“Come on out of there,” the man ordered, 50 feet away.

“I can’t,” Andrews screamed from inside the wooden box where he was chained. “I’ve been kidnapped.”

It was about 8 a.m. on Jan. 19, 1973, and 13-year-old Marty Andrews was rescued. Eight days earlier, he had been snatched off the street in Portsmouth and taken deep into the Suffolk woods by Richard Ausley.

The career pedophile raped and beat Andrews for seven days before leaving.

The box that held Andrews was buried level to the ground and covered with leaves. By raising his legs and craning his neck, Andrews found that he could lift the hinged lid a half-inch and peer out.

When the four hunters opened the box, Andrews – eyes blackened, teeth broken, nose smashed – whimpered that he wanted to go home.

But even then, he sensed that all comfort in his life had ended.

“The boy who had left home eight days earlier was gone for good,” Andrews recently recalled. “Nothing would ever been the same again.”

Another thought whispered through the back of his mind that day. Over the years, it would echo into obsession: Why had hunters found him?

He was 1½ miles from the nearest highway. It was the last day of rabbit season, and the four men were hunting in woods they normally didn’t visit. And children who are kidnapped for more than three days, he would learn later, rarely come home.

“I always had an understanding that God had a purpose in saving me,” Andrews said. “It tortured me a lot to believe that. What was the reason?”

After three decades of secrets, shame and soul-searching, Andrews, 46, has found an answer. The recent murders of two girls in Florida remind him: He wants everyone to know his story.

Paul Martin Andrews’ life had been rocked before he met Ausley. His parents divorced in 1971 and, the next year, his mother remarried. Andrews and his two sisters were merged with three step-siblings whose mother had committed suicide a year earlier. The new neighborhood also was alien. Andrews was a country boy who grew up in an isolated enclave of six houses at the end of a dirt road in Smithfield. Now he found himself living in Portsmouth, and it had a big-city feel.

Andrews got a paper route. He applied himself to studies and to making friends at his new school and church. “I was trying to make do the best I could,” he said. “I knew that my mother was happy, and that’s what mattered to me.”

It snowed on Jan. 10, 1973, and Portsmouth schools were dismissed at mid day. The roads were iced over the next morning, and schools were closed again. Andrews put his newspapers on a sled that dawn, strapped on his skates and glided through his route.

Later in the day, he and his sisters wanted to make snow cream with snow, sugar and milk. They needed milk. So Andrews headed to the store, alone.

A blue van pulled alongside him. The driver, a smiling, wiry man, introduced himself as Peewee. He said he needed help moving furniture for his brother. It would only take a minute. Was Andrews interested? For $3?

The 105-pound boy climbed in.

“Making money was very important to me, but it was more than that,” Andrews said . “I wanted to be helpful. Back where I used to live, we never saw anyone who wasn’t a neighbor. This guy needed help. He stopped me two blocks from my house. He must be a neighbor.”

Something immediately went wrong. Andrews thought the man’s brother lived a block or two away. But the driver took off on a highway and headed out of town. Andrews’ heart was pounding. Peewee was reassuring. He shared his cigarettes, made interesting small talk. “Just a few minutes more,” he kept saying.

On a quiet stretch of U.S. 13 in Suffolk, they pulled into a truck stop. Peewee ran in, saying he had to pick up groceries for his brother. Andrews, alone in the van, wrestled his nerves. Every instinct told him to run.

But, he recalled, “I had no idea where I was. And my parents would have killed me if they found out I had gotten in a van and gone off with a stranger.”

Peewee came out with a drink for Andrews. They drove a few more miles, turned down a dirt road and, when it ended, set out on foot on a wooded path where the house was supposedly hidden. They were carrying grocery bags, and Andrews thought he caught a glimpse of a hunter’s knife concealed in his companion’s pants. “The fear that ran through me was unbelievable,” he said.

They stopped at a mound. Peewee kicked aside some leaves and swung open a tin door, revealing a plywood box in the ground, 4 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 8 feet long. It was his brother’s deer-hunting box, Peewee explained, and hopped into it. He asked Andrews to help him move the groceries into the box, so the boy also dropped in.

The man slammed his knife in the wall and moved Andrews into a corner.

“I’ve got bad news for you,” Richard “Peewee” Ausley said. “You’ve just been kidnapped.”

The abductor Richard Ausley turned himself in four days after Andrews was found and was sentenced to 41 years in prison. He was killed Jan. 13, 2004, at age 64 in Sussex State Prison, where he was serving his final sentence before facing civil commitment. FILE PHOTO

The abuser kept Andrews for a week, raping him about three times a day.

In between the attacks, Ausley was friendly and expansive. He shared food and tried to teach Morse code to Andrews. He talked about being in prison, fishing, camping and astrology. He even discussed, by name, boys he had abused in the past.

Andrews tried to keep Ausley talking because whenever his captor turned silent, an attack was in store. “It was like being in a cage with a tiger,” Andrews said.

The third day was critical. Ausley wanted to leave and gave Andrews a choice. He would drop the boy off near home if Andrews promised to tell his parents that he ran away from home and say nothing about Ausley or the rapes. Ausley warned that he would come back and kill Andrews if he was betrayed.

Or Ausley would leave the youth chained in the box, call his mother and tell her where to find him.

Andrews took the second alternative. Ausley chained the boy’s ankle to a bolt in the box and tied his wrists with wire. Then he straddled Andrews and began pummeling him. It was the worst beating of the week – the one that did the most damage to Andrew’s face.

All the while, Andrews was screaming “I’m sorry,” and Ausley was crying.

“He gave me a choice on how to go home, and it didn’t occur to me that one was the right choice and one was the wrong one,” Andrews said. “I had foolishly chosen the wrong one because I knew my parents would never believe I ran away from home. Now, Richard Ausley was stuck with me. He could have killed me at that moment, but Ausley was not a cold-blooded killer. He couldn’t do it with his own hands.”

For the next four days, Andrews unsuccessfully tried to convince Ausley that he would lie to his parents. Late in the afternoon of the seventh day, Ausley announced he was leaving. He chained Andrews into the box and promised to call his mother. Then he raped the boy one last time.

Ausley never called the boy’s mother.

The discovery of Marty Andrews was reported across the nation and made “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” Caked in grime, Andrews was brought to Obici Hospital in Suffolk and recalls his mother’s voice coming down the hallway saying “Where his he? Where is he?” Her knees collapsed as she entered the room.

The boy was calm. He picked Ausley’s photo out of two suspect books and learned from police that on the day he was abducted, Ausley was supposed to have been in court to face molestation charges. The felon had already served 10 years in prison for kidnapping and abusing another boy.

When Andrews finally got home that evening, he just wanted to get clean. He recalls standing in the shower, feeling warm for the first time in eight days, and watching the dirt stream off his body and swirl down the drain. “I was home, the fear was gone and I felt like I was washing away all of things that had happened to me that week.”

Water would not wash away Andrews’ bruises, however, or his emotional scars.

Andrews overheard the police urging his parents to get him psychiatric counseling quickly, saying there was a chance now that he could become a pedophile. There was worry that the kids at junior high would taunt him. Andrews was ushered into school when no one could see him, told to clean out his locker, and then taken to Manteo to live with his father.

“It just instilled in my mind that there was something shameful about what happened to me, something secretive that no one should know,” he said.

A few weeks later, Andrews was put in a psychiatric hospital in Newport News. When he was locked into a room, he felt imprisoned and misled again. Andrews demanded to be released, and his father came and got him. Never again would Andrews submit to counseling.

Ausley turned himself in four days after Andrews was found. Andrews testified cogently at the trial, and his assailant was sentenced to 41 years in prison.

Prosecutors told Andrews he never would have worry about Ausley again.

But Andrews thought about his attacker every day. He had vivid flashbacks but told no one. “I needed to be able to talk about what happened to me, but the people I felt closest to didn’t want me to,” he said. “It was uncomfortable to hear the details of what happened, especially to someone they loved. So I learned to keep quiet.”

Andrews spent most of his teens drifting between Portsmouth and Manteo. He tried a semester at Old Dominion University but fared poorly. A new crisis emerged in his life. Andrews was realizing that he was gay.

“I was fearful that if anyone found out it would be a reason to remove Ausley from prison,” he said, “that it would confirm his story that I was a willing participant and a liar.”

So Andrews fled to Miami, where no one knew his past. For the next 25 years, he worked a variety of jobs, drank heavily, did drugs and rarely contacted his family.

In 1991, he decided to return to church for the first time in more than a decade. Operation Desert Storm had begun, and President Bush was urging the nation to pray for the troops.

He began healing. “All the things that were missing in my life came rushing back,” he said.

Andrews swore off drugs and all but stopped drinking. He taught Sunday school, sang in the church choir. He worked nights at an electronic repair shop where, under the solitude of the humming lights, he probed his secrets. Andrews agonized over every newspaper story about a missing child.

And he thought about the hunters.

“Had it not been for them, I might still be in that box today, and no one would have known what happened,” Andrews said. “I couldn’t get my mind around that.”

Three summers ago, jarring news came in a phone call from a Virginia reporter: Ausley was scheduled to be released from prison next April. Andrews wrestled over whether to break his 29-year silence. The thought of Ausley on the loose, possibly abusing other boys, was more than he could bear.

He told his story in 2002, and it became a sensation, appearing in newspapers across the country. Members of Andrews’ church embraced him. The man who stood behind him in choir happened to be a local television reporter. He sent a copy of Andrews’ story to NBC, and Andrews went on the “Today” show. Then Montel Williams called, John Walsh, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Another friend in the congregation was a prosecutor who specialized in child molestation cases. She told Andrews about a Florida law, called civil commitment, that kept career pedophiles confined after their prison sentences ended by placing them in mental institutions. Andrews learned that Virginia legislators had passed such a law several years earlier but never provided money for it.

Andrews wanted to make sure the appropriation came before Ausley was released. With money from his family, Andrews flew to Richmond several times to meet with legislators and to testify before committees. Lawmakers appropriated $2.7 million to start a 36-bed civil commitment center in Petersburg. It opened in 2003; today, 13 beds are filled.

“Martin Andrews is a true hero in stepping forward,” said House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem. “It was very difficult for any legislator to look him in the eye and vote him down.”

Andrews, however, wasn’t content to rely on the legislature. He learned that there is no statute of limitations for pedophilia. Andrews recalled the name of one of the boys Ausley boasted about abusing years ago and phoned him. The man agreed to go to authorities, who won a new felony conviction against Ausley and five years of added prison time.

A prison psychiatrist said in a report that Ausley was a dangerous pedophile with an antisocial personality disorder who showed no remorse or empathy for his victims and insisted that all of his offenses were consensual.

Ausley complained to the psychiatrist that he was becoming Andrews’ victim.

“It was the most cathartic, healing thing in my life,” Andrews said. “I wasn’t stuck in the victim’s stage anymore. I was triumphing. I had taken something awful and turned it into something wonderful. I’ve had so many victims come up to me and tell me how inspirational it was.”

Andrews finally realized why the hunters had come.

“I think God had sent the hunters because he knew I would stand up and be counted when the moment came,” Andrews said. “I think God knew when he asked if I would become a spokesman for other children and other victims, that I would say yes. ”

Does that mean God meant him to suffer at the hands of Ausley?

“Ausley was pure evil, and that’s not of God,” Andrews said.

Says Andrews, "I think God knew when he asked if I would become a spokesman for other children and other victims, that I would say yes." BILL TIERNAN / THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

Last summer, Andrews and his companion of 25 years left Miami and moved to Woodbridge, about 20 miles south of Washington, where he works as a computer technician for the city government. It’s a good job, but he hopes it doesn’t last.

Next year, Andrews plans to open a nonprofit organization for victims. He wants to become a national spokesman for victims’ rights and lobby the 34 states that do not have civil commitment laws. He’s putting together a board of directors and learning about fundraising.

“There really is no one to speak for the victims because the victims don’t speak for themselves,” he said.

After the recent murders of the Florida girls – Jessica Lunsford, 9, of Homosassa, and Sarah Michelle Lunde, 13, of Hillsborough County, both believed to have been killed by registered sex offenders – Andrews said he longed to comfort the parents, although he would never impose.

“I would tell them that it’s probably not as frightening for a child as you think it might be,” he said. “It would be very surreal to a child, and she would not have the same fear an adult would have in the same situation. I mean, it’s scary and they’re afraid, but I think God puts a veil over it for children.”

Ausley, 64, died Jan. 13, 2004, in Sussex State Prison, where he was serving his final sentence before facing civil commitment. He was strangled by his cellmate, who had been abused as a child.

The news depressed Andrews, who says he pitied his assailant but could never muster hate. “I sort of missed him in a very strange way,” he said. “He’d been a major focus of my life – sometimes the entire focus – for 30 years and I entirely expected him to be the future focus of my life. Now, all of the sudden, he was gone.”

Andrews still gets flashbacks, but they’re no longer terrifying. He still has family in Portsmouth and, in recent years, has dropped in a few times on the two surviving hunters.

Lewis Sweezy and “Robby” Robinson, both in their 70s and living in Suffolk, still go out together to shoot rabbit and deer. They’re glad Andrews came back into their lives, although in a way he never left them.

“We always wondered what happened to him,” Sweezy said. “He turned out to be a really nice guy, well-spoken, lot of book-learning. He did well for himself.”

The hunters share Andrews’ awe of their discovery.

“It made no sense that we went to those woods that day,” Sweezy said. “It seems like someone guided us there.”

Reach Warren Fiske at (804) 697-1565 or warren.fiske@pilotonline.com.