I'm astounded and grateful that she was found alive.
The psycho that had her looks like an Orc or something.
But now the questions begin, which I am sure the police are asking....
Could she not get to a phone? Did she have no opportunity to get away? They were apparantly found walking down a street.... Why did she not just run to a convenience store or a cop?
Something seems fishy here....
THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL, Memphis, TN
October 23, 1997
LESLIE GATTAS KIDNAPPER STUBBLEFIELD LOSES LAST BID FOR PAROLE
Ernest Earl Stubblefield, the kidnapper in one of the city's most notorious crimes, was denied parole Wednesday by the Tennessee Board of Paroles. The parole hearing was Stubblefield's last chance at parole. The denial means he will serve all of the 30-year sentence he received in 1982 for the 1981 abduction of Leslie Gattas. It is the third time Stubblefield has been denied parole.
``He needs to spend the rest of his time there,'' said board member Larry Hassell of Memphis. That means Stubblefield, 56, will remain in prison another 15 years and will be 71 when he is released in 2012.
The parole hearing was held at Cold Creek Correctional Facility near Henning, where Stubblefield is serving his sentence. Hassell said he and parole board members Ray Maples of Memphis and Charles Traughber voted 3-0 to deny parole for Stubblefield. Hassell said Gattas's husband and brother spoke at the parole hearing and opposed Stubblefield's latest bid for freedom.
``We had the file and all of the evidence. He didn't deny anything,'' Hassell said.
Stubblefield entered a guilty plea to kidnapping and first-degree burglary charges in 1982. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Stubblefield kidnapped Gattas, then 15, from her home in November of 1981.
He held her captive in a crawl space of the balcony of Christ United Methodist Church for 119 days.
Prosecutors said Stubblefield intended to seek a $25,000 ransom in the kidnapping.
In March of 1982, two church maintenance men spotted Stubblefield and Gattas in the church and rescued Gattas. Stubblefield was captured three weeks later in the church crawl space.
In the final days, Leslie Marie Gattas sensed the end was near.
For four months in a church crawl space with a kidnapper, the high school sophomore relied on her instincts to stay alive. Her signals were now ominous.
At 10:30 p.m., she and her kidnapper crept downstairs to the Christ United Methodist Church sanctuary. Leslie took a front pew. Dwarfed in its enormity, she prayed.
"Your God ain't so good," sneered Ernest Earl Stubblefield. "He can't help you now. The only one who can help you is me."
She wrote the notes when she could in the ladies room. He waited outside.
The mirror reflected her horror. Her round dark eyes drooped old beyond their 15 years. Her face hung sallow. She wrapped an index finger and thumb around her wrist to size up her weight loss. Thirty-five pounds.
"I was eating tons," she says. "I lost weight in anxiety."
She kept a pencil in her jeans pocket and scribbled what seemed her zillionth plea for help.
Some notes were dated. Some not. Some cursive, some printed. When he wasn't looking, before the beam of his flashlight swept past, she stuffed them in Bibles, under pews, in desks, under books, in shoes and closets.
Please help me. My name is Leslie Gattas. Call my father George Gattas and police. I am in the attic with kidnapper. Please, I want to go home. I'm scared. We come down at night and walk around in the dark.
TODAY, Leslie, 27, is an attorney at Dyer, James and Taylor. She is married and goes by the last name of Coleman. She doesn't worry that she'll be abducted again. But she does keep a gun.
She doesn't mind talking about it. People in Memphis ask all the time. They point. Stare. Interrupt dinner conversations. "I don't know if they're looking to see if I'm normal or not," she says.
From November 1981 to March 1982, her kidnapping was a nationwide mystery. It was the Memphis version of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping - a prominent family, a child taken from its bed, the agonizing period of not knowing.
Much of the story unfolded in news bites and big headlines. Afterward, journalists, publishers, TV producers and Hollywood screenwriters begged Leslie to tell her story. She refused to talk on the record.
For the past year, this reporter and Leslie developed a relationship and she eventually agreed to tell her story to The Commercial Appeal. It was, she decided, a good time for her to thank those who prayed.
This story is a compilation of police reports and interviews with Leslie and others close to the incident. Much of the information has not been previously reported.
SGT. Rick Wilson, coordinator of the Memphis Police Department's 1981-82 investigation, says the Gattas abduction was the most perplexing case he has worked. The length of time, the kidnapper, their relationship, how he kidnapped her, where they lived, how they lived - Wilson still shakes his head in wonder.
"I tell you what," Wilson says, "I've spent 27 years with the department, 16 in homicide, and that was the most amazing case I've ever worked."
There were key signs that Leslie was a runaway. There were no signs of forced entry. No footprints outside the window. No ransom note left.
Yet there were indications that said otherwise. Leslie came from a nurturing home. She was happy. Her grades were outstanding. Girlfriends indicated she was in good spirits the night of her disappearance.
FBI agent Ben Hale was stumped. He refused to believe she was a runaway.
"What you sense being close to a family, the more you know the family, is an unwritten understanding you absorb from that relationship," Hale says. ''The Gattases are A-number-one people. Here's a girl - intelligent, good at school, lots of friends, great family - and she suddenly runs away? Being a runaway certainly was a possibility. But not a probability."
ON Wednesday, Nov. 18, 1981, Leslie invited a few high school friends over for prayer night. Later, she went to her room, took a shower and went to sleep, cradled in the safety of her parents' East Memphis home.
At 2:30 a.m., a sweaty man with large pores and rotting teeth crawled in a laundry room window. He spent an hour downstairs. Upstairs, Leslie's door was the only one open.
He cupped her mouth, flashed a knife and told her not to yell.
"Are you a boy or a girl?"
She replied, "A girl."
He trussed her 118 pounds in duct tape, wrists to ankles, and carried the human ball downstairs. He huffed and puffed. "You weigh a ton," he said more than once and stopped twice on the stairs to rest.
He loaded her into the Gattas family Cadillac and drove her to Christ United Methodist Church at 4488 Poplar where he stuffed her in a choir loft crawl space. He drove the car back, dropped the keys on the desk where he found them and walked back to the church.
For the next four months the high school cheerleader lived at her abductor's side. There was no violence. She wasn't raped. But she was a prisoner in the house of God, in the hands of evil.
Please help. My name is Leslie Gattas. Call police and my father George Gattas. I'm in the attic with kidnapper. Help Me! I'm scared.
POLICE cast a nationwide dragnet. The FBI joined the hunt on a hunch it was a kidnapping. Both agencies interviewed dozens of students and family friends. Police checked one bogus lead after another. A local 14-year-old was arrested for submitting a $100,000 ransom note.
Psychics from around the country joined the search. Shelby County Rescue Squad dragged Nonconnah Creek. Students combed fields near their schools. Vigil candles flickered throughout the Bible Belt.
''HOW did you find my house?" she asked.
"Telephone book."
"Have you ever been in my house before?"
"No," he said and thought a minute. "You didn't tell anybody did you?"
"Yeah."
Two nights before her abduction, Leslie remembered a man in her room who brushed a light across her face. She dismissed it as a dream.
In the attic, Stubblefield, then 42, kept a cache of high school yearbooks. He circled pictures of some girls. Leslie's picture was circled. He wore a ring of keys around his neck - keys to 27 Memphis churches and 12 residences, including federal Judge Harry W. Wellford.
He was surprised when he found out that Leslie wasn't the daughter of Fred P. Gattas, founder of the multimillion-dollar Memphis-based showroom and catalog merchandising company that bore his name. Her father, George, was Fred's brother.
Stubblefield told her his name was Ken. That he was divorced and lived in Chicago. He loved snow. He ate fried oysters at Anderton's Restaurant. He could down a 2-liter bottle of Coke in 30 seconds. Once, he almost ate a whole ham. He was a flabby 300 pounds.
At Memphis Machine Works Inc., where Stubblefield worked as a machinist in 1975, the fellas called him "Tub Belly." He's remembered as a whiz with keys, locks and machinery. Stubblefield hated Catholics and the St. Patrick's Day pub crawl. He told Leslie he was an atheist. He read religious books, didn't swear or smoke and got angry at the mention of alcohol.
He said he'd lived in the church since June. But Sam Drash, Christ Methodist Day School headmaster at the time, is convinced it was longer. Maybe two years. "Every time I took a tool to school it would disappear," he said, ''a starting pistol, a drill, hammer, screwdriver."
IN this city of churches, Christ United Methodist Church is one of the biggest. Its multiplex includes a gymnasium, laundry room, kitchen, nursery, activity rooms, church offices and school offices.
Every night around 10:30 to 11 the two crept downstairs. He collected pencils, staplers, calculators, books, tools and files. Leslie couldn't stray from his side. When she tried, he yanked her back.
"Don't you grab my arm like that!" she demanded.
"You better watch out."
He showed a knife.
"That doesn't scare me."
"It should."
She tried to be brave. To intimidate him, she said she planned to be a doctor. He called her "Doc." She beat him at Scrabble.
"I didn't want to look like an easy victim," Leslie says. "From the beginning I acted kind of tough. In the same light, I was nice. I wasn't a snob. I was compassionate so he would like me. It's hard to kill somebody you like."
The ransom note was for $25,000. The scheme was to deliver it by Thanksgiving and make the swap at a Krystal. Stubblefield apparently never delivered it, although he told Leslie he had called and made arrangements with her father. The night of the swap, he tied her with rope, put a clock next to her face and said he would return in four hours. During the four months, he left her only five times. When he did, she was tied with tape or rope.
Stubblefield returned, frantic. Police were buzzing all over! he exclaimed. Someone must have called the cops! Excitement grew into anger. "Let 'em sweat it out a little longer," he said.
The police and the Gattas family kept busy chasing down leads.
The family distributed photos of Leslie nationwide. Her mother never left the house. Her father's hair turned gray. Police followed a cosmic-goose chase led by psychics.
Her father hired two psychics and a New York clairvoyant, a reputed expert in finding lost submarines.
The psychic's vibes indicated that Leslie was raped and perhaps murdered. He thought her body lay on the grounds of a real estate office on Summer Avenue. Memphis Police Sgt. Rick Wilson and his team tackled the neighborhood. Nothing.
The psychic shifted gears. Leslie was in Overton Park in a shallow grave. Wilson's team started to dig. "No," the psychic stopped them. She is in a drainage ditch in an industrial area.
Please help. Call police and my father George Gattas. I'm in attic with kidnapper. Help me! I'm scared. Leslie Marie Gattas.
WHEN you lie in an attic on a bed made from gymnasium tumbling mats, sheets and covers - a raft on rivers of pink insulation - your bones start to ache.
The area was 3 feet high. About all you can do is sleep, play games, read books or fidget with a Rubik's Cube. Stubblefield rigged up a light bulb and an outlet for an electric fan. He was always hot. He laid a walkway of wooden boards across the insulation to the door. When they slept he hid Leslie's shoes and lifted the boards up. She was trapped.
Stubblefield returned to the Gattas house, sneaking in and grabbing some clothes - a cheerleading uniform, skirt, warmup outfit and T-shirts. The Gattas family wasn't aware when he returned. Another time, he bought her VO-5 shampoo at Walgreens. They sponged in separate restrooms.
Mostly, she kept to herself and spoke when spoken to. He usually ignored her, unless he accused her of stealing a knife, watch or other item he had stashed under the insulation.
"He's got a temper and a half," Leslie told police.
Stubblefield's ex-wife, Ann Bates Clark, recalls their five-year marriage in the 1960s as terrifying.
"He was caught between the devil and the Lord," Clark says. "He was scary to be around. I'd either have a black eye or a knife throwed up 'side my head."
Though Leslie told police that Stubblefield "was nice" to her, there was no doubt in her mind that he would have killed her. "Every day I prayed to God to give me an extra day," she says.
God gave her 119 days. During that time, the teenager performed the balancing act of her life.
"My mind was going a mile a minute," she says. "No time for pity, it was all about survival."
She talked to herself. She recited her father's name, her mother's name, family members, addresses, dates, birthdays. "Little things to keep my brain in tune," she says.
CHRISTMAS was difficult.
"It was miserable to hear them singing Christmas songs," she says. "It's amazing that life is going on. That's what's so scary when I think of other missing children. Life is going on . . . and all that time someone is living in utter hell."
Leslie hoped she could get home by Christmas. She wrote letters to her parents telling them that her kidnapper wanted money.
But it was the same as before. The letters were never received. The night the swap was to be made, Stubblefield taped Leslie's hands and feet and left. He returned upset, saying he had called her father from a mall in Bartlett.
"When I hung up the phone, every kind of police car was there!" he exclaimed. "They were in the playground tires! Dozens of them - everywhere!"
He was angry.
MORE than a month after the abduction, police were looking for a body. There was no ransom note. No Leslie. Just a mystery and headlines, "GATTAS FATE REMAINS MYSTERY," "GATTAS GIRL NOT FOUND."
Leslie read the newspapers every morning. She reasoned there was no mention of a ransom note because police wanted to keep it quiet. She had no idea that Stubblefield never delivered them.
"It's so amazing to read things in black and white that say, 'Where is she? Where is she?' " Leslie says. "And I'm like, 'I'm here! I'm here! I'm here!' That's weird."
By February, she was convinced Stubblefield had gotten himself into something he could not get out of. He grew attached to his victim and it did not appear that he could kill her or turn her loose.
Leslie spent up to eight hours a day in prayer. God installed a "hotline" in her prison attic. Whenever the young girl needed help, she picked up the phone.
"God helps them who helps themselves," she says. "I had to do my part. That's where the notes came in. Those are things God tells you to do. It's not possible for a 15-year-old to do without God and Mother Mary. I don't think anybody's that focused."
Please help me! My name is Leslie Gattas. I need your help. Call the police immediately and my father George Gattas. I am in the attic with the man who kidnapped me. Please this is no joke. Show this note to the police. They will know what to do. They have been looking for me for a long time. I am so scared. I beg of you call the police right now . . . I am so frightened . . .
WHEN Leslie's notes were found in the church and school, they were discarded. ''We thought it was some teenager putting the notes out," says Rev. Jerry Corlew, former executive minister.
When Drash, the headmaster, turned over the notes he found to police in March he discovered there was some concern at Christ United Methodist about police involvement.
Only two weeks before Leslie was kidnapped, a tragedy had rocked the church family. Dr. Harold Beaty, senior minister for 12 years, was found shot to death in his home. The Shelby County Medical Examiner ruled that his ex-wife, Stella, fatally shot her husband, then herself.
"My understanding was that Jerry (Corlew) was concerned that by contacting the police (about the notes), if it were not a real situation, that would cause undue negative attention because Dr. Beaty had been murdered. The church was in a state of shock."
Please help me. My name is Leslie Gattas. Call the police and my father George A. Gattas. I am in the attic with the man who kidnapped me. This is no joke. Show the police this note. They will understand. I put this note on your desk when he wasn't looking. Please, whoever you are, don't leave me here . . . He might be armed.
SHE could see the workmen. Two maintenance men entered the attic space to fix the heating system. Stubblefield cupped Leslie's mouth and hid low behind a false wall of insulation. Leslie's heart pounded. She tried to emanate energy. She watched their movements and prayed that they would come closer to the back.
They left.
CHURCH employees were shocked at the large amounts of food missing - potato chips, coffee, hams, turkey, shrimp, canned goods, Coke and Sprite.
Milton Bennett and his maintenance crew changed the refrigerator locks several times. Drash, the headmaster, suggested they set up a watch.
"Logically," Drash says, "somebody here on the grounds was getting in and doing this. We couldn't figure out how." Stubblefield would remove the refrigerator door by its hinges and set it to the side. Meals were another opportunity for Leslie to work toward freedom. She ate until she was sick so someone would notice missing food.
"I was eating but the worry and stress made me lose weight," she says. ''I weighed 70 pounds. My body was slowly deteriorating."
Night after night, she gorged herself. She couldn't figure out why no one responded to her notes. Night after night, she pleaded.
My name is Leslie Gattas. You do not know me but I need your help. Please call the police immediately and show them this note. I am up in the attic with the man who kidnapped me. The police have been looking for me for a long time. Please call my father George Gattas. Please do as I say. This is no joke. We come down at night to walk around.
THIS time a third-grade teacher at Christ United Day School found one of Leslie's notes folded up on her desk. She looked at it, asked around the office and dismissed it as a prank. She threw it away.
IT'S odd to know people by their things.
Leslie tried to envision the face of the people who sat at desks that became the landscape of her life. She ate their candy. Rifled through drawers. Nothing could help her escape.
Once, when Stubblefield was in another room watching a favorite TV show, Starsky and Hutch, she left the room and went for the phone.
"It was a push button," she told police at the time, "but it didn't dial fast enough. He came in the room and I hung up."
The cook was a favorite target of Leslie's psychological tactics. She provoked the cook for attention. Of two shoes parked side-by-side on the floor, Leslie placed one on the table. She lifted an apron off its hook and set it on another table. Her actions needed to be large enough to make the cook take notice, subtle enough so Stubblefield didn't.
That night, Leslie felt certain the cook would report the missing food. No such luck. Instead, the following night, the teenage prisoner found a note. It read: "Please stop stealing our coffee."
LESLIE was discouraged. One night a maintenance man, who often roamed the church at night, saw her and Stubblefield. She worried that he might be an accomplice. At the time, he did not report the sighting to police.
Please help. My name is Leslie Gattas. Call police and my father George Gattas. I'm in the attic with kidnapper. Help Me! I'm scared.
ON March 3, Drash found a note on his desk. He told his secretary. She had gotten one too. He copied his note and immediately called police. Drash told police about the missing food.
The note said she was in the attic but didn't say which one. The church had three. Police checked attics and basements. Nothing.
They asked about the crawl space in the church sanctuary - where Leslie was kept - but Bennett reported that his crew was just up there to fix the pipes and there was nothing unusual.
On March 3, the FBI was notified by a Memphis man who was on vacation in San Diego. He reported that Leslie was on Broadway Street in a waitress uniform. A San Diego search began.
DRASH was suspicious. He knew other notes had been found and too many things were missing. "I felt strongly there was something to it," he said. Then came the pecan caper. Someone was stealing bags of pecans. A stakeout was planned. Drash counted the bags and hid under his desk until it got dark.
At 10 p.m., discouraged, he left. The next morning, four bags of pecans were gone. Someone had been there between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.
Please help me! My name is Leslie Gattas. Call the police immediately. Call my father George A. Gattas. He is vice president of Fred P. Gattas Co. I am in church attic with the man who kidnapped me. Show this note to the police. They have been looking for me a long time. This is not joke. Hurry! We come down at night at 10:30 or 11.
ON March 15, Drash called police to report three more notes. The following Sunday, Drash and his family arrived at church. His son opened a front-pew Bible and another note fluttered to the ground.
This time the note said church attic. After the service, Drash went up to the sanctuary attic.
Stubblefield and Leslie crouched low behind the false wall. He cupped her mouth. Drash stood for 15 minutes and left.
"Now," Drash says. "I'm not a religious fanatic or anything but I was sure that God was telling me something." That night, Drash grabbed his son's baseball bat and went to the school alone. His son was frightened and cried after his father left.
Drash waited in his dark office. He doesn't mind admitting that he was scared. The phone rang.
"I nearly jumped out of my skin," Drash says. It was his son. Unnerved by the call Drash left before 11:30. Leslie and Stubblefield came down around 11:45.
ON March 17, maintenance men Milton Bennett and Thomas Mungen were convinced that Leslie was somewhere in the church. That night, they set up a watch. Around 11:30 p.m., in the nursery, one of the men spotted Stubblefield and his victim walking downstairs.
"Hold it!" Mungen yelled.
Stubblefield grabbed Leslie and dragged her. She feigned a broken ankle and dropped to the ground. Bennett arrived with a billy club. Stubblefield nearly wrestled the club away. Leslie tried to run. Stubblefield grabbed her hair and dragged her up an embankment. Bennett hit him at the base of the neck. Leslie broke away. Stubblefield ran off into the darkness.
Leslie, at last, was free.
When police called the Gattas home, Leslie's sister, Lee Proctor, then 21, answered. "I freaked," she says. "I said, 'Listen I'm the oldest and if you have to tell my father that Leslie is in the morgue you can forget it.' I lost it. I thought there's no way any good phone call comes at midnight."
When Leslie got home, the sisters slept in the same room for months afterward.
Stubblefield remained at large. When police entered the attic they hauled out a pickup truck full of Stubblefield's hoard.
Police found an upper plate of false teeth, chain saws, pans, flashlights, candle holders, silverware, watches, rings, radios, citizens' band radios and directories to 40 churches.
Notebooks contained names and addresses of about 4,000 white females between the ages of 13 and 15. In some cases, maps corresponded to their homes. Some listed their father's occupation.
Police posted a sketch of Stubblefield. The manhunt began and calls flooded the police station. A man from Mississippi reported a mysterious naked man who roamed Union Avenue Church of Christ. Church employees nicknamed the streaker Stanley.
On April 6, a police dog named Smokey sniffed his way through Union Avenue Church of Christ. The dog stopped at a wall and started to chew.
Sgt. Pat Exley of the Dog Squad was confident of his canine. He bashed in the wall. Stubblefield, naked and in a narrow space under a stage, tried to squirm away. The dog attacked. He was arrested and treated for dog bites.
Stubblefield refused to speak to police. He still won't talk to the media. Or his family.
"Silence is my weapon," he had told Leslie.
Ernest Earl Stubblefield was indicted by the grand jury of Shelby County for aggravated kidnapping and burglary first-degree. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was denied parole in April 1991 due to the ''seriousness of the crime." He's at Cold Creek Correctional Facility (formerly Fort Pillow State Prison) near Henning, Tenn., and is up for parole again in April 1994.
TWO weeks after her release, the pale, thin sophomore returned to St. Agnes High School and resumed life. She did not receive therapy.
People from around the nation sent flowers, clothes, telegrams and letters. Her friends at school were amazed how quickly she fit back in. She credits her family for her easy assimilation.
"Nobody said, 'Everybody, tiptoe around Leslie.' " she says. "It was pretty much like, 'Well, OK. Let's get over it and let's move on.' That was a good attitude."
She adds, "What good would it be for me to lose my mind? If I had gone bonkers I would not have gone to college or law school. I wouldn't have married a wonderful man." If she had lost, he would have won. "But I did."
Leslie and her husband of two years, Wayne Coleman, look to be a typical American couple - ambitious, attractive, embracing life. They giggle in bed at night and plan their future and secretly want to be movie directors. They eat at Wendy's.
Somewhere in her prison hell, Leslie went from her aspiration to be a doctor to a lawyer, from a healer to a fighter.
"It's funny," she says, "litigation is my favorite part. I love getting in that courtroom."
Today, she handles various cases for her law firm. She wants to establish herself as a family attorney.
"It's rewarding 'cause you make a difference," she says. "You know, when one parent is more capable you're gonna fight to get that child in a nice home. It's not good enough to get by in life. I want people to say, 'While she was here, she made a difference.' It's not enough for people to say she was kidnapped and survived. I want them to say, 'In her 20s she did this, in her 30s she did this, in her 40s - this.' "
Leslie is personable, bright, eager. She radiates light. There is an honesty about her. And a somber side.
There isn't a day that goes by she doesn't think about it but she never talks about it unless someone asks. Her family speaks in terms of "Before Leslie went away" and "After Leslie got back."
It's made her more resilient, less trustful. She's no optimist who believes things happen only to other people. But she believes in happy endings.
"Thank God it happened to me 'cause I could handle it," she says. "What if it happened to someone else in my family who couldn't handle it? Their whole life would be ruined."
Her parents will probably never recover. Her mother still cries. When Leslie spends the night, in the crack of light under her bedroom door, she can see her parents' feet. Just making sure she's still there.
"It's so much worse to see people you love hurt," Leslie says. "He made two people hurt and they will never - in a million years - be the same. Even when I say, 'I feel fine and look fine,' they worry."
It's all part of God's plan. Leslie thinks her kidnapping happened for a reason. God allows free will.
"God figured: 'This is gonna happen but I will give her something. I can have a little hand in it and put her in a place that isn't so horrible.'
What better place to be than in God's house? There's a limit to the evil that could happen."
On her way to work, Leslie drives past Christ United Methodist Church. She always makes the sign of the cross.
"If I had to do it all over again just (to be that close to God) I would," she says. "I was so in tune. So many people go crazy over the smallest things. If they could see how it really is. Mine was so large it was out of spectrum. What happened to me is someone's worst nightmare."
When things look their bleakest, she says, is when you should be down on your knees. "Faith is a great thing," Leslie says. "Most people go their whole lives wondering if there is a God. I'm one of the lucky ones. I know there is."
Wasn't it her mother who brought the vargrant to the home to work? I think her mother is the cause of this terrible situation.