Ex-guard, hairdresser face trial stemming from 10-year disappearance of McKeesport teen
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Nearly a year ago, Tanya Kach resurfaced in McKeesport after what authorities said was a decade-long captivity at the hands of a local school security guard named Thomas J. Hose.
Today Mr. Hose and an accused accomplice, hairdresser Judith C. Sokol, are scheduled to stand trial on numerous charges of sexual and child endangerment crimes said to have occurred while Miss Kach was still a minor.
As of late Friday, it was not clear whether efforts being made to cobble together plea bargains would succeed before the trial opens in front of Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge John A. Zottola.
"I know there has been a responsible effort here to try to resolve this by plea" on the part of the district attorney's office, Lawrence Fisher, Miss Kach's attorney, said Friday.
"My preference would be to spare my client the ordeal of a trial and to see that Thomas Hose is held sufficiently accountable for his conduct in this matter."
Mike Manko, a spokesman for District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr., declined comment other than to say that prosecutor Laura Ditka is prepared to go to trial. Mr. Hose, 49, faces a minimum of five years in prison if found guilty of the charges.
"If and when we work out a deal, the media would be the first to know in court," attorney James Ecker, who is representing Mr. Hose, said Friday. Mr. Hose is on house arrest, but his mother said he was allowed to visit Mr. Ecker yesterday.
Angela Carsia, who represents Ms. Sokol, 58, of Duquesne, said she, too, is planning to go to trial.
Miss Kach, 25, achieved international celebrity in March after she revealed to a McKeesport deli owner who had known her as "Nikki Allen" that she was really a woman named Tanya who had run away 10 years earlier and then vanished.
She said she was held captive within a few miles of her childhood home at a residence on McKeesport's Soles Street, where Mr. Hose lived with his parents. There, she said, Mr. Hose -- 24 years her senior -- carried on a sexual relationship, threatened to kill her and kept her under his sway until she plucked up enough courage to finally walk away after he allowed her outside on her own.
Miss Kach testified last year that she began a relationship with Mr. Hose while he was a security guard at Cornell Intermediate School in McKeesport.
When Miss Kach ran away from home in 1996 at age 14, authorities said, Ms. Sokol facilitated Mr. Hose's pursuit of a sexual relationship with the teenager by dying her hair and keeping quiet about the inappropriate behavior.
Mr. Ecker has questioned whether Miss Kach really was unable to escape. She has testified that her door was bolted from the inside, that she had access to a phone, and she was allowed to roam outside alone.
Since rejoining society, Miss Kach has earned her General Educational Development certificate and is enrolled in an undisclosed college as a business major, Mr. Fisher said.
"She loves school and she's doing well," Mr. Fisher said. "She's looking forward to getting this matter behind her."
In contrast, Mr. Hose is faring poorly, according to Mr. Ecker.
"He's not holding up very well. He's going crazy," Mr. Ecker said. "What can I tell you? Basically [he's] someone who's locked up all the time."
Correction/Clarification: (Published Feb. 13, 2007) A headline on this story as originally published Feb. 12, 2007 about the pending trials of Thomas J. Hose and Judith C. Sokol, who are accused of crimes against Tanya Kach, the McKeesport runaway who disappeared for 10 years, misstated the case against them. They are charged with sex and child endangerment crimes, not kidnapping. Also, interviews for the story were done Friday, not Sunday.
Thomas J. Hose
Judith C. SokolFirst Published February 12, 2007 12:00 am
