Hannah Anderson case: Officials 'may never know' DiMaggio's motive

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Phillip Garrido enters a courtroom in Placerville, Calif. Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years in prison for Jaycee Dugard’s abduction. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

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A tent in the backyard of a home in Antioch, Calif., where authorities say kidnap victim Jaycee Lee Dugard lived. (Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)

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Elizabeth Smart addresses the media outside a federal courthouse following the guilty verdict in the Brian David Mitchell trail in Salt Lake City. Mitchell was found guilty in the June 5, 2002, kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart. (Colin E. Braley / Associated Press)

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Elizabeth Smart poses with her parents, Lois and Ed, outside their home in 2003. Smart was abducted from her Salt Lake City bedroom in 2002 (Tom Smart / Associated Press)

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Brian David Mitchell, Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapper, is escorted into the Frank E. Moss Federal Courthouse in Salt Lake City in 2010. (Jim Urquhart / Associated Press)

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Katie Beers, whose kidnapping attracted nationwide headlines in 1992, poses for a photo in Old Westbury, N.Y. The 30-year-old mother of two co-wrote a new book about her ordeal. (Frank Eltman / Associated Press)

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John Esposito sits handcuffed in a van in Hauppauge, N.Y., as he is about to be taken to court for arraignment on charges of kidnapping Katie Beers. (Michael Albans / Associated Press)

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Shawn Hornbeck, 15, watches as his parents Craig and Pam Akers talk to the media in Richwoods, Mo. Shawn, who was missing since Oct. 2002, was recovered in 2007 with another missing boy. (Tom Gannam / Associated Press)

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Michael Devlin is escorted out of the Franklin County Courthouse in Union, Mo. Devlin pleaded guilty in Franklin County to one charge of child kidnapping and one count of armed criminal action in the 2007 abduction of 13-year-old William “Ben” Ownby. (Tom Gannam / Associated Press)

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Steven Stayner, right, and and his brother Delbert Stayner walk toward their Merced County home as Steven was reunited with his family following a 7-year kidnap ordeal. (Ted Benson / Associated Press)

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Convicted kidnapper Kenneth Eugene Parnell during a court appearance in Oakland in 2003. Parnell was convicted in the kidnappings of Steven Stayner in 1972 and Timothy White in 1980. (Nick Lammers / Associated Press)

By Tony Perry, Kate Mather and Jason Wells

Aug. 12, 2013 1:20 PM PT

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore on Monday answered some key questions about 16-year-old Hannah Anderson and her relationship to kidnapping suspect James Lee DiMaggio, saying for the first time that she was held “under duress.”

Gore said that the teen’s six-day trek across several states and into the rugged Idaho wilderness was forced -- and that DiMaggio had left her in the dark about the slayings of her mother and brother.

But many details remain unclear, including the circumstances under which she was traveling with DiMaggio before he was shot and killed by an FBI agent on Saturday.

Authorities have also yet to say what may have motivated DiMaggio to allegedly kill Christina Anderson, 44, and 8-year-old Ethan Anderson before abducting Hannah.

In an interview with Fox 5 in San Diego, Gore said the challenge would be trying to come up with a “rational explanation for a completely irrational act. And sometimes you’ll just never know. Clearly he had severe mental problems.”

DiMaggio’s death ended a tense, multi-state manhunt that began Aug. 4, when firefighters found the bodies of Hannah’s mother and younger brother at DiMaggio’s burning home, east of San Diego.

The girl’s disappearance prompted missing-child Amber Alert text messages to the public in several Western states.

Since she was safely recovered from a remote spot near Morehead Lake about 75 miles north of Boise on Saturday, Hannah has been under observation at an undisclosed hospital, where she was said to be reunited with her father.

Her father, Brett Anderson, is scheduled to appear at a news conference in San Diego at 2:30 p.m. Monday, along with the sheriff and FBI officials.

Gore said it was clear Hannah was “under extreme duress.”

“She was taken out of the county, out of the state, clearly against her will,” Gore said.

At least one of Hannah’s friends has said that DiMaggio had told the teen he had a crush on her, prompting early theories about the intent behind the presumed kidnapping. Those suspicions deepened amid revelations that Hannah reportedly told her friend that she was disturbed by DiMaggio’s disclosure and did not want to be alone with him.

But adding to the mystery were a series of odd encounters between the pair and a group of horseback riders in the Idaho backcountry in the days before Hannah was rescued.

One of the riders, Mike Young, told reporters Sunday that Hannah “kind of had a scared look on her face” when he and his wife first saw the pair hiking on a trail Wednesday morning.

On the morning talk-show circuit Monday, the Youngs and another couple who encountered the missing pair, Mark and Christa John, reiterated how the exchanges didn’t feel right.

“I saw a lot of fear in her eyes, and I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes,” Mike Young said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

At the time, he said, he attributed it to her being taken off-guard by the horses.

Several hours later, around 5 p.m., the Youngs and Johns again encountered DiMaggio and Hannah, at Morehead Lake, below where they had set up their tent high on a ridge. DiMaggio was off to the side, petting a gray cat, they said.

The group attempted to engage Hannah in conversation as she soaked her feet in the lake, but she kept quiet, they said.

“They had a bad look on their face,” Mark John, a retired sheriff, said on “Good Morning America.”

He added that Hannah appeared “pretty wore out.”

“Neither one of them wanted to talk,” he said.

But at a news conference on Sunday, John recalled that when he and his companions started to ride away, he heard Hannah say, “Looks like we’re all in trouble now.”

The statement, John said, was loud enough to hear, “but it was mostly to herself.”

Though it was odd, Christa John said, some of it seemed to make sense. She said she asked DiMaggio what the two were doing in the area, and he said he picked the trip because the girl had chosen to go to Los Angeles and Hollywood the year before.

“They could be a father and daughter and he drug her along on a hiking trip,” she said. “There was no immediate, ‘Oh boy, we’ve got to rescue her.’ It was nothing like that. It was unusual, it was strange, but it was explainable.”

The group said they couldn’t tell if Hannah was being kept against her will. “The only thing I know,” Mark John said, “is if she sent us a signal expressing that she was in trouble, we certainly didn’t key in on that.”

The Johns pieced things together the next day, when they returned home and saw a news alert about the missing girl on television.

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