Sober Thread: 3 women missing for 10 years found alive.

Don't be assholes, guys.

 

Awesome that they are finally free. I can't imagine going 10 years and not knowing if a loved one was dead or alive.

Ariel Castro and his brothers should be crucified.

 

Love Charles Ramsay. I hope he doesn't have to pay for beer for a year. Or McDonalds.

How in the world do you keep somebody (4 somebodys?!) captive and hidden in a neighborhood for 10 years? One report is that the 6 year old girl is the daughter of Amanda Berry. I am assuming that she was raped by the captor or one of the brothers or something, which is - awful doesn't even come close. How does she give birth without anyone knowing? Good grief. What a crazy, terrible story.

 

Completely Nuts. How could this happen? A decade in captivity right in the middle of society. Let me know when they start picking apart the house, that should be amusing.

 

I've been wondering what Charlie's been up to since '05.

 

Because they weren't related to this man:

 

You know what's creepy? This happens more than most would think. There are probably hundreds of women secreted away in basements in this country. I'm actually nauseated thinking about that kind of confinement.

I'm trying to wrap my head around the determination it takes to hold multiple women captive, to keep this a secret right under everyone's noses. These women were taken in almost the same neighborhood where they were kept; couple miles away. I'm assuming these men had family, friends that came over. How do they not slip up at least once, if even drunkenly let something slip? Insane. I'd love to hear the psyche evaluations. What the fuck makes a creature like that operate.

Anyone interested in a fictionalized version of this, look up "Room" by Emma Donoghue, written after that creep in Germany was found to have held his daughter as a sex slave captive. Highly unsettling.

 

That whole story is outside my understanding. Not just hold them captive, but get one of them enough medical care to carry a pregnancy to term, deliver it and now have that child be 6 years old. FOR TEN YEARS. So many questions. I don't even remember to change the air filters in my house, and this guy was consistent enough with a routine so they couldn't ever scream loud enough for next door neighbor to hear or get to a window or escape restraints until now.

The child. Apparently, the child went out with one of the captors, neighbors saying they had seen her out playing at the park with him. Did she think nothing was strange about the ladies in the basement? Or, did she not know?

Strange all around . . .

 

They are saying the child is now the daughter of the one of the girls the one that called 911.

 

Yes! Thank you sir, thank you. I was going to mention that same book, but you've already done it. I found it quite unsettling, and quite ingenious on the part of whats-her-name's captor. I'm fairly cold hearted but even I found the premise of keeping a woman hidden away for the purpose of being raped on a daily basis to be rather distasteful. Excellent novel though.

As far as the case of these three women being hidden away goes, I'm not the least bit surprised that the kidnappers got away with it for so long. See I figure the majority of the regular posters here are from urban or suburban areas, you've all got a lot of faces and names to keep track of. How many of you, even you rural folks out there, can name the people living on your street?

I'm too shitfaced to pull it up, but there was a study saying that the average person can remember an average of 200 people. Most of those people are going to be your family, friends, co-workers, maybe the dude that works at the 7-11 around the block, or that one waitress over at the Pizza Hutt with the nice tits. Sure, you can probably name the people living next door or across the street, but what about the people a few houses down that you rarely, if ever, interact with?

More than likely, the kidnappers had these women locked inside this house with restricted movements; coming by every day or two to drop off groceries, or maybe mow the lawn or something. Maybe their neighbors saw them once... maybe three times in the ten years they were held prisoner, for brief periods of time. You see somebody once or twice, you probably won't remember them the next week. You wouldn't think that the guy that owned this house was keeping a small harem and an captive infant.

Three guys coming by once or twice a week to drop off some milk and eggs and hit the yard with a push-mover wouldn't attract that much attention. If the house was kept up and fit in with the rest of the neighborhood, it also wouldn't get attention. It really would take a captive running out of the house and causing a scene to shine any sort of light on a situation like this. Its shitty, it really is shitty... What can you do though? Didn't some guy keep a woman in a make-shift coffin under his bed for a few years, as a fucking sex slave?

Shit is fucked up.

 

To add to this, there were reports of the police being called when a naked woman was seen crawling around the backyard and then told to go in the house. I saw two different news items about it; one said that the police didn't believe the neighbours who called about it. And some kind of state agency had made visits to the house in 2000 and 2004, without any findings. I guess the other part of it is, well, what are the odds that the neighbour is keeping a woman in captivity in the basement? We can usually barely tell that people in our midst have hidden sides to them (running the gamut from recreational drug use and sexual fetishes to shit like hidden domestic violence). Finding out your neighbour had a casual coke habit would be a shock enough. The notion that they'd be hiding a human being in captivity just doesn't cross your radar until you read about someone else doing it on the news. What do you think the signs would be? What would you look for? Even if you saw some really unusual activity - like a mysterious woman crawling around naked outside and being told to come back inside - who is really going to suspect something truly shady is going on? And among people who might have suspicions, how many of them are going to act on it by calling the police? And then when you call the police, the police don't even believe you and refuse to investigate. So really, what's left after all that? Vigilantism, I guess, which has its pitfalls.

Human beings are bad at looking at large numbers of homogeneous things and spotting the very rare things that don't belong.

 

We barely know the truth of what goes on in the minds of those closest to us, never mind the person down the block, who we see out mowing their yard 2 or 3 times a year. I pulled this off the RMMB years ago, and damn if it isn't relavent:

 

Man, McDonald's is getting both awesome press, and terrible press with this story.

"McDonald's: Hero fuel!"

"McDonald's: Nutritious enough to keep prisoners alive!"

 

Just because I want to guilt trip the white folk.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/05/07/charles_ramsey_amanda_berry_rescuer_becomes_internet_meme_video.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/201 ... video.html</a>

 

There's no guilt tripping involved. That's a 100% accurate article. I was watching CNN when I think the aunt of one of the victims made a speech thanking the police and everyone for helping return her niece, and I was genuinely pissed the first person she thanked wasn't Charles Ramsey. He wasn't even mentioned.

But if he was a white guy, he'd be getting parades thrown for him, calls from the President, and he'd be a regular on Piers Morgan until the next big story.

Personally, I think the biggest news in this whole thing is there's actually something positive happening in Cleveland.