A former Maine woman was held captive and brutally assaulted for a week after recently moving to east Texas, authorities said.
The Henderson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas said four women and two men were arrested after the victim apparently escaped Tuesday from the Athens, Texas, home where she said she had been held. She was found in a nearby wooded area. Sheriff’s deputies said the woman had suffered severe bruises and burns, had the word “rape” shaved into the hair on the back of her head and was forced to call those who held her “master.”
The woman told a sheriff’s deputy that she was beaten with a cane, that one of the suspects used her chest as an ash tray and that her hand was burned with a “mark of disapproval” with a wax sealer. In a police affidavit, a sheriff’s deputy said the woman’s arms, legs, back, chest and stomach were covered in bruises and that there were cuts to “multiple body parts.”
A deputy who met with the woman in the hospital said her “body appeared to be more consistent with livor mortis in a deceased individual due to the severity of the bruising.” Livor mortis is the settling of blood in a body after death.
The woman said her captors forced her to eat cat feces and pieces of lettuce that had been spat on. She was hospitalized for treatment of her injuries and then released, authorities said.
Police are releasing little information on the victim. Henderson County Sheriff Botie Hillhouse told reporters that she had moved to Texas in November and had lived with some of the suspects before they began to torture her and hold her captive. He declined to say where in Maine the victim had lived before moving to Texas and said her name, age and other potentially identifying information were being withheld.
Hillhouse told reporters after the six were arrested that the woman had met the people living in the house online and had lived with them for a while before the assaults began.
All six of those arrested were charged with aggravated kidnapping and were still being held Friday, Hillhouse said.
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