MISSING TEEN JAYME CLOSS FOUND ALIVE Inside her brave escape
MISSING TEEN JAYME CLOSS FOUND ALIVE l Who
The 13-year-old girl who survived 88 days of captivity after her parents were murdered in front of her breaks free. Inside her shocking ordeal – and her joyous first days home
After three hours in the car, Jeanne Nutter’s golden retriever Henry wouldn’t sit still. Usually when the retired social worker and her husband, Forrest, first got to their weekend cabin in the woods of Gordon, Wisconsin, Nutter would settle in by building a fire and stowing her jewellery – including her bracelet with the medal of St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers.
But on Thursday, Jan. 10, the dog would not wait for his walk. “Henry was antsy and the road was nothing but ice,” Nutter says. “I thought, I’m leaving my bracelet on so I don’t fall and break my hip.”
But whatever powers the Catholic-school alum, now 66, ascribed to her religious medal, she had a higher calling that frigid afternoon when a thin young girl, wearing only a baggy sweatshirt and too-big men’s sneakers on the wrong feet, stumbled across the ice towards Nutter and Henry. “She said,
‘I need help.’ I recognised her immediately. Her pictures are everywhere,” recalls Nutter. “She was crying. She told me, ‘I’m Jayme.’ ”
They were two words that thousands across Wisconsin – and the world – had been waiting to hear. Eighty-eight days earlier, on Oct. 15, Jayme Closs, 13, had been declared “missing and endangered” after her parents, Jim and Denise Closs, were found fatally shot in their Barron, Wisconsin, home. Since then, Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald, his officers and FBI agents had combed through more than 3500 tips yet had no leads, no suspect, no motive – until Nutter’s harrowing encounter 110km to the north. Within the hour, an unemployed local, a loner who police identified as Jake Patterson, 21, was in jail, charged with kidnapping Jayme and killing her parents.
And by the next morning, Jayme was reunited with extended family – and her pup, Molly – near Barron, where her aunt and legal guardian, Jennifer Smith (Denise’s sister), had Christmas gifts wrapped and waiting for her miracle homecoming.
“Jayme is still in shock,” says Smith’s daughter, Lindsey, 22. “That first night in her new home – “getting comfortable in my mom’s house, eating meat and cheese and snacks … watching the Hallmark Channel” – Jayme was, her cousin says, “nothing but smiles.”
Getting there was pure terror. After Jayme described how close the house of her captor was to where they stood in the road, Nutter realised she had to get the girl to safety but no one answered at the first house they tried. “My brain was racing,” says Nutter. “I said, ‘Oh, Jayme, we’ll find somebody. I know a teacher who lives down the road.’ I was talking calmly, but I was freaking out inside.” When that teacher, Kristin Kasinskas, answered her door, Nutter told her: “Call 911. And get a weapon.”
Kasinskas’ husband, Peter, stood at the door with his gun, in case Jayme’s abductor came looking for her, while Nutter wrapped
the girl in a blanket. Jayme didn’t want food. “She just wanted to be quiet. We just sat with her,” says Nutter.
As police later drove Jayme away in a squad car, they passed what turned out to be Patterson out looking for her. When another police officer stopped his car, Patterson, according to the criminal complaint filed in Barron County Circuit Court on Jan. 14, “stepped out of the vehicle and … stated, ‘I know what this is about. ‘I did it.’ ”
The 12-page complaint filed as
Patterson was being held in Barron County jail on Jan. 14, details his alleged confession and the horrors Jayme survived.
Patterson told police he decided one morning last autumn to abduct Jayme after he happened to be driving behind her school bus and watched her get on. From there, Patterson described meticulous planning for her abduction, which included wiping fingerprints from his shotgun shells and shaving his face and head so as not to leave DNA at the crime scene.
Jayme, an only child, was asleep at home just after midnight on Oct. 15 when her dog, Molly, began barking and woke her. At her bedroom window, she saw a car driving up and went to wake her parents. Patterson shot James through the front door as he peered out the window, according to the criminal complaint. He then shoved his way into the locked bathroom where Denise had hidden in the bathtub – her arms wrapped around Jayme “in a bear hug.” Patterson killed Denise with a single shot to the head before dragging Jayme to his car and throwing her – bound with duct tape – in the trunk.
At the ramshackle house in Gordon, where a tattered sign above the front door reads “Patterson Retreat” and Christmas lights still incongruously twinkle from a pine tree in the snow-crusted yard, Patterson used crates loaded with barbell weights to barricade Jayme beneath his bed, shoved up against a wall. “He told her bad things would happen” if she tried to leave, the complaint states. “Because of his anger outbursts, [Jayme] complied and did as she was told.” There is no mention of sexual assault and Patterson is not yet charged with any sexual crimes against Jayme, though in a court appearance Jan. 14, authorities requested his DNA. Patterson admitted, per the complaint, that he didn’t know Jayme’s name – or the names of her murdered parents, Denise, 46, and James, 56 – until he saw it on the news.
Even before the details of her ordeal were known, some who knew the Closses best were not surprised Jayme summoned the strength to survive and escape. Though universally described as “very quiet and shy” like her mum, Denise, Jayme “is a complete badass. She saved herself!” says Denise’s cousin, Jodie Arnold. “If you knew Jayme’s father, you’d know where she got her strength,” says Jim Closs’s high school basketball teammate,
Todd Rongstad. “Jim wouldn’t accept defeat.”
Now, somehow, the healing begins – for Jayme, and for her traumatised home town where no-one has felt safe for 88 anxious days. “When something like this happens in a town where we leave our doors unlocked, it’s unspeakable,” says school superintendent Diane Tremblay, who brought therapy dogs into Riverview Middle School, where Jayme’s in the 8th grade, to help her classmates with their anxiety over her abduction and the Closs murders. “Out of the evil of this horrific crime, still we can have a miracle,” says Barron mayor Ron Fladten. Local music star Chris Kroeze, who dedicated his Nov. 19 performance on NBC’S The Voice to Jayme and performed at the school’s vigil, says, “Everybody came together.” The town of 3200 people raised more than $50,000 to help Jayme rebuild her life.
Fellow abduction survivors warn that recovery from trauma isn’t quick or easy. “Jayme, take time to heal and just know you’re not alone,” says Cleveland kidnap survivor Michelle Knight, 37, who changed her name in the aftermath of her 11-year captivity to Lily Rose Lee. And Jaycee Dugard, 38, who survived 18 years after she was kidnapped sent a statement of hope: “The road ahead will have many ups and downs. Allow yourself to grieve and move forward. What happened will always be senseless but it does not have to define who you are forever.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Elizabeth Smart, 31, who was kidnapped from her home in 2002 before escaping nine months later. “She can still be happy,” says Smart. “It’s going to take work and it’s going to be different probably than what she ever imagined it was going to be before, but it is worth pursuing.”
For now, Jayme and Molly are settling into their new bedroom at Aunt Jennifer’s, which Lindsey decorated with a blue glass butterfly and an angel figurine – reminders of Jayme’s mother – beside Jayme’s bed. “My aunt Denise loved butterflies and angels,” says Lindsey. Relatives are letting Jayme open up about her trauma at her own pace – “some counselling will be the best thing at first,” says Lindsey – but Jennifer is making sure Jayme is not alone with her nightmare.
Her aunt sleeps in Jayme’s room, beside her niece in bed, beneath a decorative sign that quotes the Bible verse Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you … plans to give you hope and a future.” Says Lindsey, “I don’t think my mom is going to leave Jayme’s side.”