Parents' Plea for Return of Kidnapped Girl

April 11 -- When 17-year-old Anne Sluti left home for the local mall on Friday, the last thing she told her parents was, "If I get any phone calls, tell my friends I'll be home shortly."

Five days later, her parents are still waiting and hoping to see her again.

Police believe the honor student was kidnapped outside the mall in Kearney, Neb., by a man wanted in several states on theft, assault and gun possession charges, and they think the two could now be as far away as Montana.

"I'm more interested in getting her back than anything else in this world," Kearney police chief Don Lynch said today on ABCNEWS's Good Morning America.

Sluti, a 5-foot-3 pole vaulter on her high school track team, has called her parents and a friend since her disappearance, and once she managed to call 911 in Montana, but before she could give her location she was cut off. Police traced the call to a cabin inLivingston, Mont., but when they arrived it was deserted.

She told her parents she was all right, but her mother said she could feel that someone was close by and that the girl was very troubled.

"She said that she was OK, that she wasn't hurt," Elaine Sluti said on Good Morning America. "It was very apparent that someone was with her, making sure that she didn't say where she was. And she actually sounded very strong. There did not seem to be an apparent great deal of fear, but there was obvious stress in her voice."

A Jackrabbit

Authorities say the lead suspect in the kidnapping is Anthony Zappa, a 29-year-old already wanted in five states — Louisiana, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

He has developed a reputation for slipping through the fingers of police in a frustrating two-month manhunt.

"I've been calling him a jackrabbit," Floyd County, Iowa, Sheriff Rick Lynch told The Associated Press.

The FBI and local police forces have been tracing the fugitive Zappa by a trail of stolen cars across the northern Great Plains, from Wisconsin to Montana, but the apparent abduction of the girl has them puzzled.