Three women who were kidnapped and kept as sex slaves in an underground dungeon in upstate New York have bared new details about their horrifying ordeal at the hands of serial rapist John Jamelske.
“He made me believe he was going to sell me on the Internet,” Jennifer, 26, told “The John Walsh Show” about her imprisonment.
And another unnamed victim said that Jamelske convinced her that “people upstairs” were her tormentors and he was her savior.
“He made it seem like he saved me from being sent to another country because they were smuggling girls back and forth and selling them as sex slaves,” the woman, who’s now 22, told the WNBC program, which airs tomorrow.
The three women, all in therapy and happy to be alive, were among five victims held captive by the 68-year-old retired handyman from upstate DeWitt, outside Syracuse.
Jamelske, who’s serving 18 years to life, admitted keeping the women, ages 13 to 53, in a concrete bunker he called “the party room” under his back yard from 1988 to 2003.
The monster’s first victim, a Native American who calls herself “Kirsten,” told Walsh she was grabbed at the age of 13, held for three years and forced to write her family that she was safe.
“They thought I was just having fun, that I ran away and was living with friends,” Kirsten says.
“After about a year or so, he let me call home and send letters, but I had to lie in every one of them. I had to say I was OK.” For the first year, Kirsten said she was kept in a 4-foot-deep well that was so cramped, she was unable to stand up. She had to sleep huddled on the floor and was forced to use a Cool Whip container as a toilet.
The 22-year-old victim – who calls herself “Jane Doe No. 2” and is interviewed in shadow on the program because she’s still terrified of Jamelske – said she was a 14-year-old runaway when she was abducted in 1995. She was held prisoner for 15 months and raped daily.
“I wasn’t angry at him because he made me believe it was people upstairs that were doing it,” she said.
“Jennifer” was abducted in May 2001, when she was 26, and held for two months. “I was kind of messed up. I was intoxicated, and I was walking in a bad neighborhood late at night,” she says. “There was a group of kids behind me, making some comments, and so when this old man pulls up and offers me a ride, I thought I was choosing the lesser of two evils.”
“That’s one bit of advice I can give: Don’t judge a book by its cover.”