The liberation of Julie Mulligan
After being kidnapped abroad, Rotarian Julie Mulligan reflects on resilience, forgiveness, and living a more authentic life of Service Above Self.
by Kate Silver
01 Jan 2025Loading component...
Photography by Taylor Roades
A man dozes in his bedroom. It’s around midnight, quiet except for the gentle hum of the TV. The phone rings, jarring him awake.
“John?”
“Julie? What’s wrong?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“John. I’ve been kidnapped.”
Julie breaks down crying. Then a man’s voice comes on the phone. Sharply, he demands 100 million naira — or about US$700,000 — for her safe return.
“We’ll call back,” the man says.
He hangs up.
Nearly 16 years have passed since that phone call from northern Nigeria to a home in Drayton Valley, a small town nestled between two rivers in central Alberta. Julie Mulligan has reflected on the events of April 2009 many times. How they changed her and her family. How they continue to stir complex emotions. How they engendered a deeper understanding of the nature of forgiveness and of our interconnectedness.
“This is Julie Mulligan. I’ve been kidnapped. I’m being held somewhere in Nigeria. I’m not feeling well and I probably have malaria. The kidnappers are sitting with me now. I need some contact information of Rotary members.”
Today, Julie and her husband, John, live in British Columbia, where they remain devoted Rotary members. And Julie has come to understand what happened to her, though still painful, as almost a gift, for it opened a path to seeing the goodness in people instead of the bad.
The journey to Nigeria is supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime professional and cultural exchange opportunity for the five women traveling together. They’ve been accepted to a Group Study Exchange program through Rotary. For a month, they expect to explore different cities, visit government offices and cultural sites, and spend time in workplaces while living with Rotarian hosts. They plan to befriend a Nigerian team, whose members they will later host in Canada as part of the exchange.
Clockwise from top: Julie with fellow Group Study Exchange participants before her abduction; a bustling street scene in Kaduna; a 2009 newsclip from a Canadian paper.
Courtesy of Julie Mulligan; Andrew Esiebo; Newspapers.com
Leading the Canadian team is Julie Mulligan, president of the Rotary Club of Drayton Valley. At 44, Julie is slender with caring green eyes, brown hair, and a quick, dry wit. She’s the oldest in the group, which is made up of four other professionals in their 20s and 30s, and she’s the only Rotary member.
Julie, who works in the insurance industry, is giddy. She loved her time in Africa the year prior, when she and John cycled through parts of Tanzania. She can’t wait to get back. A Rotary member since 2001, she’s especially excited to make new Rotary connections in Africa.
Located in north central Nigeria, Kaduna is a bustling and sometimes chaotic city of about 1.2 million. Although it’s a major industrial center, the town’s infrastructure and services have failed to keep up with its growth. Power outages are frequent, and many people lack access to safe drinking water. Across the state, also called Kaduna, about 45 percent of people live below the national poverty line.
Today, kidnappings have become a lucrative business and a growing threat in parts of Nigeria, including the state of Kaduna. In addition to armed bandits and criminal enterprises that use kidnappings for ransom to fund their operations, Boko Haram and other militant groups have carried out mass abductions for ideological reasons and leverage in negotiations with the government. In March 2024, gunmen kidnapped 287 school children in Kaduna state.
But in early 2009, this wasn’t the case. Back then, kidnappings were concentrated around the country’s oil fields to the south, in the Niger Delta, but in the north visitors were welcomed with open arms. In fact, showing visiting Rotarians the “real” Nigeria is something that Leonard Igini has always loved to do. As a member of the Rotary Club of Nassarawa-Kano, Igini has hosted visitors from Norway, Sweden, Japan, Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere.
And he is among the hosts for the Canadian group’s visit in 2009, with plans to later lead the Nigerian team that is to visit Canada. “The word ‘risk’ did not occur to any one of us,” says Igini about the local Rotary team, “because it’s something we have never experienced.”
On 16 April, about a week into the trip, Julie and her Nigerian host, Moses Kadeer, who belonged to the Rotary Club of Kaduna, are driving home from a Rotary meeting at an inn, where her exchange group members had been guests of honor. As they pull up to Kadeer’s home, a teal hatchback drives up alongside them. The driver rolls down his window and asks Kadeer a question — does he know so-and-so? When Kadeer says no, three men jump out and drag him from the front seat, throwing him on the ground.
Then they grab Julie. “Moses!” she screams as they beat her with a large gun. They shove her into the back seat and speed away.
For Julie’s husband, John, phone calls with her captors were agonizing. He was elated when the call that she’d been released finally came.
Image credit: Taylor Rhodes
John is in shock following the phone call with Julie. Usually, he’s a soft-spoken voice of reason when it comes to his family, whether it’s Julie, her two teenage children — Stephanie Dean, 19, and Mackenzie Dean, 17 — or his adult sons, Greg and Rob Mulligan. But this is uncharted territory.
John awakens Steph and tells her what happened. Then, he calls his sons and his most trusted friends, who also happen to be Rotarians. Within hours, Alex and Gayleen Blais, Mary and Terry Drader, and John’s son Greg have gathered round. Together, they debate what to do. Should they get to work gathering the ransom? Do they call the police? They decide on the latter, and by morning two agents arrive from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP, Canada’s national police force.
The agents tell John the kidnappers will likely call again soon. They write down the exact words John is to say when he answers the phone, and he is not to stray from the script. “They were scared the kidnappers were going to get more information about who I was, what I owned, what organizations I belonged to, all that kind of stuff,” John says, “which would lead them to increase the ransom.”
The agents motion to a chair at the end of a table and tell John that’s where he’ll sit until his wife is released. And, in no uncertain terms, they tell him they will not be paying a ransom. “The government of Canada does not negotiate with terrorists or hostage-takers,” says Peter Ryan, who was in charge of the RCMP’s extraterritorial response unit in 2009.
Then, they wait for the phone to ring.
In the morning light, Julie assesses the situation. The night before, she and two of the kidnappers were dropped off at a dark, desolate construction site. It’s clear now that they’re sitting inside the walls of an unfinished house, with dirt floors and no roof. She peers down at her dusty clothes — a blazer with intricate cutouts on the sleeves, cropped black pants and high heels — and recalls, sardonically, that she’d worn that same outfit not long ago at the Beverly Wilshire hotel for a business conference. Now, her arms and legs are covered in mosquito bites. And she no longer has her anti-malaria medication.
“You have 24 hours to put the money into this account. If you don’t do it, you may never hear from us — or from Julie — again.”
She’s starting to make sense of things. The driver — who’d returned temporarily and instructed her to call John — appears to be the boss. The two young men staying with her answer to him. In the daylight, they look to be about the same age as her teenage children. As lizards and scorpions skitter by, she starts talking to the guys, telling them about herself, her kids, her family. She shows them photos from her camera, desperate for them to see that she matters.
She asks them why they’re doing this. The younger one, who says his name is Anthony, needs money for school. The older one, who calls himself Oyo, just needs money, period. “They had this idea that in North America — in Canada — the streets were lined with gold,” says Julie.
She tries to negotiate with the two, to get them on her side. Her wedding ring, she says, could probably get them $1,000. “What if we left here, we sell the ring, and you get the money?” she asks. They don’t take the bait, and she tucks her ring into her bra — along with the photo memory card from her camera — for safekeeping.
Recognizing that Anthony and Oyo are not the masterminds but most likely pawns, Julie feels a kind of maternal connection to them. Years later, she will think of them as “the boys.” And as the situation wears on, Oyo starts to call her “Auntie.”
“John, when are you flying over here? When are you coming? What’s happening with the money?”
When she calls the next day, Julie’s voice is John’s salvation — she’s alive. It’s also torture because she’s distressed. She’s frightened. She’s impatient, even angry. And under the careful watch of the police negotiators, he’s not allowed to say what he really wants to say. “I had to stay calm. I couldn’t show emotion,” he says. “I couldn’t show my love. Because that would give the kidnappers more energy.”
From left: David Alexander oversaw Rotary International’s response to the crisis; John and Julie look through news coverage of the kidnapping; Julie with (from left) fellow Drayton Valley Rotary members Mardi Dancey and Terry Drader, and Ross Tyson.
Monika Lozinska; Taylor Roades; Courtesy of Julie Mulligan; Newspapers.com
By now, the house is in full lockdown to squelch any news from spreading and putting Julie at even more risk. The Canadian authorities give John permission to have five couples join him at the house. Day in and day out, Rotary friends and family keep him afloat, even as the tension grows.
“There was a lot of commotion, and then a lot of stillness,” remembers Julie’s daughter, Steph. She and her brother are pulled from school and told they can’t talk to anyone. The house was like a submarine, closed off from the world, she says. “Everything was just so heavy.”
To escape the stress, Steph and Mackenzie take long drives. They listen to music and call their mom’s cellphone. “It would go straight to voicemail,” says Steph. “We would put it on speaker and just keep calling to hear her say, ‘Hi, you’ve reached Julie Mulligan.’”
As the ordeal goes on, the agents advise John that the kids shouldn’t be at home. They’re worried that the kidnappers could turn violent against Julie while on the calls. So Steph and Mackenzie are sent to stay with family and friends.
"This is Julie Mulligan. I've been kidnapped. I’m being held somewhere in Nigeria. I’m in an open-air house, getting bit by mosquitos. I’m not feeling well and I probably have malaria. The kidnappers are sitting with me now. I need some contact information of Rotary members."
The call comes into Rotary International headquarters in Evanston, Illinois. David Alexander, manager of Rotary’s public relations division at the time, feels his adrenaline surge as he answers the call. Sitting nearby, General Secretary Ed Futa takes instructions from the Canadian Mounties on another line. They’re trying to trace the call; keep Julie talking, the agents say.
It’s been several days since the kidnapping, and Alexander has been overseeing a Rotary crisis response team in close contact with the RCMP as well as with Rotary members in Drayton Valley. “We had never encountered anything like this before,” says Alexander, “and I think we all felt a real sense of responsibility to do everything we were told to do.”
Steadying his voice, Alexander’s brain goes into overdrive as he tries every tactic he can to stall the call with Julie. She asks for the phone numbers of specific Rotary members — presumably so the kidnappers can ask them for money — and he fumbles through a series of questions. “Can you spell that first name? Can you spell the last name? Can you tell me what Rotary club she’s a part of?”
The call ends after about a minute and a half — too short to trace. Then the phone rings again. “We’re working on it,” Alexander tells Julie, asking more and more questions. When she responds, she sounds frustrated, angry. “I’m in a serious situation and I need help,” she cries. The call cuts out. The phone rings again.
After the third or fourth call, all is quiet. Alexander sits there, haunted and afraid for Julie. “It was the most difficult half hour of my work life I’ve ever had,” he says. “It’s seared into my memory.”
On about the fourth night, the boss orders Julie into a car and they drive to a cramped house in a nearby town. Inside are two new people: a pretty young woman, whom she comes to know as Ann, and a menacing man named Christian. In her mind, Julie thinks of this as “the inside house,” and the previous site without a roof as “the outside house.”
“John, when are you flying over here? When are you coming? What’s happening with the money?”
The boss takes her to a small bedroom with bars on the windows. Now in her own space, she starts scheming. When Ann brings her breakfast — a drink similar to Ovaltine — Julie swipes the spoon and tucks it into a hole in her mattress. When no one’s watching, she uses the spoon to try to dig into the cement around the window bars.
To keep up her strength, she does biceps curls using bottles of water as weights; and when no one’s paying attention, she practices whipping the mattress off the bed to block the door.
There are so many things John wants to say to the man on the phone. He wants to say he’ll send the money. He wants to cry and tell his wife how much they all miss her. He wants to beg them to send Julie home. But he has to stick to the script. To pay a ransom could put other travelers at risk. Plus, there’s no guarantee payment would result in Julie’s release.
“Quiet,” an agent writes on a sheet of paper. John glares at them, but follows their orders, giving the kidnappers nothing. He’s terrified it will be the last call. “I cried for 24 hours,” he says.
Julie can’t understand why John isn’t paying the ransom. After more than a week, the kidnappers have lowered it to about $68,000. It doesn’t make sense that she’s still here this long. She’s been forgotten, she just knows it. She’s convinced that John has gone back to work. Everyone has gone back to living their lives. She feels abandoned and incredibly alone.
Messages of support from friends and family
Image credit: Taylor Roades
The kidnappers are growing increasingly agitated. Food supplies are dwindling, and rice is now the mainstay. During this time, calls start coming into the house. It’s a local woman, asking to speak with Julie, and the kidnappers allow her to take the call. Day after day, she calls to ask the same questions: Are you being treated OK? How is your health? What are you eating? Believing the woman was from a church or a local Rotary club, Julie would always answer the same: “I would tell her I think I have malaria. We have no food. I just want to go home.”
Twelve days into the ordeal, the phone rings at the inside house. Julie hears muffled conversations. Excitement. Something is happening. There’s talk of collecting money. But nothing happens.
The next evening, there’s new tension in the air. Anthony, Oyo, and Ann are running around frantically. They tell Julie to sit still. “Don’t open the door. Don’t open the windows. Don’t speak to anyone.” And they leave.
She learns later that Christian has been arrested. He’d gone to collect the ransom from the woman who had been calling the house. The woman turned out to be an agent of Nigeria’s State Security Service, and the ransom drop turned out to be a sting operation. His accomplice got away and got word back to the house that the jig was up.
Alone in the house, Julie is panic-stricken. She doesn’t know what’s happening. Then, Anthony and Oyo come back for her. In the dark of night, they lead her down a road, into a village. As people walk past and motorcycles stream by, Julie is frightened of everyone. The boys keep talking frantically into their phones. Then they stop and look at her. “Auntie, don’t follow,” Oyo says. And they run away.
She stands there on the side of the road, in the dark, frozen. Within minutes, a police officer approaches. Initially, Julie pushes her away. For 13 days, the kidnappers had been feeding her lies that everyone was out to get her. But then, she relents. She begins to accept that her ordeal is over.
Over the next day, she’s taken to different police stations where she gives her account of what happened, and she identifies Christian in a police lineup. Then, finally, accompanied by an RCMP officer who arrived soon after her rescue, she boards a plane and flies home.
“I fell in love with you twice. When you came down the aisle when we got married. And when you came down the aisle when you were rescued.”
Julie’s release makes the news before John hears about it, and his phone starts ringing. First, there’s elation. But only when he hears Julie’s voice on the phone, saying “I’m OK. I’m OK,” does it sink in. After nearly two weeks as a hostage, his wife is coming home.
When Julie’s plane lands, John is waiting for her at the jet bridge. It’s an image he will never forget. “She was coming down the aisle, and it was the greatest thing,” he says. “I still tell her that I fell in love with you twice. When you came down the aisle when we got married. And when you came down the aisle when you were rescued.”
Julie, who did not end up contracting malaria, returns in good health. They arrive home to a house full of friends and family in full celebration mode. The relief at being together again is indescribable. And yet, for the family, there are layers of trauma beneath the joy.
In the immediate aftermath, Julie struggles with feelings of abandonment; sometimes she has panic attacks when she’s left alone. John wants to keep her close, so much so that he stands outside the door while she showers. Steph has a breakdown when she can’t reach her mom on the phone one day. Mackenzie, they say, still prefers not to talk about any of it.
Julie finds healing in sharing her story. She travels to Rotary clubs to talk about the ordeal and raise funds to help women in Nigeria who suffer from a condition called obstetric fistula, a debilitating injury that can occur during childbirth. Despite her harrowing experience, she makes it clear that she had no regrets. A month after her homecoming, in a letter of thanks to Rotary members, she writes, “I want Rotarians to know that I still believe that the Group Study Exchange program is the best vehicle to promote cultural understanding and peace. It is second to none in shortening the distance between two countries.”
To her relief, the Group Study Exchange team from Nigeria still travels to Canada, although the trip is pushed back a couple of months. For Igini, the visit makes a profound impression. Canada is the first place he’s been where people don’t always lock their doors or windows. To this day, he still tells his children about what he saw. “Mankind is one,” he tells them. “Everybody was at peace with each other.”
Clockwise from top left: Julie shares a laugh with a shopkeeper during a 2011 cycling trip in Sichuan province, China; Julie and John, who raised money to build a school in Nepal, visit the country in 2012; the couple trek to an Everest base camp with Calgary West Rotary members; the family celebrates Steph’s high school graduation; Julie gives a polio vaccine to a child during an immunization drive in India in 2013.
Courtesy of Julie Mulligan
After such a traumatic experience, some people might have lost their way. Julie seemed to find hers. As she learned about the people who fought for her, she was deeply moved by the goodness of humans. She read about thousands of people coming together in Kaduna for a candlelight vigil while she was held hostage. In Australia, students and professors at a university had been praying for her. She met a bishop who held prayer circles for her in Mexico. “There was just all this movement going on for peace,” she says. “My name was attached to it, but it was something so much deeper.”
“She couldn’t control that she was kidnapped, but she can control what she does after. She did not stop traveling. She did not stop going out of her front door.”
With attendees at a meeting of the Rotary Club of Kelowna, British Columbia
Courtesy of Julie Mulligan; Taylor Roades
Back at Rotary headquarters, too, senior leaders up to the general secretary were deeply involved throughout the emergency, reviewing updates from the RCMP with their crisis team and staying in contact with Canadian Rotarians directly supporting the family. Their efforts were bolstered by staff members at Rotary whose responsibilities included monitoring the safety of global travel and assisting with emergencies.
Throughout her life, Julie had participated in countless service projects to help others. Now, she found herself on the receiving end of others’ kindness. It ignited something inside of her to do more, to not hold back. “When she was released, I thought our traveling was done,” says John. “And that’s when our traveling doubled.”
Within months, John and Julie traveled to Cuba. The next year, they did a group biking trip in China. In 2012, they raised money to build a school in Nepal and traveled there with the Calgary West Rotary club, trekking to a base camp on Mount Everest. And in 2013, Julie joined other Rotarians in administering polio vaccines to children in India.
But she also needed people to see her as a whole person, a complex human, someone who is more than a kidnapping victim. Living in a small town, that was hard. The motto of Drayton Valley is, literally, “Pulling Together,” and everyone had done just that when she was a hostage. But in the “after” era, she was struggling with that identity. In line at the grocery store, strangers would commend her for being so brave. In her job as a financial adviser, the veil between professional and personal felt permanently removed. She tried therapy.
Mostly, she found herself on a quest for authenticity. She threw herself into yoga, a practice she once despised but learned to appreciate for the focus and strength it demanded. She decided to become a yoga instructor. In 2017, they moved to British Columbia, to the stunning town of West Kelowna, where the mountains and lakes were teeming with the promise of adventure — and serenity. There, her life has become full and rich. She loves paddleboarding in the morning. She plays pickleball and gardens. When she and John aren’t traveling, they’re hosting visiting friends and family. And they’ve found yet another family at the Rotary Club of Kelowna.
Of course, she has emotional scars. There are nights when she’ll sit bolt upright in bed and start talking, waking John. She’s also highly sensitive to other people’s suffering. She broke down crying once after seeing a motorcyclist injured in a crash. Even scenes in movies can trigger feelings of distress and leave her sobbing. And she can’t stand to hear the TV at a loud volume. The kidnappers always had the television blaring at the inside house.
But other things conjure more positive associations. When she was held hostage at the inside house, she would eat a mango every so often, a welcome change from regular meals of rice. Today, the fruit holds a special place. “When I bite into a mango, I’m transported,” she says. “There’s something hopeful about it, in a weird way.”
Perhaps most surprising, she thinks fondly of Anthony and Oyo. They were not among the four people imprisoned over the abduction, and she wonders what they’re doing now. She remembers how, even in the worst moments, when she wasn’t sure she would live, she saw the boys’ vulnerability, and their bravado, and knew they were just kids doing what they thought they needed to do to survive.
Julie leads a yoga class; she threw herself into the practice for the focus and strength that yoga demands.
Image credit: Taylor Roades
She also loves to paddleboard.
Image credit: Taylor Roades
Julie made it a mission to meet and thank the law enforcement officials involved in her case, traveling as far as Jordan, where one agent was based. It’s as though she was trying to show them, too, that she’s more than Julie Mulligan the kidnapping victim.
Ryan, who went on to become a chief superintendent with the RCMP (he recently retired), remembers an email from Julie nearly 10 years after the ordeal. She and John were traveling to Ottawa, where Ryan is based, and wanted to know if they could take him and his wife to dinner. “My wife, to this day, still speaks about it,” he says. Of all the hostage-taking investigations he’d overseen, this was the only one that led to a personal meeting afterward.
For Steph, watching her mother march on is inspiring. “Hard things don’t need to take you down,” she says. “She couldn’t control that she was kidnapped, but she can control what she does after. She did not stop traveling. She did not stop going out of her front door.”
If you ask Julie, she’ll tell you that her family bore the brunt of the trauma. Outside of those brief phone calls, they never knew if she was alive.
For all of them, it’s been a long recovery. But, Julie likes to think, they’ve come out stronger. “The kidnapping definitely changed my life. It changed my family’s life, for sure. But I like to think it was for the good,” she says. “I feel that life is a little sweeter when you know how quickly it can be taken away.”
This story originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.