One year ago plus a day, executives at Channel 4 Television in London received an astonishing email. It was sent from a remote region in northwestern Pakistan by an elfin, chain-smoking Canadian Muslim named Beverley Giesbrecht. The message was one of the last she sent before being kidnapped.

Ms. Giesbrecht had decided to delay her scheduled return to London, she explained. The network would have to wait another few weeks to receive her latest video footage, filmed along the war on terror’s front line. “I may have hit the ‘mother lode,’ so to speak,” she added.

In London, that meant she’d connected with someone big. Perhaps it was Mullah Omar, the mystical, one-eyed Taliban leader. Or maybe even the godfather of global terrorism, Osama bin Laden. If the 56-year-old Canadian could pull off an interview with either man, or even snap their picture, she would become an instant media superstar. Every TV network on the planet would want her.

Twelve days later, she was gone.

Ms. Giesbrecht has been held captive by her Muslim brothers since Nov. 11. She is somewhere in northern Pakistan or in Afghanistan. Almost forgotten. Hoisted by her own petard, some say.

She is a new convert to Islam. Ms. Giesbrecht has changed identities, as well. A former magazine publisher and advertising saleswoman, she left all the trappings from her old life in West Vancouver and started calling herself Khadija Abdul Qahaar.

She refashioned herself as an intrepid freelance journalist and filmmaker. Thanks to a pro-Jihadist website she established–eventually it put her on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security watch list — she made solid Taliban contacts. This fragile, 5-foot-1 woman, a recovered alcoholic with dentures, was documenting for Jihadists the NATO-led war on terror in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Ms. Giesbrecht had been there for months prior to her abduction. Working independently with few resources, she relied on occasional payments from Western TV networks and drew from a shrinking savings account. Mainly, she depended on her network of Taliban friends. Her piety and determination impressed them; they opened doors. She had what every journalist needs: Access. News of her kidnapping reached Canada quickly. There was a flurry of muddled news stories, for good information was scarce, and a mountain of confusion.

Why would insurgents kidnap a Muslim woman notorious for collecting and disseminating pro-terrorist, anti-Western propaganda, including videos of NATO soldiers being blown to bits?

Who was involved? Had Canadian and Pakistani authorities attempted to secure her release?

Is she still alive?

Not even her few friends and associates have answers. The Canadian government would not comment this week on the Giesbrecht situation, other than to say through a spokesperson that its officials “are engaged with Pakistani authorities in seeking Ms. Giesbrecht’s safe release.”

The last direct contact that her closest friend in West Vancouver had with Ms. Giesbrecht was in July.

According to one source who spoke this week to the National Post, a video of Ms. Giesbrecht in captivity surfaced last month. It is the third video to appear since her abduction last year, but the only one not to have been broadcast on television or on the Internet.

A source familiar with the latest video says it is much like the previous two. In it, a gaunt, sickly looking Ms. Giesbrecht begs for her freedom and asks that her abductors’ ransom demands are met.

But their ransom demands keep changing; this adds to the confusion. And Ms. Giesbrecht’s own accounts of her ordeal are inconsistent. Things seem amiss.

British documentary filmmaker Phil Rees doesn’t buy the loopy conspiracy theories: that Ms. Giesbrecht is a CIA operative and was dispatched to Pakistan’s insurgent-riddled tribal areas. That Jihad Unspun, the website she started in West Vancouver, was just an agency front. Or that her abduction is some sort of deranged, self-promotional hoax.

“Complete rubbish,” says Mr. Rees, one of the last Western journalists to deal with Ms. Giesbrecht. He travelled with her for 12 weeks in Pakistan and Lebanon prior to her abduction. “Bev is a sickly woman and looks well beyond her years,” he says. “She’s no spy. And I can’t believe she is doing this for publicity. Having said that, the kidnapping is a puzzle. I can’t work it out at all.”

He first met Ms. Giesbrecht in 2006, after viewing Jihad Unspun. “I was interested in her contacts,” Mr. Rees recalled in an interview this week. “She seemed to know all these people. And she saw me as her access into mainstream television.”

The pair flogged some ideas to various British TV networks, with little success. Then Al Jazeera called. The Qatar-based TV network commissioned Mr. Rees to make an English-language documentary series based on his 2005 book, Dining with Terrorists.

“Al Jazeera hired me, and I hired Beverley,” says Mr. Rees. “She was the fixer, the facilitator.”

It was Ms. Giesbrecht’s big break. At the time, she was flat broke. But this was nothing new; she was used to hardship.

Ms. Giesbrecht and her older sister were adopted as small children and raised in Kamloops, B.C., where she spent many years in hospital. “I subsequently left home at age 13, was pregnant at 14, married at 15, separated at 17, remarried at 18 and divorced twice by the time I was 20,” Ms. Giesbrecht wrote on Jihad Unspun. “By 32, I was a chronic alcoholic.”

A Christian awakening saved her, she wrote, and she made for herself a successful career in publishing and marketing in Vancouver. In the mid-1990s, she “semi-retired” to Lions Bay, a small oceanfront community near West Vancouver. But she felt empty. Then Islamist terrorists attacked the United States. The event had on her a bizarre effect. “I embraced Islam as a result of 9/11,” she wrote.

Jihad Unspun was launched on a shoestring budget in April 2002. Its purpose, Ms. Giesbrecht explained, was to “give voice to the other side of the war on ‘terrorism.’” One of the ways it did this was to collect and broadcast gruesome video footage of Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists maiming captives and killing Western soldiers.

Not surprisingly, people around her were appalled. “My Jewish friends of 20 years wouldn’t talk to me again,” she wrote. “It was absolutely instant.” She and her daughter, whom she had given up long ago for adoption but with whom she had reconciled, were once again estranged.

Ms. Giesbrecht decided she would do better in a Muslim country, so she sold all of her possessions and moved to Egypt, where she continued to operate Jihad Unspun. More than a year later, she moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and met Phil Rees.

Their 12-week odyssey last year was a success. Ms. Giesbrecht found a house to rent in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, which they made their base. She arranged for Internet service. “Part of her brief was to make everything operative for us,” says Mr. Rees.

Ms. Giesbrecht used her Jihadist connections to help set up Mr. Rees’ on-camera interview with Sami ul-Haq in a madrassa outside Peshawar. This was a journalistic coup; ul-Haq is often referred to as the “Father of the Taliban.”

As well, she arranged access to Shah Abdul Aziz, a former Pakistani parliamentarian and a vocal Taliban supporter. That interview took place near Peshawar as well.

They also interviewed a Taliban commander, in theatre with his unit. “Our leader is Mullah Omar,” Haji Yaku told them. “We are his mujahadeen.”

There were idle days, when Ms. Giesbrecht “tended to wear on people,” says Mr. Rees. She smoked cigarettes constantly, and complained of myriad illnesses. She had problems with her back, her eyes, her toothless gums. She was a very picky eater; any sort of fat or vegetable oil made her gag. Sometimes, when Mr. Rees and members of his film crew felt like relaxing inside their Rawalpindi retreat, she insisted on talking.

“She was hard work, but worth it,” says Mr. Rees. Before they parted in Lebanon, he advised Ms. Giesbrecht on the purchase of a new Sony A1 video camera and some sound equipment.

On July 12, Mr. Rees and his crew returned to London to assemble his Al Jazeera series. The next day, Ms. Giesbrecht flew back to Pakistan, alone.

She hired a young Pakistani man to translate for her. She also hired a driver, who doubled as a cook. For the next 10 weeks, they moved about northwestern Pakistan. Occasionally, she posted updates on Jihad Unspun. In one, she marvelled at being “with the Mujahadeen, close to the Afghan border.”

Then, on Oct. 22, she posted “an urgent request … in the name of Allah.” She needed to get out of Pakistan; things had become too dangerous. She indicated that she had no funds. She asked her readers to wire her money.

Yet eight days later, she emailed Channel 4, boasting about the mother lode. The email was forwarded to Mr. Rees. Immediately, he thought about Bin Laden. Mullah Omar. “She wanted to get close to the leadership,” says Mr. Rees.

Perhaps she had come too close.