Kiss The Girls Goodnight

by Mark Gado

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  Chapter 6: Barbara

  Over the next few years, Jamelske worked in various local supermarkets during the day. But at night, he roamed through dark alleys and deserted streets like a vampire. He was not a good sleeper, and when he felt restless, he cruised through the city in his old Comet, drinking coffee and watching the world go by. He liked the seedier, lower-income parts of town, where no one would think it strange when an eccentric loner who listened to rap music in a car loaded with empty bottles trolled through the neighborhood looking for girls. He had a way of acting like an adolescent to which younger people could relate. He spoke their language, used their vernacular and was familiar with contemporary music. That could explain how he was able to convince 14-year-old Barbara to get into his car one night in May 1995.

  Jamelske’s Comet

  Barbara was a troubled teenager who, like Amy, had a history of running away from home. By 1994, she was living in a foster home in the city of Cicero, located 10 miles west of Syracuse, where she continued her rebellious behavior in school and at home. In March 1995, she ran away again and stayed with friends for the next few months, until she finally settled in Syracuse with people she had met through mutual acquaintances.

  While he drove slowly down Pinebrook Boulevard in the south end of the city, Jamelske observed the slim, pretty teenager walking alone toward a 24-hour convenience store. He pulled his car next to the curb and struck up a conversation with Barbara, who was on her way home. He told her that his name was “Matthew” and he wanted her to deliver a package for him. He said that he worked for other people and they were willing to pay money for the errand. Never telling the girl what the package contained, he said that it was very important to get the job done and it would take less than an hour to accomplish.

  Within minutes, Barbara was in Jamelske’s car. He drove toward his house in DeWitt. He told her that they were going to Fayetteville, but the girl was unfamiliar with any of the roads and had no idea where she was. At one point, he told her to put her head down so that she could not see where they were going. Unknown to the teenager, her abductor had spent months planning for this moment, and he knew it was important for his victims not see how to get to and from his home. When they arrived at the house, Jamelske told the girl that they had to pick up the package. He took Barbara into the basement, where she saw a heavy metal door located a few feet off the ground. He opened the door and lifted himself into the tunnel. As he crawled inside, he told Barbara to follow him.

  Heavy Metal Gate to Dungeon

  “The package we gotta get is inside this room!” he said to her.

  Barbara climbed into the tunnel and followed Jamelske until they encountered a second door. After he opened it, he slid off the ledge onto the floor below. When Barbara joined him, she saw that she was in a completely different area.

  The room was all concrete, even the ceiling. She could see another room just a few feet in front of her behind an open door. An uncovered bulb hanging from the ceiling was the only source of light. The walls were covered with graffiti. Though some of the words were obscure, Barbara could read a few names. In a corner, a green garden hose emerged from a hole in the wall and rested inside a bathtub that was elevated off the floor by some sort of platform. As she explored her surroundings, she looked inside the adjoining room, where she saw a sheet of plywood covered with a yellow Styrofoam pad. She thought it might have been a bed for someone. Next to the bed, she saw three or four packages wrapped with brown paper and some string.

  “Lift it!” Jamelske said. “Lift it and you’ll see how heavy it is!”

  He told her that it contained gold and that he had to take the packages out of the room. As he carried the packages away, Barbara waited in the second room by the bed. When “Matthew” didn’t return for almost a half hour, Barbara was scared. For the first time, she wondered what she had gotten herself into and how she was going to leave.

  Jamelske later explained that the girl wanted to earn some money. He told her that if she helped him deliver the package, she could make plenty of money for just a little effort and time. He said that he had tricked the girl into the bunker as part of his plan.

  When Jamelske finally returned to the dungeon, he was carrying a bag, but Barbara could not see what it was. He pointed to her feet.

  “What’s that on your feet?” he asked.

  As Barbara looked down, Jamelske suddenly pulled a chain out of the bag and quickly snapped a lock onto her ankle. Before she could react, he locked the other end onto a ring on the floor. The girl began to scream as she pulled on the chain. She was convinced that “Matthew” intended to kill her. She yelled as loud as she could for someone to help her.

  “Calm down,” Jamelske said. He told her that he was working for other people who wanted him to do this, and said he wouldn’t hurt her. But Barbara couldn’t stop screaming. He gave her three pills that he insisted would help keep her calm. The pills were actually a prescription sedative that knocked her out. When she woke up, she was naked and still chained to the floor. “Matthew” took Polaroid photographs of her, which he said he needed for his boss. He told her that the pictures would be sent overseas and that eventually she was going to be sold to someone in another country.

  A few days later, Jamelske brought her a sweatshirt to wear and unlocked the chain. She was free to roam around the two rooms, but could not leave. He told her that she had to have sexual intercourse with him and drink a gallon of water each day. The first time they had sex, Barbara refused to kiss him and cried for hours. She tried to fight him off, but he was too strong for the teenager. He gave her a calendar and instructed her to write down every time they had sex or she finished a gallon of water. He took blood from the girl with a syringe on several occasions, telling her that he needed it to check for diseases.

  Over time, Jamelske brought the girl more blankets and some hygiene products. He fed her fast food at first, but to her surprise, the meals gradually improved over the next few weeks. Later, he brought a radio into the bunker so she could listen to music. He let her write letters to her family, but she never knew if he actually mailed them. One day, he showed Barbara recent photographs of her mother and her two siblings. He told her that his bosses would kill her family if she ever told anyone about what happened inside the dungeon. Every day, without fail, “Matthew” had sex with her.

  Barbara fell into a deep depression. She became convinced that she was going to die or be sold into slavery. She entertained thoughts of suicide and burned herself with cigarettes that “Matthew” had given her. Perhaps because of that, he decided to let the girl see the outside world again. It had been more than six months since she had been taken off the street in Syracuse. He tied the girl’s hands and feet together with rope, took her back through the tunnel and beyond the metal doors that led to the basement. They went up the single flight of stairs and into the backyard, where Barbara got her first breath of fresh air in many months. She could hear the sound of traffic behind the trees on the property, but she did not see anyone nearby. She had no idea where she was, but she imagined that she was not too far from the city. It was the only time during her captivity that she was let out of the prison.

  One day, without any notice, Jamelske told Barbara that she was going to be released. He said that he had convinced his bosses to let her go. He gave her some clothes, and together they went into the yard, where his car was waiting. He placed the girl in the front seat and told her to get down on the floor so she wouldn’t see where they were going. Less than an hour later, the car stopped. He reached over and opened the door.

  “Get out!” he said to her.

  Barbara jumped out of the Comet and Jamelske quickly drove away. When Barbara looked behind her, she saw that she was standing in front of her mother’s house in Syracuse. She almost could not believe her eyes. Her 13-month ordeal, during which she was kept locked up like an animal and forced to submit to this frightening, demented stranger, had f
inally come to an end.

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  Chapter 7: Celeste and the Skeleton

  After Barbara returned home, her parents were shocked at the story she told. They immediately wanted to report the kidnapping to the police, but Barbara refused. She became hysterical and said she was afraid that “Matthew” or his bosses would come back and take her away again. She was much too scared to go to the police, she said. Her parents were still adamant about reporting it, but every time they tried to convince their daughter to go to the police, she broke down in tears.

  During the first month she was home, however, her mother noticed an older-model sedan drive slowly down the street. The driver appeared to be looking at the house as he passed by. He was a white man, thin and pale. He wore glasses and a hat, but she could see that he had gray hair and a beard. When Barbara saw the stranger, she told her mother that he was the man who raped her. After that day, her mother never asked her to go to the police again.

  In the meantime, Jamelske tended to his precious bottle collection and made frequent trips to other towns and villages in the area. He made refinements to his bunker and moved the shelves in his basement to completely conceal the entrance. He bought larger padlocks for the metal doors and one combination lock to use when he was inside the room with his slave. It had occurred to him that one of his victims might catch him off-guard, knock him over the head with a hard object and escape, so he placed a combination lock on the metal door every time he entered the dungeon. He told his captives if he were knocked unconscious, they would die inside the prison because they would not be able to get out.

  Jamelske Home on Highbridge Road

  Outside his house on Highbridge Road, the surrounding land that he had sold to a developer was being excavated and prepared for new home construction. Jamelske had to be more cautious, because construction workers were everywhere during the daylight hours. It was not enough to stop him.

  A year passed since he had released Barbara at her mother’s house and Jamelske had not been identified as a suspect in that case because the abduction was never reported to the police. On or about August 30, 1997, while driving through Syracuse, he saw a woman walking alone on May Street, an area of the city noted for its diversified ethnic community. It was very dark and no other pedestrians were around. He pulled his car alongside the woman, who said her name was Celeste, and engaged her in conversation. She did not speak or understand English well, but they were able to communicate. Though Celeste did not look her age, she was much older than the previous victims who were teenagers. When the woman moved closer to his car, Jamelske suddenly grabbed her arm, yanked her inside and slammed the door shut. He told her not to scream or he would kill her. He tied a white tube sock around her mouth and pushed her down onto the floor, though he later denied taking her by force.

  “We are absolutely 100 percent apart on how this happened,” he later said.

  They drove over to Jamelske’s mother-in-law’s house, which was vacant because she was in a nursing home. He took Celeste into a bedroom, where he stripped her down and then tied her to the bed. He threatened to pour liquid cleaner down her throat if she didn’t stop yelling. She forced herself to be quiet, though she was terrified of the strange man. Celeste later said that he had sex with her on the bed that very first night. Then, before dawn, he put her back in the car, covered her with an old rug and drove her to his house.

  When they arrived, Jamelske took her out of the car and led her into the basement. Celeste noticed shelf after shelf of empty bottles as she walked through a long hallway. He lifted her up and forced her through a tunnel that led into the concrete rooms. Once inside, he chained Celeste to the floor.

  “Scream all you want now,” he said. “No one will hear you.”

  Celeste saw the bathtub on a platform in the corner of the room and the bed that was made out of a foam pad and plastic crates. Jamelske told her that his name was “Steve” and he was working for many different people who were interested in the slave trade. Celeste didn’t know what to think. She was shaking from fear and didn’t know if she was going to live or die.

  Over the next few months, Celeste endured a nightmarish litany of sexual perversions orchestrated by “Steve,” who took Viagra every day and had an insatiable appetite for sex. He enjoyed the control he had over his victims and never tired of inventing new ways to taunt and intimidate them. He placed a model of a human skeleton near the bed so that Celeste would see it every time she went to sleep or woke up. The skeleton was 5 feet tall. It hung by a rope that “Steve” had tied to a wall. He instructed her to punch holes in bottle caps and string them on a wire like a necklace just to keep her busy. On another occasion, he made her separate piles of screws and nails into dozens of glass jars.

  Plastic Skeleton

  Jamelske also liked to play a game with some of his victims by engaging in the unlikely fantasy that his victims enjoyed being abducted and even fell in love with him. He tried to pretend that his prisoners wanted to be in the dungeons and imagined they could have a normal relationship with him if they would just give it a chance. This behavior began with Amy and continued with Celeste as well. In a sense, Jamelske deluded himself into believing that he was helping his victims by keeping them safely locked up in his bunker, where they would not be subject to the temptations of drugs or other harmful influences.

  “She would sing to me,” he later said of Celeste. “She had the most beautiful a cappella voice with no accompaniment whatever. It was absolutely beautiful.” Jamelske later told reporters that if it were not for the abduction, she would have gone out with him and they could have had a real relationship. “Probably we, you know, if we met on the outside, she would have dumped whoever she was with immediately,” he claimed. “I think she would look at it like a positive thing.”

  Celeste was a strong woman who was determined to survive. She made up her mind to cooperate with “Steve” no matter how horrible it was to her. “I cried and prayed every day of my captivity,” she said later. “I did everything he asked, hoping he would release me.”

  Nine months later, in May 1998, Jamelske told her she would be released and instructed her to pack up whatever things she wanted to take with her. After he took her upstairs into his house, he placed a blindfold on her so she couldn’t see where she was going. They got into his car and drove off. Less than an hour later, he released her at the bus station on Erie Boulevard in Syracuse. However, unlike the previous victims, Celeste went directly to the police to report what happened to her.

  At the Syracuse Police Department on State Street, detectives interviewed the frightened woman and attempted to get all the information they could from her. The limited investigation that followed did not touch upon, nor did it come near, John Jamelske. Because of a difficult language problem, investigators did not interpret or understand the details of Celeste’s captivity. They knew something had happened, but were not sure exactly what it was. From what they could ascertain, detectives concluded that Celeste had been held against her will somewhere in the city of Rochester. She described the suspect as a white male, 45 years old, with a heavy build. It was a contentious interview due to the victim’s excited emotional state and a persistent language barrier.

  City of Syracuse P.D.

  Photo Courtesy of Author

  The victim thought otherwise. Years later, when she spoke to reporters about that day, she said that the police were skeptical from the very beginning.

  “They screamed at me and said they didn’t believe me,” Celeste said to the press. “They pounded the table with their fists and said I was making up a story.” One detective allegedly told her that kidnap victims usually wind up dead and wanted to know why she was still alive. But Celeste was unshakable in her details of her captivity. She said that she had to do terrible things just to survive and prayed every day that no one would have to experience the horror that she was forced to endure.

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  Chapte
r 8: Denise, the Fighter

  For the next three years, Jamelske remained at home. Celeste had been released in May 1998. Though she had gone to the police, the follow-up investigation came to a standstill. Some details she provided were confusing or became lost in translation. As a result, investigators made little progress. Syracuse detectives had also incorrectly surmised that the assault had taken place in another city and therefore did not make details of the case available to the local press. As a result, Jamelske escaped detection once again and was free to hunt for a new slave.

  In 1999, Jamelske’s wife, Dorothy, died from cancer. He became overwrought and suffered through a period of grief. “That was the only time I ever saw my father cry,” said one of his sons to a reporter. Jamelske even adopted part of a local highway through a state program and dedicated it to his wife. Though it was very clear that Dorothy was living in the house during the time some of the victims were being held captive, there is no evidence she was part of or even knew about her husband’s nefarious scheme. Following her death, he experienced a hiatus and returned to his usual habit of collecting and redeeming bottles for cash. By 2001, he was restless.