Introducing "The Hand in the Window"

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0:42I've worked three different locations. You like it? Yeah, I was made to be a dispatcher. Sarah says she's good at multitasking, which she says is a requirement for the job. We usually have six to eight screens, depending on what center you're at. When Sarah starts a shift, she logs into all those computers, and then she waits. You never know when the call will come in or what kind of call it's going to be. In September 2016, Sarah was working the overnight shift in Ashland, Ohio, a rural town about 60 miles southwest of Cleveland. Just before 7 a.m., the sun was rising over Ashland's cornfields, marshes, and woods.

1:34Sarah was about to clock out when one more call came in. 911, what is the address to your emergency? I just want to street parking at. At first, I couldn't hear her. It was real quiet. She was whispering. What is it? Fourth Street Laundromat. The Fourth Street Laundromat. There were just five laundromats in Ashland. The one on Fourth Street was near the center of town, a few blocks from Ashland's Main Street, with its brewery, restaurants, bank, and Dairy Queen. What's the problem? I've been exhausted. Police identify the caller as Jane Doe to protect her privacy. She said she'd been abducted and that the man holding her captive was sleeping nearby.

2:24My reaction was to find out where she was at first to get her out of there. Jane Doe said she was in a house by the 4th Street laundromat. You don't know what color the house is? Yellow. Please hurry. Do you think it's a yellow house? I think so. Does he own the house? No, he's broken. Does anybody actually live there? I think he's been abandoned. A yellow abandoned house by the laundromat. Sarah Miller told another dispatcher to send police officers to the area. The precinct was about five minutes away by car. Stay in the home. I don't mind with me, okay? Okay. Sarah knew if those officers were going to find Jane Doe quickly.

3:14They needed to get more information. Does he have a weapon? He's got a taser. He's got a taser. Sarah could hear that the caller's breathing was getting heavier and heavier. She was clearly afraid, but Sarah knew that she could not panic. Good dispatchers train not to react to emotions. You have to stay calm. You have to remain calm. Yes, have to stay calm and think straight.

3:50Sarah had been trained to handle all calls the same way. But this call was anything but routine. In fact, it would become the first step in an investigation that would reveal sinister and shocking crimes. From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm John Quinones, and this is The Hand in the Window. Episode 1, Colbert Court.

4:29Dispatcher Sarah Miller needed to keep Jane Doe on the line. You had a lot of questions right away. I have to get information for the officers. If he was to wake up, kill her, and escape, I wouldn't know what his name is, what he looked like, anything. I knew he was sleeping, so I asked her more questions, trying to get as much as I could before he woke up. Sarah asked, what does the kidnapper look like? Jane Doe said he was white, about six feet tall, and around 175 pounds, with brown hair. Sarah tried to learn more about Jane Doe's circumstances. what was the layout of the house? Where was she within it?

5:12Jane Doe told Sarah that she and her kidnapper had entered the house through a side door which opened into the kitchen. She was calling from a bedroom on the first floor. Sarah asked, is there any way you can escape? I don't know without waking him and I'm scared. Jane Doe was worried about waking her kidnapper. He'd put a chair against the bedroom door so that it would make noise if the door were opened. Sarah asked, was there a bathroom in the house? Could that be a way to escape? If you told me you had to go to the bathroom, he would do something to you? Yeah, because he had me tied up. Are you tied up now?

6:05Well, I... Yeah, but I kind of freed myself. Is he in the same room with you? Yes. Is it his phone you have? Yes. Yes, she was in the same room as the kidnapper. Yes, she was calling on his phone. Jane Doe took a deep, pained breath and asked, Are they on the way? I'm in the other way. We have officers we're sending. Please, no. If you're worried, you don't have to talk. You can just set the phone down, okay? I just need to hear if the officer's finding or not. Jane Doe whispered, okay.

6:53At this point, she'd been on the line with 911 for six minutes. Do you need an ambulance? Are you bleeding from anywhere? Anymore. Where were you bleeding from?

7:12We don't have to talk if you don't need to, okay?

7:19Oh, okay, welcome home. Just set the phone down.

7:28When you have a high-stress situation and you think someone's in danger, if they set the phone down, I can still hear what's going on. I can still tell the officers what I can hear. And that puts her in less danger than if he catches her with the phone. But you didn't want her to hang up. No. No, because then I might not have got her back. Because I can't call his phone back or he'd have woke up. And then the line goes silent. For what seems like, must have seemed like. Yes, forever. Almost four minutes passed without Sarah hearing anything from the caller.

8:10No response. Another minute passed. Are you still there? How much longer. What? How much longer. Twelve minutes into the call, fearing for her life, Jane Doe desperately wanted to know how much longer. Her kidnapper had been shifting in his sleep, starting to stir. Jane Doe would later say that her kidnapper had alarms going off on his phone every five minutes to keep him awake. Jane Doe had gotten to his phone, turned the volume all the way down, and that's when he finally dozed off. Do you hear any officers outside? Okay, they're in the area.

9:02The Ashland Police Division is a smaller police division. We have about 32 officers, 33 if you count the chief. Kurt Dorsey was one of the officers who was dispatched to help Jane Doe. He had just started his shift that morning. We were actually sitting in roll call when the call came out. So we immediately get up and go to our cars and start to drive towards the area of the call. At that point, Officer Dorsey had been on the force for about eight years. Initially, he wasn't even convinced the call was real. This wasn't a call that we typically got in Ashland. I've covered countless stories for 2020.

9:51But this case, it really struck a chord with me. Because it happened not far from where, as a teenager, I once picked tomatoes with my family as a migrant farm worker. Who would have thought, way back then, that this kid, who only dreamed of someday becoming a journalist, would one day be back here to report on such a shocking crime? Ashland is a town of less than 20 ,000 people. It's best known for farming, the local Christian university, an annual hot air balloon festival, and a popular county fair. On Friday nights, people gather to watch high school football games under the bright lights. Ashland is also a deeply religious place.

10:43The town itself has dozens of churches and it's surrounded by Amish country. One police officer told us that Ashland is the kind of place where police have time to respond to small complaints and nuisances, like a bat flying around in someone's house. That's September morning in 2016. As officers drove to find Jane Doe, they kept their sirens off. They didn't want to risk waking up her kidnapper. When we get out of the cars, we didn't really have a game plan. The laundromat Jane Doe mentioned was at the corner of East 4th Street and Colvert Court. When officers arrived there, they discovered two nearly identical houses right next to each other.

11:33Both houses were two stories with pale yellow siding, green window frames, and front porches. When the call came in, I was pretty calm at first, but when we got to the set of houses, I started to get kind of nervous and a little bit afraid, actually. There was really no time to formulate any kind of plan. We just started looking.

12:01Officers didn't know which house to target. Jane Doe's description of a yellow abandoned house didn't narrow things down. Both houses fit that description. I began to look through windows and see if we can see anything. Inside, the houses seemed empty. So there wasn't much by looking through the windows that told us anything. While officers scoped out the two houses, Sarah Miller was still on the line with Jane Doe. She asked again if there was any way for Jane to escape. Jane Doe said she was standing right by the bedroom door. Can you open it? I'm afraid of making noise. She was afraid of making noise.

12:54You think you can get out? You need to get out.

13:05Jane Doe said her kidnapper was strong. The officers needed to be right there to help her escape. And as far as she could see and hear from inside the bedroom, they weren't. Officer Dorsey started pulling on the doors to both houses to see if any of them would open. but no such luck. All the doors were locked in both houses. If the officers decided to just barge into one of the houses, they could wake up the kidnapper and put the caller's life at risk. But then Sarah Miller heard this from Jane Doe. She heard the side door open. She heard the side door open. Jane Doe took a big risk. She pushed the chair blocking the bedroom door out of the way and rushed to the side door of the house.

14:07Big curtains blocked the bedroom windows, but there was also a window in the side door. Yeah, I'm looking out at the time I'll come back. She said, hurry, hurry. She said to hurry up and come back.

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16:34Officer Kurt Dorsey was told that Jane Doe had heard him at the side door. That she wanted him to hurry, hurry, and come back. Now he knew that this call, as strange as it seemed for Ashland, was real. There was a kidnapped woman fearing for her life inside one of the two houses. Reflecting on that day still makes Dorsey emotional. This is like the third time I've talked about it.

17:17I was at the second house, and I remembered that I had pulled on a door hard, and it made a noise that I didn't intend because we're trying to be stealthy, but it sort of slipped out of my hand. And so I ran around the house that we were currently at and looked towards the direction of the other house, and I saw her hand. Her hand. Jane Doe had put her hand up against the window of the side door. They knew finally where she was. 911 dispatcher Sarah Miller had been getting updates from the officers on the ground. What a relief. They're there. But it's not over yet, right? They can't seem to get in something.

18:11Yeah, he's not awake yet, so they haven't got to him yet. And who knows what kind of weapons he has hidden in the house or... So... It brings... You still tear up when you hear this. Tell me why.

18:26It's just a lot to deal with unhearing things that you've heard. Once they saw Jane Doe's hand, the officers had to figure out how to get to her without putting her in danger. So once I got to the door, it was locked and we're still trying to be quiet because we were told that he was sleeping. Officer Dorsey asked dispatcher Sarah Miller to tell Jane Doe to unlock the side door. Sarah and Jane Doe had gone back and forth throughout the whole call, Sarah urging her to escape if she could, Jane Doe saying it was too dangerous. Jane Doe had already gotten out of the bedroom. Now she was ready to take another risk.

19:20as officers stood behind the locked door. Once I heard the door unlocked, I opened it, and she stood there in the doorway, fully nude, and just looked like she had seen a ghost. The shock on her face was unreal. I'll never forget it. I don't think I've ever felt...

19:49So much relief to find her.

19:57Jane Doe was frozen in place. The officers gave her a blanket to cover herself and instructed her to leave the house and finally get to safety.

20:1519 minutes into the 911 call, Jane Doe was rescued.

20:26Sarah, you helped save that woman's life. She saved herself. I was just doing my job. Sarah Miller ended up winning Ohio Dispatcher of the Year for her work on this call. The stress of the call and the huge relief she felt when Jane Doe was rescued, it sticks with Sarah. Even after the decades of 911 calls she's handled. The best reward was her getting free and his alive and well. Do you get therapy after something like this? I got God. That's all I need. God? Yep. Your faith? Yep. What does it teach you? It teaches me to let go.

21:21Do you think God would be proud of you? I hope so. I'll ask him someday. Officer Kurt Dorsey is also religious. Jane Doe would later say that she sensed a Christian would be sent to rescue her. And her rescue did seem miraculous to Officer Dorsey. So much had to go right for her to make it out alive. When I look back at that morning, I think something told me to look at that window. There were two other guys there. They don't recall seeing the hand. And I saw it. I think that a combination of maybe some divine intervention and a good dispatcher led us to that house and ultimately that door.

22:21Once Jane Doe was out of the house, officers could turn their attention to the kidnapper. They went back inside the house, weapons drawn, and began moving toward the bedroom. I remember when I first went into the house, it was sort of a mess. Although it was vacant, it looked like it was being lived in. There was a bed, clothing, and things like that inside. The house was so dirty that you could see footprints in the layers of the dust on the stairs. Random items like a shopping cart, a clock, and stuffed animals were scattered around. Officer Dorsey went through the kitchen and then turned back into the bedroom.

23:09And that's where we found the male lying in the bed. And I gave him orders to show his hands, and we ultimately arrested him at that point. He was handcuffed, and he was nude. So I actually assisted him in putting some shorts on. At that point, we walked out to one of the patrol cars.

23:35Two of the officers searched the rest of the house, but Officer Dorsey stayed back and waited with the kidnapper. He was tall with dirty blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. Officer Dorsey started to question the kidnapper. So you remember I read you, Miranda? You understand all that? Your Miranda rights and all that? Yeah. Okay. Dorsey eased into things. He didn't zero in on Jane Doe's abduction right away. So, obviously, again, you know, I already told you, you know, you can't crash in an abandoned house. I mean, that's, no, it's just one of those things. I understand that you're homeless, you need a place to crash.

24:25It is what it is, but you still can't do it. The kidnapper spoke quietly and gave brief responses, just a few words at a time. He said he'd been living in the house for about a month without being noticed.

24:43Then, Officer Dorsey started asking the kidnapper about Jane Doe. What happened? That's why we're here, man. We're trying to figure out what the hell's going on. Something obviously went on, and we're trying to figure out what in the hell is going on right now. Yeah, I understand. Again, the kidnapper was responding, but not with any real information. It got out of hand, probably. Okay. How did it get out of hand? What do you mean? I don't know. The other officers came out of the house. That's when Officer Dorsey got a message over the police radio. Bring the kidnapper to the police station. I'm going to take you on station, and I think they want to talk to you a little bit more.