Last week, in a place called Gun Barrel, Texas, a 63-year old woman was abducted from her home near midnight by a violent convicted sex offender who allegedly beat her with the barrel of a gun, dragged her into the woods and presented her with a nightmarish trio of choices, she told ABC News.

He told her he could strangle her, shoot her or toss her down a concrete well in the woods, she said. Before she could choose, she felt herself tumbling headlong into a dank, underground well that opened like a cistern at its base 20 feet beneath the ground.

The woman spent 16 hours in putrid water at the bottom of the well before her frantic family pieced together the fragmented clues to her disappearance and tracked her to the watery, underground prison.