Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  He also prevailed on local libraries to save coupons from the Sunday newspapers for him. He would get extremely annoyed if librarians did not put the coupons aside. On one occasion, he marched a librarian down to the janitor’s office to find the coupons in a stack of newspapers that had been set aside for recycling.

  “It was one of those things that made him our least pleasant patron,” said one librarian.

  However, Jamelske was not poor. He had persuaded his father to invest in the stock market in the late 1950s and early 1960s when it was booming. When his parents died, he inherited their nest egg. He also invested in real estate in Nevada and California. By 1988, when he began his career as a dungeon master, he’d sold a large area of land behind his house to a developer. By the time he was arrested in 2003, he was a multi-millionaire. No one would have guessed that he was wealthy by looking at him, though. He was recognized locally as the disheveled old man in the hooded sweatshirt and jeans who collected bottles and junk. His one redeeming feature seems to be that he went to church every day.

  While the developer built an upmarket estate around Jamelske’s dilapidated property, he let his blue-shingled ranch-style home fall to rack and ruin. His only concession was to build a six-foot fence around the acre he had retained. Even so, people who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on their modern mansions found themselves overlooking Jamelske’s junkyard.

  In the late 1980s, life for Jamelske began to change. His sons had grown up and left home. One was a high school vice principal; another, a college professor, who moved out of the state. Then his wife became bedridden.

  Jamelske began to wear designer jeans and put his hair in a ponytail. It seemed he was going through a mid-life crisis. When he started bringing home a teenage blonde named Gina, his wife suspected that he was having an affair, but she did not pursue the matter.

  Since his youth, Jamelske had spent his time cruising the streets of Syracuse and the surrounding area. He was out in his beat-up 1975 Mercury on September 17, 1988, when he saw a fourteen-year-old Native American girl named Kirsten walking along South Geddes Street, in downtown Syracuse. She was with some friends, drinking. He stopped and persuaded her to get into the car.

  “We were going to have sex. There was no doubt,” said Jamelske, who was fifty-three at the time.

  It was late at night. Her friends told Kirsten not to go with him, but she wanted a ride to a friend’s house. Instead, he took her home and chained her up.

  “She didn’t like that,” he said. So he threw her down a well and kept her there.

  “I woke up in there and I didn’t have any clothes on,” said the girl. “It was cold in there.”

  Jamelske did not consider her a kidnap victim.

  “To me, somebody that’s kidnapped is, you pick out somebody who has money and you grab them and you say I’m going to kill them...if you don’t give me a half-million dollars or something,” he said.

  Kirsten’s family reported her missing the day after she disappeared. The problem was that she had run away from home before. However, on those occasions her friends had always known where she was. This time, though, friends kept calling her home, asking where she was. The police interviewed her friends and family, but they had no idea where she might have gone.

  Keeping the girl in a well was not very convenient, especially when he wanted to have sex with her, so Jamelske began building an underground bunker to keep her in. He told the neighbors that it was a bomb shelter. At the time, the Cold War was thawing, but Jamelske was known as an eccentric so this did not raise any suspicions. He brought in heavy machinery to dig a large hole in the backyard, lined it with concrete, then covered it over. Access was from his garage, via a series of steel doors.

  One day, Kirsten woke up to find herself in the bunker. It had two rooms with no windows. There was no plumbing. She was given a bucket as a toilet. Electricity was supplied by a cable from the garage. Even though there was no escape, she was chained up in there. He intimidated her by telling her that he was going to kill her younger brother.

  “He showed me a picture of my little brother, saying that he was going to hurt him,” she said. “And he brought me a picture of my family and my house!”

  Forced to submit to daily sexual assaults, she became compliant and submissive. As part of her humiliation, he made her keep a journal of her ordeal, recording every time she was raped, brushed her teeth, or had a bath. He crowed over his absolute power over her, but gradually softened. He began bringing her gifts and developed the delusion that they had a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. She had to endure endless hours of emptiness and boredom, which she spent praying until her tormentor came to rape her again.

  The concerns of her family were allayed by a series of letters he forced her to write. The first arrived in late September. It said that she missed her family and would be home the next month. Her family recognized her handwriting. The envelope was postmarked New York, so they put an ad in the personal section of the New York Post, telling her to come home and assured her that they were not angry with her. They included a phone number for her to call. There was no response.

  Then in December, she left a message on a friend’s answering machine. Again she said she was going to return home soon. There were more phone messages and letters, all mailed from different places. She even sent an audio tape, which said, “I can’t wait to see you. I miss you.” She was crying. None of these communications gave a clue to where she might be, but at least they knew she was alive.

  Barely, though. At first, Jamelske fed her just crackers and water. Later she got Kool-Aid.

  It is not clear whether he had developed some compassion toward the girl, or if she had become a burden, but in 1990 he decided to release her. He blindfolded her and put her in his car. Then, extraordinarily, he got his son Brian to drive them to Syracuse airport. Jamelske’s strange and flimsy explanation was that the girl had a weight problem and her parents had asked him to look after her until she had lost some weight. After more than two years in the dungeon, the seventeen-year-old was well on the way to being emaciated. She was hooded, Jamelske, said, because she was going on a surprise trip. Brian said that he did not see the handcuffs. He was not prosecuted as an accessory, as by the time his father was caught, the statute of limitations had expired.

  Jamelske and Kirsten then flew to Lake Tahoe for a vacation. They were seen around town and even visited a casino—which was not the miserly Jamelske’s usual style. After a week, he gave the girl a ticket back to Syracuse and sent her home alone. Still frightened that Jamelske might hurt her younger brother, Kirsten pretended that she had simply run away from home and nothing of what had happened to her was reported to the police.

  Jamelske then returned as if nothing had happened and resumed collecting bottles and junk. He had gotten away with his first kidnapping.

  He did not try to repeat the experience right away. But then, nearly five years later, on March 31, 1995, he was cruising downtown Syracuse again when he saw a fourteen-year-old Latina on Catherine Street. He stopped and talked to her, asking her to deliver a package for him. Naïvely, she got into his car and he drove her back to DeWitt. There, she went into the dungeon to get the package and found the door slammed behind her. He left her in the dark to intimidate her. Then he persuaded her to take some pills, which knocked her out. When she came to, she was naked and chained to the wall.

  The girl fought back. She cursed him and spat at him, but it did no good. He took photographs of her lying naked and helpless on the floor. He also showed her pictures of her home and family. He knew where they lived, he said, and would kill them if she did not do what he wanted. He also boasted that he had sold other girls into sexual slavery abroad. She found she had no choice but to submit to him every day, while he fortified himself with Viagra and other performance-enhancing pills. Once a week, he hosed her down with cold water from a hose.

  Her family reported her missing, but the girl had a history of drug
use. The police went through the procedures. There was little they could do. Jamelske’s new captive disappeared into the file with thousands of other runaways across America.

  Again, after two years, Jamelske decided to release her. He blindfolded her, drove her to her mother’s apartment block, and dropped her off. After a tearful reunion, she told her mother that she had been held in a dungeon and raped every day. She gave a description of the man who had held to the police but, still frightened that he might kill her, she did not report the full details of what had happened to her in the concrete bunker. Because of her history of drug abuse and the inconsistencies in her story, the police soon dropped the investigation.

  For weeks after her return, her mother noticed a grayhaired white man driving by their home. He appeared to be staring at her daughter. When she asked who he was, her daughter said that was the man who had kidnapped her. They felt too intimidated to report this to the police.

  While Jamelske was now hooked on having a sex slave at his beck and call, he changed his modus operandi. Instead of picking a young waif, he chose an older woman—but someone who was similarly marginalized and, perhaps, whom no one would miss. On August 30, 1997, he was cruising an Asian neighborhood of Syracuse. On Lodi Street, he saw a fifty-two-year-old Vietnamese woman and stopped to talk to her. She was a refugee and spoke little English. He explained that he was lonely and needed a friend. She got into his car, but instead of driving her straight home, he cruised around town as if he was making up his mind whether to go through with it this time. Eventually, he took her to an abandoned house and raped her. Then he trussed her up in a cardboard box and took her back to DeWitt and locked her in the dungeon.

  For days later, her boyfriend reported her missing. The police took the details, but there were no leads. As she was a full-grown woman, not an underage girl, they were under no obligation to make more than a cursory investigation.

  Again, the woman was raped daily and made to do menial tasks such as poking holes in bottle caps and stringing them on a wire for six hours a day. He also made her sew quilts, pound metal objects with a hammer, and sort piles of screws. Once, she said, he dumped a military-style duffle bag full of money in the dungeon. He made her separate the loose bills into stacks of fives, tens, and fifties.

  Jamelske’s memories of this period differ from the woman’s. He claimed that she sang to him in Vietnamese.

  “She had the most beautiful a cappella voice with no accompaniment whatever,” he said. “It was absolutely beautiful!”

  Jamelske said that he was kind to her, giving her a TV so she could watch shows in the evening. She admitted that she was pleasant to him, but that was because she was so intimidated that she did not dare show any fear. She was determined not to show fear even when he placed a life-size plastic skeleton beside her on the mat where she was forced to sleep.

  “I was so scared,” she told police. “It was white. It had black eyes. It glowed in the dark.”

  And there was always the threat of physical violence. Once, when she cried after a rape that caused bleeding, Jamelske slugged her in the left ear, leaving her partially deaf.

  “I cried and prayed every day of my captivity,” she said. “I never cried in front of him again after he slapped me so hard and injured my ear, I did everything he asked, hoping he would release me. I tried to be friendly to him, and to make him laugh so that he would let me live. I would only cry when he was not around. I did not want him to hit me. I did not want to die down there in those rooms, because no one would ever find my body and my soul would remain in a cold place!”

  She was in genuine fear of dying.

  “When I thought I was going to die, when I was bleeding, he didn’t have the humanity to save me, to take me to a hospital,” she said.

  And then there was the sex.

  “I live with this every day because it’s just horrifying that somebody could do that to somebody… Like some sex animal—for his pleasure.”

  On May 31, 1998, after nine months’ captivity, he blindfolded her and dropped her off at the Greyhound station with $50 of the $70 that was in her purse when he abducted her. She went straight to the police and reported what had happened to her. However, she could provide few leads to Jamelske’s whereabouts. She had no idea where she had been. According to the police, she thought that she had been held in a shed in Rochester.

  She gave a description of her abductor. He was “a white male, forty-five years old, five foot eight inches, heavy build with a circular birthmark on his forehead.” Jamelske was sixty-three, not heavily built for an American, and there was no sign of a birthmark on his forehead. She was convinced that the Syracuse police did not believe her story. She said they told her, “Usually if someone gets kidnapped they don’t come home alive.”

  Jamelske, in his deluded way, believed he had been doing her a favor. If they had met under normal circumstances, he said, she would have dumped whoever she was with to be with him. Her abduction, he thought, was almost consensual.

  “I think she would look at it as a positive thing,” he said. “I do.”

  In August 1999, Jamelske’s wife Dorothy died of colon cancer. She had been bedridden for years and there is no indication that she knew about her husband’s crimes. Nor did he take advantage of her absence right away. He waited until May 2001, before he picked up his next victim.

  On May 11, he saw a young woman walking home. Jennifer was twenty-six and the mother of two small children. According to her own statements, she had been drinking. Other reports say that she had taken LSD. She was on her way home from a friend’s house. Jamelske offered her a lift. She took it.

  “I was pretty messed up,” she said. “I had been drinking and smoking, and I was walking to a friend’s house on the west side of Syracuse. It was cold, it was raining, and it was a bad neighborhood. Some kids were kind of following behind me. So when this white old man pulled up and asked if I needed a ride, I figured it’d be all right. I guess I made the wrong decision.”

  Besides, he seemed like a nice guy, grandfatherly. She did not remember what happened during the ride, she said. But she did pay attention to which way they were going. They were heading toward her home in Bridgeport. DeWitt was on the way. However, she did recall arriving in Jamelske’s garage. When she asked what they were doing there, he said he had to run into the house to get something. But when she tried to get out of the car, she couldn’t. That was the last thing she remembered. Then she awoke to find herself naked in a cold room. It was pitch black.

  He came to rape her. She fought back.

  “I clocked him pretty good,” she said. “He hit me a couple times. But I’m a tough girl, and it didn’t really faze me.”

  Then he burned her on the back with a cigarette.

  “I screamed and I pounded till my hands were raw,” Jennifer said. But no sound made in the dungeon could be heard outside.

  She thought she heard other screams and banging sometimes, and wondered if he had others locked away. There were drawings on the walls she imagined had been done by other women.

  After a few days, she was reported missing. The police sent out a helicopter to search the area where she was last seen. But, again, they came up with nothing.

  Meanwhile, she had to sleep on a piece of foam matting and go to the toilet in a bucket. He only fed her once a day and gave her a bath every two weeks in a bathtub did not have plumbing. He claimed he was part of a slavery syndicate and he threatened to sell her on the Internet for $30,000 if she did not do everything he said. The police were involved in it, he said, and he showed a fake sheriff’s badge that he had found on the street years before.

  He told her that the bosses of the syndicate would treat her far worse than he did. He was saving her from them. If she submitted to him sexually, they would eventually let her go. If not, they would ship her overseas.

  “I was forced to have sex with him every day,” she said, “It was part of a ritual. If I didn’t have sex with him every d
ay, then that would add on to the time that I was going to be there.”

  She said that he was skilled at brainwashing and made her read the Bible to him for hours on end. At one point, she thought of trying to knock him out and make her escape, but there was a combination lock on the door so, without him, there was no way out.

  She considered suicide. That way, at least, he would have to go to the trouble of disposing of her body. But she did not want to die alone in a cellar, without her family even knowing of her passing.

  He did afford her what he considered certain kindnesses. He gave her a television—cable, so that he could control what she watched. He would bring her food she liked, but she could only eat once a day—like a dog. This kept her weak so she could not fight back.

  She said it was her belief in God that got her through the ordeal. She would tell him that God was watching and that what he was doing was wrong. One day, she said, God was going to get him. But it made no difference.

  She worried about her two children and she begged him to allow her to write home to let them know she was alive. He permitted this. But she had to say that she was in a rehab clinic. When the letter arrived, it was postmarked Rochester. The police called every drug treatment center in the Rochester area, but all of them refused to say if Jennifer was a patient because of their confidentiality rules.

  The cigarette burn on her back became infected. She could not stand up straight and it was painful to move. So after just two months, he decided to let her go.

  On July 7, he came down to the dungeon with the clothes that she had worn when he kidnapped her. He threw them at her and told her that she was going home. She assumed that he was going to kill her and was terrified.

  “I’m really thinking, I’m done for,” she said. “I never thought in a million years that he would bring me home.”