He coaxed me into a house of horrors with his twisted Kitty notes. It took me 10 years to escape and the nightmare still isn’t over…

When Tanya Kach was 14, all she wanted was love and attention.

Her parents had split when she was 10, and with her mother out of the picture she felt increasingly lonely when she moved in with her father and his new girlfriend.

Then, in 1995, the eighth-grader found the affection she had been craving in the halls of Cornel Middle School in Pennsylvania.

Kach’s classmates didn’t like 38-year-old school security guard Thomas Hose, but she loved the way he joked around and made her laugh when they talked.

He would give her special treatment by pulling her out of class, and over six months built a relationship with the teenage girl who was at her most naïve and vulnerable.

Hose told Kach he would take better care of her than her family and promised he wouldn’t mistreat her. He called her ‘Kitty’ because she loved cats and sent her notes declaring his love. The youngster believed everything he said and was taken in.

But what she did next turned her life into a nightmare that still haunts her 29 years on.

On February 10, 1996, Kach ran away with Hose and moved into the home where he lived with his parents and 12-year-old son. 

She was held captive there for the next 10 years, subjected to horrific sexual abuse, starvation, and threats he would kill her if she tried to break free.

At first, Hose first kept her in his bedroom. Then four years into her captivity he introduced her to his parents as his girlfriend under a different name, Nikki Allen.

Now, in an interview with DailyMail.com nearly three decades after she was abducted, she has shared her chilling story about the horrors she had to endure at the hands of ‘the definition of an evil monster.’

Kach, who is today 43 and happily married, said her childhood was normal up until age seven when her mother was hospitalized after having a mental breakdown.

Everything after that started to go ‘downhill’, she said.

When her parents divorced, her father was granted full custody and her period of feeling isolated began.

‘I didn’t want to be there. My dad stopped caring about me and stopped loving me.’

Kach said Hose came into the picture when she was looking to fill that void. 

She first started talking to Hose in the hallway of her school in September 1995.

The other students didn’t like him, but Kach thought he was ‘nice’ and fond of the way he would joke around and make her laugh. 

He would give her special treatment and even pull her from class. Then he kissed her.

He would tell her ‘I can take care of you better than your family. I would never do this or that to you,’ Kach recalled. ‘He painted such a pretty picture.’ 

Hose groomed and preyed on the teen for months before she ran away from her troubled home to stay with him full time.

‘My 14-year-old self was very gullible and naïve,’ she recalled. ‘I did not have love from my dad and my mom wasn’t in my life.’

Hose told her that she was ‘everything he ever wanted,’ until the caring security guard turned sinister. 

He starved her to make her lose weight. When he did give her food it was only his leftover scraps.

His plot to get her to drop to 93 pounds was deliberate because he wanted my figure ‘to look a certain way,’ she said.

What she thought was a welcome escape from a loveless life became bleaker every day. 

She was only allowed to leave her room to bathe when Hose’s parents and son were out of the house. 

Then her situation took a far darker turn when he raped her. 

Kach revealed to DailyMail.com that Hose would sexually abuse her before he went to work.

During the day she would pass the time reading or watching TV through headphones. But when he got home the vile attacks would continue.

‘It’s like he was my master and I was waiting for him to come home,’ she said. ‘I felt like a dog.’

When he drank on the weekends, the abuse became frequent and more violent, she said. She also recalled one horrific Christmas that she spent locked in a closet.

She tried to escape, but Hose would threaten her and leave her paralyzed with fear. 

Even on days when she was sick Hose would continue to abuse her. ‘He still raped me,’ she said. ‘He didn’t care.’ 

At one point, she thought she was pregnant. Hose told her he would kill the baby, but fortunately for Kach it turned out to be a false alarm.

Hose’s coercion included manipulation and brain-washing her into believing her life wouldn’t be any better if she was free.

He showed Kach newspaper clippings of her mother getting married and told her ‘see she’s moved on’.

Then there was a newspaper announcement that her father and his wife had bought a new home. 

‘He told me “see they moved on too. So both of your parents moved on. They don’t care.”‘

Hose told his parents Kach lost her job, needed a place to stay and was there to help care for his father, who’s health was declining. 

Hose’s mother didn’t like her, so she was given a list of chores to do in the house. 

Kach would have asked Hose’s parents for help, but they were also scared of him. 

There were parts of his past already twisted in darkness. 

Hose once revealed there had been another girl at the middle school who he had preyed on. Like her, she had blonde hair and and blue eyes and was having trouble at home. But he ending up choosing Kach instead. 

After 10 years in captivity, and when Kach was in her twenties, Hose gave her more freedom from his otherwise iron grip.

He allowed her to leave the house, but gave her strict rules for when she had to return.

It was during one of these brief trips in public where she met the owner of a local market named Joe.

He paid her a few dollars every time she would visit to help him stock the shelves. 

But Joe got worried the more time he spent with Kach. He had a daughter a similar age, and started to see red flags.

So he started to ask questions. 

‘He would tell me, “you are this young girl. You don’t have parents in your life. You have no family. You’re with this older man. Something doesn’t seem right,”‘ she told DailyMail.com.

For months Kach would ignore his concerns and keep working, until one day when she broke down in tears and finally told him the truth.

She was 24 years old at the time. 

‘I started crying and shaking. I blamed myself. I told him I did something so horrible in my life. I’ve been with Tom since I was 14.’

She told him to look her up in the database of National Exploited and Missing Children.

When he saw that everything she was telling him was true, he helped her plan her escape.

Kach said Joe instructed her to go home to Hose and act like nothing had happened.

About five hours later, while she was sat in her pajamas and Hose was upstairs, a police officer came to the door. He asked, ‘Are you Tanya Nicole Cash?’

‘I collapsed into his arms and said, “Yes!” For the first time in a decade, she felt like her ordeal was over.

Hose heard the commotion and ran down the stairs.

‘Kitty what’s going on?’ he said.

‘He thought I was going to defend him,’ she said. 

‘What’s going on Kitty?’ he repeated. ‘Tell him what’s going on?’

Kach turned to her abductor and said: ‘It’s over.’ 

She said Hose wanted to talk to her but the detectives wouldn’t allow it.

As the officers rushed her out of the door, she recalled him screaming out to her ‘Judas!’ (Judas in the Bible betrayed Jesus).

‘That really hit me as a Christian and I broke down,’ Kach said. ‘That really hurt.’ 

While she was relieved to be finally free of his grasps, she felt overwhelming guilt and blamed herself for what had happened. 

‘I thought I would be living under a bridge. I thought that would be better than what I’m going through,’ she told DailyMail.com.

Kach’s father Jerry was reunited with his daughter after 10 long years.

They hugged. Kach lovingly tugged on his arms as they spoke to the press. But it was apparently all for show.

‘He acted one way in front of the cameras but once that ended he was blaming me for what happened.’

She was now 24 years old and working on getting her life back. Part of that was going through counseling she described as ‘intense.’

Less than a year after her rescue, she obtained her driver’s license. She got her GED and went to college, earning a degree in business management. She said her mother supported her.

But the trauma she endured caused health issues. 

She had a hysterectomy as a result of rampant sexual abuse.

It crushed her that she wasn’t able to have a child of her own.

Years of malnourishment caused vision and hearing loss and some arthritis.

In 2007, 11 years after Kach moved into Hose’s home, he made a deal with prosecutors and pled guilty to involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and was sentenced to five to 15 years in prison.

Every year he was up for parole, so Kach would testify and write to the parole board urging them to keep him behind bars.

‘He could have gotten over 70 years but he had a plea deal,’ Kach said.

She told DailyMail.com her one regret was not going to trial.

‘They felt I wasn’t mentally capable to go through a trial,’ she said. ‘I wish I would have went through with it. It would have been very mentally hard on me but I wish I had.’

Hose’s parents are dead, but he still lives in McKeesport – the same city where he held Kach captive and just 15 minutes away from the home she shares with her husband of 17 years, Karl McCrum.

Kach said she avoids going to McKeesport at all costs but there is always that fear of running into him. 

‘I tell everyone I don’t know what my reaction would be,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if it would be anger, sadness, fear.’

Kach’s story captured national headlines and several movies were created based on her harrowing story. 

Most recently the 2024 Lifetime movie: ‘The Girl Locked Upstairs: The Tanya Kach Story,’ created by executive producer Elizabeth Smart.

Smart was 14 when she was abducted from her bedroom in her Salt Lake City home and tortured for nine months before she was rescued in 2002. 

‘Elizabeth reached out to me about making a movie. I was happy to meet her because she is someone that understands exactly what I went through and I understand what she went through.’

She added: ‘To sit down and talk to her was so surreal for me.’

In 2011, she co-wrote the book ‘Memoir of a Milk Carton Kid: The Tanya Nicole Kach Story’ with civil rights attorney Lawrence Fisher.

He got involved with her case when it started to attract widespread media attention.

‘The school district itself failed to observe what was going on under their noses and in full view of cameras that were located in the school back in 1996, when she was abducted,’ he told DailyMail.com. 

‘They did have cameras in that school and could have seen the impropriety of what was going on between her and this security guard, but they turned a blind eye to it.’

‘We sued the McKeesport Area School district. We sued the principal of the school. We sued the counselor,’ he continued.

‘We sued the McKeesport area Police Department. We sued three different officers in that police department, chief of police and the juvenile lieutenant who was supposed to investigate the abduction, and then another police officer who ultimately took over investigating the matter.’

‘We also sued, obviously, the abductor, Thomas Hose. We sued his parents because he lived at home and kept her in the bedroom where his parents also lived.’

‘We sued the St. Moritz Security Services because they hired him independently and placed him in that school district.’

However, Fisher said all cases were dismissed due to the statute of limitations, with his request for an extension due to extraordinary circumstances also rejected.

Fisher told DailyMail.com that ‘the existence of the security cameras at the time in question were confirmed under oath by testimony of numerous witnesses in the civil case. Ten years later, when Tanya emerged from captivity, they had not been preserved.’

He went on to explain that Kach had a history of running away but was always brought back home by the police. ‘

I don’t think they seriously looked after her or looked for her. They all washed their hands of her which is not what you do with a 14-year-old child. They really abandoned her,’ he said.

Fisher believed Kach had some form of Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological condition when the victim identifies with and empathizes with their captor or abuser and their goals.

‘A jury might ask themselves, “Why didn’t she just unlock the door and leave if it was so horrible.”

‘Or when she was out on the street after she turned 18, “why did it take so many years for her to tell somebody and be rescued?”‘

But Fisher explained that Stockholm Syndrome is ‘a difficult psychiatric matter to prove or to explain.’

‘I think when you deal with people that have gone through what she went through and you see the courage and strength that they have, you become forever connected to them,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘I am really in awe of how she’s able to speak about it.’