Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  He handcuffed her and put a hood over her head, then took her out to his car. They drove around for around half an hour. Then he undid the handcuffs, took the blindfold off, and told her to get out. At last she could breathe fresh air. Then she discovered that he had dropped her off outside her mother’s Bridgeport home, though she could not remember telling him where her mother lived.

  Jennifer went to the police. Like previous captives, she could not tell them where she had been held, but she described the dungeon. There was a huge peace sign painted on the wall with the words “WALL OF THUGS” in red alongside it. But the story of her abduction was confused. The police drove her around Syracuse in the hope that she might recall something. They also tried to locate his car. She said that it was a 1974 Mercury Comet. The police searched the motor vehicle records. There was only one 1974 Mercury Comet registered in New York. It did not belong to Jamelske. She had made a mistake. Jamelske’s car was a 1975 model. The police felt her story did not hang together.

  “I was suspicious,” admitted Detective Jack Schmidt of the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Department Abused Persons Unit. “This sounded so remarkable. I don’t want to say I didn’t believe her, but at the same time I was thinking about the note from Rochester, the fact that she was a drug abuser…”

  “They thought I was making up some story or something,” she said.

  Detective Schmidt showed his folder to a sergeant who advised him to close the case. They had no way to tell if Jennifer was telling the truth, and they had no more leads to follow. But the case nagged at Schmidt, partly because of the specific details she provided—the bathtub, combination lock, the graffiti on the walls.

  Jamelske had kidnapped four women to use as sex slaves and had gotten away with it. So far he had abducted a Native American, a Latina, an Asian, and a Caucasian. Now, to complete the ethnic set, he wanted an African-American.

  In October 2002, he saw a sixteen-year-old black girl on the corner of Elk and Salina streets. She was alone. He stopped to talk to her and she got into his car. He claimed later that she was a prostitute. He asked whether she wanted to make money, and she said yes. Then they agreed a price for her to stay with him for a month. At least, that was his story. The girl denied it. She said he threw her in his dungeon, stripped her naked, shredded her clothes, and raped her. He told her there were vicious dogs that would kill her if she tried to escape.

  She repeatedly told Jamelske she hated him, and demanded he set her free her. He said he could, first on November 17, then on Christmas Day. But when those days came, he said: “The people I work for say I can’t let you go until you have more sex with me.”

  And the poor girl was in more trouble than she thought. Her family had not reported her missing and no one was looking for her.

  Despite his maltreatment of her, Jamelske developed an affection for his latest captive, whom he decided to call Meikka. Unlike the other victims, she was allowed out of the dungeon. He let her walk around freely upstairs into the house, and she even slept in his bedroom. However, there were makeshift bars on the windows. Jamelske had taken the shelves out of an old fridge and nailed them to the window frames. She was even afforded the privilege of going to the toilet on her own as there were planks nailed across the windows in the bathroom.

  But he still forced her to have sex every day. The rapes were often videotaped, and she was coerced into fulfilling his every fantasy.

  “The only thing that got me through this horrendous nightmare was my strong faith in God,” she said. She prayed every day that he would let her go home.

  Jamelske began to think he could trust Meikka. He took her shopping in nearby towns. They would go out to play pool or go bowling. They were seen taking a stroll around the neighborhood and attending church together.

  On April 3, 2003, they went to the karaoke night at Freddy’s Bar and Grill in nearby Mattydale. Meikka wanted to sing and, when her turn came, she got up on stage and grabbed the microphone. She sang three numbers to a crowd of over one hundred.

  They were a curious couple, to be sure. But no one would have guessed that she was his prisoner. Many people that night wondered why she did not scream for help. But she was young and her tormentor stood close beside her while she was on stage. She was, however, playing a longer game. He now trusted her completely.

  On the morning of April 8, he took her with him when he made his regular run to the bottle redemption center in Manlius. While he was attending to business, she persuaded him to let her use the phone. She wanted to call the church, she said, to check on the times of the services. Instead, she called her older sister and told her what had happened to her. After Meikka hung up, her sister called the number back and got through to the bottle redemption center in Manlius. She persuaded the employee who answered the phone to call 911. Within minutes, the police arrived and caught up with the couple at a nearby car dealership. They asked Jamelske what he was doing with the young girl.

  He told the police that they were friends. “We have a lot of fun together,” he said. “We have a lot in common. The only thing that she likes that I don’t is blue cheese.”

  The officers were not convinced.

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

  They planned to go bowling, he said.

  Jamelske’s story was that Meikka “moved into his house.” He described their routine outings together—walking the dog, karaoke, dancing.

  “We get on the dance floor and everybody’s like, ‘Wow, look at them, they’re having fun.’ Then everybody starts giving me high-fives,” Jamelske said. And he planned to take her to his high school’s fiftieth reunion.

  He claimed he thought the sixteen-year-old was eighteen. The legal age of sexual consent in New York is seventeen. The sex, he said, was consensual. After her nineteenth birthday party on May 12, he said, they planned to go their separate ways. He had no intention of marrying her because he did not expect their relationship to last more than a few years.

  “I know that one day she will want to be with someone her own age, and that’s alright,” he said. “I’m just gonna have as much fun for now as I can.”

  He was charged with kidnapping, rape, and sodomy.

  But Jamelske was still unabashed.

  “If this case went to trial, I think that the characterization of this as a kidnapping could be challenged,” he said.

  The police went to search his home. Outside it, Jamelske had erected a ten-foot pole in the front yard with the replica of a human head on it. From the ends of a cross beam dangled chains.

  “We didn’t know what it was supposed to represent,” said Detective Schmidt. “It might have been some sort of omen for his victims.”

  Schmidt and his partner, Detective Eddie Bragg, found that the house, with its barred windows, looked like a prison. Inside, the place was full of garbage. It was strewn with old newspapers, half-eaten food, clothes, books, furniture, pots, pans, broken appliances, and all kinds of debris. Junk was piled almost to the ceiling. However, inside the closets, they found boxes of tissues, cereal, and cooking items all stacked neatly in rows. Every inch of space was taken up. It looked as though, if one item were moved, everything would collapse on the floor. In the basement, they found row after row of metal shelving units packed with bottles, all meticulously sorted by color, brand, and size. There were more than thirteen thousand bottles.

  Behind another shelf unit full of bottles in the garage, they found a steel door, four feet by four feet. They opened it to find a short crawl way. Beyond it there was another steel door. When they opened it, they saw a bunker twenty-four feet long, twelve feet wide, and eight feet high.

  “It was dark and smelled horrible, like some medieval dungeon,” said Schmidt.

  The passageway connected with the dungeon at ceiling height. Entering, you had to turn and climb down a small ladder.
It was then that Schmidt saw on the wall a huge peace sign and the words, “WALL OF THUGS.” Jennifer had been telling the truth after all.

  There was more graffiti, too: the words “HATE” and “READY TO RUCUSS [sic], SO BRING ON THE PAIN” in a deep crimson. On the wall near the passageway, there was a crucifix and the words, “PEACE TO ALL WHO ENTER HERE.”

  Next to a yellow extension cord that ran out from a hole in the top of the walls was an eight-inch aluminum hose that pumped warm air from the house furnace, keeping the room warm and providing some ventilation. A clock radio sat on top of a filthy portable refrigerator. In the center of the room, there was a stained bathtub on top of a raised wooden deck. Victims were forced to bathe there, using a garden hose. It had a drain plug but no waste pipe. The water collected on the cement floor until it evaporated, making the room damp and moldy. An aluminum-frame chair with no seat was positioned over a pail to make a rudimentary toilet. They could also see the chain that Jamelske had used to tether his victims to a hook in the wall.

  Speaking to the press, Sheriff Kevin Walsh said, “Our big fear is we don’t know how many women he has taken over the years. Some were very young and some may have died down there; some may have even killed themselves.”

  The next day, ground-penetrating radar was brought in to search for buried bodies. None were found.

  Inside the house, there were dozens of metal filing cabinets that were stuffed with papers, calendars, and business records. Jamelske had collected hundreds of issues of old magazines, such as Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, from the 1930s and 1940s. These were carefully arranged by date. Hundreds of manila folders contained old phone bills, fuel bills, receipts from grocery stores, gas purchases, car repairs. They contained a complete record of everything Jamelske had done in his life, and his painstaking record keeping made a remarkable contrast with the extraordinary mess that filled the rest of the house.

  Police also found several videotapes. In some, Jamelske is seen dancing, singing, and exercising with one of the women as if they are friends—except for the sinister surroundings are macabre.

  In the bunker, the police found a second room that contained a grimy foam mat sitting on plastic bread trays. This was what the women used as their bed. The mat had remained unchanged and uncleaned for years. Next to the makeshift bed were two blue cloth chairs that sat on top of pieces of ripped carpet. Several newspapers were strewn on the damp floor, and everything in the cell was rotting and moldy.

  They also found a series of calendars with the letters “B,” “S,” and “T” beside the dates. Victims had been forced to write the letter S when they had sex, B when they bathed, and T when they had brushed their teeth. The calendar covered a period of fifteen years. The new visitors found the dungeon creepy. It was hard to imagine what it must have been like to be held down there, naked, in the dark, year after year.

  Jamelske seemed to have no idea of the enormity of his crime. Sheriff Walsh reported:When he was first captured, he made light of it. He treated it like it was a joke. He was telling us that the young woman that he had with him—a sixteen-year-old African-American woman, who really broke this case—that she was just a friend and that they had a relationship and they were planning to have a birthday party for her. And he treated the whole thing as if he thought that he was going to get off, and worst-case scenario he’d get a slap on the wrist and maybe get some community service.

  Jamelske insisted that he had never hurt anyone. Some of the girls had even benefited from captivity, he said. His lawyers spent days trying to make it clear to him that abducting women from the streets and holding them in a dungeon was kidnapping.

  Eventually, Jamelske pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree kidnapping, saving his victims from appearing in court to testify against him. However, when he appeared in a packed Onondaga County Court to face sentencing, the district attorney read the victims’ statements into the court record.

  Kirsten said she still felt the pain of being held as a sex slave in Jamelske’s medieval dungeons.

  “I am haunted every moment, even in sleep, by the thought of my months with Mr. Jamelske,” she said. “The cold, dampness, darkness, and loneliness. I will never forget the constant hunger, thirst and fatigue. The thought of death… I cannot speak of the terrible things he did to my body and made me do to his… When I think of the things I have had to do just to stay alive, I cannot believe I am still here.”

  “The threats and intimidation… left her with great fears and anxiety that have impacted and directed her life for the many years that followed,” the DA told the court.

  Jennifer said:I have lived my life for two years knowing that sick old man has existed and has done to other girls what he has done to me. I have lived in fear ever since. John Jamelske is a sick and evil old man and should be punished. He has no right to take away my freedom, my right to breathe fresh air or my right to be treated like a human being. He made my children think I was dead. That hurts more than everything else in the whole world. They had to endure pain, so let his punishment be swift and just. Maybe then, I will at least be able to sleep at night.

  In Meikka’s statement, she said:I almost gave up hope when you brought my clothes to me in a million shredded pieces, telling me that these people trained those dogs to go after my scent. I felt completely stripped down to nothing… You will never be able to know the fear I felt, being raped every day, sometimes three times a day. The nightmares I have, remembering how I had to fulfill your sick fantasies, making disgusting videos, being humiliated, never having any privacy, not even to use the toilet or the shower. Being chained to a fence like a dog. I hope with time I will be able to forget the horrifying sex you forced me to have day after day after day, relentless, for six and a half long months, never leaving me alone, not for one day. You are the sickest man I have ever known… I hope you die in a cold cement cell like you wanted us to do.

  Throughout it all, Jamelske stood there impassive. He was a small, frail, harmless-looking man and, to those that knew him, the most unlikely slave master.

  The judge was outraged by what he heard and by Jamelske’s apparently indifferent attitude.

  “You are a sick coward,” he said. “You’re an evil man. You’re a kidnapper and a rapist and a master manipulator of people and the truth. You took your American dream and turned it into a nightmare for these five women. Your reign of terror is over!”

  Jamelske was sentenced to eighteen years to life.

  “Mr. Jamelske, there is no question in my mind you should die in prison for what you have done to these five women,” the judge said.

  Jamelske’s attorney argued that the sentence should be reduced to fifteen years, But the DA thought eighteen years was hardly adequate:In eighteen years, your honor, perhaps, perhaps, this defendant may appear before a parole board. Those members of that parole board may see a pathetic old man in front of them who has lived in a cell for eighteen years and they may say that he couldn’t hurt anyone. The irony is that the cell he will live in for the next eighteen years, and probably for the rest of his natural life, was far more adequate, will be far more comfortable, will have far many greater creature comforts than is the hellhole that he kept his victims for so long a period of time, and I truly believe, judge, that that parole board will see this defendant for exactly what he is and never let him see the light of day.

  Others sought harsher punishments.

  “He should be tortured for what he did,” said Kirsten’s cousin. “As long as he kept them, each one of the victims should be allowed to torture him for that length of time… She was a baby when he took her. She had no teenaged life because of him.”

  Throughout the proceedings, Jamelske stood by the defense table, emotionless. He even appeared unmoved by the sentence. Asked if he had anything to say, Jamelske addressed the court.

  “I’m just truly sorry for what I did,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it and I’m just sorry for what I d
id and how it’s affected everyone and God bless all of them.”

  But no one believed that Jamelske really felt any remorse.

  “I wanted to puke when he started to cry in court,” said Kirsten’s cousin.

  From Onondaga County jail across the street from the courthouse, Jamelske was transferred upstate to Clinton Prison, better known as Dannemora, the end of the road for New York’s worst criminals.

  As part of Jamelske’s plea agreement, his assets would be sold off and the proceeds divided among the victims. He was thought to be worth between $2 million and $8 million, though no amount of money could compensate them for the hell they had been through.

  Interviewed in jail, Jamelske was unrepentant, claiming that his victims were prostitutes.

  “We would just together like, you know: If you want to stay, this amount,” he told the Syracuse Post-Standard. “When that time would come, sometimes I would say, ‘If I give you so much more, would you stay another six months?’ or this or that. If she said, ‘No,’ well, I’d say, ‘How about if I double the money?’ or ‘How about if I add this or that or whatever?’ They would say, ‘Okay, we’ll extend it.’”

  The women, he said, were “buddies.” He did, however, admit to being unconventional.

  “I’ve always said, you know, I’m unorthodox, and I’ve said to hundreds of people, I’m a little bit crazy.”

  In the end, he said, he was unlucky. When the police turned up at Fayetteville Dodge, he said to Meikka, “We’ll just get in the car.”

  According to Jamelske, she then said, “Go! Go! Go! Go!”

  “And stupid me, I should have had the key in my hand. It was the darnedest thing. At the time I said to myself, ‘Stupid me.’ So, as I was reaching my hand in my pocket sitting down, which is very hard, you know, with tight jeans, I saw the gun point right at my head at the window. And then somebody opened her door, you know, said, ‘Get out of the car.’ And she’s like, she’s like, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ So this is her secret phone call.”