Police Find Woman Held Hostage After She Fails to Send Her Wordle Score to Her Daughter

An elderly woman was rescued from a deranged intruder after her daughter noticed she failed to text her Wordle score.

Denyse Holt was asleep in her Lincolnwood, Illinois home Sunday night when she was awoken around 1:00 a.m. by a bleeding, naked man standing next to her bed holding a pair of scissors. The intruder was identified as 32-year-old James H. Davis III. Holt says he got in bed with her and told her that he wouldn’t harm her. Shortly after, he dragged her around the home, disconnecting the phones before forcing her to take a bath with him, though she was fully clothed. Finally, he locked her inside a bathroom in her basement, where she spent the next 17 hours.

“I didn’t think I was going to live,” Holt said after the incident.

Holt may have been held captive longer if not for her daughter, Meredith Holt-Caldwell, who lives in Seattle. Holt sends her daughter her score from the popular word game, Wordle, as a morning ritual. However, when the 80-year-old hadn’t sent the score or read her daughter’s messages from the previous night, Holt-Caldwell knew immediately that something was wrong. She summoned a family friend to phone the police, who arrived with the SWAT team at Holt’s home.

Davis was arrested and charged with home invasion with a dangerous weapon, aggravated kidnapping while armed with a dangerous weapon, and aggravated assault against a police officer. Authorities believe that he suffers from some sort of mental illness.

“I never thought I would come out of that alive,” Holt told the Washington Post.