It was dark out when the barefoot teenage girl barreled through the door of Susan Lacey’s cottage in Blackwood, N.J., and released a torrent of words.
She said she had been locked in a dog crate for a year and handcuffed to a toilet and not allowed to eat and didn’t go to school but she did get to take the dogs outside and her stepfather sometimes touched her but she got to listen to music and ate from a bucket but her little sister didn’t have to and she was really, truly Freddie Mercury, from Queen. She giggled.
Ms. Lacey sat her down on the couch and told her to breathe.
It took a moment for Ms. Lacey to recognize her: It was her neighbor’s daughter, and though the girl lived just feet away, she was rarely seen outdoors, and had been home-schooled for the past seven years. She was 18 years old, her hair was shaved close and uneven, and she smelled foul.
Ms. Lacey heated up a corn dog for her as the words kept coming. The girl’s jumbled mix of horrors and non sequiturs about pop music made Ms. Lacey and her adult son, who was visiting, wonder if what she was saying was true.
Then the teenager raised her hand toward her mouth to take a bite of the corn dog. There were marks on her wrists.
Had she tried to harm herself? Ms. Lacey asked. No, the girl replied. For the year she spent locked in the crate, she said, she had often had her hands cuffed behind her back. The cuffs had left scars.
Now prosecutors say they believe the teenager’s claims of captivity and abuse. Camden County prosecutors have leveled more than 30 criminal charges combined against the girl’s mother, Brenda Spencer, 38, and stepfather, Branndon Mosley, 41, including aggravated assault, criminal restraint, kidnapping and weapons offenses. Mr. Mosley is also facing numerous counts of sexual assault. Both could face up to life in prison if convicted of some of the most serious charges.
In inmate jumpsuits — navy for him, red for her — the two sat silently at their back-to-back detention hearings in the Camden County Hall of Justice late last month as prosecutors presented a disturbing array of evidence of the teenager’s yearslong ordeal. It included her stepfather’s confession to the police detailing the way the couple had imprisoned her in a dog crate, his description of the silver cuffs they had used and how he had shaved her head as a punishment. When asked about the sexual abuse accusations, he had told the police he used to drink a lot.
“He couldn’t recall sexually assaulting her,” Kelly Testa, an assistant prosecutor for Camden County, said in court, “but said that it was possible.”
Ms. Spencer has denied all of her daughter’s accusations, according to the police. Her other daughter, 13, told the police she had not been abused. The couple remains in jail, awaiting trial.
That a girl could vanish, and her abuse go unnoticed for so long, could have implications beyond this case. Prosecutors, in part, blame the lax rules around home-schooling — New Jersey is one of many states with little oversight once a child leaves traditional schooling — for perpetuating her suffering.
“These are beyond horrific, absolutely abominable acts,” Grace C. MacAulay, the Camden County prosecutor, said in an interview after last month’s hearing. “What they did is beyond heinous, and it really is an act that would be analogous to what someone would suffer as a prisoner of war — it is true torture.”
A Black Eye
For many years, the only time neighbors saw the girl was when she darted next door to pick up Amazon dog food deliveries that had been mistakenly left at Ms. Lacey’s door. Since sixth grade, she had been home-schooled.
“When you remove the child from being in public, there goes your witnesses,” Ms. MacAulay said.
Around that time, seven years ago, Ms. Lacey said she noticed the girl’s younger sister waiting for the school bus one morning, with a black eye. A few days later, she had another. She told Ms. Lacey that she had run into the TV.
When Ms. Lacey confronted the mother, she had a different explanation — that her child had run into a door. Ms. Lacey called her elementary school to express her concerns. She said she had later been interviewed over the phone by someone from the New Jersey Department of Children and Families, but never found out what happened next. A spokesman for the department said it does not comment on cases, citing privacy laws.
Shortly after that, the younger sister, then in second grade, was also removed from public school; according to prosecutors it was because the parents were afraid she would tell someone that her older sister was “living in a dog crate.”
New Jersey is one of a dozen states that do not require parents to officially inform any government entity of their intent to home-school a child. Parents are still required to provide an equivalent education; failure to do so may be punished with a disorderly person’s offense. But no one from the state checks in.
Ms. Spencer told the police that she had given up on educating her older daughter after a week. In a police interview, the girl’s younger sister could not recall any lessons being taught.
“I fear cases like this will become more prevalent,” Ms. MacAulay said, because abusive people “will see how easy it is to hide these crimes.”
In March, the police arrested a Connecticut woman who they said had imprisoned her stepson in their home for 20 years after switching him to home-schooling at 12. The stepson, then 32, escaped after he set fire to his room in order to be rescued by firefighters. Connecticut also does not have any check-in requirements for home-schoolers.
New Jersey prosecutors building the case against the teenage girl’s parents said they had been shocked to learn how little attention is paid to home-schooling.
“It didn’t make any sense to me,” Ms. Testa, the assistant prosecutor, said in an interview. “Who is overseeing this to make sure it is provided? No one is. No one.”
thatcrazydanemom
The only times the police were called to Mr. Mosley and Ms. Spencer’s house at 304 Ridge Avenue were for complaints about the excessive barking of the family’s pack of dogs: four Great Danes, a Siberian husky and two poodle mixes.
Ms. Spencer had recently taken up the hobby of dog handling. Breeders would send or sell to her purebred Dane puppies to train and show at competitions, said Penny J. Wallace, an acquaintance from the show circuit. Ms. Spencer documented her wins on her TikTok account, thatcrazydanemom.
Mr. Mosley was a train conductor for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s regional rail, and the railroad had recently cited him for heroism for putting out a fire on a train.
The dogs were always quiet by the time police officers arrived in response to complaints, Chief David Harkins of the Gloucester Township Police Department said, so they never went inside the home.
Ms. Wallace said the couple had told her at one dog show that they had been high school sweethearts. But Ms. Spencer, who is white, and Mr. Mosley, who is Black, said they were kept apart as teenagers because their families did not approve of their interracial relationship, and then reconnected as adults.
When Mr. Mosley reunited with Ms. Spencer, in 2014, she had two daughters and was divorced from their father. Mr. Mosley’s Facebook wall is full of messages about the struggles of interracial couples.
Ms. Wallace said the girl’s younger sister and Mr. Mosley almost always accompanied Ms. Spencer to dog shows, sometimes twice a week. Ms. Spencer had mentioned the girl only to complain about how often she tried to run away.
Oddly, Mr. Mosley’s Facebook feed is also filled with posts that claim the couple had three other children together: 5-year-old twin daughters and a toddler son. Prosecutors said these children appear to be fictional.
After the couple was arrested last month, the police and wildlife authorities confiscated dozens of animals at the home, including 24 chinchillas they said Ms. Spencer was illegally breeding for sale, four snakes, a bearded dragon lizard and several exotic birds. The animals had their own room, and the girl was often relegated there for days at a time to clean the cages, the police said. She had to relieve herself in a bucket, and she said an alarm setup kept her from trying to escape. The police said they had found a closed-circuit camera system on the door.
The horrors continued beyond that room, according to statements the girl made to the police and her neighbor.
Sometimes, she was locked in a bathroom for days, with her ankles affixed to a chain looped around the back of the toilet, and fed spaghetti from a Johnson’s Popcorn bucket. She told her neighbor that the younger sister was treated “like a princess,” and allowed to eat meals at the table with the family.
Once, while she was confined in the bathroom, her stepfather sexually assaulted her in exchange for food, she said. She later told her mother, who did not report it, prosecutors said. In her interview with the police, Ms. Spencer denied that she was ever told about the assault.
Family members did not respond to calls for comment. Mr. Mosley’s mother and father, wearing hats that identified them as veterans, declined to speak to a reporter at the court hearing last month.
The girls’ biological father, Lawrence Young, does not appear to be involved in their lives; in 2018 he was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually assaulting a child younger than 13 years old.
Camden County prosecutors said that victim had been the eldest daughter.
Freedom
On May 8, the night the girl escaped, she was supposed to clean dog excrement from the basement, one of her daily chores. Instead she walked around in circles, singing. When her mother confronted her, she made for the front door. Her stepfather threatened to “break her leg,” she told the police. Her mother said two words: “Bye, bitch.”
She fled, barefoot, to Ms. Lacey’s doorstep, where she had so often retrieved the packages of dog food. Her neighbor’s son, Michael Lacey, a 36-year-old pool cleaner, lent her his daughter’s shoes, and spent the next several hours calling homeless and women’s crisis shelters, trying to find someone to help her, he said in an interview. All of them said they were full.
Then he called the police, who met him and the girl at a nearby Wawa convenience store. But according to Chief Harkins, she did not reveal the abuse when they spoke to her there, saying only that she had gotten into a fight with her parents. The officers left.
On that first night of freedom, the girl slept in Mr. Lacey’s Honda Accord. Afraid that his neighbors would come looking for her in his mother’s house, he locked her in for her own safety and set the car alarm, he said. He gave her his phone, so she could play music.
The next day he took her to Jefferson Stratford Hospital, where she began to describe what had happened to her.
Then, a day later, the police executed a search warrant at her house. Her mother and stepfather were arrested on May 11. The police said the girls are now “in safe locations” but declined to provide more details.
“After I found out that everything she was telling me was true, I broke down,” Mr. Lacey said later. But as the girl sat shotgun in his car on the ride to the hospital, she had been in bright spirits as her home receded behind them.
“She was happy,” Mr. Lacey recalled. “She was like, ‘I am not going back there.’”
Kirsten Noyes and Susan C. Beachy contributed research
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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