The screams came from beneath the earth.

Two rabbit hunters were inching their way through the frozen woods of Dismal Swamp, in Virginia, on a bitter January morning in 1973 when they heard it—a sound no one ever expects to hear in the middle of the forest. It wasn’t an animal cry. It was human. Desperate. Rising up through snow and frozen soil.

They stopped, listened, and then ran.

In a small clearing they saw a strange sight: mounds of dirt, a rough plywood structure, and a metal hatch half-buried in the ground. As they crept closer, they heard the screams again, and this time they could make out words. A boy’s voice, begging. They pulled the hatch aside and looked down.

Staring back up at them from a cramped wooden box sunk into the earth was a thirteen-year-old boy—filthy, bruised, chained, and very much alive.

His name was Paul Martin Andrews. To family and friends back home in Portsmouth, Virginia, he was just Martin or Marty. Eight days earlier, he had walked out of his house to buy milk for his mother on a snow day.

Everyone thought he had vanished into thin air. No one imagined he was buried in a box in the woods, fighting to stay alive.

A Snow Day That Turned Into a Nightmare

Thursday, January 11, 1973, was the kind of day kids remember for the rest of their lives. A heavy snowstorm had swept across North Carolina and Virginia. Norfolk recorded around nine inches of snow, the heaviest single snowfall in a decade. Schools closed for the second day in a row. Children in Portsmouth spilled out into the streets with borrowed sleds and snowballs, tasting rare winter freedom along the Elizabeth River.

Inside the Andrews family home, things were ordinary. Paul’s mother, Ann, needed milk. The store was only three blocks away. Thirteen-year-old Martin pulled on his coat, told his younger sister Jennifer he’d be right back, and stepped out the door.

He never got there.

As Martin walked along the snow-packed street, a blue Ford van pulled up beside him. The driver, a man in his thirties with a casual manner, leaned across the seat and introduced himself as “Peewee.” He told Martin he needed help moving some furniture at his brother’s place and would pay him for the work. For a boy that age in 1973, the request didn’t sound outrageous. This was a time when kids walked alone, when neighbors asked teenagers to help with odd jobs, and when evil felt farther away.

Martin agreed and got in the van.

The man drove away from the neighborhoods and familiar streets, heading south toward Dismal Swamp State Park—a sprawling wetland area straddling the border between Virginia and North Carolina. Eventually, they turned down an isolated logging road.

A chain blocked their path.

The driver pretended to be annoyed and told Martin they would have to walk the rest of the way. He explained that his brother kept a “deer box” nearby—a buried structure like a hunting blind, where a hunter could store supplies and wait for game without being seen.

They left the van and walked through the quiet woods. Snow weighted down branches. Their breath puffed white in the frigid air. Eventually, they came to a low mound of earth, with a partly concealed metal hatch glinting in the snow. The man lifted the hatch, revealing a plywood box beneath the ground.

He told Martin to climb down and help him bring up some supplies.

The moment Martin’s feet touched the floor of the box, everything changed.

The man’s tone hardened. His face shifted. He pulled a large butcher’s knife and looked at the boy trapped in the cramped space with him.

“I’ve got bad news for you,” he said. “You’ve just been kidnapped.”

Martin’s stomach dropped. A cold, dark realization swept over him: his instincts, those faint flickers of unease on the walk into the woods, had been right all along.

He lunged for the knife, trying to wrestle it away. Before he could grab it, the man who had called himself Peewee drove his fist into Martin’s face, staggering him. In that box, in that moment, the fight shifted entirely. The man had the knife, the strength, and total control. Martin had nothing but fear—and the will to survive.

The Boy Who Vanished

Back in Portsmouth, nobody knew where Martin had gone.

Jennifer waited for her brother to come back with the milk. When he didn’t return, worry crept in. She told their parents. The Andrews family called the police.

The response was immediate and massive. Officers performed grid searches of the area, knocking on doors, questioning neighbors, and looking for anyone who might have seen Martin. One theory suggested he might have fallen into one of the local waterways and drowned; the area was crisscrossed with rivers and canals. The Coast Guard drained a nearby waterway. The fire department sent a helicopter to search from above.

Nothing.

It was as though the boy had vanished from the earth. No witnesses. No vehicle description. No note. No trace.

What nobody knew was that Martin had indeed disappeared from the world—but not in the way they imagined. He hadn’t fallen into water, and he hadn’t run away.

He was alive, beneath their feet, in a wooden box buried in the frozen ground.

Life Inside the Box

The underground box was roughly four feet high, four feet wide, and eight feet long. It was built from plywood and sunk into the earth, with a single metal hatch at the top. It was too low to stand up straight, except directly under the hatch. Most of the time, you could only sit, kneel, or lie down. The air was damp and cold. The walls sweated with moisture. The earth pressed in.

The man calling himself Peewee—whose real name was Richard Alvin Ausley—had built the box himself. He was a carpenter by trade and a predator by choice. He had carefully measured and dug the hole. He had chosen an isolated spot. He had planned the structure to be hidden yet accessible, a place where a child could be kept out of sight and out of reach.

Inside this box, with a knife in his hand and a boy at his mercy, Ausley dropped the last pretense of being a friendly stranger.

For the next eight days, the box became Martin’s world.

He was chained and confined, forced to endure things no child should ever experience. The cramped space left him unable to stretch out fully. The cold seeped into his bones. The darkness made time blur. There was no way to tell day from night except by the faint changes in light seeping through the hatch when it was opened.

Martin’s captor was unpredictable. At times he spoke in a more conversational, almost ordinary tone. At other times he exploded in anger and violence with no warning. He carried the knife constantly, a constant reminder that if Martin did not comply, he could be killed and buried for good.

On some days, Ausley unchained him for short periods and led him out of the box. He made Martin help gather wood, tend the fire, or cook food. They walked together through the wintry woods as if they were simply camping. To an observer who didn’t know what was happening, it might have looked almost normal—a man and a boy outdoors, making a fire in the snow.

But it was never normal. Every moment outside the box existed under the threat of the blade and the promise of punishment. Ausley told Martin explicitly that if he tried to run, he would catch him, hang him from a tree with a chain, and beat him. The message was clear: there was nowhere to go.

Inside the box, Martin’s mind did what minds do when faced with terror they cannot escape. He started breaking time into tiny units: one breath, one minute, one hour at a time. He listened for footsteps overhead. He tried to guess Ausley’s moods. He tried, in small ways, to stay human—thinking of home, of his sister, of his mother at work in the hospital.

He imagined her worry. He imagined her tears. What haunted him most was the thought that she would know he was gone but might never know what had happened to him—that he would simply be a missing child, a name on a list, a photograph on a bulletin board.

Days blurred together into a cycle of fear, cold, confinement, and brief, confusing moments of fresh air and firelight. Martin had no idea how long he had been down there. He just knew he was still alive. And as long as he was alive, no matter how bad it was, there was a chance—just a chance—that someone might find him.

Eight Days Later: Screams in the Snow

On Wednesday, January 19, 1973, exactly eight days after the abduction, Martin found himself alone in the box.

It was bitterly cold outside. Snow still lay thick across the forest floor. Trees stood like skeletal sentries, their branches crusted with ice. The ground was partially frozen.

Ausley left. Martin didn’t know why, or when he would come back—or if he was coming back at all. He didn’t know if the man had left him there to die.

In the quiet of that morning, Martin lay in the dark and thought of his mother again. He wondered if she still believed he was alive. He wondered if she cried herself to sleep. He wondered if anyone would ever know where he had been.

Then, sometime around 8 a.m., he heard it: the sound of engines.

Vehicles. Somewhere not too far away.

A surge of hope jolted through him. He started screaming. He screamed until his throat hurt, until his voice cracked, until he had nothing left but raw sound and desperate will.

Up above, two men out hunting rabbits in the snow were moving through the woods when they heard something they could not explain: screams rising from the ground itself.

They stopped.

They listened.

Then they followed the sound.

As they drew closer, they saw the metal hatch protruding from the dirt. They approached cautiously, guns in hand. What they saw when they opened the hatch was like something out of a nightmare.

A battered, bruised teenage boy, chained inside a makeshift underground cell.

Martin told them he had been kidnapped.

One of the hunters was so overcome with emotion that he had to step away to regain his composure. The other stayed and tried to reassure the boy that he wasn’t going to be left down there anymore.

The hunters called the police. Officers rushed to the scene. Rescue workers used bolt cutters to sever the metal that bound Martin. Crime scene photographs captured his condition—swollen face, blackened eyes, visible injuries. The images were horrifying, but they also provided undeniable evidence of what he had endured.

The Boy Comes Home

The police put Martin in the back of a squad car and drove him straight to Obici Memorial Hospital. He needed medical treatment. He also needed something just as important: his mother.

Ann was on duty as a nurse when they brought him in.

She later recalled how he looked: filthy, exhausted, but oddly excited—to be alive, to be found, to see his family again.

Martin’s younger sister Jennifer saw him later that day. Years afterward, on a television talk show, she described the moment she saw his face.

He turned and looked at her.

In that instant, she said, “the nightmare came true.” His eyes were different—empty, distant. The cheerful, protective older brother she knew was gone. The boy standing in front of her was someone else, someone who had seen things no child should ever see.

The physical injuries would heal with time. The internal scars would not.

Who Was Richard Alvin Ausley?

As the investigation unfolded, the truth about the man who called himself Peewee came into sharp, chilling focus.

Richard Alvin Ausley, born in Virginia in 1939, was not some first-time offender who had suddenly snapped. He was already a seasoned predator.

In 1961, he had abducted a ten-year-old boy from outside a recreation center, taken him to a remote area, and assaulted him. He was convicted of abduction and kidnapping and sentenced to a lengthy prison term—but was released on parole years before his full sentence was completed.

By the time he encountered Martin in 1973, he was also facing new charges involving a fourteen-year-old boy. On the very day he kidnapped Martin, he was scheduled to appear in a Portsmouth courtroom on a sodomy charge. Instead of going to court, he went hunting for another victim.

He was a boatyard worker and a carpenter. He had used those skills to build the underground box in Dismal Swamp, planning every detail: where to put it, how deep to bury it, how to hide it, and how to make sure he could get in and out while keeping a child locked inside.

After Martin identified Ausley as his kidnapper, police arrested him at the home he shared with his father. At trial, Martin was the key witness. He remembered walking into the courtroom and seeing Ausley staring at him, unblinking, throughout his testimony.

Ausley tried to twist reality. In court, he would later claim that what had happened in the box had somehow been consensual—that the child had wanted it, or that the boy bore some responsibility. It was a grotesque inversion of truth, a classic tactic of abusers: blame the victim, rewrite the story.

The jury didn’t buy it.

Ausley was convicted of abduction and other related charges and sentenced to forty-eight years in prison.

For many, that sentence felt like the end of the story. The man who had done this was going away for decades. The boy had survived. Justice, in some form, had been served.

But trauma doesn’t end when a prison door slams shut. And for Martin, the real impact of what had happened would unfold quietly, over years.

Silence That Wounded as Deeply as the Crime

In the 1970s, understanding of child trauma was far less developed than it is today. Professionals often believed the best way for a child to recover from something horrific was to avoid talking about it, as if silence could make memories fade.

Martin’s parents were told by experts that he should not be encouraged to talk about what he had gone through, and that others around him should not bring it up. The idea was that, if he didn’t discuss it, he would eventually forget and move on.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, everyone else moved on.

“The reality,” Martin would later say, “was that everyone forgot about it. Everyone except for me.”

The silence around what had happened became its own kind of prison. Martin learned very quickly that this part of his life—the most violent, life-altering thing he had ever experienced—was unspeakable. There was no safe space to talk about it, no language for what he felt.

He tried to push the memories down. He did his best to act normal, to be the son, brother, and student people expected him to be. On the surface, he was a boy who had survived a terrible ordeal and seemed to be putting it behind him. Inside, he was carrying it alone.

When he reached nineteen, the weight of being “the boy in the box” in his hometown became too much. Martin decided to move to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where no one knew his story. He wanted a place where he could just be a young man starting a new life—not the kid everyone whispered about or pitied.

Later, he moved again, closer to family in North Carolina, then eventually settled in the Miami area. He worked, made friends, built a life. He tried, in the ways he could, to leave the box in the past.

But trauma has a long memory. It doesn’t vanish just because other people stop talking about it.

A Phone Call That Brought Everything Back

For nearly thirty years, Martin stayed quiet about what had happened to him in Dismal Swamp.

Then, in June 2002, his mother called him with news that shattered that silence.

She had learned that Richard Alvin Ausley—the man who had abducted and imprisoned her son—was going to be eligible for parole after serving thirty years of his forty-eight-year sentence.

“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,” Martin said.

All the assumptions he had lived with—that the man was gone, locked away forever, no longer a threat—suddenly collapsed. It wasn’t just about his own safety. It was about every child out there who might cross paths with a man like Ausley.

Ausley had not been a one-time offender. He had a pattern. He had done this before. He had done this to Martin. And if released, there was every reason to believe he could do it again.

By this time, Virginia had passed legislation known as the Civil Commitment of Sexually Violent Predators Act. This law allowed the state to hold the most dangerous sex offenders in a secure treatment facility even after they had completed their prison sentences—if they were still considered a serious threat.

The problem was funding and implementation. The law existed on paper, but it had not fully come to life. Parts of it needed to be rewritten to be constitutionally sound. Resources were needed. Political will was needed.

Martin realized he had a choice.

He could remain silent, as he had been urged to do decades earlier, and hope that someone else would prevent Ausley’s release.

Or he could step forward, open the door to the box in his mind, and tell the world what had happened to him—publicly, on television, in print, in legislative hearings—so that the man who hurt him, and men like him, would not be given another chance to destroy children’s lives.

Silence had protected his abuser before.

He decided it would not protect him again.

Becoming a Voice Instead of a Secret

Martin went public with his story.

He spoke to reporters. He allowed cameras to show crime scene photos of him in the box—pictures he knew were graphic and disturbing, but which he believed told the truth more powerfully than words alone. He sat for interviews where he recounted, in measured terms, the unimaginable things he had endured. He described the box. The knife. The threats. The fear.

He also talked about what came after: the enforced silence, the years of trying to outrun his past, the cost of carrying it alone.

His goal was larger than keeping one man in prison. He wanted to make sure that no child predator that dangerous could ever slip through the cracks again.

His advocacy turned personal pain into public purpose. He pushed for full funding and practical implementation of the Civil Commitment Act. He worked with victim advocates and public officials. His case became a symbol of why such laws were not abstractions, but necessities.

The media picked up his story—not as a sensational crime, but as the chronicle of a survivor who refused to stay in the dark.

And other people were watching.

Another Voice From the Past

One of those people was Gary Founds.

In 1972, a year before Martin was kidnapped, Gary was fourteen years old when he was targeted and abused by the very same man—Richard Alvin Ausley. For decades, Gary carried the memory quietly, believing it was too late to do anything about it. He thought there was no statute of limitations for the pain, but there might be for the crime.

Then he saw Martin on the news.

He saw a man roughly his age, openly talking about what had been done to him, naming the abuser, and fighting to keep him from being released.

Gary realized he wasn’t alone.

He also learned something important: in Virginia, there was no statute of limitations on certain serious sexual offenses. It was not too late to come forward.

Gary reached out to authorities. He told them what Ausley had done to him back in 1972. He also revealed that he was not the only member of his family who had been abused by Ausley—other relatives had been victimized as well. The damage radiated out across generations and family ties.

Prosecutors brought new charges against Ausley based on Gary’s account. In 2003, Ausley appeared in court again. He pleaded no contest to the charges, and an additional five years were added to his sentence.

Because one man had found the courage to speak publicly, another man found the courage to speak at all.

A Predator’s Final Days

As Ausley’s prison time grew longer, he did something many offenders do: he tried to reshape his story in the public eye.

He reached out to the media and portrayed himself in a different light. In interviews, he framed himself as the victim—of the system, of public opinion, even of Martin. He complained that, because of Martin speaking out, his own life was now ruined.

“I will be his victim for the rest of my life,” he said.

It was a stunning reversal of reality—the man who had built an underground box to imprison children suggesting that the boy he buried alive had ruined his life by telling the truth.

The legal system, however, was less swayed by this narrative. With the Civil Commitment law in place and additional prison time tacked on, Ausley’s chances of ever walking free were dwindling, even before something unexpected happened.

In January 2004, at Sussex I State Prison in Virginia, corrections officials made a housing decision that would change everything.

They placed Richard Alvin Ausley in a cell with Dewey Keith Venable, a 24-year-old inmate serving an eighteen-year sentence for carjacking, abduction, and robbery.

Venable had his own history of trauma. He had been abused as a child by a convicted offender. He reportedly warned prison staff not to place him in a cell with anyone convicted of crimes against children. He told them that being put in that situation would be volatile. According to Venable, he was told that if he refused the cell assignment, he would be placed in solitary confinement.

Shortly afterward, correctional officers found Ausley dead in the cell.

He had been strangled and had suffered blunt-force injuries.

Venable was charged with murder. In court, his prior abuse and his warnings to prison staff about being housed with a convicted child molester were part of the record. Ultimately, he was convicted and given additional time—more years added to his existing sentence.

When Martin heard about Ausley’s death, his feelings were complicated.

“I did what I did to keep him off the street,” he said. “Nobody deserves to be murdered.”

He hadn’t wanted this end. He had wanted a system that kept children safe, not a vigilante outcome that created yet another layer of violence and trauma.

The Hole That Never Left

After Martin’s rescue in 1973, the plywood box in Dismal Swamp was removed and dismantled. But the hole—the cavity in the earth where the box had been—remained.

Decades later, journalists would note that the depression in the ground was still there. Fifty years on, the earth still bore the physical remnant of what had happened.

Martin was asked in one interview whether he had any desire to go back and stand in that hole again. It is a question that may seem insensitive, but it came from a place of wondering whether confronting the site might offer some kind of closure.

His answer was simple and telling: “Some scars don’t heal,” he said. “It’s hard to believe after fifty years that that hole is still there. I have a scar on me as well.”

That scar wasn’t just physical. It was emotional, psychological, spiritual. It was the scar of having been buried alive as a child, and then buried in silence as a teenager and young man.

From Victim to Advocate

What makes Martin’s story so extraordinary is not just that he survived, or that he helped change law in Virginia.

It’s that he chose, repeatedly, not to let hatred or vengeance define him.

He had every reason to disappear into his private life and never speak publicly again. Instead, he stepped forward, again and again, to tell a story that cost him something every time he told it.

In doing so, he changed the lives of people he never met.

He pushed lawmakers to fully fund and implement civil commitment laws for sexually violent predators, ensuring that the most dangerous offenders could be evaluated and held even after their prison sentences ended, if they were found to still be a threat. He became a powerful voice for reform—not from the perspective of an academic or an outsider, but as someone who had felt, quite literally, what it meant to be trapped with a predator with no escape.

His courage helped inspire other survivors, like Gary Founds, to find their own voices. His advocacy helped reinforce the idea that protecting children required not only punishing offenders, but also recognizing patterns and closing gaps in the system.

He also played a quieter, equally important role: helping change the way the public sees male survivors of childhood abuse. For years, cultural narratives focused almost exclusively on female victims. Men and boys who had been abused often felt isolated, ashamed, or convinced no one would believe them.

By speaking openly as a man about what happened to him as a boy, Martin helped dismantle some of that shame. He showed that masculinity is not compromised by admitting vulnerability. He proved that being a victim of abuse says nothing about a person’s strength, character, or worth—and that seeking help is not weakness, but wisdom.

A Message for Those Still in the Dark

At the heart of Martin’s story is a message that extends far beyond one man, one box, one winter in Virginia.

It is a message for every child suffering abuse in silence.

For every adult who survived it and still feels the weight of shame that does not belong to them.

For every person who wonders if speaking up matters, or if it’s too late, or if anyone will care.

Martin has put his message into words many times, but perhaps never more clearly than in a statement that has come to define the soul of his journey:

“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.”

These aren’t just comforting phrases. They come from someone who has walked through the darkest imaginable place—not just the box in the woods, but the long, lonely road of trying to heal in silence.

Martin’s life proves several hard but hopeful truths:

That survival is possible even after unthinkable harm.

That speaking out, while terrifying, can protect others and transform systems.

That the shame of abuse never belongs to the victim.

That healing is messy, imperfect, and ongoing—but real.

The Legacy of a Buried Boy

On that cold January morning in 1973, when two hunters heard screams rising from the frozen ground, they didn’t know they were about to change the course of one boy’s life.

They certainly didn’t know that, decades later, that boy—now a man—would help change the way an entire state treats the most dangerous predators.

Some stories about crime end with an arrest, a conviction, a sentence. Martin’s story didn’t end there. It moved forward—through silence, struggle, awakening, and action.

Today, thanks in part to his efforts, there are laws in place that make it harder for people like Richard Ausley to slip quietly back into communities where children live, play, and walk to the store for milk. Thanks to his voice, at least some predators will be seen for what they are before they can hurt again.

Somewhere tonight, a child will go to sleep safe in their bed, never knowing that a man named Paul Martin Andrews helped make their world a little safer. They will not know his name. They will not know about the box in the woods or the hunters or the courtroom or the laws.

But that is often what true legacy looks like: protection you will never see, safety you never realize you were given, danger you never knew was coming because someone else stood between you and the harm.

Paul Martin Andrews was once a boy buried alive in a wooden box.

He refused to stay buried.

And in that refusal—in his decision to speak, to fight, to turn pain into protection—he changed everything that mattered.