Handyman gets 18 years for keeping sex slaves

A retired handyman who admitted keeping five women as sex slaves in an underground bunker in his back garden was jailed today for a minimum of 18 years.

New York state Judge Anthony Aloi ignored a plea for leniency from John Jamelske’s lawyer.

“You are a sick coward. You are an evil man. You are a kidnapper and rapist, a master manipulator of people and the truth, but your reign of terror is over,” the judge told Jamelske.

Jamelske cried in court and apologised: “I’m sorry for what I did and how it affected everyone.”

The 68-year-old pleaded guilty last month to kidnapping five women and girls and holding them as sex slaves between 1988 and 2003 in a concrete bunker he built three feet underground, behind his home in a Syracuse suburb.

Judge Aloi, who passed a sentence of 18 years to life, said Jamelske “should die in prison for what you have done to these five women.”

Jamelske told authorities he began seeking out girls and women in 1988, after his wife became bedridden and could not satisfy his sexual urges. She died in 1999.

Jamelske was arrested in April after his most recent victim, a 16-year-old girl, managed to call her sister when Jamelske took her out on errands after six months of captivity.

After Jamelske’s arrest, police identified four other women who said he had abducted and raped them since 1988.

The victims ranged in age from 13 to 53 and were held in the bunker from two months to three years.

The bunker is linked to Jamelske’s home by a steel door, hidden behind tens of thousands of empty bottles and cans, that led to a series of crawl spaces and doors.

Deputies who searched the house 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 were raped, when they showered and when they brushed their teeth.