Evil Lives Here

We were just eating spaghetti at

the dinner table,

and I was slurping my spaghetti, and she was not

having it, but she was slurping her spaghetti.

I thought it was funny. I was a kid.

And all I remember is just eating my spaghetti,

and then just feeling, like,

a super intense, piercing pain, and looking over,

and I had a fork in my arm.

I don't ever remember going to the hospital or anything.

I just remember sitting there and, like, getting stabbed in

the arm and looking over,

and they're just, like... My arm literally bleeding with

a fork in it.

I have a tattoo that covers the scar from my mom, it says,

"I forgive you."

And then it's, uh, Mary Bernice Rowles underneath.

It's my mom's initials.

Mary Rowles sobbed in court.

Alice Jenkins showed little emotion as they heard the long

list of charges they were about to admit to.

I have had cold-blooded murderers

stand in front of me, rapists, child abusers,

burglars, drug traffickers.

I would have to say that the two of you are perhaps

the coldest, most unfeeling,

least empathetic criminals I have ever seen.

You don't really know, like, what's going on inside

people's homes.

You just don't know.

There's, like, demons inside some homes

and, like, you just don't know.

It's scary, man.

Like your neighbor, the person across

the street or someone like your family,

it could be your family member,

you wouldn't even know it's happening.

My mother's name is Mary Rowles.

From age 15 to 21,

she had six children.

The furthest back I can remember is...

1997.

I was living with my mom and my brother Tyler,

my sister Marissa,

my brother Darrell and Danny, and Caleb had just been born.

She was, like, a really good mom.

There's early photos of us, like, going

to Chuck E. Cheese and stuff like that,

and, like, just being kids.

Before Alice, my mom treated us pretty good.

My mom met Alice at a gay nightclub in Akron, Ohio.

And then the next thing I know, we're living in a new house

with just Alice.

My three older siblings, Darrell,

Danny, and Marissa, moved in with their fathers, and I was

left with Alice, Mary, my older brother,

Tyler, and my younger brother, Caleb.

And for a while, everything seemed okay.

But Alice saw herself as the boyfriend,

the man of the house.

This is the house that we lived in last,

I was 14 when I saw the house last.

Just get, like, a little nervous when I see this.

It seemed for... like for years we were never gonna make

it out of that house and away from Alice and Mary.

It's just like... I don't know.

Um, just makes me nervous, because it...

It just make... like, this house makes me think about just,

like, dark times.

Nobody knew what was going on.

At first, Alice treated us pretty good,

like, pretty kind, but over time,

she kind of got, like, jealous of the attention that Mary was

giving us.

Alice began to separate us from our mother

and tie us to the bed when she went to work.

Get on the bed and lie down.

Tyler and I were both put in the same room

in the beginning,

two twin beds side by side, essentially, and she would tie

us by our wrists and our ankles to

the bedposts so we would essentially be strung, like,

laid out so we couldn't roll over or move around.

Alice was never aggressive with it.

She was just very quiet and very stern

and just wanted to handle business and be done with it.

And Mary was taking care of Caleb most of

the day, because he was still a baby at the time.

So I didn't see much of Mary.

Stay here and be quiet until I get back.

So we would just be, like, in a room tied to beds,

Tyler and I, side by side.

I didn't really understand, like, what was going on.

It scares me more now, like, as an adult

than it... than it did when I was a kid.

I didn't really understand it then... I was

just so young, and, like, just seemed normal.

After a while, we figured out how to untie ourselves,

and then we'd come downstairs

to, like, hang out with our mom and hang out with Caleb.

Alice would get very frustrated when she'd come home

and see that we were downstairs with Mary,

and we had escaped,

but it definitely appeared as though it was kind of a game.

Because, like, we didn't get punished for escaping.

We would just go to bed and repeat the process.

It seemed like that was the game of it all was to be

tied up and then to escape

and then to be tied up and to escape.

It just seemed like she wanted the separation between

Mary, Tyler, and I, trying to, like, break that bond.

Alice sort of became the divide between Mary

and her children.

When we would escape during the day, she would come home,

and we would be doing the same thing,

just on the couch, hanging out with Mary,

trying to spend time with our mother.

And one day, she just separated us into separate rooms...

and tied the opposite opening doors together so that

we couldn't get out or open either door.

She was very quiet and reserved and almost seemed like

it was just a task

that she had to do, almost as if we were just animals to take

care of.

The doors being tied together

felt less of a game

and more like a punishment or like imprisonment.

There's, like, nothing really to do in the room.

You're kind of just sitting around from like eight a.m.

to four p.m.,

when Alice would come home to give us dinner.

There's just no word to describe the emptiness

of just, like... just feeling like you're all alone,

like, trapped in a space for an extended period of time,

and there's no way to track time, and you're just there

by yourself.

There's no one there to talk to.

You're kind of just, like, left in your own head,

left to your own thoughts.

Tyler and I liked banging on the walls and making music.

That became a way that we would, like, talk to each other,

as well, just like tapping on the wall.

Even after dinner, we were still taken to our rooms

and the doors were tied together

so that we were just left alone in our separate

rooms at night.

Mary never said anything to us once

we started being separated into separate rooms.

Sometimes she wouldn't even, like, be there when

we were at the table to eat dinner.

It would just be us.

We'd eat real quick and then go back upstairs.

I do think it was to keep

all of Mary's attention focused on Alice.

Alice's behavior slowly got worse, and she started

withholding food from us,

essentially starving us.

Up until this point, Alice would let

Tyler and I out of the room.

Most of the time, we would just have Captain Crunch

or something for breakfast, just a little cereal.

And then for dinner, the majority of what

we had was mac and cheese and hot dogs.

But I just remember one day, her coming up and opening

the door, and I'm sitting there,

and she just has a paper plate with a half

a peanut butter sandwich on it.

That was our dinner.

Like, half a peanut butter sandwich

didn't seem enough for a dinner

or to last you through the whole day.

You eat your sandwich, and when

you're finished, you go right to bed.

I just thought it was just, like, a snack or something

until it started to become routine, where she wouldn't let

us out.

It went from having dinner downstairs

and breakfast downstairs,

to, like, just eating in the room all the time.

We weren't allowed out to use the restroom.

That's when we started using the corners of the bedroom.

We would pull up the carpets and use

the restroom and put down the corner of the carpet

so Alice couldn't find it,

and we did that for months and months.

It's just crazy.

It's very animalistic.

No one should have to survive like that.

I was not able to talk to Tyler during that time.

I assumed he was getting the same food I was,

but we hadn't seen each other

for 10 to 11 months at that time.

At that point, it's almost like

the days all connect, because everything's the same.

We had no other contact with Alice besides that.

And Mary didn't do anything in this situation.

Is everything okay?

They're fine. They're just having dinner.

Mary should have called the police in this situation

or called CPS or called a family friend or her parents.