A 29-year-old northern Ohio woman has been sentenced to 22 years in prison for ordering her husband and four of her lovers to systematically torture another one of her boyfriends in a Red Roof Inn motel room for seven days.
A Lucas County judge handed Martina Esqueda, 29, the sentence on Thursday after the woman tried to excuse her behavior because of the alleged abuse and lack of love she received as a child, which she gave as the reasons for what apparently was a revenge attack on 26-year-old Austyn McClellan last year, news outlets reported.
Esqueda had been convicted of first-degree kidnapping and second-degree felonious assault in a case that evokes the notion of cult-like control over the men by the plus-sized woman.
“This case really has kind of sickened the court,” Judge Lori Olender said while pronouncing the sentence.
Esqueda, who lived with McClellan, her husband, and her four other lovers in a house in Toledo, was convicted of forcing her sexual partners to torture the victim. They “beat the victim with a metal baseball bat, forced him to stand for long periods and only allowed him to eat and drink once a day,” the New York Post reported.
The victim escaped after his captors let him go to a nearby Speedway convenience store.
Morgan Isenberg, Esqueda’s defense lawyer, tried to argue before her sentencing that the cult-like matriarch’s behavior stemmed from her abuse as a child, according to coverage by the Toledo Blade.
“She does not understand love, because she has never felt it,” her attorney said. “The people who were supposed to love her, supposed to support her, supposed to help her grow, they broke her.”
Judge Olenda disagreed, telling Esqueda that she “took all that trauma … and threw it against somebody else, put them in the same position you were in.”
The torture victim directly addressed his tormentor to tell her the impact of his traumatic ordeal.
He said in a statement read in court: “I continue to have nightmares about the horrific things you and those men did to me, Martina, because none of this would have happened had you not been the ringleader or mastermind behind every bad thing that happened to me.”
According to the Post:
The harrowing ordeal unfolded on March 14 last year when Esqueda’s husband, Michael Esqueda, 28, and her boyfriends Aaron Bradshaw, 49, Austin Bradshaw, 28, David Cessna, 26, and Chance Johnston, 27, forcibly took the victim to the motel.
She hatched the nightmarish scheme as retribution for an apparent scuffle at her home. Esqueda is said to have broken her arm when she and the victim were trying to break up a dog fight. She later told her lovers, though, that the victim had actually crippled her limb.
Her husband and three of the other men have already been sentenced for their involvement in the mind-boggling attack.
The last defendant, David Cessna, is set to be sentenced next week.
Veteran crime writer Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse and torture in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.