The Girl in the Box

This is my recollection of an event as a child. Names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been omitted to protect the privacy of those depicted. Dialogue has been re-created from memory except excerpts from news articles.

When you’re a ten-year-old, you expect people to be who you think they are. Monsters are cruel with dagger eyes. Nice people are pleasant with twinkling eyes. A friendly volunteer for a nonprofit humanitarian organization, who occasionally drove my mother to visit my father after he’d been institutionalized, had twinkling eyes.

She didn’t look like she’d kick out her niece’s front teeth and stuff her in a saddle box, but she did. This is how I found out.

During the 1960’s, my mother, a hearing-impaired Italian immigrant, had a limited vocabulary-except for swear words. Mom knew all of them and created another language with ones she made up. Angrily flapping the local newspaper in front of my face, she yelled, “Look-uh what that crazy b*tch do!”

A rail thin teenage girl, with her hair wacked off and a jack-o-lantern smile, stared back at me from the newspaper. She resembled a scarecrow whose eyes were hollowed out by crows. It gave me nightmares. Monsters were no longer imaginary.

Mom smacked the newspaper image of the girl’s aunt and cursed her to hell in as many ways as there are ice cream flavors. I recognized her. I likely saw her picking up Mom to see Dad, or at the nonprofit’s office when I helped Mom communicate with staffers, or at church. We attended the same one.

According to news reports, the aunt had her 18-year-old niece committed to a Receiving Hospital, a treatment facility for people in early stages of mental illness. During her two stays of 109 days over a six-month period, they treated her for depression and hyperactivity with twice a week shock treatments and meds.

My father became a patient there during that time. The aunt reported she faithfully visited her niece at the hospital, so I’m assuming when she drove Mom the 20 miles to see Dad, she also visited her niece.

According to news reports, the girl and her dad lived with the aunt, her husband (her dad’s brother), and their four children. The girl’s mother died ten years before and her other siblings chose not to live there. Maybe it’s better to dwell somewhere else rather than “…in a mansion with a quarrelsome woman” (Proverbs 21:9 NAB).

Local and national newspapers detailed the nightmare that unfolded after the girl’s release from the hospital. The aunt said her niece became involved with a 40-some-year-old alcoholic who she met there. The aunt and the girl’s father disapproved and apparently intervened with confinement and torture.

Sheriff deputies released details of the surreal case best described as a disturbing fairy tale. The girl told them her aunt and dad first locked her in the garage attic in August-too hot. Then they tied her spread eagle between two poles in the basement where she cried-too loud. Then they crammed her in a cabinet without a toilet break-too stinky. Finally, they made her climb into a saddle box-she fit in it just right.

Cruel treatment charges were filed against the aunt and father by sheriff’s deputies. They accused them of depriving her of proper food, mistreating her, and keeping her in a locked box in an unheated shed.

The girl noted when she lived in the saddle box, her aunt “told me to call it my apartment because if I said it was a box, no one would believe me.” She said she prayed while in there.

The following February, the girl said her aunt and father removed her from the box but kept her locked in the horse shed. Apparently, some rabbits booted her out of her “apartment.” Officers said she escaped from the shed March 12.

Mom told me the girl “gotta so skinny she stick-uh the bone of the finger in a little hole and open(ed) the lock.” This creeped me out because I imagined a zombified finger snaking out of the keyhole of a worm-infested casket.

In actuality, the responding officers said the girl worked a hole in the shed wall, reached through and pulled a pin out of the hasp on the door to free herself. From there, they said, she made her way to a relative’s house nearby.

News reports stated the girl, almost five feet five inches tall, weighed 78 pounds upon entering the hospital. Her reported normal weight was 136 pounds. During her 36 day stay, doctors treated her malnutrition, amputated part of her right big toe, and removed destroyed tissue from frostbitten toes.

The doctor determined her injuries-which included what looked like rope burns around her wrists, waist, and legs-weren’t self-inflicted. Because of her confinement in a box 34 x 21 x 20 inches, he stressed she’d need physical therapy to straighten her legs beyond 90 degrees.

Whenever Mom ranted about the case to friends, I’d hear. Then I’d share the gruesome details with the neighborhood kids, mostly boys looking for insult fodder. “Yo mama” went from wearing combat boots to competitive trash talk.

“Yo mama’s so mean she’ll bury you in a box till maggots eat your face,” and “Yo mama’s so evil she’ll tie you to a tree for the buzzards,” and “Yo mama’s so crazy she’ll lock you in a freezer till your body parts fall off.”

This is how the case played out in a jury trial in Municipal Court:

Prosecution highlights

  • The state aimed to show the aunt was responsible for keeping her niece in a locked box, beating her, giving her scalding showers, pulling her around the kitchen floor by her hair, and giving her bread soaked in coffee as food.
  • The girl, the state’s star witness, said she spent November into February inside a saddle box, first located in the cellar and then moved to a shed. She said she got out only to do housework, eat coffee bread, and have an exercise/toilet period after dark.
  • The girl testified that when she relieved herself in the field, “I would make snowballs and put them in my pocket and eat them after I was put back in my box.” When the box was opened in the morning, she noted, frost lined the inside.
  • The responding officer described the girl as having short hair, no upper front teeth, sunken facial features, a patch of hair missing, and dark marks and circles on her.
  • The girl stated her aunt once warned her, as she put her in the box, that “they were going to pour lime in my box so I could die a slow death like my mother.”
  • The girl described an incident that happened after she cleaned the cellar floor and missed a corner. As she squatted by the bucket, she said her aunt kicked her in the face while wearing her uncle’s steel-toed shoe. Then she claimed her aunt tried to push out one of her loose teeth from her bleeding mouth.
  • An officer testified that when he told the aunt her niece had frostbite and the doctors might have to cut off her toes, “she said she didn’t care if they cut her up in little pieces with their knives.”
  • A witness called the girl her best worker in the 16 years she managed stores. In October, she said, the girl’s aunt and dad dragged her into the store seeking her help because she respected her. Sobbing, the girl said she couldn’t see her brother-home on military leave. The aunt hit the table and told the witness, “I’ll kill this girl before I’ll let her see her *** brother or that *** of a sister of hers.'”
  • The girl testified her father sometimes took her out of the box to drive her to the unemployment office to get her check. She admitted she never sought help there because “I did what my father said,” and “I was scared.”
  • In closing, the prosecutor stressed that a doctor said the girl’s injuries couldn’t have been self-inflicted. And, he added, “Does the fact that the girl had a mental problem give them the right to treat her this way?” He emphasized there were only two points in the case: “Was the girl abused?” and “Who did it?”

Defense highlights

  • The defense aimed to show the girl was a proverbial liar who brought on whatever happened to her, whose injuries were self-inflicted, whose aunt, the defendant, wasn’t her legal guardian, who was an unwanted person in her aunt’s home, and who could’ve left, but didn’t.
  • Deputies testified the aunt denied they kept her niece in a box. They quoted her as saying, “Whatever she tells you is a lie. My niece is sexually disturbed and mentally unbalanced.” The aunt later told the jury she struck her across the shoulders with a rolling pin when she caught her abusing her four-year-old son.
  • A witness stated she employed the aunt to care for her two children while she worked at a plant. She expressed satisfaction with her and planned to keep her.
  • The aunt’s daughter, 17, said she and her cousin were companions until she returned from the hospital. After that, she said, “I was afraid of her,” adding that once she “…got mad and pulled me down the cellar steps.”
  • The aunt’s son, 14, testified he kept his saddle, bridles, and horse blanket in the box. The defense attorney asked if he saw the girl in the basement. He answered, “No, I wasn’t allowed down there.”
  • The aunt testified they moved her niece to the basement in October where there were two couches to sleep on, adding, “Her father fed her, disciplined her, and tied her in the chair but he never beat her.”
  • The aunt said a horse trampled her niece on the side of her face during an accident and it may have loosened some teeth. She stated, “I never kicked her in the teeth, nor did I use an electric razor to shave her eyebrows.”
  • The aunt told the jury she never helped her brother-in-law tie his daughter to the cellar rafters or lock her in a box or cabinet. But a deputy said she told him they would put a rope around her to hold her under the shower.
  • Multiple witnesses who visited the family, including a vet who treated a horse in their shed, reported seeing nothing unusual. Other witnesses said the girl appeared dirty and thin with sores, but she never asked for help. One witness saw the aunt and her niece arguing and said, “Her niece got her to the corner and popped her one in the face.”
  • In his final arguments, the defense attorney referred to the girl as a “bold and saucy” liar. He said her story of being locked in a box and a metal cabinet and hung from rafters was fantastic. He emphasized her father was responsible for her physical condition, not her aunt, who wasn’t her legal guardian.

The jury’s verdict

  • After a jury found the aunt guilty of torturing her niece, the Municipal Judge sentenced her to a 6-month jail term with a $200 fine-the maximum penalties provided by law for the misdemeanor offense.
  • The girl’s father pleaded guilty to the same charge to avoid trial. He also received a 6-month jail term with a $200 fine.
  • In passing sentence on the girl’s father, the judge said he showed no love for his daughter and “the facts of the case are nauseating to the court and to the public.”

A year later

According to a news article a year after the girl’s ordeal, she gained 61 pounds and a normal life. She lived with her older sister, returned to high school, and graduated in the middle third of her class. The principal called her a “good and reliable student” and a “pleasant individual.”

I may have only been ten years old when this case happened, but I’ve never forgotten its horrors. Neither have I forgotten the kindness the aunt showed my mother before her twinkling eyes turned to daggers.

She didn’t “overcome evil with good,” as advised in Romans 12:21, but instead, she let evil overcome her.

Enter your email address below to receive new blogs in your inbox.

PLEASE SHARE