Woman Who Endured 4 Years of Captivity and Torture in Garage Speaks Out, as Harrowing Ordeal Becomes a Lifetime Movie

Laura Cowan’s heart raced as she stood in line at a rural Riverside County, Calif., post office. She wondered how she could reach underneath her dress, where she kept a 12-page handwritten letter that described the nearly four years of torture she’d endured, and hand it to someone who could help her.

“Do I walk up to somebody and give it to them? Do I drop it on the ground? Maybe somebody would pick it up and read it,” Cowan tells PEOPLE. “I was just so nervous.”

Mansa Musa Muhhamed, the man who’d raped and abused her for years and rarely let her out of their Aguanga, Calif., home, stood behind her as she waited to approach the clerk’s window. Suddenly, an unknown man approached Muhhamed and distracted him with a friendly conversation. Cowan knew it was now or never.

“I reached into my underwear and I pulled out the letter and I put it on the counter and I slid it towards her. She took it from me because she knew,” Cowan says of the clerk’s reaction. “I never talked to her. We only made eye contact. And as I was going to the door, I looked back at her and all she did was nod.”

Days later, in the early morning on April 6, 1999, Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies knocked on the front door. Instructed to get rid of them, Cowan once again signaled with her eyes for help. The deputy called for backup and Cowan’s nightmare was over.

**

When Cowan left her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1985 for the sunny skies of Santa Monica, Calif., she never imagined her life would become a harrowing made-for-TV movie. The tale of her ordeal — titled Girl in the Garage: The Laura Cowan Story — premieres Saturday, Jan. 18 at 8/7c on Lifetime. (The trailer is shown below.)

Shortly after arriving in California, she went to a convenience store and heard a man preaching in the parking lot. The second time she saw him, the pair exchanged numbers and quickly started dating. In 1991, they got married.

They had two children, Ahmed and Maryam. Life was good for the couple who owned two businesses — a bookstore and restaurant. One day, police swarmed the restaurant and arrested her husband. He was ultimately convicted of trafficking illegal firearms and sentenced to five years in federal prison. 

With no money, no husband and two children to care for, Muhammed stepped in and offered to help Cowan. After meeting Muhammed’s wife and children, who were quiet and well-behaved, she decided to accept his kind gesture.

However, Cowan soon learned that Muhammed was not the man she thought he was. Little by little, she found herself captive and isolated within his home, which she shared with his wife and 13 children.

“He was so angry all the time. It was like walking on eggshells around there. You have to be careful about what you say and you don’t want to tick him off,” she recalls. “He would beat his children for the littlest things. He would beat them for not getting up in the morning for prayer. He would go in their room with a bucket of water and pour it on them.”

Meanwhile, his abuse of Cowan escalated. He withheld food for days as punishment, and raped her. He locked the doors and boarded up the windows. In the last six months of her captivity, he forced her and her two children to live in the garage, with no toilet, which he nailed shut so they couldn’t escape — which Cowan tried to do multiple times.

Once, when she convinced Muhammed to let her and the children go into the backyard under the guise of doing yard work — really, they just needed fresh air and sunshine — she scribbled the word “help” on a piece of paper and threw it into the neighbor’s yard.

A few days later, a social worker arrived for a wellness check. He opened the cupboards and noted the rows of cereal boxes, an apparent sign of a functional home. But the boxes were empty, says Cowan — something the social worker would have known if he had picked them up.

“[Muhhamed] smooth talked the guy so much because he kept talking and talking and talking, almost like a car salesman,” Cowan says.

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After Muhammed’s arrest, she learned that many of his children were actually adults. According to court documents, one of his sons weighed 78 lbs. and stood just a little more than 4 ft. tall, but he was 20 years old.

Muhammed was found guilty of multiple counts of torture, felony child abuse and false imprisonment, among others. He was sentenced to seven life sentences. Cowan was relieved, but the aftermath was bittersweet.

**

After her rescue, Cowan was reunited with her husband, who’d been released from federal prison. She and her children — including a daughter she had while in captivity — were rebuilding their lives as a family, but their reunion didn’t last long. A month after his release, her husband died of a heart attack. 

“He was only 45 years old. And that was devastating because the kids finally got their daddy again. And we were all happy. We were going to be a family,” she says. “I knew then after that I had to leave California. There’s just too many bad memories here.”

Despite her grief, Cowan and her children returned to Cleveland, where they had eight years of therapy, which included art therapy, pet therapy, counseling and more. 

“The only thing I can do is just take a deep breath,” she says about anytime she’s triggered by a word, smell or story. “I try to look at my body. I see that I’m sitting, so I know that I’m here. I’m not somewhere else. I’m not there anymore.”

She now shares her experience to raise awareness about the impact of domestic violence, and while the road to recovery may be bumpy, it’s possible.

“I’m a survivor of domestic violence,” she says, “but now I don’t call myself a survivor. I’m a thriver.”

Girl in the Garage: The Laura Cowan Story, premieres Saturday, Jan. 18 at 8/7c on Lifetime.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.