Police looking for clues in the yearlong disappearance of a 15-year-old girl said they found her pale but alive, locked in a hidden room in a home owned by an acquaintance of her parents.
Bloomfield police went to the home on Wednesday in nearby West Hartford to serve search warrants for DNA and other evidence and found the girl locked inside a tiny room hidden underneath a staircase and blocked from view by a dresser.
Authorities did not identify the girl, but said she had sometimes run away from home before she vanished last June.
"She is a child from troubled circumstances and found what she believed to be a friend," Bloomfield Police Captain Jeffrey Blatter said.
Police arrested Adam Gault, 41, a dog trainer from West Hartford, and 40-year-old Ann Murphy, described by police as Gault's common-law wife. Another woman who lived in the home, 26-year-old Kimberly Cray, also was arrested.
Gault was charged with second-degree unlawful restraint, second-degree reckless endangerment, second-degree custodial interference, interfering with an officer, risk of injury to a minor and second-degree forgery.
Murphy was charged with conspiracy to commit second-degree reckless endangerment, conspiracy to commit second-degree custodial interference and risk of injury to a minor.
Cray was charged with reckless endangerment, conspiracy to commit custodial interference, risk of injury to a minor and conspiracy to commit unlawful restraint, police said.
All three were in custody late on Wednesday with bond set at US$1 million each. They were scheduled to appear yesterday in Hartford Superior Court.
It did not appear the girl had been living in the room, but she could not have opened the locked, barricaded door on her own, police said. It was not clear how long she had been inside.
Investigators said she was pale and may have been indoors for some time, and that they found nothing to indicate anyone in the area had seen her outside. Her parents had not seen or heard anything from her during the year she was missing.
The girl was in protective custody on Wednesday night and was undergoing medical and psychological examinations.
"We can all assume a 14-year-old under the influence of a 40-year-old had been harmed in some way," Blatter said.
Police already had established that Gault knew the girl, and said he and the girl's parents had some sort of undisclosed business transaction in the year before she disappeared. Officers had questioned Gault several times, but he always denied any involvement in her disappearance.
Without a search warrant, investigators never got past Gault's front door -- until Wednesday morning.
Officers who served the warrants were searching the home's disheveled interior when one of the investigators slid a dresser aside and discovered a small door.
He slid open the lock, opened the door and looked inside, then called out: "Lieutenant, you better get in here," Blatter said.
The girl was sitting inside a room that was about 0.90m high and about 1.5m deep. Police said they did not find bedding inside.
Other people were living in the house, including a 15-year-old boy, though it was not clear whose child he was.
The boy's case has been referred to the Department of Children and Families, which will also decide if the missing girl should be returned to her parents.
Neighbors said Gault and Murphy had lived in the white two-story house for five or six years, posting signs in the yard advertising puppies for sale. An empty chain-link dog kennel with two doghouses could be seen in the back yard.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the