Kiss The Girls Goodnight

by Mark Gado

  On the night of May 1, Jamelske was driving along Memorial Highway, near the location where he had abducted Amy, his first victim. He saw a young woman walking on the sidewalk alone and approached her. Her good looks reminded him of his deceased wife.

  “As I drove by,” he later told reporters, “I just saw her and she was my wife when my wife was 26. And she was 26 at the time. It was ironical.” He pulled his car over and engaged the woman in conversation. The woman was reluctant.

  “I was pretty messed up,” she said later. Her name was Denise, a 26-year-old woman originally from Albany, who had moved to Syracuse the year before. “I had been drinking and smoking and I was walking to a friend’s house on the west side. It was cold, it was raining and it was a bad neighborhood… he asked me if I needed a ride. I figured I’d be all right.” She didn’t know how wrong she was. Denise got into the car and they began to drive around the city. Jamelske gave her some beer and they spent a few hours drinking and talking.

  “We’re just having one hell of a good time,” he said later during an interview. “We’re talking about everything you can possibly think about. I know she had the cutest dimple on one side of her face.”

  Denise said later that she did not know how long they were in the car. She remembered pulling into a garage, but by then she was drunk and didn’t know where she was or how she got there. She stumbled out of the car into the darkness and that was the last thing she could recall.

  When she woke up, she was naked inside a cold, dark concrete cell. For a while, she was totally disorientated and did not know where she was or what happened to her. She thought she was in a tomb and questioned her own sanity. When the lights came on and Jamelske finally entered the room, he said she could not leave and there was no one to help her. He told the horrified woman that he was going to sell her over the Internet for $30,000, and she would never see home or her family again.

  “I had to have sex with him every day,” Denise said later. “He said that was part of the ritual. I bathed once every two weeks with the garden hose in the tub. I had to go to the bathroom in a bucket. It was disgusting.”

  Jamelske controlled everything she did, including when she was able to eat. He turned the electricity on and off at his whim and brought in a bucket when he wanted her to relieve herself. Not knowing what would happen to her, Denise tried to keep her fears at bay. “I felt like I could have killed him,” she said. “I thought about it every day. But I didn’t know what was on the other side of the door, if I could get out of there.”

  As Denise became accustomed to the concrete dungeon, she began to study the graffiti on the walls. She saw female names and concluded the writings were made by other prisoners. Each day, she dwelled upon thoughts of murder and torture, which nearly drove her to the breaking point. From time to time, she heard muffled screams in the distance and was never really sure where they originated. She didn’t know that the screams were actually recordings played by Jamelske behind the walls to keep his victims in a state of terror and confusion. He told her that he was working for powerful people who would never go to jail even if she was rescued and told the police everything she knew. He showed her a badge and said the police were in on it and her situation was hopeless. She pounded on the walls in frustration until her hands were raw and bleeding.

  Graffiti in Dungeon

  Unlike some of the other hostages, Denise showed outright hostility toward her captor. She defied him at every opportunity and always looked for a way to escape. “I tried to the point where I was so mad, I wanted to kill him,” she later said on Larry King Live. “Then I realized that there was (sic) combination locks on the doors and the only one who knows the combination was him. So if I knocked him out and killed him, I’m going to be stuck down there with a dead body and probably no chance of ever getting out again.” She pleaded with him, saying that she needed to spend more time with her two small children and had to return home for their sake. That’s what kept her going, she later said: thoughts of her children, her mother, the will to live and her faith in God. She prayed every day for someone to rescue her.

  Jamelske apparently tired of the girl’s resistance and her combative attitude. Less than two months after Denise was abducted, he decided to let her go. He came into the bunker one night in July and told her that he would let her go home. She was overjoyed but apprehensive. When he removed her from the dungeon, Jamelske made her wear a hooded sweatshirt backward so she couldn’t see anything. “I was terrified,” she said. “I thought he was going to kill me. I’m thinking in my head oh, God, this is it! And then he tells me he’s got to handcuff me… I’m thinking I’m done for. I never thought in a million years that he would bring me home.” Then he tied her hands together and placed her in his car. They drove for 20 minutes until Denise felt the car stop and heard the door open. He untied her and told her to step outside. When she did, he quickly drove away. Denise discovered that she was standing in front of her mom’s house in Bridgeport, New York. She was home.

  Police had been investigating her disappearance. Her family had reported her missing to the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO) back in May. Detective Jack Schmidt of the Abused Persons Unit (APU) was assigned to the case. At that time, Schmidt was a 27-year veteran of the department. He thought he had heard it all. When he interviewed Denise, Schmidt was amazed at the tale she told: Two months of rape and captivity, a strange balding man who imprisoned her in a concrete dungeon, little food and water. It was a fantastic story for sure. Denise described the suspect as a white male, 45-50 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall, gray hair and a birthmark on his forehead. From the beginning, Schmidt had his doubts about her, because investigators later found that some of the details she offered were inaccurate. He knew victims in other cases who had concocted phony complaints and he was cautious not to let it happen again. Though police did not discount Denise’s statement, they could not be sure she was telling the whole truth.

  Onondaga Co. Sherff’s Office

  Courtesy of Author

  Detective Schmidt and the Sheriff’s Office were lacking one crucial piece of information. Because Jamelske’s third victim, Celeste, reported her abduction to the City of Syracuse Police, OCSO investigators were not aware of any previous abduction that had similar details. They did not know Celeste had described a prison that was virtually identical to the one in which Denise was held captive. As a result, Denise’s kidnapping was treated as if it were a one-of-a-kind event, when, in fact, it was part of a series of crimes committed by the same suspect.

  Captain Rick Woolley, the former supervisor of the APU, said investigators immediately checked for similar reports and did not find any. “As far as we were concerned,” he said, “it was the only case of a woman being abducted and held in a concrete prison. And remember, the first two victims never reported their abductions.” Woolley, a 27-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department who had also worked in forensics and homicide investigation, saw a few inconsistencies in Denise’s recollection of events. “We did everything we could to investigate the complaint,” he said recently. “Looking back now, I am confident that we could not have done anything differently.”

  Detectives took Denise out into the streets and drove her around for hours in an effort to trace the route she took to the suspect’s house. She looked through department mug shot books in an attempt to identify a suspect. Police tried to find the suspect’s vehicle, as Denise had described it, through DMV records. All their efforts failed to produce a workable lead.

  “I was suspicious of her story,” Schmidt later admitted. “This sounded so remarkable. I don’t want to say I didn’t believe her, but at the same time a lot of things were running through my mind.”

  Denise described the house that Jamelske had taken her to that night in May and provided many details about the concrete prison. She said that she thought she might have been in a city other than Syracuse, but could not be sure because she did not know her way around. When she described t
he dungeons, however, she was very specific. She told Detective Schmidt about the tub and the garden hose, the chair-toilet, the Styrofoam bed and all the graffiti in the rooms. She was adamant about one phrase that she saw—a few words scribbled in thick red letters across the wall by the bed. It looked as if it had been written with an unsteady hand, because the letters were crooked, uneven and tilted on an angle pointed up to the right. For her, it evoked terrible images of underground dungeons and medieval tortures, and when she said the words aloud, it made her shudder in fear.

  “WALL OF THUGS,” it said.

  “Wall of Thugs” Graffiti

  www.crimescape.com

  Chapter 9: Ellen, the Girlfriend

  In some ways, the story of Ellen, Jamelske’s fifth and final victim, is the most bizarre. Yet the details of her abduction and captivity are perfectly understandable when viewed within the framework of his insidious methods of control over his victims. Though the 16-year-old girl had several chances to escape during her ordeal, including one opportunity when she sang on stage for an audience, she chose not to take the chance. She later explained that she was afraid that Jamelske would either kill her or her family. So total was his control over his last victim, so psychologically disabling was Jamelske’s intimidation over her, that the girl was unable to ask for help even when it appeared to be easily within her grasp.

  Such behavior is not unusual in long-term abductions. Victims learn to depend on their captors for everything, including food, shelter and clothing. The abductor is usually the only human contact for a prisoner and sometimes the only source of information. Jamelske did not let his victims listen to a radio or watch television for weeks at a time. A suspect can manipulate the emotions of a victim by supplying false or misleading information, like Jamelske did when he told his captives that his “bosses” had killed before and would do so again unless they got what they wanted.

  Ellen was born and raised in Syracuse. She had run away from home on several occasions in previous years. Her family could not control her and had appealed to the courts for assistance. Ellen dropped out of school and was eventually placed in a foster home.

  On the night in October 2002, Ellen was hanging out with friends on the front porch of a house on South Tenth Street in Syracuse. It was about 2 AM, according to her statements to police, and she was getting ready to go home for the night. A car pulled up to the curb driven by an older man, who asked the girls if they liked to “party.” The man, later identified as Jamelske, invited Ellen to go for a ride and maybe even make some money. She agreed and got into the car. “He frequently drove through the streets during early-morning hours,” Woolley said recently. “He was always searching for bottles and cans, but it also gave him an excuse to be out there without raising suspicion. In the meantime, he could search for young girls as well.”

  They drove around the city for a while until they arrived at Jamelske’s house on Highbridge Road. He told her his name was “Andrew” and that she could make a lot of money if she would pose nude and let him take photographs of her. Ellen refused and told him that she was not into that. He explained that he was in a business in which he sold nude photos of women to people overseas, who posted them on the Internet. He said his boss, whom he didn’t name, controlled everything he did and he had to do what he was told.

  As he spoke, “Andrew” led Ellen down into the basement, where she saw a large metal door. He pulled the door open and revealed a narrow tunnel. He convinced Ellen to follow him into the shaft which led to another door. When she got to the end of the tunnel, she climbed down a short ladder until she stood on a concrete floor. The room appeared to be something like a bathroom, because she saw an elevated bathtub on some sort of platform and a toilet seat that looked like one “which handicapped people use where there is a pot underneath it for when they go to the bathroom.” She also observed the green garden hose hanging from a hole in the wall dripping water into the tub. She was confused as to what the tub was for since she did not see any faucets or plumbing.

  Tub and Toilet in Dungeon

  When she entered a second room, Ellen noticed that it was larger and different from the previous room. It had a small television that sat next to what appeared to be a bed, but was nothing more than a sheet of plywood covered with a mat on top of a few plastic crates. Ellen could see women’s names scribbled on the wall and other graffiti as well. She read the words, “READY TO RUCUSS” and “BRING ON THE PAIN.” She didn’t know what to think, but suddenly became very frightened when she realized she had been tricked into going into a dungeon.

  For the first week, Ellen ate crackers and Kool-Aid and little else. Her captor entered and left at all hours, so she never knew when to expect him or how long he would stay. She later said that on or about the fourth day, “Andrew” had sex with her. He explained that his business required him to report all the details of his sexual acts to his boss. They had to discuss how many times they had sex, her performance during the act and whether or not he and his boss were satisfied with her. “Andrew” told her that she had to have sex with him every day and sometimes twice a day. He said the only way she could ever be released was if his boss was satisfied on how well she performed.

  Like Jamelske’s other captives, Ellen had to keep a calendar of each day’s events like sex, bathing, TV habits, and even when she used the toilet. Jamelske also took photographs of her when she was naked and showed her pictures of other nude girls, including one of a girl with blond hair wearing a Little Mermaid mask. He told her that he was posting the girl’s photo on the Internet to see if someone would buy her. Occasionally, Ellen heard the sound of women screaming. She could not determine where the screams were coming from, but they seemed to originate from behind the wall in the smaller room. The screams terrified her and made her think that she would be tortured at any time. Jamelske told her that many police officers were involved in the abduction business, and he showed her police hats and badges to convince her. Ellen believed him because he appeared sincere and she had no evidence to doubt him. He explained that the cops had killed people in the past and would kill again if any of them, including him, were arrested.

  Over time, a curious thing happened. Jamelske began to feel a true emotional attachment toward the young girl. As a result, Ellen was able to build a somewhat friendly relationship with her captor. He began to trust her. From time to time, he let her out of the dungeon and into the house above. He even permitted her to walk outside into the fresh air under his supervision. She was able to convince him that she would go along with his business and not cause any trouble.

  Their bond strengthened over the next few months, and Jamelske began taking Ellen to the local supermarket with him. They went bowling and played billiards in Syracuse. During these excursions, Ellen had to stay close by his side and do exactly as he said. She interacted with people in the bowling alley and local stores, but she never asked for help, nor did she try to escape. She later told police that she was too scared to do anything that would upset “Andrew” because she always remembered what he told her: If he was caught, his people would come back for her and kill her.

  The more Jamelske took Ellen into public, the more he seemed to trust her. They went to the bank, McDonald’s for hamburgers, and to the post office, where they waited in line together. One night in March 2003, he took Ellen to Freddy’s Bar and Grill, a bar in the town of Mattydale, where karaoke was popular with customers. It was owned by a local resident who knew Jamelske well from the neighborhood and was accustomed to seeing the strange man go through trash bins and walking along highways looking for empty bottles and cans. When the music began to play, Ellen wanted to sing. Jamelske resisted at first, but then agreed as long as she stayed near him. Ellen went to the stage with him by her side and sang in front of the crowd. Cindy Ormond, who ran the karaoke night for the bar, knew right away there was something not quite right with the odd-looking pair.

  Freddy’s Bar and Grill

  Loopnet.com />
  “They really stuck out like a sore thumb,” she later said to reporters. “They were clearly not a couple.” Ormond watched the strange pair who made her feel somewhat uneasy. She could see that the girl was very young, but because she was not drinking nor did the girl indicate that she was in distress, Ormond did not intervene. Ellen never cried out for help during the time she was on stage and never told anyone at the bar she was being held captive. After she finished singing three karaoke songs, the quiet pair left Freddy’s and returned to the home on Highbridge Road.

  The following Sunday, April 8, 2003, Jamelske saw that he had accumulated a large quantity of bottles and decided to redeem them at his favorite store, F-M Returnables, in the nearby village of Manlius. Once he loaded up his dilapidated Comet, he retrieved Ellen from the dungeon, and together they drove over to the redemption center. The worker inside the store happened to be Terry Carncross, the wife of Jamie Carncross, who had delivered the concrete for the construction of the bunkers some 15 years before. Carncross and the old man had become friends and their wives had also met and liked each other.

  When Jamelske went into the store to redeem the bottles, Ellen finally decided to take a chance. She told him that she wanted to call a local church to find out what time services would be for that day. He let her use the phone while he unloaded the bottles from his car. As soon as Ellen saw him occupied, she dialed her sister Veronica’s phone number.

  Ellen told her sister that she was in Fayetteville with an older man who had kidnapped her and was raping her. Her sister could barely understand her because Ellen spoke in a very low voice, almost a whisper. Veronica could hear a man’s voice in the background and assumed that Ellen could not speak freely.

  “Can you call me back?” she said.