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Hey, this is Brad, host of the Crime Scene Weekly. Thank you so much for listening to our show here in the 2020 feed. After today's episode, we will be found exclusively in our own feeds. We're going to have a ton of great new episodes on the horizon. I don't want you to miss a thing. So search for the Crime Scene Weekly. Follow that. You'll get all your new episodes right there for free wherever you listen to podcasts.
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A woman is accused of holding her stepson captive for two decades. In an act of desperation, her stepson sets the house on fire. Welcome to the crime scene.
I'm Brad Milkey. I host ABC's daily news podcast, Start Here. And every week, we're bringing you the latest on what's big and what's new in the true crime space. This week, we're talking to ABC's chief investigative reporter, Josh Margolin, about this unbelievable story of alleged depravity and resilience. But before we dive in, let's go over the true crime headlines you need to know this week.
Jury selection is underway in the sex trafficking and racketeering trial of music mogul Sean Diddy Combs. Prosecutors accused Combs of forcing his alleged victims into drug-fueled sex parties he called freak-offs and then threatening them into silence. Federal prosecutors and defense attorneys are now working to seat a 12-person jury for what's expected to be a high-profile and closely watched trial. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Next up, a story out of Mississippi. After 49 years on death row, the execution date has been set for 78-year-old Richard Gerald Jordan. Jordan is Mississippi's longest-serving death row inmate. He was sentenced to death back in 1976 for kidnapping and killing a woman. He filed multiple death sentence appeals, the most recent of which was denied in October. His execution is now set for June 25th.
Lastly, a Connecticut man is facing one of the state's most serious charges, murder with special circumstances, after police say he beat his 12-year-old son to death with a baseball bat.
Officials say 52-year-old Anthony Andrew Esposito Jr. is accused of killing his son at their home. Because the victim was a minor, the charge carries the harshest possible penalty under state law, life in prison without the possibility of parole. Esposito is also charged with criminal attempt to commit murder after allegedly trying to also kill his 16-year-old daughter. During his arraignment last week, prosecutors said Esposito told police he beat his son because...
He was being disrespectful. He's now being held on a $3 million bond. No plea has been entered. Now, let's get into this week's big story. ABC's chief investigative reporter, Josh Margolin, is here in the studio to tell us about these horrifying allegations of captivity in Waterbury, Connecticut. So I can't stress enough to our listeners that this is a disturbing story, right? There are going to be details here about physical abuse, about psychological abuse, but it's worth examining. So here's the gist.
A man claims he was held captive for 20 years by his stepmother, confined to a locked room inside their house. The only way authorities apparently found him is because he set the place on fire. The stepmom, Kimberly Sullivan, now faces charges of kidnapping, a felony assault, of cruelty to persons and other crimes. But Josh, let's examine this, I guess, through the eyes of the people who discovered this. Take us back to the night of the fire. What happened? First of all, just honestly,
overarching in the story. The details here are just so disturbing. And in reading the police affidavit,
Typically, police affidavits are dry recitations of fact, and it made me wince, the words on the page. It really is terrible. So a fire was reported at this home in Waterbury, Connecticut. Waterbury is a midsize community on the outer rim of the New York City commuting zone in Connecticut.
It's got a pretty long, well-known history in the Northeast, was an industrial community. There are some nice parts, some less than nice parts, but it's been rated over the years as a nicer community to live in. So fire is reported on February 17th, 2025. This is the night that the fire breaks out in the home in Waterbury.
And 911 is called. And the fire department comes out. It turns out that it's Kimberly Sullivan, who ultimately is charged. And we actually have audio of that 911 call. So here's that. Please hurry. It's still Blake Street. There's a fire. Oh, my God. There's a fire. Ma'am, what's up? The TV. I don't know. My son, he was in his room and I don't know. He did something with the TV. I was sleeping. I fell asleep.
Okay, so panic there. So panic, and firefighters arrive, as you'd expect, and they put the fire out, and there's substantial damage. And, you know, they heard the report in the 911 call that there was a son who was somehow injured in the fire. They get there, and they find a son, and he weighs about 70 pounds. So they're thinking that it's a young kid, but precocious.
pretty quickly they realize this is somebody who is severely emaciated. Now, there are physical things that they're not going to be able to tell immediately just upon finding him there on the floor in the house. But
But really quickly, once they get him to the ambulance, it is obvious that something else is going on here. And they're able to ultimately speak to him. You know, he had suffered some smoke inhalation. So at that point, he really wasn't able to communicate well. But fairly quickly, they realized that what they saw was their eyes weren't fooling them. This is somebody who was severely ill.
This is somebody whose body was going into physical failure, something called a wasting syndrome, where basically the human body begins to shut down and waste away. In the police reports, there's a comparison, the way that he looks to a Holocaust survivor, like all those terrible images that we saw when the concentration camps were liberated in World War II. - You said he's 70 pounds. How old is he?
He was 31 at the time. He's since turned 32, but he had allegedly been in captivity, according to police reports, since the fourth grade, since he was...
11 years old. We're talking about 20 years of being in captivity. I mean, it's the most awful tale of the tape that I could give you. Apparently all of the teeth in his mouth had rotted. And so the teeth are breaking off. He hadn't showered for...
The estimate is one or two years. Wow. What do police say they find in the house? Most importantly, for what happens next, the police very quickly see that the door is removed from the room where the man had allegedly been held captive. And the door has what appears to be a slide bolt lock.
They also allegedly find holes in the door and the door frame suggesting that there had been locks, other locks over the course of time. And very clearly in the police affidavit, they say this slide bolt lock is a lock meant to keep somebody in, not to keep somebody out.
So this, according to police, in a very, very detailed document, this was a situation where the person, this man who had been kept in this room, was kept captive and unable to control his goings and comings. And is he talking at this point? Like, obviously, there's going to be psychological damage here, you'd think. But do police say he's able to articulate his mental state or his apparent escape plan?
Actually, the police report ultimately to prosecutors and to the public that the man is fairly clear-headed about,
Certainly his educational level is that of a child. And they talk about his cognitive abilities are that of a child because he basically stopped learning in any real way in the fourth grade. So there are certainly issues, but he really goes into describing the
clear-headed plan that develops in the short period of time before the fire is set and the 911 call is placed. So he had a thing of hand sanitizer that he had gotten his hands on. He also had some paper that he had gotten from the house because there were portions of time that
of varying lengths where he was allowed out of the room at different times of the day or the week to do chores. He had found an old lighter and he kept the lighter secretly somehow. And that's not described by police to this point. He keeps the lighter. So out of desperation on this final fateful day, he decides he is going to light this fire
He tells police, he decides that he needs to not only light the fire so that it creates smoke in the house to like set off a smoke detector or something. He needs to light it and let it rage somewhat and catch things on fire in his room so as to be serious enough that his stepmother would be forced to call the fire department. Hmm.
Otherwise he fears that he just would be setting a fire that would be quickly tamped down and it would have- - He needs to get out of control to the point where you need outside help. Outsiders need to come. - Outsiders need to come. As I'm hearing this and reading these documents, it's pretty highly developed for somebody who is allegedly kept in starvation conditions, no contact with anybody else. You know, it's a testament, I think,
to the human brain, to the will to live, to the whole fighting for survival thing.
of a human being that he comes up with this strategy that ultimately is remarkably successful because the outsiders have to come in. The 911 call is placed. The outsiders have to come in. They see it. He has to get medical care. And for the first time in God knows how long, he's exposed to outsiders to whom he's able to tell this terrible story to. How does he describe this?
this all starting, I guess. Like he, apparently police think this started when he was around 11. How does, what does that look like? It actually, according to police started before that allegedly. So they tell the story as this man, as a child had been going to school and the captivity starts as just extreme deprivation for, as a result of him,
taking food that he wasn't supposed to have in the home. Now, this is obviously according to what he told police. So in elementary school, he gets disciplined, locked in his room, and there's already some amount of poor treatment, allegedly, that he's suffering through as a result of taking food he wasn't allowed to take. Mm-hmm.
But what ends up happening is people started asking questions. See, at that point, he was showering every day or two. - He's going to school. - He's going to school. But what's happening is, as you'd expect, he's at school and questions are being asked. He was deprived of food, allegedly.
So he was asking classmates for food. He was taking classmates' food. He was taking food out of the garbage. This is obviously not typical, I want your Hershey bar kind of behavior. And so the child welfare agency in Connecticut ended up going to the house a couple of times. And it's that that leads to
the man being kept at home and in captivity and not being allowed to go to school. Okay, so it's at this point then that the parents take him out of school. Right. It's not understood right now what leads the alleged captivity and abuse to start when it actually started, other than this issue of him taking food that the stepmother didn't want him to have. But we do know, according to the police report,
What changed in the fourth grade to take him from going to school and interacting with other people to the point of being held alone in captivity. And we're actually going to take a quick break right here. But when we come back, we're going to hear about what life was allegedly like behind that closed door.
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All right, we are back with ABC's chief investigative reporter, Josh Margolin. So, Josh, once Kimberly Sullivan is allegedly holding her stepson like this in captivity...
What is that like, I guess? Like, is there allegedly a routine or is he just in the room all day or do we know? - Well, there's something of a routine according to the police reports. So what we understand is that his days would end seven o'clock, 7:30 at night. And that's when he would go to sleep and it was fitful sleeps. He wasn't well fed ever. So obviously he wasn't sleeping well.
From his description of the room to police, it's not clear that there was even a bed in there. At a certain point, there was a black and white television, he said, but he's in the room, 7, 7.30 at night. He sleeps till somewhere between 3 and 4.30 is when he wakes up each day. And-
Some days he's allowed out to do chores. Those chores vary in the length of time he's out of the room, like from 15 minutes on some days to as much as two hours. There was some discussion that at a point he was allowed to clean the stepmother's car outside in the driveway. So he was actually outside. But for the most part, he describes a life of just counting the cars that go by. Wow.
So that's how he would spend his days. And it seems that over the course of the years, the conduct grew more extreme. The room that he was allowed to remain in, the room where he was being held, at one point he was held in a bedroom, then he was held in a storage room. It becomes more and more like a cell, basically. Right, and when the fire department and the ambulance comes on the night of the fire, the room that he had been occupying
that had the slide bolt lock on the door was a storage room that they described as being roughly eight by nine feet and that it had some sort of, you know, angular ceiling. Presumably it was like, you know, top floor of the house and it was, but it gave the effect of really being much more like a cell than a bedroom or a living space.
So he didn't go to school. Did he interact with neighbors? I mean, was there any... No. Who around these people knew what was going on? No, there were accounts in the local paper, accounts from neighbors that said that the neighbors didn't even know that there was a son in the family. Apparently they knew that there were daughters.
And of course begs the question, why is one child in a home treated differently than others? But they see daughters coming and going, but they don't see a son ever. Wait, let's talk about the family then. So we keep talking about the stepmother, but so it's not just a stepmother and her stepson in this house. It's a whole family. It's a whole family. Apparently, you know, police have been on the one hand, they've been very eager to share the details of the story that,
that the son told about his life in captivity in order to allow them to effectuate the charging and arrest of the stepmother. On the other hand, we still don't have a lot of details. And because the victim thankfully has survived and he is an adult, there are privacy rules. So there's a limit to what they're allowed to say about his medical condition and other things. And there's also a limit to what police say
tend to want to say in general in a case where they have an active prosecution. As best as we can piece this together, it seems that Sullivan, the stepmother of the alleged victim, she has married the alleged victim's father, his biological father. The father is somebody who is wheelchair-bound at a certain point, seriously debilitated. Mm-hmm.
In the home at various points also, we understand that Sullivan has two daughters who come and go. It's not clear that they lived there, but they're around, they're seen by neighbors.
And it's not clear that there was anybody living in the home besides Sullivan and the stepson at the time of the fire. All of that is going to come out as the investigation develops and the prosecution gives more information because we know that the father died.
It did appear that his father did give the alleged victims some more liberties to be out of the room and to be able to be out in the house. But it's not clear how much that was. But so then – because we're talking about sort of what people around this knew, the welfare checks. So there are welfare checks early on when they're –
Looking into how this kid who was in school is being treated, what happens? Do those continue then after you get withdrawn from school? There's no evidence that the welfare checks continued. That really is one of the terrible parts of this terrible story. And by the way, this is not unique to this one terrible story. We have covered this.
people held in captivity previously, and we've done extensive work on this issue. And it's almost like these people just fall off the radar. And let's look at this. This man slipped through the cracks for 20 years.
Look, the National Home Education Legal Defense Association ranks Connecticut as among the least regulated states for parents or guardians, you know, that remove their children from classroom education. There are no homeschooling regulations in Connecticut or any system that's in place to monitor students once they're removed from school for any reason. And look, there's a statute that they will point to in Connecticut that
That requires the parents be able to show that the child is receiving, you know, whatever the equivalent is of instruction at, you know, a high school system somewhere in the state or nearby or something. But nothing explains how the state does.
can or would enforce that. So you never actually have to show up like you don't have to produce the kid to outside authorities at any point. OK, so then a few weeks after that fire in March, the stepson's stepmom, Kimberly Sullivan, is charged and arrested with kidnapping, felony assault, cruelty to persons and other crimes in connection with all this. Tell me about her case and how she pleads.
First of all, she's pleaded not guilty. That's the most important thing, very important to know. And she has been released on bail wearing an ankle bracelet. She's not currently incarcerated. Sullivan's lawyers told the ABC station in the area there, WTNH, that the alleged victim's biological father, who has since died, that he was really at fault. The lawyer has said, quote, he, meaning the alleged victim, was not locked in the room.
She, meaning Sullivan, did not restrain him in any way. She provided food. She provided shelter. She is blown away by these allegations, according to the lawyer. And...
The lawyer says, additionally, that the alleged victim's biological father lived there until recently, quote, he was the biological father. He was the one who dictated how his son would be raised. We think, as the evidence comes out, you will see that she is not the villain. She's made out to be. So the lawyer is saying, like, she just happened to be there. This was a tyrannical father who now happens to be dead. Right.
Right. And the lawyer saying that when time comes to go to court, to go to trial, that the evidence will come out and that will be the story that they bring to the jury. Well, and the half sister, she was outside the courthouse. She talked to reporters. Our affiliate WTNH was there. She says she doesn't even believe Kimberly Sullivan's story.
The world is shocked by his condition. Like, how can you not realize that someone is so frail and malnourished and just mistreated in your own home? It's just, I don't buy it. You've covered a lot of cases, right? You're sourced up and down with cops and so many different police departments.
You could even tell listening to the police here how disturbed they were by this. So here's a clip of Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnuolo at a press briefing in March. This was also from our affiliate WTNH. Thirty three years of law enforcement. This is the worst treatment of humanity that I've ever witnessed. Right. I mean, honestly, when we first started talking about it, we just we really couldn't believe it. It took time.
It took a lot of convincing amongst ourselves to just really accept what was going on. And it's really hard to talk about still. I mean, it's shuddering to think that someone would treat any person, let alone a family member or someone that was entrusted as a guardian or a parental figure in this way. So do they have a sense as to why, Josh, like what would cause someone...
to do something like this if they think it was the stepmother? You know, look, cops are used to some very, very bad things, as we know, right? They see people at their very, very worst. They see people who love each other hurt each other. They see terrible things. They see terrible violence and vicious displays. There's the distinct sense that
coming through the police affidavit that they just don't know what the hell happened here. Like how could somebody treat somebody else that way, allegedly? That really is the question at the heart of all of these terrible captivity cases. The way the physical description of this alleged victim, it's not like he missed a meal. He said that he was starving every day of his life.
that at most he was given two sandwiches and some water. If these allegations are true, it ends up feeling like a story about people inflicting pain on someone again and again. Yes, and again, we have to obviously underscore the fact that nobody has been convicted here and that the stepmother is arguing through her attorneys that she didn't commit a crime. But even if there's no crime committed, something happened to this man
And he was denied some amount of human dignity and food and outside access and treatment. How has he, the victim here, responded to this? I mean, because I just can't imagine making any sort of public statement. And yet he has. I agree. I'm surprised.
that this man has been willing to say anything, that he's not just trying to hide from the terrible life that he had. And to his credit, you know, he made a statement recently. And let me read some of it to you. He says, please call me S. S.
This is not the name given to me by my parents when I was born. I am choosing a new name for myself and I will use that name as I reclaim control over my life and my future. My name is my choice and it is the first of many choices I will make for myself now that I am free.
I am a survivor of more than 20 years of captivity and domestic abuse. I was held prisoner in my home from the time I was taken out of the fourth grade at age 11 until two months ago at age 31 when I purposely set the fire that helped set me free. And he goes on, much has already been said that tells part of the story of the abuse I endured. Someday, perhaps my whole story will be told.
Unbelievable. And the attorney for Sullivan then put out his own statement saying that this statement from the young man lacks both specifics and credibility, he said. Kimberly Sullivan now has a court appearance later this month. Josh Margolin, unbelievable story. Thanks for telling it to us. Thanks, Brad.
All right, and that will do it for this week's episode of The Crime Scene. Thank you so much for listening. The Crime Scene Weekly is a production of ABC Audio, produced by Nora Ritchie. Our supervising producer is Susie Liu. Mixing by Shane McKeon. Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Tara Gimbel, and Emily Schutz. Josh Kohan is our director of podcast programming. Laura Mayer is our executive producer. I'm Brad Milkey, and I'll see you next week at The Crime Scene. ♪
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