by Mark Gado
Jamelske dug a short tunnel from his basement that led into the side of the smaller room. The access door was only 32 inches by 37 inches wide, just enough for one person to enter at a time. He located the door almost 4 feet from the floor so that a short ladder had to be used to climb up to the entrance. Once a visitor passed through the door, he would have to crawl a distance of nearly 10 feet before he reached the bunker. When he did, he would be perched on a ledge a few feet off the floor. There was a second door there, constructed of metal, that could be secured by a lock and hasp from either side. A visitor could be locked in and also locked out.
Though Brian imagined that the family would never actually need the “bomb shelter,” he did not question his father as to why he built it. Brian later told police that even as he was constructing the new addition, he felt “something bad would happen as a result of the rooms being built.” After it was completed, Brian went inside and discovered a sink and an old bathtub in the smaller room. His father offered several explanations for the bomb shelter. He said that he would use it to store his bottles or as a sleepover room when relatives came to visit. Brian became uneasy because his father’s habit of being secretive made him suspect that the bunker had an alternative purpose.
“I refer to it as a bomb shelter,” Jamelske later said. “I refer to it as a two-fold thing. Number one was, you know, the party room. And number two was, at the time, everybody was worried about the Soviet Union and I said that, you know, our biggest threat is probably going to be China, and one day, you know, when they have the capability, I’m going to be glad that this bunker is here.”
Over the years, several people were able to tour the bunker. One was Carncross, the man who delivered the concrete for the Albanese Ready-Mix Company. Jamelske showed him the rooms that he helped build and let the man walk around. He noticed the graffiti on the walls and thought that it was unusual. Carncross later told police that he saw a chair in the room and a mattress leaning up against the wall. He also said the graffiti painted on the walls might have contained people’s names, but he wasn’t sure.
Shortly after the Carncross visit, Jamelske also let a friend’s daughter into the bunker for a peek. The girl was only 12 at the time. Years later, she told the police what she had seen. She described the basement as being filled with thousands of beer cans and bottles. Behind one large shelf, the girl saw what appeared to be a hole in the wall. When she crawled through, she said, she found herself in a concrete room where there was no light. Jamelske gave her a candle and she was able to walk into another room that seemed slightly larger than the first. The girl said she even wrote something on the wall of that room, but she could not remember what it was.
Shelves of Bottles in Basement
As time passed, Jamelske made a few improvements to his underground bunker. He brought in a single electrical wire to provide some light and ran a garden hose in through a hole in the wall for water. In the first room, he stacked a few plastic bread trays on the floor and threw a sheet of plywood and a Styrofoam pad over them. He brought in a bucket and a chair to be used as a toilet and installed a clothes dryer hose for ventilation. His preparations were complete. He was ready. All he needed was a tenant.
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Chapter 4: Amy
Jamelske was a nomad. He liked to be out late at night and spent most of his time driving his shabby Mercury Comet through the streets of Syracuse and nearby towns like Fayetteville, Kirkville and Auburn. Though he was 53 in 1988, he considered himself a ladies’ man, especially with younger girls. He listened to contemporary music, used a teenager’s vocabulary and displayed the maturity of an adolescent. He especially liked rap tunes and played audio tapes of rap artists in his car while he indulged in his favorite pastime: Driving aimlessly around the county at all hours of the night. “Cruising,” as he called it, was something he had enjoyed since his teenage days. “If I wasn’t here,” he once told a reporter, “I’d be out cruising.’”
By 1988, Jamelske’s wife, Dorothy, was bedridden with cancer. He decided that since he could no longer have a normal relationship with his wife, he was justified in finding other women for sex. He felt it was a waste of time to develop a relationship with a woman; it was too tedious and time-consuming. It was far less complicated and much more exciting to simply kidnap a girl for sex.
Jamelske was out cruising through local neighborhoods in east Syracuse one night in September 1988 when he spotted a girl walking along South Maple Street. Amy, 14, was on her way home after being with friends. She was a troubled girl who had run away from home before and already had several contacts with police. Jamelske stopped the car and began talking to the teenager. He soon convinced her to get into his car. They drove to his mother’s house, where he had prepared a room for the occasion. He later said that they were going to have sex” and although he knew it might have been a bad decision, he did it anyway.
When they arrived at the house, he forced the girl into the basement, where there was a concrete alcove formerly used as a storage area for a well pump. There was enough room in the 7-by-3-foot space for a person to sit or lie down on the floor. He had also installed a door with a lock and a hasp. The concrete cubicle had no heat, no toilet and no electricity. When he first forced Amy inside, he chained her to the wall so she couldn’t climb out. On the surface, where the well cap protruded from the ground, Jamelske placed a wooden doghouse so no one would notice there was an empty shaft below. Years later, when Amy appeared on Larry King Live to talk about her ordeal, she said that when she woke up the next morning her clothes were gone.
Basement Steps
Each day, Jamelske would crawl into the room, carrying a lighted candle in the clammy darkness. He would unlock the metal door and demand sex from the petrified teenager. He told her that if she tried to escape, he would find her and imprison her forever. Isolated, frightened and in fear for her life, the girl was powerless to resist and succumbed to her captor’s every demand. “He controlled her by threatening to kill her brother,” Onondaga County Sheriff Kevin Walsh later told the press. “The brother was just a little kid, how Jamelske knew that, I don’t know.” For the next six long, excruciating months, he kept the traumatized girl inside that filthy cell, had sex with her each day and told her he would kill her family unless she cooperated.
By March 1989, he decided to move Amy to his own newly constructed dungeon. Making sure that she could never see her surroundings, Jamelske took her out of the pump room, and forced her into his basement. He took her down the hallway where a steel door led to a tunnel. Together they crawled through the narrow shaft into the concrete rooms. Once inside, Jamelske immediately placed a chain on Amy’s leg and locked it to the floor. He took her clothes and kept her naked for the first few days. She used the bucket as a toilet and slept with the chain attached to her ankle. Most days, it was dark as a coal mine because Jamelske controlled the light to intimidate his captive. She slept on the Styrofoam pad, and when Jamelske demanded sex, which was every day, she had to submit. He fed her crumbs for food and gave her a bottle of water every few days. She was allowed to bathe, but had to use the garden hose and an old tub, which drained out onto the dungeon floor. There was no outside contact at all. If Amy screamed, no one could hear her—not even Dorothy, who was sick in her bed on the first floor of the house. The cement prison was virtually soundproof.
Jamelske told the girl that his name was “Luther” and he was part of a huge sex cult. He said that many politicians and famous people participated in the cult, including police officers who came to the house to have sex. Other girls were involved, he said, and some of the prisoners were upstairs in the house. He said that she had to have sex with him until his superior decided that she was good enough to have sex with the boss man. “He’s like, ‘Well, every time that you don’t have sex with me it adds on to the time that you’re in here,’” Amy later said on Larry King Live. “So I just gave up basically and just laid there… just let him get it over wit
h.”
Bedding in Dungeon
Jamelske told her that no one would help her escape and she had to stay until he decided it was okay for her to go home. He forced her to drink alcohol and made the young girl keep a detailed diary of what happened to her each day. She was instructed to make an entry into the log whenever she had sex with him, whenever she bathed or brushed her teeth. He developed a code of letters to designate each activity and a time had to be inserted after each entry. The letter “T” indicated brushing her teeth, “S” represented sex and “B” was for a bath. Each day, her tormentor would come into the prison and check on the log to make sure it was up-to-date. As time went on, he brought Amy small gifts, pretending that she was his girlfriend and they were in love. He brought her candy, flowers and snack food.
In Jamelske’s mind, he thought they were getting along so well that he decided to keep her for a while. He imagined that they could build a relationship together over time and that Amy would eventually care for him.
Amy would sometimes sleep for 20 hours and was never sure if it was day or night outside. She would go through long periods of anxiety, depression, and fear. Some days, she would stay drunk and lay on the plywood bed in a state of melancholy that resembled a coma. In the meantime, Jamelske brought a Bible into the dungeon and had Amy read it to him each day. “When he heard enough,” she later said to Larry King, “I would close the Bible and the next thing you know, he’s telling me it’s time to have our daily sex.”
After months of captivity, he finally allowed Amy to watch TV. For the first time, she was able to get a bearing on what was happening in the outside world. Because the television was able to receive a local news channel, she assumed that she was in the Syracuse area. Though she knew that her family had probably reported her missing, she never hoped that she would be found. Because she was convinced that the police were part of her abduction and imprisonment, she thought that she would remain in the prison forever, a sex slave to “Luther” and living life like an animal in a cage.
In the meantime, Amy’s family had reported her missing the day after her abduction. Though she had run away on previous occasions, Amy usually went to a friend’s house. She was either found or returned home on her own. On this occasion, police checked with her circle of friends and discovered that no one had seen her, nor did anyone know where she could be. Jamelske had instructed Amy to write a letter in her own hand to her parents. She told them that she was all right and planned to come home soon. “After about a year or so, he let me call home and send letters,” she later said, “but I had to lie in every one of them. I had to say that I was okay.” Amy also called a few friends and said that she was fine and would return when she felt the time was right. She also sent an audio tape, made under Jamelske’s supervision, to her. She told them she was healthy and missed them.
By then, police had contacted postal inspectors and tried to ascertain the origin of the mailing, but it was impossible to say which post office received the letter. In October 1990, almost two years after her abduction, Amy finally called home and spoke with her mother. The girl said that she would be home soon and not to worry. She told her mother that she couldn’t reveal where she was living and would explain everything when she returned home. Police later tried to trace the call, but telephone company computers could not track the caller after so much time had passed. Amy made several additional calls, but the phone company was unable to provide a source location. In January 1991, the mother concluded that Amy was not in any type of danger and was living with friends and working in New York City as a barmaid. She told police that Amy did not wish to live at home with her parents and she was satisfied with that arrangement. Though police were not satisfied, they closed the case for the time being.
Throughout her captivity, Jamelske reminded Amy that the cult was made up of very dangerous people and that if she refused to cooperate or have sex, her family would be killed. He showed her photographs of her home, her mother and her little brother, which he had taken himself by posing as a rental agent for the landlord. Through conversations with her, he found out where she lived. He then went to Amy’s home and convinced her mother that he worked for the property owner. He managed to talk his way inside and was able to take photographs of the home and a few photos of the family as well. Amy never knew that Jamelske had visited her home; she just saw the photos. “He showed me a picture of my little brother saying that he was going to hurt him,” she told Larry King. “And he brought me a picture of my whole family and my house!”
After two years of confinement, he decided that he wanted to take Amy out of the prison for a trip to California. He told her that his bosses owned a cabin in Lake Tahoe and she had to go there to have sex with them. Though he was confident that he could control her in public, he showed her the family photographs again and instructed her not to ask too many questions.
On the day of the trip, he blindfolded Amy and put her into his car. Jamelske had his son, Brian, drive the car while he sat in the back seat with Amy. He told his son that the girl’s family asked him to keep the girl because she had a weight problem and they wanted her to lose some pounds before she could come back home. Brian, for whatever reason, seemed to accept this explanation. “My father was always a little odd,” he once told the police. When they arrived at the airport, Jamelske removed the blindfold, and together, he and Amy boarded the plane.
In Lake Tahoe, he and Amy went to a casino, ate dinners in public and toured the local sights. After just one week, he decided it was time to send Amy home. He bought a ticket back to New York and drove the bewildered teenager to the airport. After they said goodbye, Amy boarded the plane and flew back to Syracuse. When she finally arrived home, she never told her parents what had happened to her. She pretended that she had simply run away and stayed with friends for the nearly two years she was missing. Her mother and father did not believe her, but were happy to have her home. Traumatized, intensely withdrawn and terrified that her tormentor would come back to throw her into the concrete prison again, this young woman carried the secret of her torturous ordeal in “Luther’s” gothic dungeon in silence for the next 13 years.
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Chapter 5: The Junkman
After he released Amy in California, Jamelske returned to New York and resumed his life in DeWitt as if nothing had happened. He cleaned out the bunker and removed all traces of her captivity. At night, he crawled into the back alleys and parking lots of Onondaga County, rummaging through Dumpsters and garbage barrels, searching for empty deposit containers. Every week, he would cash in the bottles at his favorite redemption center in the town of Manlius. Sometimes, if he liked a bottle or needed a particular style to complete a set, he would rinse it out and add it to his collection, which had grown to over 10,000 pieces.
The basement area of Jamelske’s home on Highbridge Road consisted of several rooms stocked with dozens of metal shelves. Every shelf contained dozens of empty beer bottles of every shape, color and brand. Each set was carefully lined up and separated by size and type. On one shelf, Genesee bottles were arranged according to 8-ounce, 12-ounce and 16-ounce sizes. The next shelf had similar sizes of Piels beer and the next shelf had a different brand. All the labels faced outward and each bottle had the exact same amount of space between them. He would spend hours on his collection, adjusting the rows, moving certain sizes to other rows, dusting and cleaning the bottles in a planned and methodical routine that he repeated each month. Over the years, every inch of available space was taken up by the collection, and when he ran out of room, he would move the rows slightly closer so he could fit another dozen bottles on the shelf. His bottle menagerie was neat, orderly and predictable.
More Bottles in Basement
Upstairs in the house proper and outside in the yard, it was a very different story. Trash and junk were scattered everywhere. The front lawn was a jumbled mass of abandoned cars, old kitchen appliances, furniture, lamps, discarded tools, car tires, bro
ken lawnmowers and assorted objects that looked as if they were dropped from the sky. Tall pine trees and a 6-foot-high wooden stockade fence, which Jamelske had constructed around his entire property, prevented prying eyes. Weeds and vegetation had overgrown. From the road, a passerby could easily imagine that the house was abandoned.
Jamelske Living Room
In 1988, Jamelske had sold a tract of land that surrounded his house to a local developer. Within two years, a contractor developed the property into a multi-residential project called Waterford Woods and built dozens of modern homes valued at several hundred thousand dollars each. A new road was cut in, driveways were paved and professional landscapers planted red maple trees and ornamental shrubs. Waterford became a very desirable place to live, and all the lots were quickly sold. But Jamelske’s home remained a noticeable eyesore in the community. Neighbors were annoyed and disgusted at the decrepit appearance of his property, but could do little except look the other way when they drove by. His home was a stark contrast between the isolated junkyard and the beautiful new homes in Waterford, but the owner could not care less.
Neighborhood Around Jamelske’s Fenced Home (center)
The neighbors frequently complained to town hall about the horrendous condition of the property at 7070 Highbridge. As a result, authorities dispatched code-enforcement officers to Jamelske’s home on several occasions to cite him for ordinance violations. DeWitt Code Enforcement Officer James Conlon visited the property at least a dozen times over the years. He wrote several summonses for violations, but it didn’t seem to do any good, because nothing changed. “Everything we pointed to, he had a use for it,” he later told reporters. Conlon had no idea at that time that a concrete fortress existed underground. “If we knew about it, we would have cited him, looked at it and asked him, ‘What’s this going to be used for?’” he explained. “I probably walked right over the bunker. He walked me around and didn’t seem nervous about having me on the property.” Conlon saw the accumulated trash on the land, which included the old cars, construction material, kitchen appliances, and rusted automotive parts. The trash was an ordinance violation, and he wrote the required citation, but Jamelske seemed reluctant to pick up any of it. The junkman was just too fond of his junk.