#KIDNAPPED MAN TUMBER SERIES#

A collaboration between the FBI, DEA, RCMP, Sûreté du Québec and New York State police was launched.”Īn SQ SWAT team rescued the couple two days after their ordeal began. “This is when a major investigation began. Helm either for the money, the drugs or their grandson or his mother. “You will see through the evidence that these callers wanted to exchange Mr. “(They were) worrying calls,” Chaiken said, adding that the men demanded to have either drugs or money from the Helms’s grandson, who had been part of a failed drug transaction.

#KIDNAPPED MAN TUMBER SERIES#

Soon after, two of the kidnappers began making a series of calls to Michael Helm. When he went to their house it was “evident that something bad had happened,” the prosecutor said. Meanwhile, back in New York, Chaiken said, the couple’s son, Michael, realized his parents were missing. The couple were eventually taken to a house in Magog where Kosmas Dritsas’s father, George, 77, was waiting.

Chaiken told the jury the catheter will be an important detail in Arnold’s trial. The prosecutor said Arnold took a while to show up because he was assigned to go to a hospital to get a catheter for Sandra Helm. She said the Helms were smuggled in a boat across the Akwasasne border and taken to Valleyfield where two men - Franco D’Onofrio, 57, and Kosmas Dritsas, 51 - were waiting in a car.Ĭhaiken said the couple were then driven along a back road to a location where D’Onofrio and Dritsas waited for Gary Arnold. In her opening statement to the jury, prosecutor Kim Chaiken said two strangers entered the couple’s home on a Sunday night and ordered them out. He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. Arnold is charged with kidnapping, forcible confinement, extortion and conspiring with other men to carry out the kidnapping.

Kidnapped man tumber