Episode 9: The Deer Box: Paul Martin Andrews
On a freezing morning in 1973, a teenage boy was abducted by a serial sex offender and kept chained in a subterranean box buried in the woods. Police and his family searched frantically for him, but it was as if he had vanished into thin air. There were no clues, no witnesses and no trace of the boy. What investigators didn’t know was that the boy was in fact alive. And he was being forced to endure the unthinkable to survive his violent captor. Years later, that boy, now a man, would become a powerful victim’s advocate and would lead a campaign to change legislation to better protect children from predators.
The Day of the Abduction
Thursday the 11th of January 1973 was extremely cold. A heavy belt of snow extended from North Carolina to Virginia. The city of Norfolk, Virginia saw 9 inches or 23 centimetres of snow, the heaviest single snowfall residents had seen since 1963. Across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk, in the independent city of Portsmouth, school children were enjoying a rare snow day. Schools in the area had temporarily closed, and children and teenagers were revelling in the freedom of a full day of unstructured time stretching before them. No school, no teachers, no chores and in many cases, no parents.
Paul Martin Andrews was approximately three blocks from his home when a blue Ford van pulled up beside him. The 13-year-old had been on his way to a local convenience store to buy milk. He didn’t use his first name, and usually went by Martin or Marty to friends and family. The driver of the van introduced himself to Martin as ‘Peewee’, and offered Martin a cash payment if he would be willing to help him move some furniture at his brother’s home. Martin agreed and got into the stranger’s vehicle. Peewee drove Martin about thirty minutes south to Dismal Swamp State Park, a forested wetland that straddled the border between Virginia and North Carolina. The man pulled into an isolated logging road but found it closed.
The man told Martin that they would take the rest of the journey on foot. He explained that his brother had a deer box nearby – a buried structure similar to a hunting blind, where hunters could store supplies in preparation for hunting season and could stalk prey for long periods of time without being seen. The two abandoned the van and began the short hike into the woods. When they arrived at the site, Martin saw mounds of dirt, with a partially concealed metal hatch glistening in the snow. The hatch led to a plywood box buried in the ground. Little did the teenager know that this deer box did not belong to Peewee’s brother at all, but had been meticulously planned, built, and sunk into the ground by the man standing next to him.
Peewee opened the box and instructed Martin to climb inside to help him bring in the supplies. Once inside the box, the man who had called himself Peewee drastically changed his demeanor. He produced the large butcher’s knife and said to Martin, ‘I’ve got bad news for you. You’ve just been kidnapped’. When Martin heard these words, he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. These words proved his intuition had been right all along. Martin began to struggle with his assailant. He tried to wrestle the knife from Peewee’s grip. Before he could grasp it, the man who had lured him this far from home, punched him square in the face and subdued him.
Police Investigation
Paul Martin Andrews was born in Virginia in 1959. Along with his parents and younger sister Jennifer, the Andrews family had recently moved to the city of Portsmouth. The 11th of January 1973 was the second snow day in a row that Martin and Jennifer were enjoying away from school. Martin told his sister that he was going to the nearby store to buy milk, but when he didn’t return, Jennifer began to worry. She soon alerted their parents, who subsequently called the police. The search effort to find the missing 13-year-old was both comprehensive and thorough.
Police began a grid search, and interviewed neighbours and scouted for potential witnesses. One theory that the police followed was that Martin had possibly accidentally drowned in one of the waterways or river systems that traversed the cities of Portsmouth and Norfolk. The local Coast Guard drained a nearby waterway, and the Fire Department conducted an aerial search in a helicopter, but no traces of Martin were found.
Martin’s Time in the Box
The box was damp and cramped. It wasn’t possible to stand straight unless you were standing within the area below the open hatch, half in and half out. You could only sit, kneel or lie down. During his time in the box, Peewee reportedly told Martin that this was not the first time that he had abused a child. As one day bled into another, Martin was gradually unchained for short periods of time and allowed out of the box, usually to keep the fire going and prepare food. He was always afraid, with the threat of imminent death and the threat of the blade that Peewee carried with him at all times.
Rescue
On Wednesday the 19th of January 1973, exactly eight days after his abduction, Martin found himself alone in the box. It was still bitterly cold outside, and the trees and ground were covered in a blanket of snow. The ground was partially frozen in places. Peewee had left him, and he didn’t know if or when he would return. He also didn’t know if he would ever see the light of day again.
When he was alone, his thoughts turned to his mother. He wondered if she would be worried or crying, not knowing where he was. What bothered him the most about his predicament was that his mother would know that he was gone but would never know what happened to him.
At about 8am, Martin heard the sound of vehicles in the distance. He began screaming and making as much noise as possible to attract the attention of the drivers. It worked. The drivers apprehensively approached the metal door protruding from the dirt, guns in hand. They were hunters out to snare some rabbits.
Instead, they found a battered and bruised child chained in a makeshift cell in the ground. Martin told them that he had been kidnapped. One of the hunters reportedly was so overcome with emotion at the sight of Martin, bloody and beaten in the ground that he had to step away to compose himself. The police were informed of Martin’s discovery and descended on Dismal Swamp State Park.
Speaking years later, Martin said that those photographs show the brutality of what he went through, possibly in a way that that just describing his ordeal would fall short of. The police put Martin in a squad car and drove him to Obici Memorial Hospital, partly to receive medical attention, and partly to reunite him with his mother, Ann, who was a nurse and on shift at the time.
Martin’s family were shocked at his condition, and even more shocked by what he had been through. Ann recalled that he ‘looked filthy, exhausted, but he was excited’. Martin’s sister Jennifer appeared alongside Martin on a TV talk show, years after his ordeal. She described the moment she first saw him after his abduction. She said that when she saw his face, ‘he turned and looked at me, and that’s when the nightmare came true. His eyes were empty. He wasn’t there. My strong, older brother was somebody else’.
Martin later said that his parents were told that he shouldn’t speak about his experiences, and that they should not allow anyone else around him to bring it up. They were told that ‘if I wasn’t allowed to speak about it, that I would forget about it, that it would just go away. And what happened over time, though, was that everyone forgot about it. Everyone except for me’.
This enforced silence around what was possibly the most life-altering experience that could happen to a child was incredibly damaging for Martin. He tried his best to move on from what had happened to him. He suppressed his memories, knowing that there was no safe space to express them around him. And that even if he could speak about it, no one else would probably understand. When he was 19, Martin decided to move to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He wanted to escape his past trauma and live somewhere where no one viewed him as a victim. He later moved closer to his family in North Carolina, before ultimately settling in Miami.
Richard Ausley’s Background
Virginia native Richard Alvin Ausley was born in 1939. By the time Ausley encountered Martin Andrews in January 1973, he was already a prolific child sex offender. He had previously abducted an assaulted a child, and Ausley was convicted of abduction and kidnapping. He served ten years for that crime but was released early on parole. On the day that Ausley abducted Martin, he had been due in court on charges of assaulting a 14-year-old boy.
Ausley was a boatyard worker. He also had carpentry skills and had scouted the woods for an isolated spot in which to conceal the plywood box he would later build. He took the time to measure and dig the hole in the ground.
After Martin had identified Ausley as the man who had abducted and assaulted him, police set out to locate their suspect. Ausley was arrested after he returned to the home he shared with his father. At trial, Martin was scheduled to testify in court as a key witness against Ausley. Martin says that he remembers walking into the courtroom and seeing his former captor. He says that he remembers Ausley ‘staring at me. His eyes never really left me’. Richard Ausley was sentenced to 48 years in prison for Martin’s abduction and assaults.
Potential Parole
In June 2002, Martin received a phone call from his mother, Ann, to inform him that Richard Ausley was likely to be released on parole. Martin said, ‘To hear that this man, this man who had done such horrible things to me. This man that I thought would be in prison for the rest of his life, that I would never have to deal with him, was now being released, I was horrified’.
Ausley served his sentences across several prisons, including Mecklenburg Correctional Center in Boydton, Brunswick Correctional Center in Lawrenceville and Sussex I Prison in Waverly, Virginia. The latter would be where he would meet a violent end at the hands of his new cellmate, Dewey Keith Venable. After serving 30 years of his 48-year sentence, Ausley was eligible for parole.
After being forced into silence for almost three decades, Martin went public with his story. He began to vigorously campaign for funding for the Civil Commitment of Sexually Violent Predators Act. According to a 2003 news report by WAVY 10 TV, the crux of this statute was to ‘take the most violent sex offenders and put them into rehab before they serve their prison time’.
Under this law, an inmate would have a probable cause hearing ten months before they are due to be released to decide their fate. If the court decided that they were not suitably rehabilitated and still posed a danger to the public, they could be confined to a state mental facility indefinitely. The Civil Commitment of Sexually Violent Predators Act was passed into law in 1999, but Martin and other activists campaigned for better funding and to ensure that sections of the bill were rewritten to be constitutionally sound.
As a consequence of Martin speaking publicly about his ordeal, another of Ausley’s victims, Gary Founds came forward. Founds had been repeatedly assaulted by Ausley in 1972, but charges were never made against him for this crime. In fact, Gary was just one of three members of his family who had been abused by Ausley. Charges were filed for the crimes against Gary, and an additional five years was added to Ausley’s existing sentence.
Ausley’s Response
Ausley courted the news media and was interviewed many times. After his additional sentence began, Ausley spoke to the media, framing himself as Martin’s victim, rather than recognising the reality of the situation and what he had done to Martin in that box. Ausley told the cameras that his life is now over. He said that Martin saw to that. He said, ‘I will be his victim for the rest of my life, or his’.
In 2004, Dewey Keith Venable was a 24-year-old inmate serving an 18-year sentence for carjacking, abduction and robbery. He had previously been victimised by a paedophile, Dennis L. Sewell. Venable had reportedly warned prison guards not to place him in a cell with Ausley, or any other convicted child molester. According to Venable, correctional officers threatened to place him in solitary confinement if he refused his new cell assignment. In January 2004, Ausley was murdered in his cell by Venables.
Summary
An autopsy found that Ausley’s cause of death was strangulation and blunt trauma to the torso. Upon hearing about Ausley’s death, Martin explained that he was conflicted over the news. He said, ‘I did what I did to keep him off the street. Nobody deserves to be murdered’. While the plywood box was removed and dismantled after Martin’s rescue, the hole in the ground in the woods of Dismal Swamp State Park that was Martin’s cell for those eight days remains exactly where Richard Ausley dug it. According to a 2021 article by Nikolas Lanum, Martin was asked if he had any wish to return to ‘stand in that hole after all those years’. This strikes me as a strange and invasive question that was entirely unnecessary to ask of someone who had already survived so much. Nonetheless, Martin responded that ‘some scars don’t heal’. He added that it’s ‘hard to believe after 50 years that [that] hole is still there. I have a scar on me as well’.
We will end this article with a powerful quote from Martin. He says:
‘If there’s anything that I could say to children who are being abused, who’ve been abused, to adults who were abused as children, is that as long as you keep it to yourself, they get away with what they’ve done. You’ve done nothing wrong. That you have nothing to be ashamed of. And you can take hope that there can be a life that you can live without that fear. You can live without that pain’.
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