The man, Jake Patterson, 21, was charged Monday with kidnapping, burglary and two counts of first-degree intentional homicide, and was scheduled to appear in a Wisconsin courtroom later in the day. He was arrested Thursday, shortly after Jayme escaped from under a twin-size bed where she was being held and sought help from a woman walking a dog.
Her disappearance three months ago stunned her small hometown, Barron, Wisconsin, and set off a nationwide search.
Jayme, who said she had never before met Patterson, said she was awakened by her barking dog on Oct. 15, the night of the attack. She said she saw a car outside her house and alerted her parents. Her father, James Closs, went to investigate and was shot and killed near the door as Patterson forced his way into the house.
Jayme told authorities that she and her mother, Denise, hid in a bathtub. Patterson forced his way into the bathroom, pulled back the shower curtain, and made her mother, Denise Closs, place black tape over her daughter’s mouth, Jayme said. Patterson then shot her mother with a shotgun that he had taken from one of his relatives, and dragged Jayme, with her wrists and ankles bound, to his car, where he put her in the trunk.
Perhaps 20 seconds after driving away from the house, Patterson said, he slowed down to make way for a sheriff’s deputy who was responding to a 911 call placed by Denise Closs before she was shot.
Jayme told investigators that she was held by Patterson for nearly three months in a cabin in Gordon, Wisconsin, about 65 miles north of her home. When Patterson had guests over, she said, he would make her hide under his bed, boxing her in with totes and laundry bins that he secured with barbell weights.
But last Thursday, when Patterson said he was leaving for a few hours, Jayme forced her way out, grabbed a pair of ill-fitting men’s shoes, left the cabin and ran to a roadway seeking help. A woman who was walking by with a dog escorted her to a nearby home, where sheriff’s deputies were called.
A short time later, according to court records, deputies confronted Patterson near the cabin on a wooded cul-de-sac.
“I did it,” he told a deputy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.