Kiss The Girls Goodnight

by Mark Gado

  “Maybe,” Ellen replied.

  “Can you write down my cell number?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  Veronica gave her sister the cell number, and Ellen suddenly hung up. When she checked the caller ID, Veronica saw the call originated from a phone at F-M Returnables. She called the number back and spoke to an employee. Veronica described her sister, and the worker told her that she just left the store with an older man, but overheard the couple talking about visiting a car dealership. The employee called the police, who responded within minutes. After interviewing the worker at the store, police concluded that the couple planned to go to Fayetteville Dodge, a dealership located just a short distance from the redemption center.

  Manlius Police units then raced over to the dealership, where they spotted Jamelske and Ellen near their vehicle. As police approached the victim, they could see that she was very excited and nervous. Ellen began to yell for help the moment police began to speak.

  “Thank you!” she cried. “Thank you for saving my life!”

  She ran into the arms of one female officer who, unaware of the abduction, was surprised at the victim’s reaction. Ellen quickly told police that she had been held prisoner in “Andrew’s” house for the past six months and he was raping her every day.

  “I saw the gun point right at my head at the window,” Jamelske said later. “And then somebody opened the door, you know, and said, ‘Get out of the car!’ And she’s like ‘Go! Go!’ So this was her secret phone call.”

  Officers took Jamelske into custody and placed him in the rear seat of a waiting unit. Though he was surprised that police wanted to arrest him, he remained calm. He told police that Ellen had been living with him at his house for several months. He said that he had met her in Syracuse and that she came with him willingly.

  John Jamelske

  Mug Shot

  “Is this a problem that I’m so much older than her?” Jamelske said to Manlius police officer Brian Damon. “I’d just like to get this straightened out so I can go home. I’d like to be with her tonight if possible.”

  While Ellen quickly told police more about her months of captivity, Jamelske painted an image of a wonderful relationship. He said she was his girlfriend and they were making plans for the future together.

  “We are also planning on going to my 50th high school reunion together,” he told Officer Damon. “I can’t wait. Everyone’s gonna be like, ‘Wow, John! Look at you two! That’s great!’”

  As they drove into the Manlius Police Headquarters, Ellen described the dungeons where she was held, although she did not know the address or how to get there. On the way to headquarters, police drove on State Road 92, also known as Highbridge Road. When they passed Jamelske’s home, partially hidden by pine trees and a stockade fence, Ellen yelled out to police.

  “That’s it!” she screamed. “That’s the house!”

  In the meantime, Jamelske rambled to Officer Damon on the way to headquarters. He said that he was planning on a big birthday party for Ellen in May. Her family was invited and many of her friends would be there as well. But, Jamelske said, he did not want to marry her. He said that he did that once and he didn’t want to do it again. He knew that she would find someone her own age one day, and that would be fine with him. In the meantime, he just wanted to have some fun, he explained.

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  Chapter 10: Into the Dark

  After the Manlius police and the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office consulted with each other, they decided that Jamelske should be taken to the county sheriff’s headquarters in Syracuse. As he sat in the back of the police car during the ride to the city, Jamelske denied holding the girl prisoner and said that she had come with him willingly. In the meantime, police had interviewed Ellen and learned more details of her captivity.

  Detectives listened to the girl’s shocking story and realized immediately that Jamelske had kidnapped women before. Detective Schmidt had investigated Denise’s abduction and suspected immediately there was a connection between the two cases. Once they heard Ellen’s claim of hearing voices in the bunker, police were concerned that other women could be held captive. Based on that belief and the need for urgency, police decided to enter Jamelske’s home without a search warrant. The law permits warrantless entry to a home or dwelling when exigent circumstances exist, such as someone’s life being in danger or a public emergency when there is no time to apply to a court.

  Schmidt and Fahey, accompanied by Sergeant Woolley, responded to the Highbridge Road home. They kicked in the front door and, after a brief search of the ground level, descended into the basement. They saw the incredible bottle collection on the shelves that lined the basement walls. Guided by Ellen’s description, they quickly located the entrance door to the dungeons behind a set of shelves in the east side of the basement.

  Entrance to Jamelske Home

  “It was unlocked and open,” Woolley said.

  Schmidt lifted himself into the tunnel and crawled to the opposite end. Using a flashlight, he inched his way forward until he came to another metal door, which he easily pushed open. He noticed immediately how quiet it was. The second door opened to the right. As he pointed the light into the room, Schmidt called out.

  “Hello? Hello?” he said. “This is the police! Is there anyone in there? This is the police!”

  There was only silence. Schmidt came to the end of the tunnel and saw that he was perched on the top of a ledge. He had to turn his body in order to drop inside the room. It was only a few feet down to the floor.

  “I’m in!” he called out to Woolley, who was already crawling in the tunnel towards him. The smell in the room was atrocious, offensive, and reminded Schmidt of a damp and moldy cave. The room was cold and oppressive as if it were deep underground, though Schmidt calculated that the concrete ceiling could not have been more than 4 feet below the surface. He assumed that the ceiling in the basement area of the house and the one in the bunker were about parallel and, in fact, they were nearly level. Later, investigators were able to measure the actual depth as just 3 feet under Jamelske’s backyard.

  Tub in Dungeon

  In the first room Schmidt and Woolley entered, they saw the portable toilet. Directly behind the aluminum chair was a plywood platform resting on plastic crates. On top of the plywood was the bathtub. It had no plumbing or running water. A green garden hose dangled from the ceiling into the tub where the drain emptied onto the platform. Next to the tub were various items such as combs, a partially used toilet paper roll, tampons, spoons, tissues, an empty peanut can, and a Bible.

  “Above the tub, written across the north wall of the room was a quantity of graffiti,” Woolley said. “We could see the crude writing on the walls very clearly.”

  The graffiti looked old and seemed to be written with a crayon or a thick permanent marker. Woolley moved closer to see if he could read the script. Directly opposite the bed on the longest wall in the room, some words were scribbled in red across the surface. The words looked if they had been written under stress. As Schmidt scanned the light slowly over the surface of the wall, he read the words that made his blood run cold.

  “WALL OF THUGS,” it said.

  “The moment I saw it, a chill went through me from my head to my toes,” Schmidt later said. “I knew that it was all true. I’m telling you that the whole damn nightmare that Denise had told me months before from beginning to end flashed before my eyes in a second.”

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  Chapter 11: The Wanderer

  Though he did not murder any of his victims, Jamelske’s behavioral patterns mimicked those of a serial killer. He seemed to take pleasure in a kind of sadistic contempt for the victims from the very beginning, which strengthened his oblivious attitude toward their suffering. This attitude is typical of the classic psychopathic personality. In Signature Killers, former FBI profiler Dr. Robert Keppel writes that “the sadist’s satisfaction comes from the acquisition of power ov
er his victims along a learning curve that he extends from crime to crime. In this learning curve he actually teaches himself how to achieve greater sexual gratification from administering… dread, dependency and degradation.”

  Like other serial offenders, Jamelske’s obsessive “cruising” habit sometimes took him hundreds of miles from his home base. He was extremely mobile and drove his car incessantly, without any real direction, even when he was not hunting for women. Police discovered his nomadic travels through a special applications search in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and the state motor vehicle database. These inquiries, which can be powerful investigative tools, can consist of a variety of search parameters, such as color or make of vehicle, zip code searches and state-wide reviews of car registrations.

  For example, police may have nothing more than a suspect vehicle that was described as a red Chevy pickup with a partial plate containing the letter “B.” The case detective might begin an investigation by performing a special application search through state registrations in the incident’s zip code for all red Chevy pickups that contain a “B” in their license plate. If the search provides results, the detective may try to run down all those possibilities to determine if they are related to the incident in question. If no results are provided, the detective may choose to expand that same search into adjacent zip codes, and so on.

  When a police officer runs a car registration during a traffic stop through the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) system, a notation is made on that database record. In Jamelske’s case, investigators ran his vehicle’s registration on the 1975 Mercury Comet through the DMV computers to check for any police activity. When detectives analyzed the results, they found his vehicle had been run on 70 occasions by many different police agencies in New York State. Police had stopped Jamelske in jurisdictions such as Yonkers, Nassau County, Long Island, Poughkeepsie, Albany, New Paltz and many others. Infractions included traffic violations, “suspicious person” investigations, property damage accidents, and other types of unspecified incidents. They sometimes issued summonses, which Jamelske always paid promptly. The computer record provided a road map for Onondaga investigators, who were able to trace his movements throughout the state over a long period of time. Though no additional abductions were ever discovered, police had to take this investigative step.

  Jamelske’s 1975 Comet

  Jamelske possessed an outgoing, friendly demeanor that was persuasive and very effective at coaxing women along during the abduction phase. According to friends, he was always smiling and kind of happy. Except for one instance, Jamelske did not have to use force to get the victims into his car. He swayed them by promising money, security, alcohol, a good time or whatever he thought would work under the current circumstance. “Even though in certain senses he’s a loner,” his son, Brian, once said, “he was gregarious. He engaged almost everyone in conversation about everything.” Like many child molesters, who have an uncanny knack for finding and identifying troubled children, Jamelske also seemed to target that type of victim. “He definitely had that ability,” Woolley said. “I think one of the reasons he was out at night was to find young girls who were out at the same time. In his predatory mind, he must have thought if a girl is out in the street at that hour, she must have some issues. And in many ways, he was probably right.”

  Most kidnappers and sex offenders are physical cowards. It’s part of their pathology, and Jamelske was no exception. They do not seek, nor do they want, a victim who may be physically fit or difficult to handle. Teenagers fit that profile well while still being able to satisfy the offender’s sexual demands. At least two of Jamelske’s victims were runaways. In those cases, the victim’s families did not report the girls missing. It wasn’t because they didn’t care; it was because the victim had run away from home before the abduction, sometimes more than once, and had returned safely after some time had passed. “He didn’t go to a shopping mall and grab a teenager from her friends,” said District Attorney William Fitzgerald. “He chose people he knew would not be missed.” Jamelske learned very quickly that troubled teenagers made easy prey and were easier to control than an adult. They were also much more likely to believe his exaggerated tales of “bosses” who controlled the situation and “international sex-slave” organizations that wanted to buy American women.

  Jamelske’s selection of victims was the result of a hoarding mentality that guided his life. All five victims were from a different ethnic background: African-American, Japanese, Canadian, Middle-Eastern and Latino. The chance that he randomly selected victims is very unlikely. Though he later denied it, he seemed to intentionally choose girls who were ethnically different than the previous victim. That process strongly suggests that he was building another “collection,” much like his empty beer cans, the thousands of bottles in his basement and the 56 unopened boxes of Kleenex tissues. Jamelske was not only a collector of inanimate objects; he was a hoarder of human beings.

  His infatuation with young girls apparently began with Debbie, the 16-year-old blonde, whom he took into his home as his mistress in 1984. She may have been the precursor or the “trial run” for Amy’s kidnapping few years later. His sexual obsession was so all-consuming that he began his abduction career right under the eyes of his wife, Dorothy, who resided in the same house just one floor above his homemade dungeons. Though some people thought it was impossible for her to live in the same house where the women were being held captive and without being aware of what was happening, case detectives were unanimous in their opinion that Dorothy Jamelske never knew of her husband’s diabolical schemes. “There’s no indication that she knew what was going on in the basement,” Sheriff Walsh said during an interview with Larry King. “She knew from time to time that he had young women down there. But we don’t believe that she knew he was actually holding them captive.”

  In Ellen, the last victim, a sort of brain-washing effect transpired over time. After months of psychological domination, during which she was subjected to veiled threats of sexual slavery and the murders of her family, Ellen became acquiescent and seemed to conform to Jamelske’s every whim. This facade of subjugation also served Ellen’s goals as well. Her outward compliance put her captor at ease and helped to sustain his fantasy that the victims were grateful for their abduction and were even falling in love with him. He once described his relationship with one of the victims as being “buddies” and said that even after he was arrested, they remained “buddies.”

  In reality, Ellen never stopped thinking about her escape. She imagined many different ways of obtaining her freedom, but could never seem to gather the courage to act, until the day she surreptitiously called her sister on the telephone. Though it may seem reckless to have taken Ellen out in public and thereby expose himself to capture, Jamelske’s behavior was not surprising. He lived in a fantasy world of his own making that required years of effort to build. During that time, he deluded himself into believing that he was sort of a “benevolent uncle” who had only the best intentions for his prisoners. In order to sustain that mirage, he needed a “home” for his girls.

  He constructed his concrete bunkers at great cost, devised elaborate plans to hold his victims, and spent most of his waking hours dwelling on his sexual compulsions. He forced his prisoners to maintain meticulous records of their activities, such as sexual encounters, meals, and personal habits. Those diaries enabled Jamelske to relive the experience over and over again through the victim’s own documentation. The daily logs also further denigrated the captives, which added to his self-absorbed gratification.

  Dr. Robert D. Keppel

  Portrait

  As Dr. Keppel has pointed out, criminal offenders improve their “skills” as they commit their crimes. Jamelske learned more about the practical aspects of imprisonment with each abduction. How to keep the women under control, feed them, and provide clothes and toilet facilities (as crude as they were) were problems that had to be addressed and solved. Like serial k
illers who learn more about murder each time they kill, Jamelske became more adept at his trade. With each girl, the act had to be better than the last. The excitement level had to increase, because he gradually became anesthetized to what he enjoyed before and needed more to intensify his fulfillment. As that desire became stronger, so did the level of risk-taking.

  It began by letting a victim out of the bunker for a few minutes into the house above. Later, he permitted a girl to go outside the home. Soon, another victim could walk around his yard and eventually go for a ride in his car. He eventually allowed the ultimate risk: singing on a barroom stage in front of dozens of witnesses. It could almost be the fictional plot of a James Patterson novel. Jamelske’s narcissist belief that he was in such total control of his victim convinced him that he was unstoppable and immune to serious punishment. Minimizing his crimes may offer further proof that he had successfully deluded himself into believing what he had done to the victims was nothing more than a minor infraction.

  “Motive is one of the thorniest issues in criminal investigation analysis,” writes FBI profiler John Douglas in Journey into Darkness. “It is also among the most critical. Until you can figure out why a particular violent crime was committed, it is going to be very difficult trying to come to meaningful conclusions regarding the behavior and personality of the offender.” Jamelske’s motives seem hidden behind a cloak of self-deception and a preposterous claim of ignorance of the law.

  “I never considered anybody a kidnap victim,” he told reporter Jim O’Hara from the Syracuse newspaper The Post-Standard. “I did something wrong, but I figured it’s like unlawful imprisonment, maybe 30 hours of community service or something of that nature.”

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