot.
Just one, Lisa McVey, would live to tell the tale.
Bundled into car and raped multiple times
The daughter of a drug addict mum, who ended up homeless, Lisa went to live with her grandmother in Tampa, Florida, at 14.
But she suffered sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of her grandmother’s boyfriend and, on November 3, 1984, she decided she was going to take her own life and even wrote a suicide note.
A chance encounter with evil was to change that.
As Lisa cycled home from her job at a doughnut shop in the early hours of the morning, she was knocked off her bike by Long and a gun was held to her head as he bundled her into his car.
He then blindfolded her, bound her hands and forced her to perform oral sex before driving her to his apartment, 30 minutes away.
"He held me for 26 hours at gunpoint,” she later told Fox13. “He raped me over and over again. I lost count.
“I was deathly afraid that he was going to kill me. Here I was thinking about killing myself, and now I was going to be fighting for my life.”
Previous abuse helped victim keep calm
But Lisa, who believes her previous experience of sexual assault helped her cope through her ordeal, kept calm and came up with a plan to save herself.
She talked to him and asked him why he was doing this to her and he told her it was to “get back at all women” after his divorce.
Lisa told him: “Listen, it's unfortunate how we met, but I can be your girlfriend. I could take care of you, and no one ever has to know."
"I talked to him gently, like a four-year-old,” she says. “And it worked."
The ordeal was made even more terrifying by her captor’s wild mood swings, veering from ‘gentle’ to violent in a split second.
“His demeanour was very aggressive. I did what he told me to do. I was afraid if I didn’t he would kill me,” she says.
“Then he got in the shower and it was like night and day. It was like a fantasy for him. He started bathing me, started washing my hair, trying to touch me gently.
“He would hold me for a second, and then all of a sudden become this aggressive monster again. One minute he was calm as a four-year-old child, next thing he was a raging bull.”
One minute he was calm as a four-year-old child, next thing he was a raging bull.
All the time the level-headed teenager was collecting clues, despite being blindfolded throughout.
She worked out the time it took to drive to his home, counted the steps to his apartment.
"At one time he placed my hands on his face,” she recalls. “There were pockmarks, a small moustache, small ears, short hair, clean-cut, kind of stout, but not overweight; a big guy."
When he let her go to the bathroom alone, she touched every surface she could, leaving fingerprints for the police to find later.
Eventually, Lisa appealed to his sympathetic side, telling him she was the sole carer to a seriously ill dad who would have no one if she died.
Incredibly, he agreed to let her go – driving her to a remote spot near to where she had been abducted and telling her to wait five minutes before taking her blindfold off.
On the way there, from under her blindfold, she managed to see the word Magnum on the car dashboard – a feature unique to 1978 models.
Long also stopped to use a cashpoint and she was able to note the names of a nearby hotel and shop as well as working out the time of day from a TV theme tune she heard playing somewhere nearby.
As soon as he drove away, Lisa went to the police and told them everything.
As cashpoints were relatively rare in 1984, they were able to locate the bank where the transaction took place and pinpoint Long.
Lisa’s description of the car helped narrow the search and on November 16, Long was arrested.
Tragically, the bodies of two more victims – Virginia Johnson, 18 and 21-year-old Kim Swann – were found after his arrest.
Long, then 31, confessed to ten murders and the kidnap and assault of Lisa McVey, and received a string of 99-year prison terms and two death penalty sentences.
Lisa, who went on to get married and become a Florida police officer, was in the front row when Long was executed in 2019.
Her decision to join the police force was inspired by her horrific experiences and she told Fox she wanted to be “a protector. Nobody is going to get hurt on my watch.”
Now 54, Lisa says she has suffered from PTSD and depression, adding “in my dreams, I'm always being hurt” and she says her goal is, “Just to be able to let that pain go and be healed."
But she says her work with the police, and with children she works with at a Florida school, have helped her.
"I'm a survivor and a warrior,” she says. “There's no victim here."
Believe Me: The Abduction of Lisa McVey is available on Netflix from Tuesday
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