Although everything I know about it is based on information that I read in the media and have no special insight, I feel obliged to comment on the latest bizarre case that has emerged in Cleveland, since I live here.
Three unrelated women separately disappeared in 2002, 2003, and 2004 when they were aged 19, 16, and 14 respectively. (You can read profiles of the three women here.) There were intense searches for the two younger women, less so for the oldest who some thought had run away on her own. When the searches failed, hope that they were alive also faded.
Then yesterday evening they were suddenly and dramatically found and rescued. They had apparently been living in a house on a residential street right in the city, a couple of miles from where they disappeared. One of them had a six-year old child. Three brothers in their fifties who lived in the house have been arrested.
People are astonished at how it could possibly be that three grown women could be held undetected in captivity right in the middle of a city. And how could a baby have been born with no one knowing? As you can see from this photo of the house, the houses are close to each other where shouts or a crying baby could likely be heard by neighbors, which would have come as a surprise to people who thought there were no women or children living in the house. Police say that the women seem to be in reasonably good health despite having been tied most of the time.
It is useless to speculate as to what happened and we need to await further information. But I suspect that as more news starts to emerge, we are going to hear some unpleasant details about what went on in the past decade.
My wife and I were talking about this. Both of us were surprised that only one of the women had had a child. And we both came to the conclusion that perhaps that wasn’t actually the case. The thought of what the perp may have done with other children makes me physically ill. At best, he may have sold them to desperate adoptive parents. At worst….the mind boggles.
This, no doubt, is only going to become more and more grim as we learn additional facts.
Several sources have referenced one of the brother’s Facebook accounts and recent postings -- seems there was a strong religious bent, but really no surprise there.