'God Saved This Little Girl'

In 1983, a 6-year-old California girl was grabbed by a stranger on her way home from school, but it wasn't, and isn't, an ordinary case. The people involved say the way this one turned out was literally a miracle.

Erin Moriarty of 48 Hours Investigates explained on The Early Show Monday that, more than 20 years after it happened, the victim has come forward to tell her story, in part because her case is still open. She's hoping her abductor can be caught.

And even after two decades, the men who saved her life say the rescue involved nothing less than divine intervention.

If innocence had a face, Moriarty says, it might look something like Jillian Marie Searles did in 1983, when she was a first-grader in the high desert community of Barstow, Calif.

Jillian lived in the carefree world of a happy girl, until one September day when, as she walked the few steps to her babysitter's house from school, a strange man grabbed her from behind.

"I started kicking and screaming, and so he had his hands around my neck," Jillian told Moriarty recently. "And I remember just trying to fight and get him off of me and get out of there. But you know, he was obviously much stronger than I was. And I couldn't breathe, and I remember thinking, you know, 'I can't breathe,' you know. So I just kind of played limp, so he would let go of my neck."

Before long, Jillian's mother got a terrible phone call.

What was she told?

"Just that she was gone. Just that she was gone," Verna Sommers tells Moriarty.

By that time, the man had driven Jillian, who was still clutching her Raggedy Ann doll, to a remote area called Newberry Springs.

He pulled her from the truck.

"And then," Jillian says, "he proceeded to molest me."

After that, "He took me, walked me over to like an abandoned mine shaft. And he had me straddle (a) railroad tie. And then he handcuffed my feet. And he said he was gonna come back for me and that I had better not make any noise, otherwise he was gonna hurt me or kill me."

Then, says Moriarty, he drove away, leaving Jillian, half-naked and shackled at the feet, all alone in the merciless California desert."She didn't have a chance if she wasn't found that night," Deputy Henry Valencia of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Dept. tells Moriarty.

In the high desert, Moriarty points out, temperatures plunge when the sun goes down, and the area comes alive with coyotes.

"As soon as they were able to determine that she wasn't able to defend herself, they would have made a meal of her," Valencia says.

What's more, Moriarty notes, San Bernardino is the biggest county in the United States. So, for police, finding Jillian would be like searching for a needle in a 21,000-square-mile haystack.

"We got a call from Barstow that there was a little girl that had been snatched off the street and was missing," says Lt Jim Singley of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Dept. He's now retired.

On that night, chopper pilot Singley and Valencia raced to the skies, searching the rugged terrain until well after dark, without any luck.

That evening, a man called police and spoke of a little girl on a hill. Singley and Valencia went out again, flying low over endless hills in ugly weather, until Singley felt sick.

"I said, 'I've got to set it down, I'm gonna throw up.' " And as I set it down, and I'm putting the skids down, we're starting to settle down on the ground, and I'm going to open the door and throw up, there's this little Raggedy Ann doll. And I said, 'There's the Raggedy Ann doll!' And the funny thing is, once you see something, the adrenalin starts going, and I'm not sick anymore. It's time to go.

"And we're moving around again, and Hank's flashing the light and I'm hovering. It's raining and blowing, and Hank hits something out to my left -- the light shines under the ship -- and I thought I saw something, and he puts the light back there, and there she is, sitting on that beam, waving at us."

"And," Valencia recalls, "he says, 'There she is!' And sure enough, there was this little white object…"

Valencia paused in telling the story, because he broke up.

Once he composed himself enough to speak, though still crying, he said, "…Sitting inside this mine shaft on a four-by-four that was extending out. ... I couldn't say anything other than, 'There she is.' So he lands the helicopter. I pop out and up the hill."

Tears were streaming down Valencia's face as he continued, "and I tell her, 'It's okay. We're the good guys.' "

"I just saw a really big guy in a coat," Jillian remembers. "He seemed really tall to me. And he had a smile on his face, and he told me that I was gonna be okay."

Tears rolling down her face, Jillian said, "Next thing I knew, I was at the hospital. And everybody was there. My parents were there. And the police were there."

"This little girl," Valencia maintains, "was just watched over. She was blessed. She was blessed. That's about all I can say."

Adds Singley, "When you look back at this, you think, 'Why did I get sick then and there? Why did I land at that spot?' And it's an emotional, religious sort of feeling.

"It really is a good story. It's a true story. In this world where we see some many pedophiles and so much bad stuff and so many little kids that are taken, you know, God does watch out. God does have a purpose, and God saved this little girl."

On Tuesday, Moriarty says, she'll report on the hunt for Jillian's abductor, and Jillian will reunite with her two rescuers.

To this day, Moriarty observes, they say finding Jillian was the biggest event of their lives.