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Monday June 13, 2005

Katie Holmes Hostage Crisis Enters Fifth Week

LOS ANGELES, CA- Ever since the sudden disappearance of actress Katie Holmes in mid-May, America has anxiously held its breath hoping against hope that she would soon reappear alive and well with a dull explanation of her whereabouts. However, the public became fully aware of the dark nature of her predicament a few weeks later when her frightened face appeared on a videotape along side a shrieking, jumping maniac who claimed that he loved her with "intensity."

Thanks to the tips that poured in following the broadcast of the video, authorities have identified her kidnapper as Thomas Mapother Cruise. Unfortunately, in the weeks since this breakthrough in the case, little progress has been made. A thorough search of the Hollywood hills turned up little more than a few piles of litter and a sleeping Andy Dick.

With no further leads, police spoke with another mysterious figure on the video, a middle-aged Chicago woman who identified herself as Oprah Winfrey. Police believe she may have been brought in to witness the event and spread the message to the media.

"I was so scared, but I was too breathless to scream," recalled Winfrey. "It was like watching a news story about a child falling into the gorilla exhibit at the zoo. I thought he was going to eat her face off."

Desperate to see their daughter alive again, Holmes' parents did the round-robin of 24-hour news channels over the weekend, appealing to Cruise to let Katie go. "She's just a sweet girl who never hurt anyone," said her tearful mother from her Toledo, Ohio, home via satellite linkup. "You could have picked any victim, why did you have to choose my little girl?"

Other than her safety, the Holmes' other driving concern is that Cruise might defile their daughter, but FBI agents say off the record that won't be an issue. According to their profilers, the kidnapper is very likely not interested in sex at all- with females, anyway. Last week the bureau's super-computer calculated a 65% likelihood that he is just planning to murder her and make a suit from her skin, so there's nothing to worry about.

Even more galling is that Cruise has done this before. At a recent press conference, investigators produced photos of the suspect menacing a young Australian woman a few years earlier, leaping around and screaming in her face about how much he loves her. The woman in question escaped four years ago and refused to be interviewed for fear that it would give up the location of her Los Angeles area safehouse.

Most disturbing of all, it now seems that Cruise intends to make poor Katie his bride in some bizarre Scientology ritual. Considering that Stockholm syndrome has very probably kicked in by now, odds are good that Holmes will accept the depraved proposal and join the Cruise's culty cultish cult, surrendering to a life of cultivating MEST and reading bad science fiction.

The President of the Church of Scientology International, Rev. Heber Jentzsch, was quick to rebuke the media for implying that Cruise is acting within the tenets of the church. "The rash behavior of this Cruise person does not reflect the values and virtues of the Church of Scientology. We are a faith just like any other. I mean, paying thousands of dollars to be hooked up to a lie detector and convinced your an immortal alien isn't any dumber than worshiping trees or necro-cannibalism. Eh, OK. We're a nutty cult."

The next big opportunity to bring closure to the case came during the MTV Movie Awards on Thursday when, to everyone's surprise, the Dawson's Creek star arrived unannounced on the arm of her captor. LA SWAT teams were immediately scrambled to the location. Snipers stationed on nearby rooftops had explicit orders to take down the tuxedoed kidnapper but were unable to find a clean head shot on a red carpet choked with out of work actors jockeying for camera time.

In the news coverage of the event, Holmes did her best to smile and play along with her abductor's twisted demands, but something in her eyes gave it away. What had at first appeared to be dry eyes under the hot California sun may have been some attempt to communicate. Investigators put their best algorithms to use and soon discovered that the repeated pattern of blinks, long and short, matched that of Morse code and translated to the letters H, E, L, P, M and E.

So far, authorities have been unable to decipher what the word means. The best database match so far has been a ancient Greek myth about a moldy bowl of grapes, but no word yet as to what it has to do with her plight.

--Mark Arenz

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