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“Mommy, I’m forgetting daddy,” three-year-old Tamra Rich lamented six months after guerrillas kidnapped her father, Mark Rich, and two others with New Tribes Mission (NTM).

“We would look at pictures,” said Tania Rich, Mark Rich’s wife. “I’d cry and tell her stories about him. So she knows him only through the stories that we can tell of him.”

Tania Rich watched Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas lead her husband and fellow missionaries Dave Mankins and Rick Tenenoff at gunpoint into the darkness. That was January 31, 1993, in the Kuna village of Púcuro near Colombia’s Panamanian border. She never saw them again.

NTM concluded from guerrilla testimonies that FARC shot the three in 1996 as Colombian troops closed in, said NTM spokesman Scott Ross. Their remains may never be found.

Tania Rich recalls the night the men were taken. The Riches heard loud voices before armed men burst into their hut. Tania hid in a bedroom. A guerrilla found her and aimed a gun at her. Her husband lay on the floor, hands bound, with two guerrillas’ guns pointed at him. Guerrillas told her to pack food and clothes for him. The rebels led Mankins and Tenenoff from their huts and forced the three to leave with them. Villagers and the missionary wives feared the rebels would return, so the next morning, the wives and children canoed down river and radioed the mission. An NTM airplane picked them up. “I remember this terrible battle that was raging in my heart,” she recalled. “Lord, you gave Mark to me. I cannot do this on my own.”

Rich cried as she remembered God’s response to her heart’s questions: “‘Tania, you’re mine, and Mark is mine. Just whatever I decide in your life is best for you, and you need to trust me with that.’ I battled with the Lord for a few hours over that with many tears until I was able to just let go,” she said. “I didn’t realize that would also include those eight and a half years of waiting and wondering, not knowing whether he was alive or not, wondering if he was suffering. I spent long years waiting, wondering and learning to find God sufficient when the very thing that was nearest and dearest to me was gone.”

Meanwhile, Dan Germann, who was then NTM’s Colombia director, sat by a radio in Panama City waiting for FARC to contact the mission. FARC demanded a $5 million ransom. Threats filled FARC’s messages. Twice Germann heard the missionaries’ voices as “proof of life.” FARC’s last radio message was January 16, 1994.

What no one knew at the time was that a European claiming to represent NTM began to “negotiate” with FARC for the missionaries’ release, Ross said. The man’s plan was to secure their release for less than FARC’s demands to NTM and keep a cut for himself.

When NTM officials realized that FARC hadn’t contacted them in more than a year because of the interloper, they sought out the rebels. It took months to convince FARC that the European did not represent NTM. Mission officials again refused to pay ransom.

Others also tried to prey on NTM. “I can’t count the number of people who said, ‘If you just give me money and a plane ticket, I can get you up there [where the hostages are],'” Germann said. “We’ve met some of the sleaziest people on the face of this earth, people who are absolutely immoral. And at the same time, we’ve met some people who were truly godly.”

To keep government officials active on the case, NTM launched a prayer and awareness campaign. Tania Rich, along with fellow hostage wives Patti Tenenoff and Nancy Mankins, embarked on a tour in which they met the presidents of Colombia and Costa Rica and Spain’s Queen Sofia. President Bill Clinton spoke out on the case. The wives were interviewed on Larry King Live, 20/20 and other national news shows.

NTM’s crisis team followed all leads. A FARC guerrilla who once had guarded them described the men’s captivity in a jungle camp 15 miles from Púcuro and about 100 yards from another camp. There, 10 to 15 guerrillas cooked meals and waited for word from FARC leaders about what to do with the hostages. Reports agreed the men were in fairly good health and spirits.

Their wives were also biding time, lives on hold. Rich taught at NTM’s Sanford, Florida, school. “It’s been part of our identity for so long, waking up and thinking, ‘Well, maybe it will be today that we know what has happened to Dave, Mark and Rick,'” she said.

By 1997, more reports from guerrilla defectors independently began to agree they were dead. That year, Tania Rich began asking the Lord whether her husband was dead. “Knowing what I know now, maybe it was the Lord starting to slowly prepare me for the truth,” she said.

In 2000, Colombian soldiers acted on an informant’s tip and searched for remains and found those of an animal. Late that year, police arrested Jose Milciades Urrego Medina, a leader of the FARC front that kidnapped the missionaries. Last month, Germann talked to another guerrilla who had been with the men. He told Germann that the three died in 1996 when Colombia’s military raided the FARC camp. Rather than let the men escape or be rescued, guerrillas shot them.

Their deaths were not in vain. “So much good has come out of it,” Rich said. “People are realizing this is something that’s worth living and dying for. We’ve gotten to share the gospel with literally hundreds of thousands of people that we would not have had a chance to share with otherwise.”

November 12, 2001