A southeast Houston man was arrested on Thursday after being accused of kidnapping a woman and holding her captive for four to five years at his home.
According to Click 2 Houston, the 52-year-old man, Lee Carter—also known by his stage name Viper—is currently being held in Harris County Jail on a $100,000 bond. Houston police made the arrest on an outstanding aggravated kidnapping warrant after receiving a tip that a woman was still in the residence, having performed a welfare check at the Perry Street home back in April.
Court documents detail that officers went to the home on April 7, 2023, for a kidnapping in progress and heard a woman's voice coming from a window of the home. The woman claimed that four or five years before she was pregnant, Carter approached her at Almeda Genoa when she was homeless and offered her a dollar.
Carter allegedly asked the woman if she needed help and told her to get in his vehicle, driving her to his home on the 5200 block of Perry Street where the woman says she's been held ever since. The documents read that Carter forced the woman into taking drugs and having sex with him, also impeding her from leaving the home by locking her in his garage. The woman claimed that on occasion, Carter would allow her to leave the garage and shower, but when speaking to police, she said she hadn't showered in two months.
A makeshift toilet was also inside the garage, although it didn't flush, alongside a mattress covered in vomit and assorted bags of chips and Twinkies. Officers described the woman in the documents as being "extremely malnourished," weighing “approximately 70 pounds with a pungent stench," as well as having no shoes and being visibly filthy.
The woman said that her pleas to leave the home were met with threats of physical violence, while Carter allegedly forced her to take pills, crack cocaine and other substances that left her incapacitated. Carter is also accused of only feeding the woman chips and additional snacks, disallowing her from receiving full meals.
The woman said that her first attempt to escape landed her in the hospital, where Carter picked her up and returned her to his garage, which he boarded up to prevent her from fleeing again.
One of Carter's neighbors believes that he was running a human trafficking operation and other illegal activity from his home. “He had just kind of explained that, um, he had some girls that were in there, and he never used the word locked up, but, um, he was kind of protecting them from themselves,” Jedediah Beights told Click 2 Houston. “From the sounds of things, she would call him his boyfriend. Her boyfriend. So, I mean, it was kind of a mutual weirdness, I guess.”
Carter, who raps under the name Viper, released an album in 2008 entitled You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack. The project's cover has been used as a meme online with some pointing out the obscure title of the work and the lack of detail in artwork.
