AGED 13, Jessyca Mullenberg was abducted by a man who had been secretly abusing her for years.
Now, 30 years after a TV show led to her rescue from his evil clutches, Jessyca, 43, reveals what happened during her months in captivity - and the lasting impact of her ordeal.
Waking up, 13-year-old Jessyca Mullenberg looked down and was gripped with fear. “I realised I was tied to the front seat of the car by brown rope,” she remembers. “I was terrified.”
She’d been abducted by Steven Oliver, a 39-year-old obsessed with Jessyca and who had been abusing her for years before kidnapping her.
Over the next 105 days, Jessyca would be subjected to multiple rapes, beatings and brainwashing.
The nightmare would only come to an end when the FBI discovered her whereabouts after a tip-off.
Today, 30 years on from finding herself at the centre of a that rocked America, Jessyca is a mum-of-two and a sexual abuse awareness advocate.
She has dedicated herself to stopping any child going through what she did.
Jessyca was eight years old when unmarried Oliver, then 34, came into her life.
He was a neighbour in the small town of Altoona, Wisconsin, where she lived with her mother Monica and stepfather Jake.
Oliver worked as a teaching assistant at her school and was the father of one of her classmates, Ryan.
“Oliver would invite me, my brothers and all the neighbourhood kids to his house to play ,” she says.
“Almost immediately, he started grooming me, first by making me sit on his lap.”
He would make up a reason why Jessyca was in trouble and would tell her to go and stand in his kitchen, while everyone was still outside.
“In the kitchen, he’d touch my breasts and bottom, and get me to touch him. If I did it wrong, he’d punch me,” she says.
Over the coming months, the abuse in the kitchen escalated to forced oral sex and rape.
“I was eight, so I had no idea what he was doing to me,” explains Jessyca.
“He said if I told anyone, he’d kill my brothers and the rest of my family. I was so young that I totally believed him.”
In the of 1993, after two years of abuse, Jessyca’s family moved 100 miles across state because her stepfather had a new job.
“I was so relieved, because I thought the abuse would stop,” she says.
But Oliver was determined not to lose his grip on his young victim, so he began renting a trailer with Ryan close to her father’s home - her parents had split when she was four and her father lived around 100 miles from Jessyca’s new home.
“I stayed with my dad every weekend, and couldn’t believe it the first time I visited and saw Oliver. His trailer was right across the road. I felt sick knowing he was so determined not to let me go.”
Oliver, still working as a teacher’s aide, found a new way to be alone with Jessyca, in order to continue abusing her.
“He told all the parents in my dad’s neighbourhood he’d been selected by a publishing company to start a weekly writing workshop for kids. We’d all submit and short stories, we even did a play,” recalls Jessyca.
“He’d single us out for one-to-one tuition, and mine was always longer, so the abuse just continued without anyone knowing. I was so scared of him.”
In September 1995, when Jessyca was 13 and she’d been going to the “workshop” for a few months, Oliver told her that one of her short stories had been chosen for publication, and they needed to travel 200 miles for a meeting at the publishing company’s office.
There was no way to escape - no one could hear me shouting
Jessyca
She says her father agreed to the trip, unaware he was handing his daughter over to her abuser.
“Even with everything that had been going on, I still believed the trip was real. Why would I not? Oliver had even fooled the adults,” she says.
They left early in the morning, and Jessyca fell asleep, but when she woke up and discovered she was restrained, she realised there was no meeting - she’d been kidnapped. Oliver used the journey to ensure she memorised their cover story.
“He told me he was my father ‘Dave Johnson’, and I was his daughter ‘Cindy’, and we were moving to start over our lives after my brother and mother had died in a car accident.”
Oliver repeatedly told her what he’d do to her and her family if she tried to alert anyone to the kidnapping.
“We stopped on a bridge to take a break,” remembers Jessyca. “He threw a rock over the bridge and told me that what happened to the rock would happen to my lifeless body if I said anything to anyone or tried to get away from him.”
He held a pocket knife to my back and told me that if I screamed or shouted, he would kill me and then kill my family
Jessyca
After a nine-hour drive, they arrived at Kansas City airport in , where Oliver forced Jessyca on to a plane to Houston at knifepoint.
“He held a pocket knife to my back and told me that if I screamed or shouted, he would kill me and then kill my family,” says Jessyca.
“He wouldn’t have been able to do this today with all the security checks, but back then you could get a ticket under any name and didn’t need proof of identity.”
Once they landed, Oliver found them a cheap hotel to stay in, and he went about changing Jessyca’s appearance so she wouldn’t be recognised.
“He cut my short and dyed it from blonde to brunette,” she remembers. “He also went clothes shopping and came back with lots of baggy clothes, which made me look like a boy.”
After two days, they moved to another hotel near Houston airport, and as they checked in, Oliver wasted no time telling staff his cover story about the fatal car accident and that they were a father and daughter down on their luck.
The hotel staff took pity and asked if he’d be interested in a vacant position as a painter and decorator for the hotel.
Agents kept asking me if I was Jessyca Mullenberg, but by then, that name didn’t mean anything to me.
Jessyca after being freed
Oliver jumped at the opportunity, particularly because the position included free accommodation in a block of old, abandoned rooms that were separate from the rest of the hotel.
Jessyca’s heart sank as Oliver marched her towards one of the small, windowless rooms.
“I was locked inside day and night, there was no way to escape. We were in a part of the hotel where no one else was staying, so no one would hear me banging on the door or shouting,” she remembers.
When Oliver got back at night, he’d rape her, as well as hit her and tie her to the bed.
In the first week of her captivity, Jessyca tried to call her home using the phone in the room while Oliver was working, but the calls never connected.
“It was an old rotary phone, and he’d switched all the numbers around, so I just kept dialling wrong numbers.
“I started to believe that my old life was slipping away, and I couldn’t even remember my home number,” she says.
Oliver tormented Jessyca psychologically, too, repeatedly telling her that her parents had given up searching for her.
But in fact, her desperate family had never stopped looking, and when they were told by the FBI that Oliver might have taken her out of the state, they printed thousands of posters that were then attached to trucks travelling nationwide, in the hope someone might recognise her.
In the end, it was an episode of prime-time TV show that would save Jessyca from Oliver’s abuse.
The show had featured her abduction earlier that year, but a repeat episode aired on the evening of December 28, 1995.
One of the hotel staff was watching at home and recognised Oliver as the maintenance man staying in the hotel with the young girl he claimed was his daughter.
The next morning, FBI stormed the hotel room, arrested Oliver and took Jessyca to safety. By that point, Oliver had completely brainwashed her.
“Agents kept asking me if I was Jessyca Mullenberg, but by then, that name didn’t mean anything to me.”
Dr Darrel Turner is a forensic psychologist who specialises in predatory behaviour and has consulted for the FBI.
He says: “The more an offender can diminish the child’s frame of reference of what’s normal and what’s not, the more impact they will have on the victim and their ability to appreciate what’s happening to them.”
Darrel adds: “It’s similar to the abductions of Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart, who were also just children when they were removed from their family homes and isolated so that the perpetrators could exploit the power differential that exists and exert their terrible influence.
“This and the trauma Jessyca had experienced explains her lack of memory.”
After hours of talking and them showing photos of my family, I finally remembered what my real name was.
Jessyca after being freed
“After hours of talking and them showing photos of my family, I finally remembered what my real name was,” recalls Jessyca.
By the time her mother’s plane had touched down in Houston the following afternoon, she was beginning to comprehend just what had happened to her during those 105 days in Oliver’s clutches.
“It’s pure ecstasy,” said her mother Monica when the pair were reunited at the airport. “We waited so long for the nightmare to be done. We’ve waited for the miracle to happen.”
Bravely, Jessyca agreed to testify at Oliver’s trial in 1996, and gave a graphic account of what had happened to her in the time she’d been kept captive.
Oliver was sentenced to 40 years in for kidnapping and interstate transportation of a minor for illegal sexual purposes. He’s still in jail to this day, aged 68.
Unfortunately, Jessyca’s trauma didn’t end with Oliver’s imprisonment, and as well as the mental scars he’d inflicted, there were physical ones.
“In my early 20s, I needed jaw surgery, because he had hit me so hard in the face, so many times, that my bones began to deteriorate, making it very hard to talk or eat, and I was suffering from non-stop headaches every day,” she says.
Jessyca also suffers from severe and experiences flashbacks of her ordeal.
“I have a fear of flying after being forced to board the plane in Kansas City,” she says. “I also can’t stand the smell of cigarettes or , because he constantly smelled of those things.”
He hit me so hard in the face so many times, I needed jaw surgery
Jessyca
However, Jessyca’s determination not to let Oliver hold any further power over her has been a constant in her life since.
She went on to study at college and graduated with a degree in , criminal justice and law enforcement.
And then, in 2018, she was given the prestigious Hope Award by the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children.
Jessyca is now married to tech manager Curt, 48, and despite fears she may not be able to conceive due to the unrelenting sexual assaults she suffered at the hands of Oliver, she defied the odds and has two children of her own.
However, as she explains, being a mum can also bring its own terrors.
“When they were growing up, I was waiting for my five-year-old daughter at the school bus stop, but she never got off and the bus driver didn’t see her get on.
“I called my husband, panicking, and rushed to the school in tears.
“Thankfully, she was at a school event and there had been a misunderstanding about what time she’d be home, but it was a harrowing experience for me.”
But Jessyca is determined that Oliver won’t take any more from her life than he has already and is passionate about continuing her advocacy work.
“I speak about what I went through to educate people about the signs of abuse, so it can be stopped early and perpetrators can be caught.
“I simply won’t let Oliver win. I want to devote my life to preventing another little boy or girl from going through the hell that I did.”
