CORTLAND, N.Y. -- On Aug. 24, Angela Helms dropped off a new outfit she had bought for her 25-year-old daughter Mary Bartholomew.

"She said, 'Oh great, now I'll have something to wear tonight,' and I asked her, 'Where are you going?'" Helms said.

Bartholomew said she was going to Elmira to meet a man she met on Facebook through a mutual friend, her mother said. The two had already met in person the week before at a party, she said.

But the man from the party did not seem at all like the man Bartholomew met a week later, Helms said. That meetup would lead to a months-long investigation into Bartholomew's whereabouts.

Bartholomew became a missing person the next morning.

Helms said she knew something wasn't right when her daughter disappeared. Bartholomew has four children, ages 6, 4, 3, and 1, who she was very close with, Helms said.

"I knew she would never leave them," she said.

Jon Turner

The man, 23-year-old Jon Turner, kidnapped Bartholomew and forced her into a brutal trip across the country, according to the Nye County Sheriff's Office. Nye County is northwest of Las Vegas.

After the pair left Cortland County, fewer and fewer credible leads came up about their whereabouts, Helms said. What started out as an active search through the streets became more passive, she said.

Her daughter and the man could have been anywhere.

Helms said she would go to parking lots and hand out flyers. She was making missing person posts online, some of which had been shared thousands of time. She was sorting through hundreds of tips from people who thought they saw her, and working with different missing persons advocacy groups across the country.

But from talking with mothers of other missing women, Helms eventually lost hope in seeing her daughter again.

"I honestly believed that she was dead," Helms said.

That changed when she received a two-sentence message this week from another grandparent of one of Bartholomew's children:

"Are you awake? Mary's on the phone."

Bartholomew was found in Beatty, Nevada, at 8:21 p.m.(PDT) Thursday night, the sheriff's department stated, more than 2,500 miles from her Cortland home. She was beaten and injured in a motel.

Bartholomew told investigators Turner had assaulted her and choked her until she was unconscious, then brought her to the motel where he handcuffed her to some furniture and continued to hit her, deputies said. She was able to escape and alert motel staff, who called authorities, according to police.

Turner was arrested and charged with battery domestic violence with strangulation, battery with a deadly weapon, assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment, first-degree kidnapping and other charges, according to the Nye County sheriff.

He is being held in Nye County jail on $275,000 cash bail or bond.

From speaking with her daughter, Helms believes Turner became obsessed with Bartholomew and got increasingly violent as time went on. When Bartholomew went over Turner's house in August, he told her they were going to be together forever and threatened to kill her family -- and her four children -- if she tried to leave, Helms said.

Turner rarely left Bartholomew alone during the over-two-month period, Helms said. She said her daughter thought about trying to escape earlier, but was afraid of what would happen if Turner caught her.

"If you fail, you're going to die," Helms said Turner told her daughter.

Turner had already been beating the woman and said he had knives and guns, Helms said. At some points he forced her to walk through the woods near Big Bear Lake in California, where their car was recovered by California Highway Patrol officers in early September, according to The San Bernadino Sun.

Helms said Bartholomew told her they walked more than 200 miles to Nevada after ditching the car, sleeping outside with Bartholomew either tied up or handcuffed.

Bartholomew is still in a hospital in Nevada, but she should be able to come home to her family next week, her mother said. Her children, who have been told she went on "a trip," are eager to see her, she said.

Knowing Bartholomew is alive, Helms said she knows that they can make it forward together through whatever comes next. But she said she wanted to remind people about those who are less fortunate, about those who have had loved ones missing for years without any answers.

"Luckily, she made it out alive," Helms said. "I've talk to other mothers whose daughters did not, and my heart goes out to them."