Sex Slaves
It's hard to imagine that these cases occur so often in recent times, but there are quite a number of them. Dr. Katherine Ramsland looks at some of the most interesting and high-profile cases where individuals and couples have become obsessed with taking sex slaves.
There are four basic victim types and sometimes their stories lead to the grave and sometimes to freedom. The slave masters are also very diverse psychologically in the way they practice this deadly game of dominance and submission.
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COLLECTORS:
Girl in the Box
It started out as a simple trip from her home in Oregon to see her friend in California, but she never got there. As she hitchhiked, she was picked up by Cameron & Janice Hooker. Instead she spent the next seven years chained, blindfolded and living in a ventilated box, wearing a slave collar. Eventually she was allowed to do household chores such as cooking, washing dishes, and cleaning up for the couple and their two children. Yet whenever Cameron yelled "Attention!" she was to strip off her clothes, stand on her tiptoes, and reach her hands to the top of the doorway between the living room and dining room.
Then one day the whole nightmare ended as quickly as it had begun.
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John T. Jamelske
Elderly eccentric millionaire built a concrete dungeon in his dilapidated Syracuse house where he kept women that he abducted imprisoned as sex slaves. When he tired of them, he released them from the miserable, filthy conditions in which he kept them.
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Tanya Nicole Kach
The teenager was seduced and abducted by Thomas Hose, the security guard at her school. At fourteen, she was robbed of the rest of her childhood as she was forced to live for ten years on the top floor of her captor's house, not being allowed to go out until she was an adult. Incredibly, her captors' parents lived in the house the entire time, not having any idea that she was living in their son's room. By chance she was rescued by the sharp intuition of a local deli owner.
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The Kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart
Homeless preacher Brian David Mitchell and his common law wife, Wanda Barzee, brazenly kidnap a 14-year-old girl from her bedroom, initiating an internationally publicized investigation. Bureaucratic errors permit the kidnappers and their victim to live out in the open for 9 months. This case is a excellent example of the Stockholm Syndrome, where the captured victim learns to sympathize with her captors.
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Kenneth Parnell & Steven Stayner
Serial pedophile Kenneth Parnell abducts seven-year-old Steven Stayner, the brother of serial killer Cary Stayner, and takes him to live in his cabin near Yosemite. By a tragic coincidence, Stevens stepmothers father had a cabin a few hundred feet from Parnell's, not knowing that his Steven was easily within the sound of voice.
Stevens seven years of captivity are partially shared when a new boy is abducted and shares his fate as a sex slave to the aging pedophile.
Years later in 2002, Parnell was free and in his 70s, but Parnell's age and frailty did not prevent him from asking a caregiver to obtain a little African-American boy for him. Parnell offered the woman $500 for the service. At first, the woman doubted that the old man was serious, but when she became convinced that he was, she went to the authorities. A sting operation was arranged and Parnell was caught red handed in an attempt to perpetrate his twisted, criminal behavior on another child victim.
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Captivity Exploits Dark Side of Human Invention
Dressed up as a hot, sexy game with an escape mechanism, the film is really a testament to depravity.
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SERIAL KILLERS:
• Paul Bernardo & Karla Homolka
It was a daring thing to do, but writer and director Joel Bender made a true-crime drama based on the infamous story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Karla was quite controversial when released in Canada in 2006, and some groups even tried to block it. They were unsuccessful. Now it's available on DVD.
The film adopts Karla's point of view throughout, and if you believe the performance you'll regard Karla as the prototypical battered wife and compliant accomplice. This can get annoying for anyone familiar with the facts, but in the end it's made clear that her story is pretty much a self-serving "reorganization" of what happened: she never apologized to victims' families, never expressed public remorse, and seemed as narcissistic upon her release as she'd ever been.
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• Elizabeth Bathory
This legendary countess is remembered for murdering women for fun and bathing in their blood to make herself more beautiful. Was there any truth to this heinous legend or was this a story concocted by her powerful political enemies?
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• David and Catherine Birnie
David's insatiable sexual appetite caused him to enlist wife Catherine into abducting, raping, and eventually, brutally murdering four women in the their Perth, Australia, love nest and torture chamber at 3 Moorhouse Street. David's cruelty finally got to Catherine who couldn't stand to participate in another murder. The victim escaped and resulted in the capture of the two serial killers.
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• Jeffrey Dahmer
Young man from a normal family, as far as any family under a microscope can be designated "normal," reaches puberty and starts to fantasize about sex with dead men. As these fantasies begin to take over his conscious mind, his link with the real word begin to disintegrate. He becomes more and more alienated with his family, who cannot fathom what is going on and are powerless to help him.
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• Ricky Davis & Dena Riley
Career criminal and meth-addicted mommy link up to fulfill Ricky's lifetime ambition torturing, raping and killing women on video. Just as police got an important tip, this depraved couple escaped, abducted a young girl and planned their suicide.
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• Marc Dutroux
After serving 3 years of a 13-year sentence for the rape and abuse of 5 young girls, Belgian justice minister released him and a number of other sex offenders for good behavior. Two eight-year-old girls, kept in Dutrouxs dungeon starved to death while he was in prison.
Shortly after Dutroux's release from jail, more young girls disappeared around neighborhoods where Dutroux owned houses. Police twice searched his houses, but not well. Hidden in a secret sound-proof dungeon in the basement, two girls yearned for freedom. Vital facts concerning the girls disappearances were kept from other police investigators.
Police ignored a tip that Dutroux offered a man between $3,000 and $5,000 to kidnap young girls, hold them for him in a dungeon and later sell them into prostitution. Dutroux's own mother wrote prosecutors that her son had been keeping young girls in one of his houses. These vital clues about the missing girls were ignored. It would be another year before police would finally pay attention to what the informants had been telling them all along. During that year when nothing was done, other girls disappeared.
Marc Dutroux, a convicted pedophile, murderer and supposed leader of an international child pornography and prostitution ring, gained worldwide attention, not only because of the horrific nature of his crimes, but also the gross negligence and amateurism of police and government officials involved in the investigation. The Dutroux case caused such outrage in Belgium that it prompted one of the largest peacetime demonstrations since World War II and just about brought down the government.
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• Gerald & Charlene Gallego
We have a few stock images that spring to mind when we think of serial killers. Maybe we see a Jeffrey Dahmer-type characterquietly savage, a misfit loner who practices his unspeakable avocation under society's radar. We probably do not, however, associate married couples with our notions of serial killing.
Gerald and Charlene kidnapped and killed ten people, mostly teenage girls, lured and captured in well-planned schemes, the ultimate goal of which was to provide a steady procession of disposable "love slaves." Depending on whose story you believe, Charlene Gallego was either a reluctant facilitator of, or a willing participant in her husband Gerald's tragic extended binge. After the couple's apprehension, Charlene claimed that Gerald had beaten and intimidated her into helping him, but Gerald, for his part, insisted that she had taken part in the assaults and killings. "We had this sexual fantasy see, so we just carried it out," Charlene later recounted chillingly. "I mean, like it was easy and fun and we really enjoyed it, so why shouldn't we do it?"
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• Gary Heidnik
He said his plan was to abduct young women, impregnate them and raise a family, but he became a torturer and killer he descended into madness.
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• I Know Who Killed Me
Plenty of vulgarity, raw gore, and close-up crotch shots in this feminine version of the Jekyll/Hyde story.
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• Judith & Alvin Neelley
Eighteen-year-old Judith Neelley lured teenagers to a horrible death, but only after they had been raped and tortured. It was the consensus of those who listened to the various witnesses that Judith was the brains behind the most serious of the couple's offenses. It was she who had persuaded Alvin to participate with her in the brutal crimes, not the other way around. When they had lured Lisa Millican into their car and molested and killed her, it was Judith who injected her with liquid drain cleaner and who then shot her.
She was also the person who shot John Hancock and left him for dead. The question for a jury was whether she had done so because she herself was psychologically disturbed or whether she had been forcibly subordinated to Alvin in such a manner that she would do whatever he wanted, even when he was not around. They had decided that she was aware of what she was doing and had not been under anyone else's power.
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• Charles Chiat Ng & Leonard Lake
Cruel, psychopathic son of wealthy Hong Kong businessman, discharged from the Marines for stealing, and his accomplice kidnapped, raped, tortured and murdered an estimated 25 captives in a fortified bunker in California -- all caught on video. When Lake killed himself with hidden cyanide tablets, Ng fled to Canada, setting the stage for one of the most expensive legal battles in U.S. history, dwarfing the O.J. Simpson trial.
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• Andras Pandy
The Marc Dutroux case left the Belgian government reeling, so judges went back over old cases to see if serious errors had been made. They re-interviewed Agnes Pandy, the mousy then 38-year-old daughter of a protestant minister.
Her whole demeanor made her easy to ignore. A lackluster young woman, blank unblinking eyes behind nondescript spectacles, she seemed to be the kind of person who wandered around the fringes of life, always overlooked. Perhaps she had issues with her father. She certainly had seemed a little odd when she first walked into police headquarters claiming that her father had turned her into his sex slave.
Her tale was one of imaginable depravity. She talked of how her father, a bookish churchman, had raped her when she was just 13. Her will had been totally subjected to his. By the time she was finished talking, Agnes had implicated herself and her father in the murders of five family members.
The body parts that would later be pulled from the mud in Pandy's murky basement, the slabs of unidentified "meat" pulled from his freezer, would offer an even more chilling glimpse into the horror.
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• John E. Robinson Sr.
This first Internet serial killer is one of the boldest criminals in recent history, using bondage and S&M to lure unsuspecting women to their deaths. His story is one of the most bizarre and lengthy homicidal careers in American criminal history.
His brutal treatment of his sometimes willing victims stands in stark contrast to his benign, fleshy appearance. Robinson compounded his murderous ways by taking the infant of one victim and selling it to his brother, pretending to be a do-good adoption broker. He seduced vulnerable or lonely women he met through Internet chat rooms and killed them, continuing to cash their government checks or alimony payments for years with just minimal interference from their desperate families and frustrated investigators.
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• Fred & Rose West
They were the typical family next door, or at least they appeared to be. But 1994 witnessed the slow peeling away of the layers of secrets hidden in the ordinary house at 25 Cromwell Street, now known as the Gloucester House of Horrors. Rose was running a thriving prostitution business, bearing illegitimate, mixed race children one after another, while Fred lured young women to stay at the house. While that may have provoked scandal, police discovered that Fred & Rose turned their children and guests into sex slaves and murdered them when they tried to escape.
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• Christopher Wilder
No doubt his need to dominate women and turn them into his sex slaves began well before his arrest at age 17 for participating in a gang rape in Sydney, Australia. Therapists noted that he wanted to hold a woman captive against her will. This charming son of an American naval officer, despite his stable childhood, became compulsive about killing beautiful young women mostly beauty queens who could be models. It was an addiction, spurred by sexual fantasies and excited by a certain type of attractive victim. Eight beauties definitely died by his hand, but he is almost certainly responsible for many other deaths as well.
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