In 1973, Michela Madden, a young widow with five children, opened the door of her home in Sebastopol, California, to two strangers. Her uninvited visitors were David Clair Ferguson and Douglas T Savory, or Dave and Doug. One had a bullet in his leg. On the run from the police, they took her hostage.
Madden, now known as Michaela Garloff, is a remarkably resilient woman. Her husband had been killed a few years before as a victim in a drunk driving incident. She was raising her kids on her own and, strangely, Madden ended up more scared by the cops than by the criminals who broke into her home.
Her experiences with Doug and Dave have inspired her granddaughter Mimi Wilcox’s film, Bad Hostage, which is now on the shortlist for the Best Documentary Short Oscar.
Wilcox had been working on the film, which had its world premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest in 2024, since 2018. Since then, the 40-minute documentary has screened at many other festivals, from Hot Springs to Woodstock and to Sebastopol itself. In the process, it has sparked heated debate about whether so-called Stockholm Syndrome actually exists, or whether it’s a construct dreamed up by authorities and psychiatrists, invariably male, to demonise the behaviour of hostages, invariably women. (The syndrome refers to the supposed phenomenon when captives end up taking the sides of their captors).
Before starting work on the film, Wilcox acknowledges that she never thought twice about Stockholm Syndrome.
“I am sure I had used the term. I took it for granted. I hadn’t thought critically about it because it is so permeated in our culture…it wasn’t until fairly deep into the process of this film that I started to think about it,” says the director (who has a successful parallel career as an editor working on several award-winning documentaries from other filmmakers, includingEscaping Twin Flames by Cecilia Peck and The Dilemma of Desire by Maria Finitzo).
Bad Hostage had begun as a family affair. Growing up, Wilcox heard the story of the siege many times from her mum (“she really loved the story and told it so beautifully”) and other relatives. It had comedy, pathos and danger – and was an incident, quite understandably, that no-one involved had ever forgotten.
Early on, Wilcox found herself wondering how much of the story was “family mythology” and how much had really happened.
As she worked on the film, and looked into other hostage situations including that of Patty Hearst, the heiress kidnapped by terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Kristin Enmark, the young Swedish woman held hostage in a Stockholm bank, Wilcox realised that the syndrome may not actually exist. In each of these cases, the women involved strenuously denied that they had taken their captors’ sides. They all felt they had been treated as badly by the authorities as by the men holding them hostage.
What was true about Wilcox’s grandmother was that she struck up a rapport with Doug and Dave simply because she behaved with common sense and decency. That’s why she was considered “a bad hostage.” She made them coffee. They were joined by a local journalist, Boniface Saludes, who entered the house as an intermediary.
Wilcox discovered “an incredible article” by Saludes – “he had written about the experience in a riveting and cinematic way” – which inspired her, and convinced her the story was “even more dramatic” than she had realised from the family’s own accounts.
The director’s grandmother, now in her late 80s, was initially sceptical about participating. “Who cares about my story? Who would want to know about this thing?” she asked. “It’s no big deal.” Nonetheless, she agreed to talk, and proved a “sharp and funny” interviewee with a very vivid recall of what had happened.
As for Dave and Doug, the criminals, they weren’t involved. Although they were convicted of shooting at the police, they were acquitted of holding Madden and Saludes hostage. “That was a shocking detail to me,” the director says. They were given seven-year prison terms.
“We couldn’t find any other encounters that Dave had had with the law. It seemed he had lived out his life and passed away. [But] Doug, it seemed, had gone to Arizona and had got involved in another similar situation. He had taken another family hostage and, I believe, shot and killed a police officer and then shot and killed himself.”
One memento the home invaders had left behind was Doug’s broad-brimmed hat. “I had no idea she had kept it. That was one of those incredible discoveries,” Wilcox observes of the headgear which features prominently in Bad Hostage.
The director describes her documentary as “a real scrappy independent endeavour all the way.” She and her team were “constantly applying for grants” and trying to raise funds in any ways they could. She continued to work on other films at the same time. “[But] it was really difficult to edit all day for someone else, and then come home and edit my own project…I really tried to squeeze in the most productive bursts on this project between my editing projects wherever I could.”
Producer Max Asaf, formerly development coordinator at Kartemquin Films, was in a similar situation. Both were juggling other assignments while working to complete Bad Hostage. “Also, the story just took time. I started the film with one idea of what it would be and then it became something completely different,” says Wilcox.
At one stage, she had been keen to broaden the scope of the film, to make it a history of northern California – and to focus on the long running battle of attrition between the “hippies and the pigs [cops].”
“We went down that path for a little while before finding it wasn’t quite cohering.”
In the end, the filmmakers didn’t speak to any of the law enforcement involved. The focus remained instead on the family. Wilcox tried to get in touch with Patty Hearst (who features in archive clips) but never heard back. “That’s extremely understandable,” she says of Hearst, who faced years of media harassment and intrusion after she was taken hostage.
At the screening in Sebastopol, Wilcox’s family were finally able to see the film with an audience. Unexpectedly, several of journalist Boniface Saludes’ relatives also turned up (Saludes himself died in 2023). “To my grandmother, he is just such a hero. It was amazing to connect with them [the relatives] and understand the different role the story had played in our families.”
Now, the documentary is on the Oscar trail. It’s currently available to watch on the Kinema platform for a small fee. As for the director’s grandmother, the most gratifying part of the documentary experience has been in seeing audience interest in her experiences from all those years ago. “She really thought no-one would care. She didn’t understand why people would be interested…she was asked the other day what she thinks of Stockholm syndrome and she said ‘well, I think it is a total fallacy!’”
