A 29-year-old man is in jail after a four-month police investigation revealed he held women captive in his squalid south-county apartment while raping and torturing them with utensils, including scissors, plastic wrap, a mallet, knives and a can opener.
A grand jury indicted Adam Michael Capriglione, of the 13000 block of Butler Oak Drive, on nineteen felony counts, including rape, sodomy, domestic assault and felonious restraint ranging back to 2006.
Capriglione also faces charges of child endangerment for filming himself having sex with a girl under eighteen in 2007 and for exposing a four-year-old to his dangerously unsanitary apartment, where investigators found a knife in a cereal box.
"The level of violence and torture and depravity that has been inflicted on these women is something that makes him a particularly dangerous man," says St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch. "Nobody wakes up one morning and does this. This is something that develops over time."
See also: Ten Worst St. Louis Crimes of 2013
Police started investigating Capriglione when one victim managed to leave the apartment and seek help at a medical center. When staff saw the extent of her torture wounds, they sent her to a hospital and called the police, McCulloch says.
Police say Capriglione first met the victim, who is not from St. Louis, online and brought her to his south-county home. During two weeks in January, Capriglione penetrated her vagina with a can opener, choked her unconscious, hit her with a mallet, burned her, cut her, forcibly restrained her and forced a dildo into her anus and vagina, according to the probable-cause report. Doctors found burns on her cervix.
Police are currently working with four victims, but McCulloch says he's certain there are more.
"We know there is at least one other victim out there," McCulloch says. "I have no idea how many others there are."
Read what Capriglione's other victims are claiming, and read a statement from Capriglione's lawyer on page two.
