IA - Wife accused of kidnapping husband calls him abusive, alcoholic adulterer

According to investigators, Derek Groppetti had arrived in South Dakota a day earlier and gone to the home of his wife's family. That evening, the two got into an argument that turned physical, and Derek suffered minor injuries.

The next day, Olson agreed to take Derek Groppetti to the airport so he could catch a flight back to California, but the father-in-law said he needed to make a stop and asked his son-in-law to help him sweep out a grain bin at an abandoned farm a few miles away, across the Iowa border.

After the two men went inside, Olson reportedly climbed up a ladder, locked the bin's top panel, then climbed down outside and locked the door with Derek Groppetti still inside. "Craig said that he locked him in a bin ... just to make him calm down," states a sheriff's report. "Craig stated that his daughter came out to the site where the bins were, and she was going to try to talk to Derek, while he was in the bins, 'You know, through the wall so it would be civil.'"

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After the kidnapping but before her capture by law enforcement, Oriana Groppetti took out a restraining order against her husband in California and told them that she was the one who needed protection.

It says Derek Groppetti is a violent, abusive alcoholic who's been cheating on his wife for months with another married woman...

Perhaps not surprisingly, her restraining order application doesn't mention anything about her father locking Mr. Groppetti in a grain bin a few days earlier.

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The man left in a grain bin by his father-in-law this summer said Thursday that he called 911 and reported being kidnapped only so he could get a ride to the airport.

The victim in the kidnapping trial of Craig Olson and his daughter, Oriana Groppetti, also told jurors that he never felt threatened, despite running from his family and later telling police that being "locked" in a northwest Iowa grain bin was "like a horror movie." "I don't honestly believe they were trying to kidnap me. I used the word in the heat of the moment because I didn't have a better word to describe the situation," Derek Groppetti said.

When asked to explain why he told police he'd felt threatened, he said he just wanted to go home and he "had a lot going on."

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An Iowa jury has found a Visalia woman and her father guilty of false imprisonment for locking up the woman’s husband — also from Visalia — in a grain bin nearly five months ago.

Oriana Groppetti and her father, Craig Olson of Canton, S.D, each faces up to one year in jail on the misdemeanor charge...

The jury found the pair not guilty on two felony kidnapping charges, and on charges of assault while committing a felony. The kidnapping charges carried possible prison time if convicted.

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