By Seamus McGraw
May 24, 2006
(Crime Library) — The discovery earlier this year that Tanya Kach, a teenaged runaway who had been kept for more than a decade as a virtual sex slave, she alleged, by a middle school security guard who had allegedly seduced her and then imprisoned her when she was just 14, riveted the nation.
News crews flocked to the working class town of McKeesport, PA, and when the security guard, now 48-year-old Thomas Hose, was arrested and charged in connection with her alleged imprisonment, along with an accused conspirator. The story dominated the news cycle for days.
But the strange case was not without parallels. Three years ago, the working class town of Rockhampton in Queensland, Australia, weathered a similar media storm when Natasha Ryan, a young girl, believed to have been abducted and murdered by a serial killer named Leonard Fraser, suddenly emerged, in the midst of Fraser's trial for her murder.
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| Natasha Ryan |
In the days that followed, Natasha Ryan, then 18, admitted that she had spent the past four years living in absolute seclusion, often hiding in a bedroom cupboard in the home of her slightly older boyfriend. Unlike, Tanya Kach, however, Natasha Ryan insisted that she had been a willing accomplice to her own disappearance, and unlike Kach, who told authorities that she had remained hidden out of fear, Ryan has told anyone who would listen that her self-arranged abduction was done out of love.
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| Rockhampton, Australia |
It's not that the officials in Queensland are totally devoid of romance, nor were they unhappy to see that Natasha was alive and not buried in some remote billabong. All the same, they were upset enough that she had and her boyfriend had tricked the system that both were charged with causing a false police investigation and both are scheduled for trial next month.
Next Page
See Crime Library Feature Story on Leonard John Fraser
See Full Coverage of Tanya Nicole Kach Case
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