Missing Wordle update sees kidnapped woman rescued
The wildly popular web-based word game Wordle has helped rescue an 80-year-old woman from an alleged kidnapping.
Chicago woman Denyse Holt was asleep in her home on Saturday when a naked, mentally ill man allegedly broke into her home and held her hostage for 17 hours, as reported by the New York Post.
The key to her rescue came after she didn’t text her daughter with her daily Wordle answers, prompting her daughter to call the police, WBBM-TV reported.
The intruder - identified as 32-year-old James H Davis III - was bloodied from a broken window and reportedly slipped into Ms Holt’s bed while holding a pair of scissors.
“I was in shock,” Ms Holt said, recalling that she tried to stay calm during the ordeal.
“I was trying to survive, that’s all. He said, ‘I won’t harm you or molest you’.”
After ordering her to take a shower with him in her nightgown, she recalled that he changed his mind.
“He said, ‘No, I’m not warm enough. We have to take a bath’,” she said.
Following the bath, she said Mr Davis dragged her around the house, disconnected the phones, took several knives from the kitchen, and took her into a bathroom in the basement, which he blocked with a chair.
“I didn’t think I was going to live. I was doing marching and stretching as much as I could,” she recounted.
Eventually, Ms Holt’s daughter Meredith Holt-Caldwell noticed that her mother hadn’t sent her a message about the word-logic puzzle as she usually would.
“I didn’t send my older daughter a Wordle in the morning - and that was disconcerting to her,” Ms Holt said.
Denyse Holt’s daughter Meredith realised something was amiss when her mother didn’t send her an update about the word-logic game Wordle. Image: CBS Chicago
After the family called police, officers arrived at Ms Holt’s home at about 9.40pm on Sunday.
Members of a SWAT team were able to overpower the man using a stun gun following an hours-long standoff.
The man was eventually overpowered by SWAT and police with a stun gun. Image: CBS Chicago
“I never thought in a million years this is what was happening, but it was,” Ms Holt-Caldwell told WBBM.
Mr Davis was later hit with several charges, including home invasion with a dangerous weapon, aggravated kidnapping while armed with a dangerous weapon and aggravated assault against a peace officer.
“I’m very lucky,” said Ms Holt, who was physically unharmed from the ordeal.
Wordle, the online word-logic game developed by software engineer Josh Wardle, has become a viral trend among English-language puzzlers.
Players are required to guess a five-word letter, which changes each day, in just six attempts, using letters on the board as clues.
Images: CBS Chicago, Getty Images