Woman, beaten and sexually assaulted, escaped captor to get help, according to Southington police report

Hartford Courant - 9/3/2021

A woman in Southington escaped a night of physical and sexual abuse this week inside her captor’s home, tricking him to give herself a chance to flee and flag down a nearby motorist to call for police, according to new court records.

The first responding officers found the woman seriously injured at about 7:30 a.m. Wednesday and she was rushed to the Hospital of Central Connecticut’s Bradley Campus, where she detailed hours of torture at the hands of a Plantsville man and was found to have injuries over almost her entire body, according to a gruesome police incident report released Friday.

Jonathan Vose, 36, was arrested a few hours later and charged with a half-dozen offenses, including first-degree kidnapping and sexual assault.

He originally was held on $250,000 bond but a judge, after reviewing the woman’s account to police, quadrupled his bond to $1 million, court records show.

Had the woman not escaped when she did, she was convinced Vose would have killed her, she told police.

“The victim added that she truly believed that if she had not escaped, the accused would have killed her and that during the incident he told her he would kill her and leave her body at her father’s house so he could see the damage the accused did to her,” according to the police report.

Neither the woman’s name nor her relationship to Vose appear in the court records released Friday, redacted under the state’s domestic violence laws designed to protect victims, but an incident report drafted by Southington police details her account of the attacks and how she was able to outwit her accused abuser to escape.

The threats and violence began a week ago when Vose told the woman she had to have sex with him or “I’ll hurt you,” she told police.

The violence escalated early Wednesday morning when both she and Vose got off work shifts around midnight and she went to his condo to sleep while he went out to drink alcohol with a friend, according to the report. When Vose returned at about 1:30 a.m. he confronted her with a social media post showing him doing shots of liquor with another person but when she asked why he began to attack her.

The woman said Vose punched her in the ribs, picked her up off the bed and slammed her onto the floor on her back and tailbone, she said.

“She could not breathe, was seeing stars and thought she was going to die,” according to the report.

He continued to hit the woman in the face “every five minutes from 2 a.m. until 8 a.m.” and sexually assaulted her repeatedly, threatening to kill her if she did not allow him to continue, according to the report. Throughout the night Vose would point a long black rifle at the victim and set it in the doorway of the bedroom, she told police.

“The accused went on to state that he didn’t care if he went to jail because he would kill her first and gave her the option that he would shoot her in the head, strangle her, or she could write a suicide note and take some of his pills to overdose,” the report said. “The accused stated that he wasn’t going to allow the victim to leave his bedroom for five days while her injuries healed and that in the meantime she could ‘piss on the floor.’ ”

The woman ultimately convinced Vose to let her retrieve ice from the downstairs kitchen for her swelling face, convincing him she would not flee because she was naked, but instead she grabbed a sweatshirt from the downstairs area and fled the house, she told police.

She ran to a man in a pickup truck outside at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, where they dialed 911 together and the man waited with her until police and paramedics arrived to help, according to the report.

Vose voluntarily agreed to meet detectives at the police station but told them the woman had repeatedly banged her own face against the headboard of the bed during an argument before they had consensual but “rough” sex, according to the report.

But a neighbor told police he had heard the couple arguing several times over the past few months and that he had worried so much about the woman that he had texted Vose about it, but Vose dismissed the neighbor, saying the woman “was going through a lot,” according to the report.

Officers conducting a court-authorized search of Vose’s condo later Wednesday afternoon found a black pellet rifle, bloodied pillow cases and a bedsheet, and several other items the woman had described in her account, according to the report. They also found the woman’s cell phone and purse inside. She consented to detectives’ reading her text messages with Vose, but they are not detailed in the report released Friday.

Vose was arraigned Thursday in Superior Court in New Britain, where his bond was raised to $1 million and he remained in custody Friday. He is scheduled to return to court Sept. 21.

Zach Murdock can be reached at zmurdock@courant.com.