Run To The Darkness — Euroventure ’96 And The Youth Mission That Became Part Of A Rescue

In the summer of 1996, a Christian youth missions camp in Grindelwald, Switzerland became the unlikely setting where a 15-year-old trafficking survivor was reunited with her family, questioned by investigators, introduced to a new life in the Alps — and confronted with a missions message that described almost exactly what had just happened to her.

UNITED STATES—In the summer of 1996, Victoria Cameron arrived in Grindelwald, Switzerland under circumstances unlike those of almost anyone else attending Euroventure.

To the young Christians gathering in the Swiss Alps, Euroventure was a missions camp — a place for worship, Bible teaching, outdoor activities, international fellowship, and preparation for lives of Christian service.

For Victoria, it became something far more personal.

She had just been rescued from the trafficking environment she had been living in within Liberty, Missouri.

People she had known before her disappearance had found her.

Her family was trying to absorb the shock that she was alive.

Government agents were asking her questions about what had happened.

And in between those interviews, Victoria could return to a Christian youth camp filled with worship music, hiking, restaurants, whitewater rafting, Bible teaching, young people, and the beauty of the Alps.

The rescue and the camp existed side by side.

How The Switzerland Trip Became The Way Out

In 1996, while Victoria was still living in the Thénardiers’ environment in Liberty, Missouri, she was attending their church and had become friends with a girl from the youth group.

The girl had a car, and the two began visiting other Christian churches in the Kansas City area because they were interested in learning more about the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Victoria began attending Mike Bickle’s Metro Christian Fellowship and Pastor Phillip O’Reilly’s River of Life Church.

At River of Life Church, Victoria received the gift of praying in tongues.

During this period, she received prophetic words from Mike Bickle and Pastor Phillip O’Reilly that told her God would use a missions trip to Switzerland to help get her home.

Two days later, she found a Christian newsletter advertising Euroventure, a youth missions trip to Grindelwald, Switzerland.

Victoria immediately connected the trip with what she had just been told.

She asked the Thénardiers if she could go.

They refused.

Later, after praying with her friend and trying to find a way to contact people who could help her get home, Victoria was connected with FBI agents who had previously worked with Joseph Cameron—a man from her church in London who had been personally involved in her previous rescue from child trafficking in 1989.

The Euroventure trip then became part of the plan to get her safely out.

Arrangements were made for Victoria to go on the trip, anonymous donors covered the cost, and the Thénardiers were allowed to believe she was simply going on an ordinary Christian missions trip and would return afterward.

The “B Trip”

A group from Pleasant Valley Baptist Church in Liberty, Missouri was already scheduled to attend Euroventure.

As part of the arrangement created after Victoria made contact with the FBI, the Thénardiers were told that so many people had wanted to go that a second trip had been opened.

The Pleasant Valley group was described as the “A trip.”

Victoria was told she would travel with the “B trip” — another group going to the same Euroventure camp, but with separate preparation meetings and a different travel schedule.

The purpose was to make Victoria’s departure look like an ordinary church missions trip.

The Thénardiers took her to meetings for the “B trip” and saw a room full of people who appeared to be preparing to travel with her. Colin and Robbie led the meetings, which included Bible study, spiritual preparation, packing, international travel, and other practical details of the trip.

To the Thénardiers, Victoria appeared to be leaving with a real second missions group whose trip had been arranged through the church and paid for by anonymous donors.

Victoria later learned that the people surrounding that arrangement were connected with Joseph Cameron’s network and were helping watch over her, confirm her identity, and make sure she reached the plane safely.

Victoria does not know the exact positions or roles held by everyone involved.

What she understood later was that the people around the “B trip” were in on the effort to keep her safe.

In simple terms, Colin explained to her that they were conducting surveillance.

Why Colin And Robbie Were There

Colin was not a stranger to Victoria.

He was someone she had grown up with and the young man she had been engaged to marry before she was taken back into the trafficking environment in Missouri.

After Victoria’s contact with the FBI led back to Joseph Cameron, Joseph needed to know whether the girl asking for help was really Victoria.

According to what Victoria later learned, Joseph sent Colin and Robbie into the preparation meetings so they could see her for themselves, confirm her identity, and remain close enough to watch what was happening without alerting the Thénardiers.

For Victoria, the recognition was immediate.

She knew Colin.

Colin knew her.

She wanted to leave with him right away.

But he warned her not to react as though they knew one another.

“Act like you don’t know me,” Victoria remembers him saying.

The rescue could not simply become an open confrontation at that point. Victoria was still living in the Thénardiers’ house, and Colin believed that if they realized who he really was — or understood that the people searching for her had found her — they might move her, prevent her from leaving, or make the situation far more dangerous.

That is why Colin and Robbie remained inside the appearance of the “B trip.”

Colin regularly wore a baseball cap. But Victoria remembers that whenever Mr. Thénardier came into the preparation meetings, Colin pulled the brim particularly low over his eyes.

“I hope he doesn’t know who I am,” Victoria remembers Colin saying.

Colin later explained that he did not know how closely the people involved in trafficking Victoria might have been watching her family, or whether they might also have been watching him. He could not be certain that Mr. Thénardier would not recognize his face.

Colin and Robbie told Victoria that merely being there was dangerous.

“They told me what they were doing was very dangerous, that their lives were at risk just being in the same room with me,” Victoria remembers. “At the time, that sounded almost silly to me. I thought, why? I just came to church. I’m going to this meeting for the mission trip, and then I’m going to go on it. Why are you in danger?”

To Victoria, everything around her still looked remarkably ordinary.

She was sitting in a church.

She was attending Bible studies.

They talked about missions, packing, international travel, and getting ready to go to Switzerland.

She did not yet fully understand what Colin and Robbie believed was happening underneath it all.

Once Colin had identified her, he later told Victoria, the danger was that the people controlling her could discover what was happening before she reached the plane. He feared that she could be moved somewhere else, trafficked again, or otherwise disappear before the rescue could be completed.

Victoria remembers that after Colin recognized her, he turned to Robbie and said:

“We are going to see a miracle happen.”

The Emergency Number

At the final Bible study Victoria attended before the trip, Colin gave everyone present an emergency telephone number.

He warned that something could happen before departure.

“Satan does not want you to go on this trip,” Victoria remembers him saying. “There will be spiritual warfare. If anything prevents you from getting on this plane, or you even think something’s going to happen, call this number and we will have people standing by to come pick you up.”

The number was given to everyone in the room.

Victoria did not understand at the time how important it would become to her personally.

The night before she was supposed to leave, Madame Thénardier was out of town at her mother’s house in St. Louis.

Mr. Thénardier and his brother, who were supposed to take Victoria to the airport the following morning, were still at the house.

A teenage friend was staying with Victoria that night.

Late in the evening, an alarming incident suddenly changed everything.

Victoria remembers hearing her friend screaming. Mr. Thénardier and his brother left the house with her.

At the time, Victoria thought there might have been some kind of medical emergency.

Whatever had happened, Mr. Thénardier and his brother were gone.

There was nobody left in the house but Victoria.

She began to worry that she would miss the plane.

Then she remembered the emergency number.

She called.

Colin answered immediately.

Colin later told Victoria that he and Robbie had hotel rooms nearby, but Colin was too nervous to stay there. He wanted to be physically close enough to watch the house himself and make sure nothing happened before she left.

His plan had been to remain parked on the street, watch Victoria leave with Mr. Thénardier, and then follow their car to make sure it actually went to the airport and that Victoria reached the flight safely.

Instead, the events inside the house changed everything.

Because Colin was already parked nearby, he was at the front door within minutes.

Victoria simply walked out of the house with him.

There was no confrontation.

No one was there to stop her.

Victoria remembers Colin telling her not to take the bags that had been packed for her.

They would get what she needed separately.

Then they left.

The carefully planned surveillance operation suddenly became something much simpler.

Victoria called for help.

Colin came to the door.

And she walked away with him.

Arriving In Switzerland

Victoria and Colin arrived in Switzerland before the Pleasant Valley group.

Victoria does not know whether she was ever formally registered as an ordinary Euroventure participant.

What she remembers is that once they were there, Colin picked up a name tag belonging to someone who had not arrived and wore it as they moved through the camp.

He also had a name tag made for Victoria.

That allowed them to move openly through Euroventure, attend some of its activities and worship gatherings, and appear to be part of the camp while everything else surrounding Victoria’s rescue continued.

Joseph Cameron was came to the camp in Switzerland.

For Victoria and the people she considered family, the reunion was almost difficult to comprehend.

They had believed they might never see her again.

Now she was standing with them in the Swiss Alps.

“I think everybody was in shock, not just me. My family was in shock that I was alive. They thought they were never going to see me again, and then I was found, I was rescued, I was back with my family, and we were planning a wedding. That was quite the turn of events.”

A Camp And An Investigation At The Same Time

Victoria did not stay in the same accommodations as the larger Euroventure group.

Because of the circumstances surrounding her arrival, she and the people with her were placed in separate lodging down the street for privacy and safety.

Her days moved between two very different worlds.

In one, she sat in private meetings with government agents who asked her questions about what had happened to her.

Then she could take a break and return to the camp.

She attended worship gatherings.

She walked through Grindelwald.

She went to restaurants.

She hiked in the Alps.

She went whitewater rafting.

Euroventure also offered sports activities, small camp competitions, group Bible studies, and other youth activities, but Victoria did not participate in everything.

Some activities simply did not interest her.

Others she missed because she was meeting with investigators.

Her experience of Euroventure was pieced together around everything else unfolding in Switzerland.

She could leave an interview about what had happened to her and walk back into worship.

She could spend part of the day answering questions and then spend the next part walking through the mountains.

Flowers, Rocks And A Journal

Some of Victoria’s strongest memories of Switzerland are remarkably quiet.

She journaled.

She picked wildflowers and pressed them into the pages.

She collected rock and mineral specimens from the Alps.

Science and geology fascinated her, and the mountains gave her a landscape filled with different stones, minerals, and formations to examine.

She also became fascinated with Swiss embroidery and the local craftsmanship she saw while walking through Grindelwald.

What interested her was not primarily the tourist experience.

She was drawn to the natural beauty and culture of the place itself — flowers, rocks, mountains, handmade art, walking through town, and the feeling of being surrounded by a world completely different from the one she had left.

Much of that time was spent with Colin.

“He had just rescued me from that house. He was quite the hero, and I was really excited about getting married and spending the rest of my life with him.”

Becoming Herself Again

For Victoria, those days also represented the possibility of becoming herself again.

The people who trafficked her had repeatedly altered her appearance and disrupted her identity.

She remembers the family members around her believing that marriage would help reinforce the sense that she belonged with her family after having been stripped of so much of her identity.

“They thought I needed to feel safe with my family, and getting married was like reemphasizing that you belong to that family after you were taken away, stripped of your identity, your name, all of that.”

Victoria remembers having to separate psychologically from the environment she had left.

“Each time I was trafficked, they cut my hair. They didn’t want me to have long hair. They wanted me to be fat. They tried to fatten me up. I didn’t feel like myself. I had to go through a kind of detoxification process where you separate from that environment and you go back to being yourself.”

In Switzerland, journaling, walking, collecting wildflowers, studying rocks, noticing embroidery, worshipping, and exploring the Alps became part of that return.

Worship With The Alps Beside Them

Victoria remembers hearing Darlene Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord” at Euroventure for the first time.

The auditorium had a large wall of windows along one side, usually covered by curtains during the service.

During one of the worship gatherings, as “Shout to the Lord” was being sung, someone pulled the curtain back.

Suddenly, the Alps filled the windows.

Victoria never forgot the moment.

The first time she heard the song, she was looking out at the mountains.

Another worship service near the end of the camp remained with her for a different reason.

The auditorium was darkened.

A candle remained lit on a table covered with a red-and-white checked cloth.

Caedmon’s Call’s “There’s a Stirring” played.

The message surrounding the gathering was about hearing the calling of God.

Euroventure was not presented simply as a summer camp.

It was meant to be a place where young Christians encountered God and asked what He might be calling them to do with their lives.

For some, that meant missions.

For others, ministry.

It was more than recreation.

It was about calling.

“Run To The Darkness”

The theme Victoria remembers from Euroventure was:

“Run to the Darkness — A Lost World Needs You.”

The message was missionary in nature — Christians going into spiritually dark places carrying the light of God, sharing their faith, serving people, and helping bring people out of darkness.

For Victoria, that message was personal.

“People had just done that,” she remembers. “They had just run to the darkness and pulled me out of it.”

Colin and Robbie had entered the world in which Victoria was being trafficked, found her, stayed close enough to intervene, and helped get her out.

While young people at Euroventure were being challenged to run into darkness carrying the light of God, Victoria was sitting among them knowing that people had just done exactly that for her.

Seen With Her Family

The presence of the Pleasant Valley group in Switzerland also mattered for another reason.

Some of the people connected with the Missouri group knew Victoria from the environment she had left and had been given a different understanding of who she was and where she belonged.

Once they arrived in Grindelwald, it became important that Victoria be seen openly with the people she identified as her family.

She walked through the camp with Colin.

She attended gatherings.

She participated in activities.

She was visible.

People from Missouri could see that she was alive, that she was there voluntarily, and that she was with the people she recognized as her family.

Some subsequently communicated back to the Thénardiers that Victoria was at the camp, that it appeared she had obtained a boyfriend at the camp. They reported she was walking around with a young man she identified as her future husband, talked and acted like she was planning a wedding, and was refusing to return with the group.

Victoria’s presence in Grindelwald therefore became more than participation in a youth camp.

It became a public reality that could be witnessed by people from the life she had just left.

She had not disappeared.

She was there.

She was alive.

And she was not going back.

At The Top Of The Mountain

Near the end of Euroventure, the group rode a gondola all the way to the top of one of the mountains.

They ate there and later gathered for worship.

This time, Victoria was not looking at the Alps through a window.

She was standing on the mountain itself, looking out across the surrounding peaks.

“Shout to the Lord” was sung again.

Fog had gathered around the mountain and seemed to follow the group upward as the gondola climbed.

To Victoria, it felt like a tangible picture of the presence of God.

Charismatic Christians sometimes speak of the Shekinah glory of God — the manifested presence of God — and Victoria connected what she saw that day with biblical images of God appearing in a cloud, including the cloud associated with Moses.

Standing there, Victoria was not merely high above Grindelwald.

She was an ocean away, on the other side of the world from the terrible situation she had been trafficked into.

For the first time, she felt permanently safe.

She was no longer simply out of the house in Missouri.

She was in Switzerland.

She was with her family.

She was standing on top of a mountain in the Alps.

And she knew she did not have to go back.

Looking across those mountains, Victoria thought about how enormous and powerful God must be to have made them.

The God who made those mountains was the God who had brought her there.