Toledo, Ohio: A father and his adult son were sentenced to life in prison Friday after being convicted of raping and shackling a teenage stepdaughter who escaped their basement by hiding a spare key and using it to unlock her handcuffs.
Jurors found Timothy Ciboro and his 28-year-old son, Esten Ciboro, guilty on charges of rape, kidnapping and child endangering.
Both men had denied abusing the girl, who is now 14, and a nine-year-old girl who also testified that she had been sexually abused by the father and son.
Esten Ciboro, who along with his father served as his own attorney, told jurors during his closing argument Friday that they needed to do the right thing and 'reunite this family and end their suffering.'
Lucas County Judge Linda Jennings sentenced Timothy Ciboro to life without parole while his son received 68 years to life.
'You two are the most depraved, demented and evil people I've ever seen,' the judge said.
The older girl testified earlier this week that she was forced to stay in the basement for varying lengths of time as punishment or when the men left the house and that she was allowed out to shower or use the restroom.
Officers found leg irons in the basement along with a bucket the girl said she used as a toilet, according to a police report.
The girl, whose mother was living in Las Vegas at the time, said she was left to live in the house with the men at age 7 when her mother moved away.
She said she was treated more harshly than the younger girl and a boy who lived in the house, and that her punishment for wetting the bed worsened from being spanked, to being locked in a bathroom to being chained in the basement.
Police arrested the men last May after the older girl escaped and was found outside a downtown office building more than a mile away.
The two men questioned the older girl after she described the abuse and being shackled by the ankle to a support beam in the darkened room.
At one point during her testimony on Tuesday, she told Timothy Ciboro to stop referring to himself as her dad. 'You didn't treat me like a dad,' she said to Ciboro, who is not her biological father.
'You think I like punishing you?' Ciboro responded.
'I would say the sexual touching you enjoyed,' answered the girl.
At a pretrial hearing, Timothy Ciboro successfully argued that he should be able to bring a Bible into court, saying it was 'the only law book that matters'.
'There's a great deal of strategy in Scripture and I use those strategies in everything I do,' he told the judge, according to the Toledo Blade.
