On August 29, 2016. Mark Tromp, 51, wakes up convinced that someone is watching his family. That the phones are tapped. That the money is not safe. That the only way out is to disappear.
What follows seems like a movie script, but it is real: Mark, his wife Jacoba, and their three adult children abandon cards, passports, and cell phones. When they discover that one of the children hid his phone, they make him throw it out the window 32 kilometers after setting off. After that, the family begins to fall apart: one returns, two flee in their own car, another steals a vehicle to return alone.
Police find one of the daughters catatonic, unable to speak. Psychologists point to an extremely rare phenomenon: folie à plusieurs, a delusion that jumps from one mind to another like a contagion. Mark apologized afterward. He never explained what started it.