13 Criminals Who Kept Humans As Torture Pets For Long Periods Of Time

It's obvious that all serial murderers are sadistic killers. However, there are scales of sadism even within serial murdering. At the top of this sadistic heap? Those who kept women confined to a small space for months on end, torturing them with delight. These people - who kept others as human torture pets - used a variety of methods to keep them from escaping. Some chained their victims up like animals, while others preferred the locked basement approach. The important thing to note here is that the women eventually escaped, although the physical and mental atrocities of the torture that they endured will remain. 

For seven long years Colleen Stan was the prisoner of Red Bluff, California residents Cameron Hooker and his wife Janice. They used her as a BDSM sex slave and kept her inside their home. Before Stan "consented" to signing herself as their sex slave for life in 1977, they trapped her in a box for 23 hours a day. Over time, they gave her more freedoms and even allowed her to babysit their children and visit her own family. However, if she tried to escape, they would beat her fiercely. Shortly after her family visit, she was imprisoned in a wooden box yet again, as they feared they had given her too much freedom. Finally, after years of abuse and brainwashing, she escaped. 

In April of 2015, Anthony Darryl Allen began holding his supposed girlfriend hostage in Lenexa, Kansas. Not many details are known, but he is accused of raping the woman during the four months that she was not allowed to leave his apartment. She finally managed to slip a note to one of the apartment managers who then called the authorities. Allen did not go quietly; he turned the gas on in the apartment and ate bug spray to try to kill himself while the police were outside. He has been charged with the aggravated kidnapping and rape of the unnamed woman. 

Unlike the other kidnappers on this list, Heidnik killed some of the women that he had held captive once he was done with them. Between the years of 1986 and 1987, he kidnapped six women and held them captive in his basement. He alternately raped and tortured them, making the others watch while this went on. When the women supposedly began to die "by accident," he would dismember their bodies in front of the living victims. At one point he even cooked the flesh of one of them, Sandra Lindsey, and fed it to the others. Eventually, one of the women, Josefina Rivera, convinced him to let her go; she went straight to the police. For his part, Heidnik was sentenced to death for his crimes and executed via lethal injection in 1999.

Austrian Josef Fritzl kept his own daughter, Elisabeth, imprisoned in his basement for 24 years. Way back in 1984, when she was 18 years old, Elisabeth's father enlisted her into "helping him with something in the basement." However, he locked her down there - behind a series of 8 doors and various corridors, all built to ensure that his wife did not hear what was going on. (She assumed that Elisabeth had run away.) Fritzl visited his daughter in her dungeon of torture every couple of days, raping her repeatedly. She gave birth to seven of his children - one that died shortly thereafter, three that remained in the dungeon with her, and three adopted by Fritzl and his wife. Fritzl tortured Elisabeth and the children as well, forcing them to dig with their hands to enlarge their living space and withholding food and water from them for days at a time. Finally, when their oldest daughter, Kersten, became sick in 2008, he freed the entire family. He was arrested shortly thereafter. 

Kala Brown and her fiancé, Charlie Carver, disappeared in August of 2016. Odd Facebook updates appeared on her page after her disappearance, claiming that the two had gotten married and did not want to be found. However, Brown had actually been kidnapped by her boss - Todd Kohlhepp - and her fiancé had been murdered and buried on Kohlhepp's property. Kohlhepp alternately kept Brown chained up in a metal shipping container and in a small, barren apartment on his multi-acre property in Woodruff, South Carolina. During the two months that Brown spent in captivity, she was raped by Kohlhepp numerous times. 

As it turns out, she was not his first victim. Other bodies were found buried on his property, and he confessed to the mass murder of several employees of a motorcycle shop. Investigations of all of Kohlhepp's possible murders are ongoing.

Ariel Castro kept Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus trapped in his Cleveland, Ohio home for around a decade. They were kept trapped in bedrooms, the basement, or the garage, depending on whether or not he had his friends and family members over (none of whom knew about his proclivities). Over the duration of their years of torture, the three girls were raped, beaten with household objects, and chained to walls. One (Berry) gave birth to his child, while other pregnancies were dealt with in horrific fashions. Finally, in May of 2013, the women discovered that Castro had forgotten to lock the inner-front door and managed to escape with the help of several neighbors. Castro, sentenced to life plus 1,000 years in prison, hung himself in his prison cell after serving one month of his sentence.

Sedalia, Missouri resident James Barton Horn Jr. kept his girlfriend, Sandra Kay Sutton, captive in a wooden box for over four months. The girlfriend claimed that their relationship started out well, but after a period of time, he became violent and controlling. The box was four feet long and rather deep, and it was built entirely for the purpose of keeping people within its walls. After locking her in for a period of time, Horn would let her out to eat, use the facilities, and then he would rape her before placing her back in the wooden crate.  

In a shocking twist to this story, Sutton and her 17-year-old son were found shot to death in their apartment in 2015, and Horn was the main police suspect. Police shot and killed Horn at a wildlife area in Missouri in May of 2015 as part of this investigation.

Bertin Ocampo kidnapped his alleged girlfriend (whose name has not been released) and kept her in a shed located behind the Haines City, Florida home that he lived in with his nephew and his nephew's wife. Apparently, neither was aware of what was going on in their own backyard. During the month that Ocampo kept her locked up with only a television and a bed, he beat her, stabbed her in the leg, threatened the life of her daughter (who thankfully lived elsewhere), and raped her three to four times. Afer his arrest, Ocampo was charged with false imprisonment, sexual battery, aggravated assault, battery, and aggravated battery.

In 2002, Elizabeth Smart vanished from her bedroom in her parents' house. She was only 14. Nine months later, she was rescued by police in Salt Lake City, Utah. She had been held the entire time by Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Ileen Barzee. The two brainwashed her, raped her, and made her stay in rural campsites in the mountains of Utah. After arrest and trial, Mitchell has been serving a life imprisonment sentence since 2011, and Barzee is serving 15 years for aggravated kidnapping. For her part, Smart has become a vocal advocate for child safety since her rescue.

One of the most celebrated rescues in recent history was that of Jaycee Dugard. She was kidnapped at the age of 11 and held in a compound built in Phillip and Nancy Garrido's Antioch, California home for 18 years. During that time, she was repeatedly raped by Garrido and gave birth to his children - with the first delivery occurring when she was only 13. Nancy Garrido psychologically tortured Dugard, acting as her jailer. There were times when they would give her pet kittens, only to make them vanish, and Dugard spent some of her imprisonment handcuffed in a locked room. In 2011, Phillip Garrido was sentenced to serve 431 years, and his wife, Nancy, was sentenced to 36 years to life in prison.