Warning: This is a pretty graphic post.
Seattle police have arrested a 66-year-old suspected of kidnapping, raping, and torturing a woman in what court documents describe as a “torture room,” inside a mobile home in Tacoma.
Police say the 66-year-old man, identified in court documents as John Joseph Hauff, picked up the 24-year-old woman at 82nd and Aurora around 9:30 p.m. on April 2nd and offered to pay her for what police describe “sexual role playing.”
Hauff told the woman he “wanted to tie her wrists to the bed posts and use an electric vibrator on her,’ according to police records. “He told her he liked it that way.”
Police say Hauff then offered to pay the woman $100, and agreed not to tight her up too tightly.
The woman got in the Hauff’s car, a blue Ford Taurus station wagon, but became concerned about his behavior, and later asked Hauff to pull over at a gas station, so she could buy some cigarettes.
While the woman was at the gas station, she texted a friend Hauff’s license plate number, and address in Tacoma, and told the friend to call police if she did not contact them by midnight.
The woman continued on with Hauff, who pulled off I-5 near Federal Way, and told the woman “he needed to blindfold her and tie her hands to the seat belt so she wouldn’t see where he lived,” court documents say.
Police say when the woman got to the Hauff’s home in Tacoma, he took her to a dungeon built in a large mobile home, tied a chain around her neck and padlocked it.
Hauff then told her “he was the master [and took all her clothes off and tied her to the wall," police records say.
The woman started screaming, and was able to get her blindfold off, only to realize she was shackled to the ceiling in Hauff's "torture chamber" filled with whips, syringes, belts, paddles, "sexual devices," locks, ropes, chains, tubes, and two devices designed for "administer[ing] electricity to the human body.”
According to court documents, the walls in the “torture room” are eight inches think, “making most sounds—such as screams—emanating from inside the room almost undetectable.”
The woman asked Hauff to let her go, but he told her “no,” put the blindfold on her, and let the room for about 15 minutes. He returned and began plucking out the woman’s pubic hair, and then stuck electrodes to her and began shocking her. He did this for about three hours, police say.
Hauff then used a speculum and catheter on her, and bound her until some of her extremities turned blue.
At one point, she asked Hauff he was going to kill her. According to police, the man told her “we’ll see.” He later threatened to bury her body in his yard, police records say.
When the woman told the man she had text messaged his license plate and address to a friend, he untied the woman, paid her $200, and asked her not to call police before he dropped her off on Rainier Ave.
The woman later contacted SPD, and detectives opened an investigation into the case.
On Saturday, SPD’s SWAT team found the suspect—who was with another woman—and arrested him. Hauff admitted to police that he’d picked up a woman several weeks earlier for a “bondage session,” and when the woman “asked to be released…he was so aroused that he didn’t stop to release her.” Hauff also admitted to torturing the woman.
Prosecutors have charged Hauff with kidnapping, rape, and assault.
