commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Here on All Things Crime Blog, we’ve seen several stories in which abusive parents lock their children in cages as part of an overall pattern of abuse. Now we have a new story in which a full grown woman, 30-year-old Joelle Lockwood, was held captive in a wooden cage in a mobile home in Indiana by a twisted couple, reportedly for baby-making purposes, which means she was raped regularly by the man of the house, a certain Rick House.
Joelle was kidnapped on July 9th by House and his girlfriend, Kendra Tooley. In addition to being raped and generally abused by the demented couple, she was forced to wear a dog collar and go around half-naked much of the time. Joelle would still be in captivity were it not for the heroic rescue efforts of Kendra Tooley’s ex-husband, Ronald Higgs.
Nina Golgowski and Jason Molinet of the New York Daily News write:
Higgs said it was his ex-wife, Kendra S. Tooley, who asked him to come over to the mobile home to financially help her and her boyfriend, Rick H. House Jr., on Thursday afternoon.
Higgs said he initially didn’t want to, but for a reason he couldn’t explain, he did.
(Higgs now believes that it must have been God’s doing that brought him to the mobile home to rescue Joelle.)
Once Higgs, who has a heart condition and had just gotten out of the hospital, decided to go visit Tooley, 44, and House, 37, it was agreed that he would spend a few days there.
Although Higgs is a giant of a man and was a biker for 30 years, he appears to be rather modest and unassuming. He told the Tristate Homepage that when he first saw Joelle and the giant wooden cage, he didn’t know what to think.
According to Regina Avalos of Mesa Top News Examiner, Joelle was not kept in the cage at all times:
“When she was not locked up in the cage, the couple forced her to do chores around their mobile home naked. House and Tooley rarely fed or gave water to Lockwood during her time in the home.”
At first, Higgs didn’t realize Joelle was being held against her will, but by Friday afternoon, the captive had clued him in to the fact she was being treated in truly abominable fashion. Higgs described their conversation in an interview with WFIE:
“She said, ‘please,’ with tears in her eyes, ‘Don’t leave here without me.’ And I promised her. I promised her. If I have to give my life to get you out of here, I will.”
In another interview, Higgs told the Tristate Homepage:
“I didn’t really know what I could do because I’m nowhere near the man I used to be, but I’m not leaving this house without her. I don’t care what I have to do. She’s coming home.”
Higgs reports that once he decided to rescue Joelle, he first offered to buy her from the couple. This would seem quite logical given that House and Tooley needed money. The couple refused, however, forcing Higgs to resort to more drastic measures, which he instituted late Saturday afternoon.
Meanwhile, Higgs gradually realized that Joelle was being used as a sex slave for baby-making purposes. He recounts:
“The whole time during it all they was talking about a baby. ‘She’s not leaving here until she has the baby. I’m not selling her, you’re not taking her, you’re not doing nothing.’ She told me Ricky was raping her, making her have oral sex. Kendra can’t have more children and Ricky doesn’t have any children of his own. I hate to say this to the public or even her even hearing it, but I think they were just going to have a baby and we would never see her again.”
On Saturday afternoon, Higg’s phoned one of his daughters and rather cryptically told her that if wasn’t home by 5:15, she should call the police and tell them where he was, that he was in danger, and that he had something (or someone) they were looking for.
When Higgs ultimately made it clear that he was not leaving without Joelle, he and House brawled. At one point, House confronted him with a shotgun and at another point, Higgs head-butted House and reportedly knocked him across the room (which must have been extremely painful).
It’s not precisely clear how he and Joelle eventually managed to leave the house trailer from hell, but my sense is, it was a combination of two things: 1) House and Tooley knew the police would come looking for Higgs if they didn’t release Joelle (and of course knew where he was); and 2) Higgs told the kidnappers that he would tell the authorities that he had found Joelle wandering the countryside in a state of disrepair.
In any event, after Higgs and Joelle left the trailer, they soon went to the police. Sometime after that, Joelle was reunited with her family. The Evansville SWAT team then raided the home and arrested the kidnappers.
“I would say their state when they were taken into custody was emotionless,” Posey County Sheriff Greg Oeth told the Courier & Press of House of Tooley and House’s arrest.
The couple was formally charged with rape and criminal confinement on Monday.
Although Higgs is being hailed a hero, which he of course is, he is working hard to deflect the praise:
“Everybody’s calling me a hero. I’m just a pure-bred American that believes in freedom” he told WFIE.