Today’s Strib has the details on the sentencing of a man who pled guilty to helping his wife and her teenaged sons kidnap two young women who where then prostituted and used as sex slaves until one escaped and brought the situation to light. Newspaper accounts suggest that the wife was the ringleader.

Lamiea Kerschbaum, Kerschbaum’s wife, has been charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment and is in the Ramsey County jail awaiting a competency hearing on July 26. She recently spent months at the state mental hospital in St. Peter being evaluated…

…Investigators think the Kerschbaums used pistol whippings, drugs and threats of voodoo to keep the girls under their control.

While her husband and one of her sons have pled guilty, Lamiea Kerschbaum’s trial has yet to begin.

Lamiea? That sounds an awful lot like one of the recent “Challenging Word of the Week” entries I posted back in May. An excerpt:

Lamia
(LAY mee uh)noun

The lamiae, in classical mythology, were a race of monsters with female heads and breasts and the bodies of serpents, who enticed young people and little children in order to devour them. The story went that the original lamia was a Queen of Libya with whom Jupiter fell in love. Juno became furiously jealous and stole the children of the queen, who went mad and vowed vengeance on all children. Lamia became a term for any vampire or she-demon. The literal meaning of lamia in Greek is “female man-eater.” In medieval times, witches were sometimes called lamiae.

Note to soon-to-be parents considering names for your impending children: if you see “Lamiea” or something similar in the baby name book you just might want to cross that one off the list.

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