N.Y. man accused of raping captive girls in dungeon

DEWITT, N.Y. -- In a whispered phone call from a bottle return business, the 16-year-old told her sister she was being held captive and raped.

The call led police to a weathered, blue, ranch-style house, hidden behind a wall of 20-foot evergreens and fenced off from neighbors.

There, police say, 67-year-old John Jamelske, a widower and retired handyman with two sons, systematically imprisoned and raped at least four young women in a two-room dungeon, beginning in the late 1980s, before releasing them. The 16-year-old allegedly had been held for six months.

Jamelske's lawyer insists it is not "a 'Silence of the Lambs' scenario," but police say they are seeking other possible victims.

During a search of the house, deputies said they found photographs of women chained to a wall. They also say they found diaries Jamelske forced his victims to keep, recording details such as when they had been raped, when they showered and when they brushed their teeth.

"He may have been just a handyman, but he apparently created his own world where he was the ultimate ruler, a king," said Dr. Alan Manevitz, a psychiatrist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York.

Jamelske's house, with a dented car parked on the driveway and a rusted flagpole in the front yard, is dwarfed by $500,000 homes in this affluent community just outside Syracuse in central New York.

A steel basement door leads through a series of crawl spaces and doors to two 12-square-foot rooms with 8-foot ceilings, said Onondaga County Sheriff Kevin Walsh.

The first chamber in the concrete bunker was furnished with a small tub and chemical toilet. The second had a microwave oven and a mattress. There is an intercom and ducts for heating and electricity.

The basement door was hidden behind thousands of empty beer bottles and cans, neatly stacked from floor to ceiling.

Jamelske was charged April 9 with kidnapping, rape, sexual abuse and sodomy after the rescue of the 16-year-old girl. She was only able to sneak the phone call to her sister when Jamelske took her out to run an errand after six months of captivity, police said.

Prosecutors plan to also present evidence to a grand jury in the cases of three other women who came forward with similar accounts, First Chief Assistant District Attorney Rick Trunfio said. None has been publicly identified.

"It's scary to think about," said Lynnette Bonner, a teacher who lives about a mile from Jamelske's house. "My daughter came to visit and went jogging right by the house. I drive by it twice a day." Neighbors said they rarely saw Jamelske.

Police said Jamelske, whose wife died in 1999, had traveled extensively in the United States and Canada. Public records show he invested $1 million in real estate in California, Nevada and New Mexico, although police and Jamelske's lawyer said they did not know the source of the investment money.

His lawyer, J. Michael Forsyth, has declined to talk about his client's mood since the arrest, but says he will likely undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

At least two of the alleged victims were teenagers with histories of running away from home. One was the 16-year-old, and because of that, her disappearance had never been reported.

Another woman, now 28, told the Post-Standard of Syracuse she was high on drugs when she accepted a ride from Jamelske in 2001.

She went to police after she was released following two months of captivity, but was unable to lead investigators to the house.

Onondaga County Chief Medical Examiner Mary Jumbelic said her office will re-examine the deaths of Jamelske's wife, Dorothy, and the 1990 death of his 85-year-old mother, Wanda. Officials had previously concluded both deaths resulted from natural causes.

So far, Jamelske has exercised his right to remain silent, Walsh said.

"We certainly did not expect to ever see something like this in our community," the sheriff said. "I've been in law enforcement for 40 years and I've never seen anything as bizarre as this."

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