A young woman in Cleveland, held captive for a decade, manages to get to the front door and scream for help. Neighbors rush to her aid as she tries to claw her way to freedom. Police soon arrest a 52-year-old man, seemingly an ordinary resident, who is accused of abducting three women and holding them for years as prisoners.

In Manlius, Keith Alexander heard the story and remembered a teenager, frightened and withdrawn, the hood from her sweatshirt drawn tight around her face. He remembered an old man who made small talk about class reunions and returnable bottles while the girl waited in silence at his side:

John Jamelske.

Ten years ago last month, Alexander and a co-worker, Terry Carncross, were thrown into the same moment of crisis as the neighbors who intervened in Cleveland. They were everyday people, working at the F-M Returnables bottle and can center in Manlius, when they helped apprehend a man they'd always seen as a harmless eccentric.

In truth, Jamelske – who turns 78 Thursday - was a vicious, calculating predator. Allowed his freedom, almost certainly, he would have struck again. For Alexander, the events in Cleveland brought back every detail of how Jamelske finally came to a reckoning.

“We’d known him for a long time,” Alexander said. “He was an odd guy, but he was always pleasant, always polite.”

Investigators learned Jamelske was a serial rapist who'd held five women captive, at intervals, over 15 years. He'd lock them in a concrete dungeon and eventually release them, after doing all he could to make any allegations of abuse seem far-fetched if those victims tried to tell authorities.

In Manlius, as in Cleveland, the end of the terror came down to two factors: A prisoner took a desperate chance to gain her freedom, and civilians reacted quickly despite their own initial disbelief.

Alexander was a few blocks away, at a pet boutique he was helping to set up, when Jamelske walked into the redemption center on April 9, 2003, with the 16-year-old girl. No one is sure why Jamelske took that chance: Was it foolishness, or arrogance about the measure of his command?

He was a regular at the shop; he often went through stacks of “junk” bottles and cans for ones that he saw as collectibles. As for Alexander, he worked in the 1980s for the same concrete company that built the bunker Jamelske used as a dungeon for his victims.

A few years later, Alexander helped install a concrete floor in Jamelske’s garage. Jamelske brought the workers into the basement and showed them his bunker.

Alexander assumed it was a bomb shelter or a spare room. There was graffiti on the walls. Only later would Alexander learn who put it there.

At the bottle and can center, Jamelske asked Carncross if the teen could use a phone; supposedly, he wanted to allow her to call a church. While she made the call, Carncross and Jamelske talked in a nearby doorway. Jamelske was disappointed about missing Alexander, with whom he'd often talk about rare returnables, or politics, or whatever was on his mind. He left with the girl, telling Carncross they intended to visit Alexander at the pet boutique.

After they were gone, the phone rang and Carncross picked it up. A frightened woman said her sister, who’d been missing, had just called from that number. The girl needed help, the woman said; she’d told a harrowing tale of being imprisoned for months by a rapist.

Carncross quickly called Alexander. To him, the story seemed incomprehensible. Sure, Jamelske was “quirky,” but hardly threatening. Yet when Jamelske pulled in, and the girl got out of the car, Alexander immediately knew.

“She’s really withdrawn, she’s got this hood pulled down around her face, and I thought: ‘Wow. This is true,'" he said.

Jamelske, unconcerned, made casual conversation. An older man, whose wife was a high school classmate of Jamelske’s, was working on the storefront. Jamelske mentioned a class reunion; he said he might bring along the teen. He spoke of taking a load of returnable bottles and cans to Canada, and he asked if Alexander wanted to go.

When Jamelske left, Alexander hurried to the window. He called 911, and he read the numbers from Jamelske’s license plate to the dispatcher.

From there, Alexander returned to the redemption center, where investigators had started to pour in. The girl’s older sister also arrived – just before the girl called her again. Manlius Police Officer Elizabeth Butler took the phone. The girl said she was at a business, and she could see a sign for Target through the window.

The police and the workers at F-M Returnables quickly put it together: She was at Fayetteville Dodge, on Burdick Street. Jamelske was arrested there. The teenage victim got into a patrol car with Manlius Police Officer Nadine Zesky, now retired.

Investigators would later reveal how Jamelske used mental games to control his isolated captives. He told them he was aligned with powerful and dangerous forces. He told them male police officers were in on his plot, and they’d punish the women if they ever called for help.

The teen looked at Zesky and said, “Thank God you’re a girl.”

Keith Alexander: On a quiet day in 2003, John Jamelske and a frightened teenage girl walked into Alexander's returnables center in Manlius.

Ten years later, Jamelske is the one locked away. In Manlius, Alexander still manages the bottle and can business. The long ordeal of the women in Cleveland left him recalling how Jamelske brutalized his victims without detection for 15 years, and how that savagery would have continued if not for a gamble by a teenager on an April Wednesday.

“He could still be out there,” said Alexander, who does the same business as those neighbors in Cleveland:

Redemption.

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Post-Standard. Email him at skirst@syracuse.com, visit his blog at www.syracuse.com/kirst, write to him in care of The Post-Standard, Clinton Square, Syracuse 13221 or send him a message on Facebook or Twitter.