Girls: Captor Said He'd Kill Us

The man who abducted two girls from a teen hangout told them he would kill them and started a countdown, the teens said in an interview broadcast Monday.

Days after they were freed from their attacker when police killed the man, 16-year-old Tamara Brooks and 17-year-old Jacqueline Marris recounted their ordeal while holding hands in a televised interview.

In her first interview, Brooks said that when the ordeal began early Thursday, she felt that "It's all a bad dream ... I was terrified. I started praying."

The girls were abducted by Roy Dean Ratliff, 37, from a remote area where they were parked with their dates. Kern County Sheriff Carl Sparks said they were raped.

The girls said they supported each other during the ordeal.

"I was touching her, letting her know I was there," said Marris, who also gave a television interview on Friday.

"I wasn't going to leave her alone at all. ... I wouldn't want to live like that," Brooks said.

The pair said they communicated without words, writing in each other's hands.

At one point, Marris said, Ratliff told them: "`I'm going to kill the both of you.' We were hysterical."

Marris said Ratliff started to count down "one ... two ... then he collapsed."

She said he was bleeding and drinking a lot. Marris had said earlier that they tried to kill the man by stabbing him.

Twelve hours after they were kidnapped, sheriff's deputies closed in on Ratliff's stolen car in a remote location and shot him to death.

"When you see a life taken in front of your eyes ... it's the worst feeling in the world," Brooks said

After it was over, the girls ran out of Ratliff's car and hugged.

"After all that, it's done," Brooks said. "Oh my God, we made it, we made it."

Ratliff was a fugitive ex-con with nothing to lose and would have killed and buried his victims if the deputies who fatally shot him hadn't arrived in time, Kern County Sheriff Carl Sparks told a Bakersfield news conference Friday.

"Those two girls are safe and I honestly believe they were probably 10 minutes away from being killed and buried out there somewhere in that ravine," Sparks said.

The investigation continued, but Sparks was certain of the kidnapper's intentions.

"He had already hurt the girls — wasn't anything else to do there," the sheriff said. "He went to a remote area that he should have known he was going to be trapped in. ... I think .... he recognized the helicopters and he said, 'I got to get rid of these girls.'

"He was a two-striker. He was going to prison for the rest of his life. He had nothing to lose. He needed to get rid of those girls."

The two girls were rescued and their kidnapper cornered and killed by deputies because the stolen truck he was driving was spotted off a rural road by Animal Control officer Bonnie Hernandez, CBS News correspondent Jerry Bowen reports.

She was the last link in California's barely week-old Amber Alert System, a network of law enforcement agencies, media outlets and 500 digital highway message boards up and down the state designed to quickly notify the public of child abductions.

Amber stands for America's Missing Broadcast Emergency Response, a program started in Texas after the 1996 kidnapping and murder of a nine year old girl Amber Hagerman.

Said L.A. County Sheriff's Chief Michael Solderbergh: "It worked just the way it is supposed to work and we are overjoyed. I think we can say all the planets were in alignment."