TRENTON, New Jersey – One evening last week, a barefoot teenage girl with a shaved head burst into her next-door neighbour’s home in Blackwood, New Jersey, sat down on the couch and began to spill out a harrowing story.
She said her stepfather and mother had imprisoned her at their home for the past seven years, ever since they pulled her out of elementary school with the excuse that she would be homeschooled.
They locked her in a dog crate for an entire year and, at one point, had chained her up in a bathroom, she said, adding that her stepfather had sexually abused her.
This week, following a police investigation, prosecutors in Camden County, in South Jersey just outside Philadelphia, announced several charges against her mother, Brenda Spencer, 38, and stepfather, Branndon Mosely, 41.
These included assault, criminal restraint, kidnapping and weapons offences. Mosely also faces numerous counts of sexual assault.
“The investigation has corroborated the heinous acts endured by the victim, and we will hold those responsible accountable,” Lieutenant Andy McNeil, a spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, said in an interview.
The authorities did not identify the 18-year-old teenager.
Mosely is a rail conductor for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, the transit system that serves the Philadelphia region, and Spencer is a dog handler who specialises in great danes, the authorities said.
They are being held in jail while they await a detention hearing scheduled for next week.
Lawyers for the couple declined to comment.
‘I wish I had known’
Days after the distressed girl barrelled into the home where he was staying, Mr Michael Lacey, a 36-year-old pool cleaner, said he kept breaking down in tears over the brutality she had described.
She recounted to Mr Lacey how an alarm system was rigged so she could not escape, how her mother shaved her head as punishment, and how she was forced to relieve herself in a bucket.
And she explained to Mr Lacey that it all happened behind closed doors, just 18m away from the house he was living in, which belonged to his mother.
“After I found out that everything she was telling me was true, I broke down,” Mr Lacey said in an interview. “I wish I had known.”
The region has recently been shaken by an eerily similar episode, in which a 32-year-old Connecticut man escaped from what he said was 20 years of imprisonment by his late father and stepmother.
He lit a fire in his room, forcing firefighters to rescue him from his family’s burning home, the authorities said. His stepmother faces multiple charges relating to his confinement.
The scene in Blackwood, where the teenager is believed to have been held, is “one of the most despicable cases we’ve run across”, Gloucester Township Police Department chief David Harkins said at a news conference on May 14.
Officials also took aim at homeschooling, an increasingly popular and barely regulated alternative to traditional schooling. Taking the girl out of school “helped hide the heinous, years-long torture”, said Ms Grace MacAulay, the Camden County prosecutor.
When the police entered the home, they found squalid conditions, Ms MacAulay said, as well as a room rigged with an alarm system, the bucket the girl said she was forced to use, and chains that she said had bound her.
Mosely and Spencer took the teenager’s 13-year-old sister out of school after second grade in an effort to conceal her sibling’s abuse, according to a criminal complaint.
“They were afraid she would tell someone that the victim was living in a dog crate,” the document read.
Only for barking dogs
The charges against the couple relate only to the older sister. Officials said an investigation was continuing into whether there were other victims.
According to their Facebook accounts, Mosely and Spencer have three other children together, a three-year-old boy and twin five-year-old girls.
Officials said only the two teenage sisters were found in the home and were unable to provide information about any other children.
A large number of animals were also removed from the home, including four great danes, three other dogs, a lizard, snakes, several birds, two hamsters and 29 chinchillas, according to Mr Harkins.
Spencer’s social media is filled with love notes to Mosely, interspersed with images of her in sundresses posing with great danes at dog competitions.
The family appears to have lived at the house in Ridge Avenue since 2017, according to property records.
Since then, the only police calls to the home had been for barking dogs in the yard. But whenever the police arrived, Mr Harkins said, the couple quickly put the dogs inside.
No responding officers ever entered the house. NYTIMES
Join ST’s Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.