Tanya Kach

There was something odd and disturbing about the young woman, a kind of melancholy, perhaps, some hint of darkness that even her bottle blonde tresses couldn't mask. Though he doesn't like to talk much about it now, Joe Sparico has said that he noticed it almost the first time the young woman walked into his deli. Maybe it was just his nature — even in a brief conversation with a reporter he comes across as a warm and engaging man, the kind of guy who likes to get to know his regular customers — but little by little he tried to draw her into conversation, to get her to open up a bit about who she was, where she came from, and why she seemed so haunted.

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She had said her name was Nikki, and that she lived nearby.

It was a lie, authorities now say, like virtually every aspect of her life over the past 10 years. And when, perhaps thawed by the deli owner's warm and open manner, she finally confided the truth to Sparico; the tale she told was almost unimaginably bizarre.

It was a story of exploitation and cruelty, of captivity and deprivation. It was a tragic tale of a childhood stolen, allegedly by a man who, as a security guard at a local school, collected a paycheck to protect the innocent. It was a story that touched on the worst fears of every parent, and a story that once told, would echo across the nation.

Her real name was Tanya Nicole Kach, she told him and yes, she was that Tanya Nicole Kach, the same young girl who had vanished from her father's home on Feb. 10, 1996 when she was just 14. For the past ten years, she told him, she had been kept as a virtual sex slave, forced, she said, by a man nearly twice her age to live secretly like a prisoner in a second floor bedroom in her captor's home. She was fed whatever he brought her, she said and used a bucket as her bathroom. Worse still, she said, he used her to satisfy his sexual desires and then made her detail every one of their sexual encounters in writing in a calendar book, all so he could brag about his exploits to his friends and co-workers. And through it all, she has reportedly claimed, her captor told her over and over again that he was the only one in the entire world who cared a thing about her.

He was wrong, of course. Sparico cared. He cared enough to notify police earlier this month, and authorities now contend that their investigation has confirmed the essence of Kach's horrific tale. Over the past week, they have charged two people in connection with the case, Thomas John Hose, the now 48-year-old man whom authorities claim held Kach prisoner and sexually abused her, and Judith Sokol, a 57-year-old hairdresser, whom they allege helped Hose cover his dark scheme.

Both have insisted that they are innocent of the charges, and both have been released on bail. And in what some might describe as either a bizarre irony or a touch pf poetic justice, Kach's accused jailer is being held under house arrest, a prisoner in the same home where he allegedly kept her for so many years.

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