LENEXA, Kan. – That’s a Kansas woman you hear shouting “yabba-dabba-doo” when her beloved pet tortoise was found nine months after it meandered away from home.
Jan Langton’s love of turtles dates back to her childhood after a family friend gave her a desert turtle. The Lenexa woman, who also loves The Flintstones, wanted to name her Fred – but the operative word here is her.
“So I named her Fredericka,” she said. “And Fredericka, unfortunately, had an accident, and she passed away.”
In the back of her mind, it always made Langton sad that she never had a “Fred,” until she saw a post on Facebook in 2015. Someone had found a Russian tortoise, and the owners couldn’t be found.
“And so I said, ‘You know, hey, I’ll take her,'” she said. “And that’s the Fredericka that we have today.”
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It wasn’t the first time Langton’s beloved 17-year-old tortoise ran away from home successfully. Yet, it was the first nine-month Houdini act that Fredericka had performed that had her owner sleepless at night from guilt.
Langton said she decided to let Fredericka have free rein in the fenced-in backyard. As a precaution, she tried to push Fredericka through the spindles and then vertically through the spindles to make sure she couldn’t reach through.
“And I thought, ‘I’m good to go,'” she recalled. “There’s no way this tortoise can get out of here.”
Langton would bring Fredericka in every night to avoid the coyotes and shelter the tortoise from the weather. Leave it to Fredericka, though, to find an unnoticeable 2-inch gap to aid in her disappearance.
When Langton came home after work to bring her back in the house, she couldn’t find her.
“I looked in every one of her bushes that she ever hid,” Langton said.
See, Fredericka loved a good game of hide-n-seek. When she would hide in one bush and be found, the tortoise would go to the next one. She changed her bush every night, Langton said.
As dusk set and the last bush was finally checked, a once-frantic Langton was now sick in the pit of her stomach.
“Oh, good Lord, she’s gotten out,” Langton shouted.
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Just how far can a tortoise go? Well, they’re from the Mediterranean and known as nomads – they roam everywhere.
Langton said Fredericka’s favorite thing to do is walk. If allowed, a tortoise can stroll 18 miles a day, then stop, and then do it all over again the next day.
“She could have reached anywhere,” said Langton as she hit social media asking the surrounding Kansas City areas if they have seen her pet.
Soon, Langton had the whole community looking for her lost friend. The $400 tortoise reward she offered was a nice incentive, too.
Strangers would text her out of the blue with random photos of a turtle they had found on the side of the road. Soon, Langton found herself giving Tortoise 101 lessons to all followers on her Nextdoor and Facebook apps. She pleaded with everyone to post her missing tortoise flyer, because fall was coming, and Fredericka could die if temperatures got under 50 degrees.
“I wasn’t going to give up, because I didn’t like feeling guilty,” Langton said. “I felt bad for the tortoise, because she’s hungry, she’s cold.”
A stranger even offered her bloodhound to help in the search. Nothing.
The seasons would now change to Kansas’ harsh winter. Nine months would pass before the unthinkable.
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About a week before Fredericka was found, Langton posted her flyer one last time on Nextdoor. It was a long shot, but spring was here and people would be clearing out their landscaping.
It was on May 20 when Langton received a phone call at work from her daughter. Henry Miles, a 7-year-old neighborhood boy, had found Fredericka in the woods behind his parent’s home.
“She then texts me the picture, and it’s her. It’s her! Everyone thought I had won the lottery,” Langton exclaimed.
She couldn’t get home fast enough.
“I had to calm myself down,” she recalls feeling like a 3-year-old on Christmas morning. “Do not speed. Do not speed. It’s OK.”
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People would ask her all the time how she knew it was her tortoise that was found. She reminds them that there’s probably only one tortoise galloping free in her subdivision woods. Fredericka also has a unique fingerprint – her shell. Her beak was also goofed up.
After the excitement wore off, Langton had her $400 reward ready to hand over to Henry along with a handwritten thank-you note.
“I had that money stashed in my drawer ever since I announced it,” Langton recalls. “His eyes got as big as saucers. He was so modest and so sweet.”
Malnourished and dehydrated, Fredericka made a trip to her veterinarian. She had something affecting her eye possibly from scratching her shell. Doctors told Langton they even found marking on Fredericka’s shell from a raccoon scratch.
Doctors also told Langton they were shocked that the tortoise survived a winter in Kansas.
“That is a miracle in and of itself that she survived it,” she said.
Today, it’s still a mystery where Fredericka went on her months-long sabbatical.
It’s believed she found a home, not in the fictional prehistoric city of Bedrock, but in a compost pile of grass clippings complete with a moist underground to dig.