Police found a sex slave chained to a stripper pole in a run down two storey house in Detroit

FROM the outside the run-down two-storey home in an ordinary Detroit suburb was unremarkable. It was what went on inside that was horrifying.

FROM the outside, the old, run-down two-storey home in an ordinary Detroit suburb was unremarkable.

The gardens were tidy and the property looked like it could be home to a typical American family.

Which is all the more reason why even the most hardened police officers were left shocked with what they found inside — and why they’ve called the home the “house of horrors”.

They were supposed to be there to speak to 32-year-old Ryon Travis regarding a fraud and theft complaint.

As police went though the house they were stunned to find a 25-year-old woman chained to a stripper’s pole with a padlock around her neck, The Washington Postreported.

Once she was freed she told her rescuers she had been locked up for weeks. It was punishment, she said, by Travis, because she tried to run away from the property where she was being kept as a “sex slave”.

Police charged him with sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion, and producing, possessing and transporting child pornography. He has pleaded not guilty.

She’d been there for weeks, she told police — a form of punishment for trying to escape the residence.

The victim alleged she was a sex slave, one of four who were living in the home that Travis called his “wives”, but prosecutors have accused Travis of treating the women more like slaves who were advertised online for profit.

She had known him for six years, but it was only in the last 18 months he allegedly began forcing her into sex work.

Ryon Travis, 32.

“She said that the defendant posted advertisements online and in chat rooms that he had four girls for sale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Woodward said at a March 23 bail hearing according to The Washington Post. “And she said that if she or the other women refused to dance or perform sex acts, the defendant would be violent with them, and that he would hit them with a closed fist, kick them or push them down.”

At that hearing, Travis sought to have the case dismissed, NBC affiliate WDIV reported, because he should be allowed to decide which laws to obey.

Magistrate Judge Mona Majzoub denied his request and remanded him in custody until trial.

“You are a danger to children. You are a danger to women. And you are a danger to people who are helpless in your presence.”

She couldn’t believe he could “chain” someone up even when he was under police scrutiny for the fraud complaint and the phones that were taken.

“I don’t understand how you could have been present at a search in your home on March 2 where you know that phones were taken and were going to be searched, and by the 21st, you have chained a woman against her will, in your home, knowing that agents were looking at you,” the New York Daily News reported.

Police also seized two mobile phones that belonged to Travis. According to court documents the phones contained graphic images of a man sexually abusing children. In one of the photographs, the child was lying on a sheet with a “distinctive blue and white pattern,” according to the documents tendered in court. A police search of Travis’ home revealed the same sheet on a bed in Travis’s bedroom.

It was the presence of the images that prompted the police officers to dub it a true “house of horrors”.

Originally published as Police found a sex slave chained to a stripper pole in a run down two storey house in Detroit