Tanya Nichole Kach, sex slave

A Kind of Grim Parole

Once she turned 18 and was legally an adult, Kach had allegedly earned a kind of grim parole. Though still essentially a prisoner, she has said, she was permitted to leave the house. But even then, she remained under Hose's control, she has said. He had stripped her of her name, and her identity. As far as anyone was concerned, she was not the runaway Tanya Kach whose image still flickered on obscure websites, she was Nikki Adams, a woman who apparently carried with her darkness deep enough for even strangers to see.

She was no longer completely isolated, at least not as isolated as she had been during those first four years. A neighbor, for example, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that the young woman she knew as Nikki would often come by to visit, but would always scurry home when it came time for Hose to return from work.

It was, according to published reports and the police affidavit, only within the last year that Hose permitted her to walk the neighborhood more freely.

In some respects, it seemed, the young woman who called herself Nikki was a kind of ghost, carrying with her the specter of a child who had vanished a decade ago. Perhaps that is what Sparico sensed when she walked into his deli trailing her sorrow behind her. He doesn't want to talk much about it now. In the weeks since he finally managed to get the young woman to open up, reporters and curiosity seekers have besieged him, as they have all the players in this tale, and now, in respect to Kach, he prefers to remain quiet about his role and the secrets he confided to him. "I've become a media darling," the bemused deli owner said. "It's been hectic.

But earlier this week, Sparico was briefly reunited with the woman, who has since returned to her father and his family and has learned, she has said, that her father never abandoned his hope that she would return. "She was here," Sparico said, "her and her family." And Sparico, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review had this to say of the child, now a woman who had allegedly been told so often that no one but her captor could love her that she came to believe it: "I love her. I consider her my daughter," Sparico told the newspaper.