The Predator Next Door: The Real Story of Robert Berchtold and Jan Broberg
- Cassy Morgan
- 5 hours ago
- 8 min read
It began like any ordinary suburban friendship in 1970s America. Two families lived side by side in small-town Idaho, bound by faith, church gatherings, and neighbourly warmth. But beneath the friendly smiles and Sunday socials lurked a darkness that would one day horrify the world. When Robert Berchtold, a charismatic family man and trusted friend, entered the lives of the Brobergs, no one could have imagined the nightmare that would follow. What unfolded was not just a story of abduction, but a chilling lesson in manipulation, betrayal, and control.
As Jan Broberg later said, “He was like a second father to me.”
Robert Berchtold was not a typical criminal. He was what some have called a master manipulator, the kind of man who could charm an entire family while secretly plotting against them. His crimes would inspire shock decades later when Netflix released Abducted in Plain Sight, but the events themselves, rooted in the sleepy streets of Pocatello, Idaho, remain some of the most disturbing in modern true crime history.
A Friendly Face in a Faithful Community
It all started in the early 1970s. The Brobergs were a Mormon family, active in their local congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Bob and Mary Ann Broberg had three daughters, Karen, Susan, and Jan. When they met Robert “B” Berchtold and his wife Gail at church, it felt like divine coincidence. Both families had children around the same age, and they quickly became inseparable.
“The kids played together, the parents enjoyed each other’s company,” Jan later recalled in Abducted in Plain Sight. “Everyone had a best friend.”
The Broberg children affectionately called him “B”. To the family, he was warm, funny, and generous. He would show up with gifts, take them on outings, and seemed genuinely interested in their lives. But behind the charm, Berchtold was already calculating. He wanted Jan. And to get to her, he would first win over her parents.
The Grooming of an Entire Family
Unlike most predators, Berchtold did not act in secret. He made himself part of the family. He spent hours with them, joined family dinners, and inserted himself into every aspect of their lives. “He was like a second father to me,” Jan said, looking back years later.
He began flirting with Mary Ann, complimenting her looks, confiding in her, and eventually inviting her on a church retreat to Logan, Utah. “We got a little too cosy,” Mary Ann later admitted, “and the first seeds of what would eventually grow into an affair were planted.”
At the same time, Berchtold turned his attention to Jan’s father, Bob. During one of their car rides, Berchtold spoke about his failing sex life and claimed that his wife no longer satisfied him. What happened next would later shock even the most jaded investigators. Bob said that Berchtold became sexually aroused and asked him to provide “relief”. Bob complied.
“I entered into a homosexual relationship with her father in order to have access to Jan,” Berchtold later admitted. “I had a fixation for Jan. I don’t know why, but I did.”
It was the perfect trap. Both parents now carried secrets that Berchtold could use to control them, and he did, mercilessly.
Therapy, Lies, and the Bedtime “Treatment”
When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints reprimanded Berchtold in 1974 for inappropriate behaviour with another young girl, he claimed he wanted to seek help. He told Bob and Mary Ann that his therapist recommended a very specific treatment, one that required him to sleep in the same bed as their daughter, Jan.
“Neither one of us were comfortable with him doing it,” Mary Ann recalled, “but it was part of his therapy.”
It is hard to imagine now, but in that time and culture, people often deferred to authority, to church leaders, to therapists, to so-called experts. The Brobergs wanted to believe that Berchtold was trying to overcome his problem. What they did not know was that the psychologist he mentioned had already lost his licence and that the tapes he was supposedly listening to were filled with bizarre, sexually charged messages.
For six months, Berchtold shared Jan’s bed up to four nights a week. It was a calculated and deliberate act of grooming, hidden behind the language of healing.
The First Abduction: A Manufactured Alien Mission
On October 17, 1974, Berchtold picked Jan up from her piano lessons, saying he would take her horseback riding. It sounded innocent enough. But along the way, he gave her what he said was allergy medication. She soon passed out.
When Jan woke up, she was in Berchtold’s motorhome, bound by her wrists and ankles, lying in a small bunk. A strange voice filled the room, a mechanical recording claiming to be from two aliens named Zeta and Zethra. They told her she was half-alien, chosen to complete a mission to save their species. The task was to have a child with Robert Berchtold before her sixteenth birthday. If she did not, her sister Susan would be chosen instead, and her family would die.
“It was a terrifying thought,” Jan later said. “It was the thing that kept me obedient.”
Berchtold raped Jan repeatedly during the journey to Mexico. Once there, he married her in Mazatlán, where the minimum legal marriage age was just 12. After five weeks, he called his brother Joe and asked him to contact Jan’s parents to seek their blessing for a legal U.S. wedding. Joe contacted the FBI instead, leading to Berchtold’s arrest and Jan’s rescue.
But the trauma was far from over.
Blackmail, Shame, and the Return Home
When Jan was examined by a doctor, the report said there were “no signs of sexual trauma.” For the Brobergs, this was a relief. They had no idea how careful Berchtold had been. Jan said later, “I would just look at the leaves… if you just look at the leaves, it’ll be okay.”
Meanwhile, Berchtold’s manipulation continued from afar. His wife Gail visited the Brobergs, pleading with them to drop the charges. She warned that if they did not, Berchtold would expose Bob’s sexual encounter. Under pressure and humiliation, they signed affidavits that effectively cleared him.
With no witnesses and no case, Berchtold avoided prison and moved to Utah.
The Second Abduction
In 1976, Jan vanished again. She had just turned 14. Berchtold, ever the manipulator, had convinced her to escape out of her bedroom window one night. He gave her more pills and drove her to Pasadena, California. There, using the alias “Janis Tobler,” he enrolled her in a Catholic girls’ school, telling the nuns that he was a CIA agent who needed to keep his daughter safe.
For 102 days, Jan was missing.
When the FBI finally located her, she was withdrawn and frightened, still under the influence of Berchtold’s “alien mission”. Even after her return, she remained terrified that her family would be killed if she disobeyed the instructions.
Her fear ran so deep that as her 16th birthday approached, she began to consider suicide. She later admitted that she had planned to kill her sister Susan and herself if she failed to become pregnant.
But when her birthday came and went, and nothing happened, Jan realised the truth. The aliens were not real. She had been living in a carefully constructed nightmare.
Life After the Nightmare
The years that followed were filled with therapy, silence, and guilt. The Brobergs, burdened by shame and community judgment, withdrew from public life. Jan, traumatised but resilient, eventually built a new life for herself. She became an actress, appearing in shows such as Everwood and Criminal Minds.
In 2003, Mary Ann Broberg published Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story, a book detailing the horrifying events that had shaped their family. It brought the story back into the public eye and out of Berchtold’s shadow.
“I wasn’t able to talk definitively or explicitly about the sexual abuse. It was really hard for me to do,” Jan told the BBC. But through writing, public speaking, and the Netflix documentary, she found her voice.
The Final Confrontation
The book’s release had an unexpected consequence. It lured Robert Berchtold out of hiding. In March 2004, he showed up at a women’s conference in St. George, Utah, where Jan and her mother were speaking. Members of Bikers Against Child Abuse were present, protecting Jan at the event. When one of the bikers confronted Berchtold, the situation turned violent. He allegedly ran over the biker with his minivan.
Berchtold was arrested on charges of assault, trespassing, and disorderly conduct. During the legal proceedings, six other women came forward with similar stories of his manipulation and abuse.
When Jan finally faced him in court, she looked him in the eye and said, “My goal, Mr. Berchtold, is to educate the public about predators like you. That is my goal.”
He was found guilty. But before sentencing, Berchtold told his brother Joe that prison would kill him. That night, he mixed his heart medication with Kahlúa and milk and took his own life.
“Bob had gone to court that day and been found guilty,” his brother later said. “He says, ‘If it’s one day in prison, it’s going to kill me. I’m not going there.’ He had taken all his heart medicine and drank Kahlúa and milk. He drank that and died.”
Legacy of a Survivor
It is easy, in retrospect, to ask how the Brobergs could have allowed this to happen. How could two intelligent, loving parents have let a predator so deeply into their lives? The answer lies not in stupidity but in trust, a trust that Berchtold exploited in a time when discussions of grooming and child sexual abuse were still taboo.
“He was like a second father to me,” Jan has said repeatedly. “They were duped in a terrible, terrible way.”
Her story now serves as a warning about the insidious nature of grooming and coercion. In her adult life, Jan has become an advocate for survivors, using her experience to raise awareness of how easily predators can hide in plain sight, not as strangers, but as neighbours, friends, or even family.
Today, Jan Broberg speaks openly about resilience and recovery. In interviews, she has said, “I want people to know that no matter how dark your story, you can get to the other side of it.”
Her courage in confronting her abuser publicly and surviving the unimaginable has helped countless others come forward with their own stories.
The Predator Next Door
The tragedy of Jan Broberg and Robert Berchtold reminds us that evil does not always arrive with a warning sign. It can live next door, attend your church, sit at your dinner table, and smile while planning your destruction.
In the end, Berchtold’s web of lies collapsed under its own weight, but the scars he left behind endure. As Jan’s story continues to inspire awareness and understanding, the case remains a haunting study in manipulation and misplaced trust.
As Jan once reflected, “You never think it can happen to you, until it does.”
Sources
Abducted in Plain Sight (Netflix Documentary, 2017)
BBC News interview with Jan Broberg, 2019 – “Jan Broberg on surviving the unimaginable”
Oxygen True Crime, “What Happened to Robert Berchtold After Abducted in Plain Sight?” (2020)
ABC News, “Man who abducted Jan Broberg appears at her women’s conference” (2004)
Mary Ann Broberg, Stolen Innocence: The Jan Broberg Story (2003)
