May 6, 2013: Arrest

Dan Brill and Mike Hageman were taking a domestic violence report on West 47th Street when their radios started buzzing.

The two veteran police officers looked at each other: The radio traffic was urgent; something unusual was happening. Hageman stepped outside the house to listen as Brill finished taking the woman’s statement.

“It sounds like they found Amanda Berry,” Hageman said when Brill returned to the car.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Brill said.

Nearly every cop on the west side of Cleveland knew Amanda Berry’s name and face. For ten years, her photo had been up on the wall of the Second District headquarters, on telephone poles, and on highway billboards. Everyone wanted to believe she was still alive, but cops know these long-term missing-person cases typically end when someone discovers bones.

But now the excited chatter on the police radio was saying that Amanda Berry was alive and safe on Seymour Avenue, just a few minutes away.

“Be advised, suspect Ariel Castro, fifty-two-year-old Hispanic male, is driving a blue Mazda Miata convertible,” the dispatcher announced.

Brill and Hageman knew that half the police cars in Cleveland were already on Seymour Avenue, so they decided to look for the Miata. They started driving east on Clark Avenue, a busy main road not far from Castro’s house. And there it was: just up ahead, a blue Miata was pulling up to a stop sign with two Hispanic males in their fifties in the two-seater convertible.

As the police moved closer, the driver of the Miata saw the cruiser and made eye contact with the officers. Brill and Hageman were waiting for “the look,” the expression they see on the faces of car thieves, drunk drivers, or any other driver who doesn’t want to attract police attention: a guilty look, then a careful effort to direct their attention anywhere but at the officers.

The Miata driver did none of that. He seemed totally calm.

He headed down Clark Avenue and then turned right into a McDonald’s parking lot.

Brill radioed in the license plate: FHY4669.

The confirmation came quickly: It was Castro’s 1993 Miata. “That’s the male we’re looking for,” the dispatcher said.

The officers pulled up directly behind the car and turned on their overhead flashing lights. The two men in the car turned around, clearly bewildered. Hageman and Brill approached them, asked for IDs, and told them to keep their hands in plain sight. Ariel Castro was the driver, and his brother, Onil, was in the passenger seat with a dog on his lap. The cops ordered them out of the car.

Ariel said nothing, but Onil seemed confused. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What did Pedro do?”

Onil told the officers that if their brother Pedro, who had a severe drinking problem, had gotten into some kind of trouble, they could find him at his house, where he lived with their mother. He demanded to be released.

“We will explain this all to you,” Brill said. “But right now we need you to cooperate with us.”

Onil was still holding the dog, and the officers saw that there was another dog in a plastic milk crate in the space behind the seats. Onil was still complaining loudly about being stopped when the officers told him to put both dogs in the crate.

As they handcuffed both men, Ariel Castro was silent.

Officer Tom Connole pulled up in a second patrol car and quietly updated Brill and Hageman: “He held three girls kidnapped for ten years. One of the other ones is Gina DeJesus.”

Brill was shocked. Not only was Amanda alive, but so was Gina, whose disappearance was just as well-known in Cleveland. So they had been together all these years.

The officers put Onil in their patrol car and Ariel in Connole’s vehicle. They were each read their Miranda rights, and when Ariel Castro was told he was being held on suspicion of kidnapping, he seemed stunned. He started to speak, but then stopped and slouched down in the patrol car.

The brothers were taken to the Second District police headquarters, a five-minute drive from Castro’s home, and locked up separately. Ariel Castro was placed in Cell 22, a tiny room with a concrete floor and yellow brick walls. Previous occupants of the cell had scratched their colorful street names into the bars over the years: Baldy D, Bobby 104, Lil Bryan. Castro sat there silently. In another cell across the room, Onil was mouthing off to the officers, demanding to be freed and insisting he had done nothing wrong.

Police had found their brother Pedro passed out drunk in his backyard and arrested him as well. He now lay on the floor of a third cell, still sleeping it off.

All three men were given dark blue “paper suits,” which are generally used for prisoners who are a suicide risk. The police had taken that precaution because the case was so extraordinary and was already drawing overwhelming media attention. Onil was furious about being forced to change clothes, but Ariel quietly slipped into the outfit while officers changed the unconscious Pedro.

The Cleveland police and FBI did not want to make any procedural missteps in such a high-profile case, so they decided to wait until the next morning to question the suspects. For the next few hours, until well after midnight when Castro was transferred downtown to the Justice Center lockup, police, FBI agents, and other officials came to his cell door to catch a glimpse of the man accused of such breathtaking crimes. Throughout it all Castro sat silently on a wooden chair beneath the cell’s neon light.

He never asked a single question about why he was being held.

May 6, 2013: Reunion

At the moment Amanda was kicking out the door of 2207 Seymour Avenue, Nancy Ruiz was preparing dinner for her sister Janice three blocks down the street. Janice lived there with two other sisters, a nephew, and his family. She had suffered a stroke a week earlier and had been released from the hospital that afternoon. The house had been in the family for about fifty years, and its fresh white paint and tidy yard made it stand out on an otherwise run-down block.

Nancy was cooking a chicken stew while Janice rested in her bedroom. Her doctors had said that Janice needed quiet, so Nancy had drawn the curtains and shut off her phone and the TV to make sure nothing disturbed her.

Outside, though, Nancy heard a commotion—sirens and people shouting. She didn’t think much of it, but then the door swung open and her older sister Sandra burst in and shouted, “They found three girls in a basement down the street!”

Nancy froze.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Is it Gina?”

“I don’t know,” Sandra said. “But we have to go!”

They took off down the street and parked near the corner of West 25th Street, right behind Cesi Castro’s Caribe Grocery. Cesi and his wife, Norma, were standing outside the market watching the chaotic scene—police cars with flashing lights, TV satellite trucks, a gathering crowd.

As she passed, Nancy quickly hugged Norma, whom she had known since she was a teenager, and began running toward the police cars. She ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape and saw Andy Burke, an FBI agent who had been working on Gina’s case from the beginning.

“Please,” she said to him, “just tell me! Is it Gina?”

“Yes, it is,” Burke said.

“Oh, my God!” Nancy shouted. “Oh, my God! They said there’s a baby. Is it hers?”

“No,” he told her, “it’s not hers.”

She fell into his arms and they both started crying. “They’re in that ambulance right there,” Burke said, pointing toward the emergency vehicle pulling away down the street.

“You have to go to Metro Hospital,” Burke told her. “That’s where she’s going.”

Cleveland Deputy Police Chief Edward J. Tomba, who had just arrived, put Nancy and Sandra into his cruiser and tore off, sirens blaring, toward the hospital.

 

Gina

We’ve only been in the ambulance for a few minutes when we pull up to Metro Hospital. They wheel Michelle in on the gurney, but Amanda and I walk, and she’s carrying Jocelyn.

I was sick so many times inside that house and wanted to go to a doctor, but now here I am at this huge hospital, and all I want to do is stay outside and breathe the fresh air for hours.

Doctors lead us into a big room with three beds that says TRAUMA 16 and TRAUMA 17 over its doors. The whole wall is glass, so we can sit on the beds and see the nurses’ station and all the doctors and cops rushing around.

They put Amanda and Jocelyn on the bed at one end, Michelle in the middle, and me on the third and pull curtains around each of us. A doctor examines me and tells me I weigh a hundred pounds—thirty pounds less than when I was kidnapped. Then I hear a voice I haven’t heard in nine years.

“Gina!”

It’s my mom.

A cop is helping her make her way to me because she almost fainted when she saw me.

“Hi, Mommy,” I say, very quietly.

Neither of us knows what else to say, so we just hold each other. My mom keeps looking at me and touching me, checking me out to make sure I’m really okay. She’s smiling and crying at the same time.

A few minutes later my dad runs in and hugs me, and then my sister Mayra.

There must be a hundred police and FBI guys in the hallway, some of them looking through the glass and others who come in to say hello. Some of them are crying and a couple of them even fall to their knees, sobbing.

My mom and I can’t stop hugging.

“Mommy,” I ask when we finally pull apart, “do you still make mashed potatoes, fried chicken, and corn?”

“We can make it tonight!” she says.

“I want to go to the mall,” I tell her.

“We’ll go tomorrow!” she says.

Then I remember that I have something for her.

“Wait, Mommy, wait,” I tell her. “I gotta show you something.”

I get the book bag I took when we left Seymour Avenue and pull out a “missing” flyer of me, the one that he got from her and that I decorated with glittery hearts and pictures of food.

“Look what I have,” I say, handing it to her.

“Oh, my God,” she says.

She recognizes this flyer, and she’s starting to put it all together.

I think if Ariel Castro were standing here right now, she would kill him.

Amanda

Where is Beth?

I wish she would get here. I’m dying to see her. Gina’s family has been here for a while, and a nice woman named Yvonne Pointer is talking to Michelle.

The nurse says Pointer’s daughter was murdered in 1984, and now she’s an activist who helps victims of violence. She’s sitting on the bed with Michelle, holding her hand, and they are singing: “Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring.”

The doctors keep poking and pulling at me, checking my heartbeat and blood pressure. I weigh ninety-two pounds, and I was one-twenty when he took me. They take swabs from my mouth and Jocelyn’s to check our DNA.

The nurses bring us a sandwich, chips, and juice. They ask Jocelyn what her favorite food is, and she says, “KFC!” So somebody runs out and gets her some. She’s excited but takes one bite and realizes it’s the spicy kind. Too hot for her, so she gulps down water.

And then I see Beth.

She’s walking through the nurses’ station but hasn’t noticed me yet. She looks so skinny, even thinner than I am. But it’s really Beth! And my aunt Theresa and my cousin Melissa!

Beth looks through the glass window and finally catches sight of me.

She starts pushing her way through the chaos until she finally reaches me, and we hug. We’re both crying hard, and Theresa and Melissa put their arms around me, too. Jocelyn is sitting on the bed staring at all this. I don’t think she has any idea what’s going on.

“Who is this?” Theresa asks.

“That’s my daughter, Jocelyn,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “tell her to come over here!”

So Jocelyn joins in the hug, and I introduce everyone. She knows exactly who they are because I have been talking about them for her entire life.

“Is Daddy okay?” I ask Beth. “I heard on the news he was really sick.”

“Yeah,” Beth replies. “He’s okay.”

“And what about you? You’re so skinny. Are you okay?”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m fine.”

An FBI agent named Tim Kolonick comes in and introduces himself.

“We’ve been looking for you for ten years,” he says.

“I know. I saw you guys on TV. Thanks for not forgetting us.”

He looks at Jocelyn and asks her name. “She’s gorgeous,” he says, smiling at her.

In a few minutes the police ask me to come to a separate room and answer questions. I tell Jocelyn to wait with Betsy Martinez, a nurse who has been taking good care of us. I can tell Joce is getting more comfortable, because she’s running all over the place, with her face all red from a cherry Popsicle somebody gave her.

“I’ve got a joke, Miss Betsy,” she says to the nurse.

“What’s your joke?”

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“To get to the other side!! I got you!!!”

And she laughs and laughs and laughs.

Amanda

They ask me if I want a shower.

God, I would love a shower, a long one, without worrying about someone pawing me. Just a hot, peaceful shower. I can’t remember the last one I had. It used to be my favorite thing.

Today—Monday—was my bath day anyway. He had a schedule in the house. It depended on the season and the weather, but usually Jocelyn and I got to take a shower every four or five days. Tonight it was going to be our turn to go downstairs to use the shower.

They lead us to a big bathroom. It’s so clean! I close the door and lock it, and Joce and I stand under the hot water, soaking and shampooing and scrubbing. It’s been ten years since I have been able to use all the soap and shampoo I want. I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet smells. I’m so happy it almost makes me cry.

As we’re scrubbing, the diamond stud in my ear falls out and slips down the drain. He used to wear it and then gave it to me. This seems like a fitting moment to have that little trace of him disappear forever.

We dry off with fluffy towels and put on some clothes that a nurse gave us. She says it was stuff that her family had outgrown. When I escaped from the house, I was wearing a tank top and a pair of baby-blue pants that Gina had sewn for me out of fabric from an old dress. Now Jocelyn is wearing a Disney princess dress and I’m in a track suit. I can’t wait to buy brand-new clothes that nobody else has ever worn.

We walk back to the big room in the emergency ward, and I see Teddy, Mariyah, Marissa, and Devon standing there along the wall. The last time I saw Teddy was at Burger King the day I was kidnapped. I was so mad at him that day, but I’m so happy to see him now. And I can’t believe how big the girls are.

My mouth drops, and I run over to hug them.

“This is Devon,” they tell me, and I take a long look at this adorable little boy. I first saw him on the TV news as a newborn in Beth’s arms, and now he’s seven. I’ve been gone for his entire life.

“It’s nice to meet you, Devon,” I say, and we hug.

At around midnight they put my whole family into an FBI van and drive us to an Embassy Suites hotel in the suburbs. We have a two-room suite with FBI agents stationed outside to make sure nobody bothers us. They tell us there are reporters from all over the world at the hospital and on Seymour.

Jocelyn and Devon are bouncing off the beds and playing in the big closets like they’ve been friends forever, and Beth and I sit up talking. She tells me about Mom, and what it was like right up to the end. We make plans to go visit her grave. Beth says she didn’t have enough money to get her a gravestone. I’m going to figure out how to fix that.

We never do get to sleep, and at about eight we wander down to the breakfast buffet. In the house, Gina and I would often daydream about a buffet where you could eat whatever you wanted and all you wanted. I eat pancakes and doughnuts and orange juice, and I ask the man at the omelet station to make me one with ham and cheese and onions. I can’t believe how much I’m eating. I haven’t seen this much food in ten years. So many choices!

Then, back in the room, in a bed with big pillows and soft sheets that smell like soap, I fall into a slumber so deep and happy that I could sleep forever. And for the first time since I was sixteen, I’m actually looking forward to waking up.

 

May 7, 2013: Nos Vemos

On the morning of Tuesday, May 7, Cleveland police officer Larry “Chiqui” Guerra brought a suspect into the Justice Center in downtown Cleveland. As he was turning the man over for fingerprinting and booking, he heard a familiar voice call out in Spanish from behind him.

“Hey, Chiqui! ¿Qué haces? ¿Cómo estás?”

Guerra turned and saw Ariel Castro in a holding cell, lying on a mat on the floor, his hands clasped behind his head, smiling.

Guerra took a step back in surprise. He had known Castro all his life. Their families were both from Yauco, and they had grown up together in a Puerto Rican neighborhood a few streets away from Seymour. Castro was seven years older, but he and Guerra hung out in the same places, including the Caribe Grocery.

Castro’s uncle Cesi and Guerra’s father were friends and they’d often take young Chiqui to Indians baseball games. When Guerra graduated from the police academy, Cesi Castro bought him a military-style flashlight worth more than a hundred dollars.

Guerra played the güiro, a percussion instrument made from a hollowed-out gourd, and he would always join in the parrandas, the Christmas music parties in the back of Cesi’s shop. He had seen Castro there at one of those celebrations just five months before, drinking a beer.

Guerra had always thought that Castro was a little odd and obsessively private. Guerra had never met his wife or his children. Castro would never engage in conversation much beyond small talk. He was friendly enough, but you always knew not to ask him too much because he wouldn’t answer.

Guerra had been at home when he heard the news, and he thought of all the times he’d talked to Castro while he had the girls locked in his house. He thought of the hundreds of times he’d driven by 2207 Seymour and towed illegally parked cars off that street. It was his neighborhood, and the man accused of this unbelievable crime was his friend.

Now here was Castro, smiling at him from the mat on the floor, looking as relaxed as a man in a backyard hammock.

“¿Ariel, qué pasó?” said Guerra.

“I really fucked up,” Castro said, sounding tired.

“Hey,” Guerra warned him, “I’m not just Chiqui in here. I’m a policeman. Whatever you say, you might want to think about it.”

“I don’t care,” Castro said. “I’m a victim here, too.”

“How can you say that?”

“I didn’t take those girls,” Castro told him. “They came with me. I didn’t make them do anything.” He stood and started pacing around in the cell as he talked. “I was abused, too, as a kid.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Guerra replied, his anger rising. “But it doesn’t give you any excuse for what you did. Dude, it’s been ten years. You even know Gina’s father. Everybody knows Felix. How could you do this?” Guerra felt the crime personally, as his brother had married a relative of Gina’s, and their daughter and Gina had been close friends.

“I didn’t make them do anything,” Castro insisted. “I didn’t rape them. They did this willingly. They wanted to be with me. And another thing, when can I see my daughter? I should be able to see her.”

Guerra was growing increasingly disgusted, and asked, “How did you keep this a secret for ten years? Did your brothers know anything about this?”

“My brothers didn’t know anything about this. Nothing,” Castro answered. “It was hard, but this was my little secret, and I’m glad it’s finally over. I know I’m going to die in prison, but I didn’t do all that stuff you guys say I did.”

Guerra looked at Castro staring back at him through the bars and saw that he was cool, unemotional, and resigned. And Guerra thought to himself, he’s been living this lie for so long that he actually believes it.

“All right, man,” Guerra said. “I’m done talking to you.”

“Okay, I’ll see you later,” Castro replied.

“Nos vemos,” Guerra said—see you later—though what he was really thinking was, “Para el carajo.”

Go to hell.

May 7, 2013: Confession

On the morning after his arrest, police searched Castro’s house and found ninety feet of chains. They seized padlocks, deadbolts, and a clock-radio and wires rigged up as alarms connected to the front and back doors. In a drawer in the kitchen they discovered a note handwritten by Castro with the heading “Confession’s [sic] and Details.” The four-page document, printed on lined notebook paper, was filled with misspellings and scratched-out words.

The first page was dated with odd precision: “4-4-04, 8:06 a.m.,” forty-one hours after Gina’s abduction. The letter apparently took him four days to finish, because the final page was dated “4-8-04, 2:05 p.m.”

The rambling note was in turns confession, suicide note, personal history, and rambling fatherly advice to his children.

He wrote that he had been “abandoned” by his parents, that an older boy had sexually abused him when he was a boy in Puerto Rico, and that his mother had been so physically abusive there were times he “wished she would die.”

He said that he was married at age twenty and that the “marriage was a failure from the beginning.” He claimed that Nilda was “abusive” and would hit him and “push me to the limit.”

“I hit her back,” he wrote. “She put me in jail, only to get me out and apologize to me. This happened a couple of times, but the name calling and arguments were always there.” After she left him he said, “I lived alone for the most part . . . I had good sex drive. I was in a relationship with a woman for about two years.”

He then described kidnapping Michelle and Amanda, claiming, “I treat them well and make sure they eat good.”

“I don’t understand why I keep looking for women out in the street. I already had two in my possession,” he wrote. He said that Michelle and Amanda were being held “against their will because they made a mistake by getting in a car with a total stranger.”

Though he expressed no remorse about taking the first two women, he did seem more troubled about Gina: “I had no idea Gina was so young, she looks a lot older,” he wrote, adding that he didn’t know that Gina was “the daughter of Felix, a school classmate of mine.”

The bottom line is, I am a sexual predator who needs help, but I don’t bother to get it. I live a private life. I function around others like a normal person. I’ve been having problems with my head for a long time. I feel depressed, dizzy and short term memory loss. I really don’t know what’s wrong with me. To the parents of these three woman [sic], I would like to say, I’m very sorry. I am sick.

When I wake up in the morning, I don’t feel like I’m really hear [sic]. For some reason I feel I can’t concentrate. This is a big problem in my everyday life. I just want to put an end to my life, and let the Devil deal with me.

Castro wrote that he planned to let the women go “when I feel I have arranged everything so my family knows what to do after I take my life.” He noted that he had about $10,000 in a bank account and another $11,000 in cash hidden inside his washing machine.

I would like this money to go to the victims, for they deserve every red cent of it. Again, I apologize (sorry) to everyone this whole ordeal has affected.

To my children, please be strong and make the right decisions. Just because you may think you know someone do not get into their vehical [sic]. This was the case of Amanda + Gina.

Grimilda; please do your best to insure my babies are safe. If possible, move away (far away).

As I write this letter on 4-8-04 at 2:05 pm, my simptoms [sic] are clearly bothering me (dizziness and not really feeling like I’m hear [sic]). Also, Depression. I know I am sick (Mentally).

May 7, 2013: Fallout

While investigators searched Castro’s house, other officers scoured the neighborhood to make certain they weren’t missing any accomplices or clues. Across the street and three doors down from Castro’s house, police arrested Elias Acevedo Sr., a convicted sex offender who had moved in with his mother but failed to register his new address with police. He was jailed for that offense, and while he was incarcerated police linked his DNA to an unsolved 1993 rape. The further they looked into that case, the more they also began to suspect Acevedo in the unsolved disappearance of Christina Adkins, who was eighteen and pregnant when she went missing in January 1995.

Encouraged by the fact that Amanda, Gina, and Michelle had been found alive after so many years, FBI agent Andy Burke began reviewing cold cases. Burke noticed inconsistencies in police reports about Adkins’s disappearance—one witness seemed to have given police a false name and date of birth. After pulling the original files and reinterviewing people involved in the case, Burke discovered that that witness was Acevedo.

Acevedo ultimately confessed to killing Adkins, as well as Pamela Pemberton, a thirty-year-old whose body was found in 1994. He then led police to an area off I-90 near downtown Cleveland and pointed to a manhole cover. When officers lifted it, Burke shined his flashlight twenty feet down into an old concrete storm sewer and saw Christina Adkins’s skull.

May 7, 2013: Interview

Twenty-four hours after his arrest, still in his paper jumpsuit and slippers, his hands cuffed in front of him, Ariel Castro shuffled into a small interrogation room on the ninth floor of the Justice Center, the headquarters of the Cleveland police and Cuyahoga County courts.

At 5:28 p.m., two interrogators—Dave Jacobs, a veteran officer in the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office assigned to the FBI’s Violent Crimes Task Force, and Andy Harasimchuk, a Cleveland police sex crimes detective—entered the room, showed Castro their badges, and began questioning him. Castro sat with his chin resting in his shackled hands, his elbows on the table, sobbing softly and dabbing his eyes.

“Whatever you need to know,” he said quietly, “just ask me questions.”

He spelled out his name. He said he had an ornate tribal tattoo around his left bicep and tried to lift his shirt to show the detectives but couldn’t manage it with his hands cuffed. He said he was five-foot-seven.

Jacobs handed Castro a paper with his Miranda rights and asked Castro to read them out loud.

“‘You have the right to remain silent,’” Castro started, but then his voice broke and he started crying loudly. “I’m worried about my little girl. How’s she doing?” he asked.

Jacobs assured him that Jocelyn was fine.

“I miss her so much already,” Castro said, wiping his eyes. “She knows I was always there for her. I’m sorry. I’m glad she finally got her freedom.”

Castro finished reading the Miranda form and signed it, along with another document granting his consent to speak to police without a lawyer being present.

The interrogation began with Castro giving some family history about his late common-law wife, Nilda Figueroa, and their four children. He said his job as a bus driver was hard and, “I would just come home stressed out.”

His account was delivered as matter-of-factly as if he were answering questions from a bank teller. But he broke down again when he mentioned Jocelyn: “My daughter was born there. It just worked out so well. She’s a miracle baby.”

Jacobs asked him to describe the day he abducted Michelle. He said he offered her a ride home from the Family Dollar store at Clark Avenue and West 30th Street. He couldn’t remember what year it was.

“I’m just so screwed up in my mind,” he said. “Anybody in their right mind wouldn’t do something like this.”

He described chaining Michelle in his basement. Jacobs asked if he had had sex with her, and Castro replied, “That was the whole intention.”

“I’m selfish and cold-blooded,” he said. “Having four kids, and now five, I can’t understand how I did these things. I’m a father. I’m a grandfather.”

When the officers asked about Amanda, Castro started sobbing again.

“I’m going away for a long time; I know it,” he said. “I just want to tell you whatever you need and tell the truth. . . . Maybe my information can help other kids or other women.”

He said he did not know Amanda before he abducted her. He told them that he was dropping off his daughter Arlene on West 110th Street when he saw Amanda walk by in her Burger King uniform: “I noticed Amanda smiling towards us and I was attracted to her. So I says ‘bye’ to my daughter and I pulled out of the driveway and I went the way Amanda was walking.” He pulled up next to her, rolled down his window, and asked her if she wanted a ride. “She said yes, surprisingly,” Castro recalled. “She thought my daughter was still in the van.” Castro then said he “tricked her” into coming to his house and described how he began having sex with her on that day.

“A week or two later I called her mom. I think I said something like, ‘I have your daughter and that she’s okay, and that she’s my wife now,’” he said, crying again.

There was rarely any interaction between Amanda and Michelle, Castro said, because he told them not to talk to each other.

He described Jocelyn’s birth in the plastic wading pool, and how he cut the umbilical cord, froze the placenta, and eventually buried it in the backyard.

While Amanda named her Jocelyn Berry, he considered her last name to be Castro.

The interrogation then turned to Gina, and Castro recalled that he went to Wilbur Wright Middle School looking for Arlene on April 2, 2004, when he noticed Gina on his way in.

“I was attracted to Gina. She was showing her cleavage,” he said.

He spoke briefly with a security guard and then went inside the school, but when he couldn’t find Arlene, he left. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, he recalled, he was driving down Lorain Avenue when he saw the two seventh-graders walking together near the corner of 106th Street.

Castro said he knew Gina was the daughter of Felix DeJesus, and he would see them together at school assemblies and shows. But he said on the day he abducted Gina, he didn’t realize it was her: “If I’d a known then, I would have just dropped her off.”

Castro turned his car around and drove past Arlene, who did not see him, and pulled up beside Gina near the corner of 104th Street. “I did something very cold-blooded to my daughter; I passed her to get to Gina,” he said, breaking into tears again.

He told the interrogators he was surprised that police didn’t see him on surveillance footage when he went into Wilbur Wright Middle School that day: “They could have cracked the case right there.”

Castro said he had not planned to abduct anyone that day. It was an impulsive decision, and he was surprised when Gina got into the car with him, though he couldn’t remember how he convinced her to come into his house.

“We stayed downstairs for a while, then we went to the basement,” he said.

Jacobs asked how he persuaded her to follow him there.

“I just asked her,” he said.

Jacobs asked what happened there.

“We were just talking,” Castro replied. “She was complying with everything. All three of them, they were just so compliant. To this day, I don’t understand how they would get into my vehicle and got into my house with no questions and without a struggle.”

He repeatedly used the word “consensual” to describe his sexual relationship with his captives. He claimed he had never been violent and that none of the victims had ever cried while he was having sex with them.

Castro said he would sometimes take the women outside into the backyard, but always made them wear wigs, baseball caps, and sunglasses.

Jacobs asked if he was concerned they would try to escape.

“I gained their trust,” he said. “They were surprisingly willing to do what I asked.”

Castro described how he would occasionally have guests over to his house. “I would tell them be quiet, because, ‘I don’t want you to get in trouble,’” he said. He did not have to say things like, “I’m going to beat your ass,” “because by then I had felt them out. I kind of knew what I could get these girls to do.”

On the day the women escaped, Castro told the officers, he had gone to his mother’s house to wash his car. He said he told Jocelyn, “I’m going to Grandma’s, and she’s going to cook for us, and I’ll bring some back.”

Amanda’s room was unlocked because Jocelyn had been complaining about being locked inside all the time, he said.

“Yesterday, I know I let my guard down.”

He never took Amanda, Gina, or Michelle out in his car, he said, but he often went out with Jocelyn. His brother Pedro had seen them in his car a few times, and Castro told him she was his girlfriend’s daughter. A few days before Castro was arrested, he said Pedro had walked into a Burger King while he and Jocelyn were eating breakfast, but his brother thought nothing of seeing Castro with the child.

“I never took her to my mother’s house,” he said. “I wanted to so bad. I wanted her to meet her, but she never met her.”

Jacobs asked Castro about a cross in the backyard of Seymour Avenue and some freshly turned dirt. Castro said he had buried two or three pet dogs in the yard, and the newly dug earth was for a greenhouse he had started building.

Jacobs asked if anything else might be buried in the yard.

“If you’re trying to get at, ‘Am I a serial killer?’ I’m not,” Castro said.

“I don’t think you are,” Jacobs said.

“I’m a sexual predator,” he said. “They say if you do it once and you continue doing it, you’re a predator.”

“What if you only do it once? In your mind, what does that make you?” Jacobs asked.

“Probably just an offender,” he said. “I kept doing it over and over.”

Jacobs asked how Castro managed to keep the whole thing secret for so long.

“I don’t know how I pulled it off,” he said.

 • • • 

After two hours of talking, Castro asked when he could eat.

Jacobs and Harasimchuk said they would take a break and get Castro some food. As they were leaving the room, Castro stopped them.

He said he had about $40,000 in his 401(k) account from the Cleveland Public Schools, plus cash hidden in a black bag inside a broken Kelvinator washing machine in his basement. He was worried that “corrupt cops” searching his house would steal it.

Another officer brought Castro a slice of pizza and a bottle of Coke. Sitting alone in the room, with the surveillance camera still recording him, Castro had trouble picking up the pizza with his cuffed hands, and put his face down into the plate and ate it. When he finished, an officer brought him a second slice.

A half hour later, the two interrogators returned.

Castro asked if they found the money in his basement and told them, “I would like as much money to go to the victims as possible, and my daughter.”

Jacobs showed Castro a series of photographs of the women, taken the previous night at Metro Hospital. He asked him to identify the first one, and Castro started sobbing heavily.

“My baby’s mama, Amanda,” he said. Through his tears Castro told Jacobs, with obvious pride, that he had helped her quit smoking.

He then identified Gina and Michelle, and crying again, said, “I was just so tired of this double life and I wanted freedom for them.”

Jacobs asked Castro about his sexual history. Before he abducted the three women, he recalled, he used to pick up prostitutes on Lorain Avenue and bring them back to his house.

He said he had “lost sexual interest” in his three captives by the end, because “I just didn’t find them attractive.” He had not had sex with Amanda or Gina in “eight months or a year,” and only rarely had sex with Michelle, although he admitted to having two videos on his phone of him having sex with her the previous week.

Jacobs showed Castro the letter dated April 4, 2004, two days after he abducted Gina, that police had found in his kitchen.

“In case something ever happened to me, I wanted you guys to see that I’m a victim,” Castro said, explaining the letter, referring again to his claim that he was sexually abused as a child.

He said he never intended to have a child with any of his captives, but he never used any form of birth control. He claimed all three women “wanted sex all the time . . . they would ask me for it.” When Amanda became pregnant, he said, “We just dealt with it.” He called her “an excellent mom.”

During the course of the four-hour interview Castro never apologized for what he had done and cried every time Jocelyn’s name was mentioned.

“I miss my daughter dearly, but on the same token, she has her freedom now,” he said. “And they have their freedom.”

 

May 9, 2013: Starting Over

Amanda

The FBI says we need lawyers, and they’re sending over ones they say we can trust. I’m staying at Beth and Teddy’s house on West 129th Street, and there are satellite trucks and TV cameras outside. The police are keeping the media away from the front door and we have our shades drawn. Beth went out yesterday and pleaded for privacy, but this doesn’t feel like privacy.

The lawyers, Jim Wooley, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Jones Day; Henry Hilow, a former assistant county prosecutor and partner at McGinty, Hilow & Spellacy; and Heather Kimmel, associate general counsel of the United Church of Christ arrive, and we meet in the living room with Jocelyn, my aunt Theresa, Beth, Teddy, and their kids. The room is filled with stuffed animals, flowers, and cards that people have sent from all over the world. Jim and Henry start making jokes about each other and they actually make me laugh. I cover my mouth with my hand because my teeth are so yellow and gross after ten years without seeing a dentist. I can’t wait to get them fixed.

“Is there anything we can get for you or bring to you? Anything at all?” Henry asks.

I’m not sure what a lawyer can do for me, but there are two things I need.

“My mother doesn’t have a headstone, and I would like to get her one. And I want a birth certificate for my daughter.”

“We can do that,” Henry says.

May 13, 2013: Graveyard

Amanda

A week after my escape I’m finally going to see where my mom is buried.

I wanted to go yesterday, because it was Mother’s Day, but the FBI said that all the news people would be expecting me to do that, and I’m not ready to face the cameras.

So now Joce, Aunt Theresa, and I are on our way to the cemetery a few miles outside Cleveland. So many wonderful memories of my mom flood back as we drive past the pretty trees and fields along the road.

Jen Meyers, a victim specialist with the FBI, is driving us in her van. Jen recently worked with families in the school shooting at Newtown, Connecticut, and she’s been great to talk to about how to cope with what happened to us. She has been with us practically every day since the moment we got out, and I’m glad she’s the one taking us out here.

We don’t know exactly where Mom is buried, but Aunt Theresa has a section and plot number, and she knows that it’s close to my grandma’s grave. We walk across the grass trying to find the spot, and when we finally do, what I see makes me break down.

Somebody has laid fresh flowers on my mom’s grave, with a note: “Dear Amanda, We hope that your mom knows you are home.” It’s signed by someone I don’t know.

For ten years, I lived in a world controlled by one selfish man. Now I live in a world of kindness, where total strangers help me and ask for nothing in return.

I explain to Joce that this is where her grandmother is buried.

“She’s in heaven, but this is where her body is,” I tell her. “So we’re going to come here and visit her all the time.”

“Okay, Mommy,” she says quietly.

It’s cool, barely fifty degrees, and rays of sunshine shoot through the big trees around the gravesite. I look around at the perfectly mowed grass and think my mom would approve.

I crouch down and whisper, “Mommy, I’m home.”

 

August 1, 2013: Sentencing

On August 1, Ariel Castro took a seat in a downtown Cleveland courtroom, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and shackles. He looked like an unremarkable middle-aged man with wire-rimmed glasses, a receding hairline, salt-and-pepper beard, and a bit of a paunch.

Castro had already pleaded guilty to 937 felony counts, with many details of the indictment drawn from Amanda’s diaries, and today was his sentencing hearing. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty, an outspoken former judge, said 937 was a “conservative” number of the possible counts against Castro. He described Castro as “evil incarnate.”

In exchange for the guilty plea, McGinty had not sought the death penalty, and the case was wrapped up at remarkable speed—less than ninety days from arrest to sentencing. Castro had agreed to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus a thousand years—a sentence intended to convey the community’s revulsion at his crimes. McGinty also said it was a message to other criminals who might want to become famous by copying Castro.

All that was left now was for Judge Michael Russo to formally accept the deal at the sentencing.

Wooley, Hilow, and Kimmel wanted a low-key hearing. Given the extraordinary interest in the case, they had no desire to have Amanda, Gina, and Michelle endure a very public confrontation with Castro. The county prosecutor, an elected official who never shied away from the media spotlight, disagreed. McGinty said Castro’s crimes should be aired as publicly and in as much detail as possible. He said he wanted to leave no doubt in Judge Russo’s mind that he should approve the sentencing deal, and to leave a court record so damning that no judge, even decades in the future, would ever consider letting Castro out of prison. He wanted all the victims to testify.

Russo agreed to let the sentencing hearing go forward, and McGinty presented a series of witnesses, including psychiatrist Frank M. Ochberg of Michigan State University.

Describing Castro’s treatment of Amanda, Gina, and Michelle, Ochberg said, “The damage done to them will not go away.” But he called them, “marvelous, compelling examples of resilience.”

Amanda and Gina did not want to see Castro and were not ready to speak publicly, so they declined to attend. They sent family members to read statements.

“The impact of these crimes on our family is something that we do not want to discuss with people we don’t know,” Beth told the judge. “Even if I wanted to talk about it, it is impossible to put into words. For me, I lost my sister for all those years and thought it was forever. And we lost my mother forever. And she died not knowing. . . . It is impossible to put into words how much it hurts.

“Amanda is not here today. She is strong, beautiful, inside and out, and is doing better every day. She’s not just my only sister, but the best friend I have and the best person I know. She does not want to talk about these things. She has not talked about these things even with me.

“The main reason she does not want anyone to talk about these things, or be forced to talk about these things, is because she has a daughter. She would like to be the person who decides what to tell her daughter, when to tell her daughter, and how to tell her daughter certain things.”

Sylvia Colon, Gina’s cousin, spoke on behalf of the DeJesus family.

“To Ariel Castro’s family, we are saddened that you are burdened with this horror and will unfortunately forever be tied to these atrocities. Please know that we do not hold you accountable and pray that you can one day be whole again. Continue to love and support one another—we promise you that with this recipe you will be triumphant.

“Our family recognizes it is not for us to judge or determine any punishment. Only a higher power can do that.

“Today is the last day we want to think or talk about this. These events will not own a place in our thoughts or our hearts. We will continue to live and love.

“We stand before you and promise you that our beloved family member thrives. She laughs, swims, dances, and more importantly she loves and is loved. We are comforted in knowing that she will continue to flourish. She will finish school, go to college, fall in love, and if she chooses, will get married and have children. She is where we will continue to put our energy. She lives not as a victim, but as a survivor. Her insurmountable will to prevail is the only story worth discussing.”

Then she turned to the defense table and faced Castro directly.

“To Ariel Castro: Que Dios se apiade de su alma.”

May God have mercy on your soul.

Michelle stood before the judge and described the pain of being separated from her son. He had been placed in foster care before she went missing, and she had been working to regain custody when she was abducted. Then she addressed Castro: “I spent eleven years in hell. Now your hell is just beginning. I will overcome all that happened, but you’re going to face hell for eternity.”

Judge Russo asked if Castro had anything to say before sentencing.

For the next sixteen minutes Castro stood at the defense table, rambling in a soft voice, without notes, appearing to voice thoughts as they came to him, in no particular order. He had pleaded guilty to almost a thousand counts of horrendous crimes. But he sounded, for all the world, like a man whose feelings had been hurt by all the mean things being said about him.

He described being abused and said he was addicted to sex. He said that pornography had pushed him into “the art of masturbation,” which he would engage in for “two or three hours a day nonstop.” He claimed he had never been abusive until he met Nilda, whom he beat because “I couldn’t get her to quiet down.”

Castro insisted that Jocelyn had had a “normal life” and would probably describe him as “the best dad in the world.”

“There was harmony in that home,” he said.

“Most of the sex that went on in the house, probably all of it, was consensual,” he told the court, insisting that his imprisonment of the three women did not involve violence: “I simply kept them there without them being able to leave.”

“I just want to clear the record that I am not a monster. I did not prey on these women,” he stated. “I just acted on the sexual instincts because of my sexual addiction. . . . I am a normal person. I am just sick. I have an addiction, just like an alcoholic has an addiction.”

Finally he offered an apology: “I am truly sorry to the DeJesus family, Michelle, and Amanda. You guys know all the harmony that went on in that home. I ask God to forgive me. I ask my family—and I apologize to my family also for putting them through all this. I want to apologize to the state of Ohio, the city of Cleveland, for putting a dark cloud over the city. I just want to apologize to everyone who was touched by these events.

“I just hope that they find it in their hearts to forgive me and to maybe do some research on people who have addictions so they can see how their addiction takes over their lives.”

He then criticized the FBI, saying: “I feel that the FBI let these girls down” because they questioned his daughter, Arlene, about Gina’s disappearance, “but they failed to question me. If they would have questioned me . . . it’s possible that it would have ended right there.”

He apologized to the judge for taking up his time and then complained about Gina’s cousin telling him in court, “May God have mercy on your soul,” which he said was “uncalled for.”

After alternating between describing the “harmony” in the house and saying how sorry he was, he concluded: “So again, thank you, everyone. Thank you, victims. Please find it in your hearts to forgive me. Thank you.”

On the bench Russo could barely conceal his disgust. He accepted the sentencing agreement and asked Castro to rise as he issued the court’s final word on his case:

“Sir, there is no place in this city, there is no place in this country, indeed there is no place in this world for those who enslave others, those who sexually assault others, and those who brutalize others.

“For more than ten years you have preyed upon three young women. You subjected them to harsh and violent conduct. You felt you were dominating them, but you were incorrect. You did not take away their dignity.

“Although they suffered terribly, Miss Knight, Miss DeJesus, and Miss Berry did not give up hope. They have persevered. In fact, they prevailed. These remarkable women again have their freedom, which is the most precious aspect of being an American.

“Mr. Castro, you forfeited that right. You now become a number with the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. You will be confined for the remainder of your days. You are hereby remanded for transport to Lorain Correctional Institution.

“Now for Miss Knight, Miss DeJesus, and Miss Berry, as well as your young daughter, we celebrate your futures. We acknowledge the faithfulness of your families, your friends, and all others in this community who so fervently believed that you were alive. On behalf of the judges and the staff of this court, we wish you continued success and a sense of peace.”

Castro stood, and bailiffs led him out a side door of the courtroom.

It was the last time he would ever be seen in public.

 

August 1: Gravestone

Amanda

I’m watching the sentencing on TV at home with Jen Meyers from the FBI. I’m glad I didn’t go down to the courtroom. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me again.

Beth said what I wanted to say. And if I had been up there in front of the cameras and so many people, it would have been hard not to cry.

It makes me angry to listen to his ridiculous, delusional statements. I want to slap him.

“None of that is true,” I say to Jen. “How can he say that?”

“That’s just in his mind,” she replies. “It doesn’t matter what he says. You know what really happened.”

While we’re watching the sentencing hearing, Jen gets a text from Jim Wooley. He says the people from Kotecki Family Memorials, who donated my mom’s grave marker, called to say it was laid at her grave today. It’s a bronze stone with roses etched around the border, and a color photo of my mom, smiling.

My mom has amazing timing.

First I felt her pushing me toward the door the day I needed to find the strength to escape Seymour Avenue.

Now on the day he is finally being punished, her memorial stone, which means so much to me, arrives. She is the reason I’m still alive, and her spirit will get me through whatever lies ahead.

Gina

I wake up on my parents’ bed and hear his voice on the TV.

I have a sex problem. I was a victim. Blah, blah, blah.

They were the same things he said in the house so many times. I’m glad I decided not to go to court. It’s pointless to talk to him or to listen to him.

You know what? Even if he was a victim, he had the power to choose. He didn’t have to do what he did to us. If he was mistreated as a kid, it should have made him more aware of how important it is to treat other people well. Just because he abused me, I’m not going to go abuse somebody else.

He keeps talking—that voice! I heard it every day for nine years. I’ve had a few months without it, but now all his crazy talk is back. He says one thing and then the opposite. He did nothing wrong and treated us well, but he is sorry for what he did and wants to apologize.

He’s telling so many lies, it’s hard not to get angry. He keeps talking about the “harmony” on Seymour Avenue. Does he think people are stupid? He tied us up and forced all of us to say how much we wanted sex with him. He really is crazy if he actually believes we did.

I want to scream at him: “Nobody cares what you have to say! You’re not going to convince anybody that you’re not a monster. Maybe you weren’t a monster every day, but you were most definitely a monster. You put me in prison. Now it’s your turn.”

 

August 5, 2013: Return to Seymour

Angie Castro Gregg walked back into her father’s house at 2207 Seymour Avenue two days before it was scheduled to be demolished.

Cleveland officials wanted the house razed as quickly as possible, and to shred and throw in the dump all its contents, to prevent it from becoming a ghoulish attraction. The last thing they wanted was “House of Horrors” tourism.

Castro had agreed on July 29 to forfeit the home, but not before breaking down in tears and complaining to police that it was a “perfectly good house” and should not be destroyed.

Evidence had been removed, every inch of the house had been photographed, and the FBI prepared a wooden scale model that cost more to build than the value of the actual house. The electric company cut the power and a contractor had donated his services to tear the place down.

Before the demolition equipment arrived, Castro’s family was given a chance to salvage any personal items. So now, with FBI agents watching, Angie climbed the stairs to the second floor, a part of her former home that she had not seen in fifteen years.

She had left this house when she was fourteen, after her parents split up. Although she had been back several times, her father had never let her upstairs. What she found there now made her shudder: Windows boarded over. Holes drilled in the walls. Missing doorknobs. Wires in strange places. Locks on the outside of the doors.

She felt sick. It was hard to imagine what sort of mind had devised it all, and it was worse to accept that it had been her own father’s.

She walked into what had been her parents’ bedroom and saw a child’s drawings on the walls and clothes for a little girl, and realized Amanda and Jocelyn must have lived there. She was horrified at the thought of Amanda giving birth to a baby and raising her inside these four walls.

She walked into the little bedroom that had been hers. Pictures she had taped to the wall were still there, as were her elementary school plaques and awards. It was eerie to see her childhood memories in a place that had witnessed so much misery.

Angie collected as many old family photos and other personal mementoes as she could find, including her red dog puppet she found in the attic.

Just a few months earlier, she had spent several hours in the living room of this house helping her father set up his Facebook account, while Amanda, Gina, Michelle, and Jocelyn were locked away upstairs. She wished there had been a clue. A noise. A creak. A cry. Anything that would have made her suspect that something was wrong. If she had discovered the girls, or if her father had confided in her, she could have forced him to go to the police and let the girls go.

Over the years she had remained close to her father and talked to him often. But now she couldn’t bring herself to face him. She hadn’t gone to visit him in jail. She knew how persuasive he was, and that he would try to convince her that what had happened wasn’t as bad as it sounded, so she cut him off completely.

Her mother had died the year before, and now she realized her father wasn’t who she thought he was.

She felt like an orphan.

 

August 7, 2013: Demolition

Amanda

They are tearing down 2207 Seymour, and it’s big news on TV.

There has been so much interest in that house that police built a security fence around it and have been guarding it around the clock. People have driven from all over to see it, causing constant traffic jams.

As a huge piece of heavy equipment with a giant mechanical claw rips off the front of the house, on TV I can suddenly see right into the room where he kept me for so long.

It’s such a strange feeling. For so many years I dreamed of smashing those walls, ripping the wood off those windows—anything to get out of there. Now I’m watching this big machine do it for me, taking just a few minutes to destroy what had been my whole world.

Jen Meyers called and asked if I wanted to be there, or even just drive by in her car while it was happening. It was nice of her to ask, but Seymour Avenue is the last place in the world I want to be.

Gina stayed home, too, but I see Michelle is there letting some balloons go.

Tim McGinty, the county prosecutor, is being interviewed on TV and is explaining they want a “new and positive use” for the land, maybe a park. He says that they were going to use the $22,000 in cash they found in Castro’s washing machine to pay for the demolition, but the company did it for free as a public service. He offered the cash to me, Gina, and Michelle, but we didn’t want Castro’s money, or anything of his.

I’m grateful that I will never see that house again.

Gina

I’m watching the news at our friend Janet Garcia’s house. I didn’t want to go to the demolition and face all the cameras and reporters. My mom said she could take me down there and hide me in a car, but then I’d feel like I was in captivity again. No, thank you.

My mom is there watching, and my aunt Peggy is actually climbing into the big crane. She takes the controls and smashes the claw straight into the second floor of the house, right into the bedroom where he held me. When the house starts crumbling, I can hear people cheering. I don’t make a sound, but nobody is cheering louder than me.

 

August 2013: Downward Spiral

At 6:25 p.m. on August 2, the day after his sentencing, Ariel Castro arrived at the Lorain Correctional Institution, about twenty miles southwest of Cleveland—a standard first stop for prisoners from northern Ohio entering the state prison system.

At the county jail in Cleveland where he had been held since his arrest, he had told officials that he was suicidal. But during the medical and psychological screenings given to all new inmates at LCI, he said he had lied about wanting to kill himself because he had been scared of being placed in the general population and wanted to be in a cell alone. He said he had been depressed since his arrest, but that he had plenty of reasons to live, including his religious beliefs, his family, and his children.

“He appears quite narcissistic, but does not show evidence of mood, anxiety, or thought disorder,” the medical officials who interviewed him concluded. Still, they recommended that Castro be placed on suicide watch and segregated to keep him safe, from himself and other inmates. Their report stated that his feelings about suicide could change “as the gravity of his situation begins to sink in.”*

Three days later, on August 5, Castro was transferred to the Correctional Reception Center (CRC) in Orient, southwest of Columbus. That prison normally serves as the intake center for inmates from the southern half of the state, but officials made an exception to get Cleveland’s most notorious criminal as far away from the city as possible.

Given Castro’s infamy, Warden Rhonda Richard ordered a more extensive mental-health examination by prison doctors. Castro told them he was “upset” because other inmates had been shouting at him and harassing him. During the examination, Castro smiled occasionally and described himself as “always a happy person.”

The doctors found him “oblivious to the realities of his future situation, and . . . incredulous that the media and other inmates should treat him so poorly.” Castro told them that he wanted to “do my time in peace.” They concluded that he was a “low risk” for suicide, but they said that could change because prison life might “challenge his sense of entitlement and fragile grandiosity.” Diagnosing him as having “Narcissistic Personality Disorder with Antisocial Features,” they urged prison officials to monitor him closely for any changes in his mental health, “given his lengthy sentence, somewhat fragile self-esteem, and the notoriety of his crimes.”

Accordingly, the warden ordered that Castro be kept in the prison’s segregation area, in a cell by himself out of sight of other inmates. He would be allowed to leave his cell one hour each day for recreation, medical appointments, or meetings with prison staff. A supervisor would be present when his meals were delivered. Whenever he left his cell, Castro was to be handcuffed. Guards were required to go to his cell and check on him every thirty minutes. Those measures were intended to prevent Castro from harming himself or from being harmed by anyone else.

Castro’s new home was the last cell on the second-floor hallway, or “range.” It had two windows with a screen and two thick horizontal bars, a bunk bed, sink, toilet, and a little corner desk, a Bible, pen, and paper. From his sparse cell he could see no one, and no one could see him.

 • • • 

Castro started complaining almost immediately.

Guards said he was “demanding and pompous.” He often sat naked in his cell, and he was constantly told to put on clothes when female guards were on duty. He refused to leave his cell for recreation.

He began writing journal-style notes, and in the first entry, dated August 10, he grumbled about a guard who “mistreats me, for no apparent reason.” He hated his food, claiming that he found hair and plastic in his meals, and that they were always served “in a pool of water.” He wrote that he flushed most of his meals down the toilet. He was dropping weight quickly, and inmates saw guards holding up his pants as they led him to appointments.

“I really think someone tampered with my food,” he wrote on August 14, the day medical staff came to his cell twice in response to his complaints of chest pains, vomiting, and nausea. Guards who brought Castro his food showed him that his tray was randomly selected from a cart full of identical trays, but Castro continued to insist that it was being doctored.

His many concerns began to obsess him, and he documented them in his journal.

August 22: He asks for a mop to clean his “filthy” cell and toilet. He asks for clean bed linens and underwear, but “nothing gets done.”

August 28: “I’m really getting frustrated.”

August 31: “I will not take this kind of treatment much longer . . . I feel as though I’m being pushed over the edge, one day at a time.”

Castro also wrote an essay called “A Day in the Life of a Prisoner.”

I eat, brush, and go back to bed, get up, lay down, get up, lay down. This goes on all day. . . . I pace in my cell, meditate, stare at the walls as I daydream a lot.

I will never see light at the end of the tunnel, but that’s all right, it’s what I chose. . . . I’ve lots of time on my hands now to think and read, write, exercise. I want to make a bigger effort to try to commit to God.

I also get depressed and don’t want to do anything but just lay here . . . Most of the guards here are okay, but the younger ones don’t take the job seriously or they are rude to me for no apparent reason. . . . Sometimes I drift into a negative thought, I check myself and try harder not to go there.

He had two visits at this prison from relatives, including one from his mother. He was free to make phone calls but never did.

September 3: Last Day

On the morning of September 3, Brandi Ackley, a supervisor in Castro’s unit, collected his underwear to be washed. She had often seen Castro naked in his cell, and that day she noticed that Castro’s prison pants were loose and falling down. She left instructions for officers coming on duty later in the day to return Castro’s underwear when it came back from the laundry.

At 1:30 that afternoon Castro was handcuffed and escorted by guards to a meeting with prison officials to discuss his request to be placed in “protective control,” an even higher level of segregation and security. Castro was asking for that change due to “the high-profile nature of my charges” and seemed happy that this could involve a transfer to a prison closer to his family in Cleveland. He also asked about mail and family visits.

The prison officials recommended that the warden grant Castro’s request.

He was returned to his cell at 1:52 p.m., and guards checked his cell periodically throughout the afternoon.

At 5:29 a guard and a supervisor left a dinner tray at Castro’s cell. As they were walking away, Castro called them back and said there was a problem with his food. The supervisor again told him that his tray had been chosen randomly, but Castro refused to eat.

Guards checked his cell at 6:08, and at 6:30, a guard, supervisor, and nurse came to speak to him. He refused his evening hypertension medication, which prison doctors had prescribed after his arrest.

For the next two hours and twelve minutes, no one came to look in on Castro, even though regulations required checks be conducted every thirty minutes.

Alone in his cell, he placed a pocket-size Bible on his bunk and opened it to the Gospel of John, chapters two and three, which contain one of the Bible’s most well-known verses: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

He laid out several pieces of paper on the small corner desk. On one he wrote out the names of his children, including Jocelyn, and his six grandchildren. He decorated it with hearts, flowers, musical notes, a cross, the words “Daddy” and “Mommy,” and the exclamation, “God is Great!”

He carefully wrote the date, “Sept. 3, 2013,” on another piece of paper and printed several Bible verses in large capital letters, ending with, “For all are sinners, we all fall short of the glory of God.”

He stacked up ten pages of complaint forms, mostly concerning food and harassment by prison guards, which he had never submitted, adding a few pages of handwritten notes titled, “I Found God” and “A Day in the Life of a Prisoner Who Has Accepted God.” In the neat pile he also placed a letter to his mother.

“Hi Mrs. Warden,” he began another note asking for permission to call his mother. “She and I haven’t spoken in nearly 3 weeks. I would like to speak to her, for I’m concerned of her well-being and she of mine.”

He set a pair of glasses on the bed, straightened his shower shoes on the floor near the wall, and draped his towel neatly across the sink.

At 8:51 guard Ryan Murphy checked on Castro. He was standing near his cell door, staring directly at Murphy. They met eyes. Neither man spoke.

Castro wrote out one final complaint form: his underwear still hadn’t come back from the laundry.

 • • • 

At 9:18 p.m., twenty-seven minutes after the previous check, guard Caleb Ackley looks into Castro’s cell and sees him hanging.

Ackley yells to Murphy, who sounds an alarm and runs to join him.

Castro has tied a bedsheet around his neck and knotted the other end around the frame of the window screen. His orange prison-issue pants have fallen to his ankles.

The officers lift Castro to relieve the pressure from his neck and tear the sheet away from the window. They lie him on the floor while Murphy runs to get something to cut the sheet away from his neck. Several other guards arrive and start CPR, thinking he might still be alive.

At 9:22, prison medical officers arrive and take over the CPR. Castro is unresponsive, then . . .

9:25: Prison officials call for an ambulance.

9:49: The ambulance hasn’t arrived, so they call again.

10:05: Forty minutes after the first call, ambulance medics arrive at the cell.

10:18: Castro is loaded into the ambulance and leaves the prison. Following prison protocol, he is handcuffed.

10:46: Castro arrives at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

10:52: Thirty-three days after he was sentenced to life in prison plus a thousand years, Ariel Castro is pronounced dead.*

 • • • 

At 3:45 the following morning, Franklin County Coroner Jan M. Gorniak began her autopsy at the county morgue. In the cool, clinical language of postmortem exams, Gorniak described an utterly unremarkable corpse:

The body is that of a well developed, well nourished white male, compatible with the reported age of 53 years.

He was five-foot-seven and weighed 168 pounds, down from his weight of 178 when he arrived at the prison a month earlier. There were handcuff marks on his wrists; his right earlobe had a single pierced hole; and his nose, abdomen, lips, and internal organs were all normal. He had damage to his throat and bite marks on his tongue, which were consistent with Gorniak’s official ruling about the cause of death: suicide by hanging.*

Her only unusual finding was an inch-high cross, in blue ballpoint pen ink, that Castro had drawn on the left side of his chest, directly over his heart, which looked like a small plea to God from a man who knew his Judgment Day had arrived.*

 

Halloween 2013: Finding Peace

Amanda

It looks like a million kids are trick-or-treating on our new street, even though it’s a drizzly evening. Joce is dressed up as Blueberry Muffin, one of the Strawberry Shortcake characters, with a blue wig and striped tights. She and her cousins step outside and fall into the happy parade.

I’m still getting used to this. I walk along the street behind her and I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m doing something wrong, that I’m breaking some rule, that I’ll be punished for walking out the door.

For too many Halloweens, I wished I could take Jocelyn outside, but all we could do was trick-or-treat at Gina and Michelle’s bedroom door. He kept the house lights off so no children would come knocking at 2207 Seymour Avenue.

I’m trying to forget all that and move on, but it’s hard. Memories come from nowhere, unsettle me, and have a way of keeping me on edge, close to tears. But day by day it gets better. I love my new home and love that I’m living under the same roof as Beth, Teddy, and their three kids. They live upstairs, and Joce and I are on the first floor.

Beth found this house online. It was in terrible shape but in a nice neighborhood, and Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage agency, had taken it over during the recession when so many houses were going into foreclosure. Jim Wooley mentioned the house to Mary and Rustom Khouri, developers and philanthropists in Cleveland, and they persuaded Freddie Mac to quietly donate it to us. The Khouris helped pay for a complete renovation, and an army of volunteers—overseen by George Shiekh Jr., owner of Cleveland Tile & Cabinet, and one of his workers, Paul Irwin—worked for three months at no cost to us. Many other kind people with busy lives, including lawyers at Jones Day, helped to replace the roof, install new HVAC, and make the place sparkle, from the new hardwood floors to the bright-pink paint in Jocelyn’s bedroom.

I placed three big words on the wall over the fireplace: LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE. They remind me of the promise I made to myself inside Seymour that when I got out, I would remember that every moment is a gift.

So many people in Cleveland, and well beyond, donated to the Cleveland Courage Fund, set up by City Council members Matt Zone, Brian Cummins, and Dona Brady. The fund raised nearly $1.4 million, from more than ten thousand individual contributions, some of them as small as one dollar. The donations came from all fifty states and seven countries, and it was split evenly among me, Gina, Michelle, and Jocelyn. I put Joce’s money in a trust fund for her.

The Courage Fund money has bought me the time to concentrate on getting Jocelyn settled into our new life, and to learn all the ways the world has changed since I was sixteen. Whatever happened to pay phones? Now cell phones give you driving directions! There are so many things to get used to, like grocery stores. I load up my cart with food I used to dream about: strawberries, plums, kiwis, big boxes of Raisin Bran, and green beans. And, of course, ribs! I have to remind myself that I can just get a few things at a time and come back to the store whenever I want to, and he can’t stop me anymore.

I make us the most amazing breakfasts of over-easy eggs, nice and yolky with bacon and sausage—just because I can. Sometimes when I’m cooking, I go out of my way to push the pan to one side of the burner. He always demanded that it be exactly in the middle of the flame and called me names if I did it wrong. It feels liberating to do things my way, not his.

I want to finish high school, but Jocelyn comes first. Classes at the neighborhood elementary school started only a couple of weeks after he was sentenced. I didn’t think she was ready for what other kids might say, so I’m homeschooling her for one more year. We turned a small bedroom into a classroom that has lots of things we wished for on Seymour Avenue, like light pouring through the windows. We have a laptop and a printer, and a brand-new desk.

The walls are covered with harder vocabulary words:

Congruent: same shape and size.

Homographs: words that are spelled the same but have different meanings.

We study math, contractions, alliteration, proper nouns, the solar system.

I taped the alphabet to the wall, along with words that start with each letter. And at the start of every class we stand, as we did inside Seymour Avenue, put our hands over our hearts, and say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Gina and I have become closer friends than we ever were inside. It’s like we’ve started over. Joce loves it when Gina comes to visit, and she uses my phone to text her silly messages. It’s tougher between me and Michelle. We are very different people, and I think life is going to take us in different directions. We endured the unthinkable together and we’ll always have that bond. I wish her happiness.

Joce has made new friends. Some of the little girls in the neighborhood come over to play, and I’m starting to let her go to their houses. But it’s hard to let her out of my sight. When they play in the front yard, I sit on my new sofa and watch them out the window. I’m happy that she is stepping out into the world, but I’m also worried. Will she run into traffic? Will she be too trusting of others? Will kids be mean to her?

I don’t sleep much. I lie with Joce until she falls asleep, then I get up and pace, walking from room to room, trying to settle my racing mind. Seymour Avenue is like a scary movie playing over and over in my head. Because he killed himself, Joce and I will never have a chance to confront him, so I’ll never really be able to feel closure.

A few weeks ago Teddy, Beth, and I went to a yard sale and as we were loading the car, Teddy teased me and called me a “dumbass.” He was just joking, but I felt like I’d been hit by a train. I choked up and started crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

I snapped at him: “Don’t ever call me that again! He used to call me that, and I hate it!”

Poor Teddy was just joking, but hearing that word triggered something completely overwhelming inside me.

I don’t go out all that often. When I do, people recognize me. Everybody means so well, but it’s awkward when strangers walk up and hug me. I’m not sure what to say or how to act. I’m seeing a counselor, and she says it will take time to heal. One minute I feel whole and strong, and the next minute I feel like I am breaking.

I think about what it all means, who I am after ten years in that house. I know I’m more aware of other people’s pain. I am a believer in the power of hope—in myself and in God. But I still don’t know why this happened to me, or what lies ahead for me and Joce.

After all those years locked up in a house dreaming of getting out and being with other people, sometimes all I want to do is be by myself at home.

So at night I pace, trying to figure it all out, looking for peace.

December 11, 2013: Moving On

Gina

My tutor and I meet at a Cleveland Public Library with big windows, where I can see the snow falling outside. Diane Cook, a retired teacher, tutors me several hours a day and helps me with other skills, too, like budgeting money and studying for my written driving test.

Today we’re working on reading. I never finished seventh grade, so I have a long way to go to get my high school diploma. I’m twenty-three and sometimes I think it would be easier to just quit and get a job. But every time I say that, my mom nearly jumps out of her skin. She wants me to finish school, period.

I know she’s right, so here I am, making my way through The First Part Last by Angela Johnson, a novel about teen pregnancy. I turn to page seventy-five and start reading out loud and keep going until I reach the last line of the chapter: “Nothing has changed, but everything has.”

“What does that mean?” my teacher asks. “What’s changed?”

“He’s growing up, maybe,” I say.

This is how I am rebuilding my life, one page at a time, one day at a time.

I don’t cry much. Amanda is still a fountain of tears, but everyone is different. I try to push my locked-up years out of my head, erasing him from my mind and filling it with new and happier memories. At least that is what I want to do, and it seems to be working.

I’m starting a new life. The Gina I was, the Gina before Seymour, is gone. That innocent, introverted, and happy-go-lucky person doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s hard to let her go. But it’s what happened. So instead of dwelling on that, I’m focusing on figuring out the rest of my life. Everyone changes, anyway. Sad and violent things happened to me, and because of that I think I can help other victims, like a young girl I met recently. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me about the bad situation she grew up in. She needed someone to listen to her, and when she was finished I told her, “I’m glad that is over. Take it slow, day by day. Enjoy that it is not happening now. Enjoy the right now.” She was grateful and said that if it worked for me, it just might work for her.

I appreciate everything now: new eyeglasses, a quiet bath, squeezing all the toothpaste I want onto a new toothbrush, my mom’s pork chops. I have my own bedroom! Because of kind people who gave to the Courage Fund, my family was able to pay for an addition to our small house that my dad had been planning for years, and someone donated a privacy fence outside, too. I’ll have my license soon and just bought a little Toyota so I can drive to the mall or over to Amanda and Jocelyn’s. I couldn’t believe all the funny license-plate frames they sell, and for fun I picked out one that says YIELD TO THE PRINCESS! It’s hysterical when my dad drives my car.

While I was practicing driving, I drove my car into a really deep pothole the other day and messed up the front end. I am mad at myself for doing that, but I’m not letting it bother me. I’ve had worse problems.

I spend lots of time with my mom. We go to bingo and dance salsa in the house, but mostly we just hang out together. It’s been hard for her to get used to the idea that I’m not fourteen anymore, not a kid to correct, to tell to sit up straight or not to stay out late. I understand why she still thinks of me that way, and that she wants to protect me, but I am so much older now.

I’m jumpy sometimes and wonder when that will stop. It happens over little things, sometimes just the sound of the front door opening. For years, whenever I heard a door open it was almost always bad news. My niece came close to me holding scissors the other day, and I asked her not to come near me with them again. She didn’t know about how he would use them to chop off my hair.

Sleep can be hard, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, kicking and crying and screaming “Get off of me!” My little dog, Lala, sleeps in my room. For the few months I had her on Seymour, before he gave her away to his relatives, she slept beside me, between my legs, or even right on my pillow. Lala was in the car with him and his brother when he was arrested, and she ended up in an animal shelter. One day on the TV news, I saw her there. I told my lawyer, Heather Kimmel, that I would love to have her, and she went and rescued her for me.

I have very few things from the Seymour years. I threw away all my clothes. I have Lala and some notes and poems I wrote to my family: “I hope to see you soon so we can sit outside and watch the moon.”

I love walking outside and looking up at the sky. It may be my favorite thing. It always cheers me up to gaze up and see the sun or the moon. I wish everyone would realize how much they would miss it if they couldn’t go outside for years.

My nieces talk about Twitter, what they are googling, and how to use the GPS on their cell phone. When I first got out of Seymour Avenue, I had no idea what they were talking about, but I’m catching up with all that changed in the world between 2004 and 2013. A lot of my school friends have jobs and babies.

I feel closer to God. There were times inside when I lost my faith, or nearly did, because I couldn’t understand why God would let this happen to me. After I got out, I went to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church and I knelt there and prayed and asked God to forgive me for doubting Him.

I also said a prayer to Nilda Figueroa. When he first kidnapped me he told me this was all her fault, that if she hadn’t left him he wouldn’t have kidnapped me, Amanda, and Michelle. For a while I was actually angry at her. I guess I was mad at anything and anyone who I thought could have saved me all that pain. I had no idea then about all she endured, and so I asked her to forgive me for ever blaming her and told her I was sorry for what she went through. I also lit a candle for all missing children.

My parents took me to the Night Out Against Crime three months after I was freed. They had gone every year to hand out “missing” flyers with my picture. I wasn’t ready yet to speak publicly, but my dad got up and said what I wanted to, that we were there “for every missing child that’s out there.”

I hope I’ll be able to do more to help those kids soon. I am finding my voice.

May 5, 2014: Washington

Gina

Wow! The White House.

Our names are on the guest list, and two uniformed Secret Service officers greet us. One of them says it’s amazing to meet us, but she’s got that backwards: we’re the ones who are amazed.

We were invited to Washington by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an organization that helped our families when we were gone. They are giving us their Hope Award, which goes every year to someone who inspires hope for missing children. The big awards dinner is at the Ritz-Carlton hotel tomorrow night, on the one-year anniversary of our escape.

The center flew us all here. I came with my parents and our neighbor Charlene Milam, who has done so much for my family over the years. Amanda brought Beth and two cousins, Tina and Tasheena. Our lawyers, Jim Wooley and Heather Kimmel, flew with us, too, but they insisted on paying their own way since they have vowed never to take a cent for working with us. They are like family now.

I had never been on a plane before, and neither had Amanda. Everybody told us not to worry about it—it couldn’t be easier, like sitting in your living room. Yeah, right! Our flight from Cleveland was so bumpy that people’s drinks were flying out of their hands and hitting the ceiling. Even passengers who flew a lot said it was scary, their worst flight ever. Before I was kidnapped, I would have thought: What bad luck that my first flight was so horrible. Now, after learning to focus on the positive, I think: What good luck that we landed safely.

We walk into the White House and see the East Room and the State Dining Room and the Blue and Green and Red rooms. On Seymour Avenue we used to call our rooms by their colors. I never imagined when I was living in that miserable pink room that one day I would be standing in this famous Red Room.

I have never seen such wide hallways and grand staircases. When we come to a shiny banister I whisper to Amanda that I bet the Obama girls slide down it when nobody’s around.

“I want a picture of me pretending to slide on it,” I tell her.

So I climb up on it, and she gets her camera ready.

“Gina, be careful,” Jim says. “You might fall.”

And, of course, I do!

“I bet I’m the first Puerto Rican to fall in the White House!” I say, laughing.

Just then we run into Bo, President Obama’s dog, in the hallway. He’s adorable, and the guy walking him lets us pet him for a few minutes.

I’m thinking that this has to be the single coolest day of my life. Then, as we are getting ready to leave, someone tells us that Vice President Biden would like to meet us and wants to know if we can come back tomorrow.

May 6

Amanda

It’s ten a.m. and we’re back at the White House, though we come in at a different entrance than we did yesterday. Today we’re going to the West Wing. The hallways are narrow, and there are people all over the place. Everybody looks like they are in a hurry. We stop for a minute outside the Oval Office and peek in, but it’s empty. I feel like I am on a movie set.

We’re escorted to a little seating area to wait for the vice president and I ask to use the ladies’ room. When I come out, I walk around a corner and whoa! I come face-to-face with President Obama, who’s talking to Gina and Beth. It’s really him! He is holding out his hand and he knows my name.

“Hello, Amanda,” he says. “I heard you were coming to meet the vice president, and I wanted to make sure I had a chance to say hello. I want to tell you how proud I am of you, and that it’s such an honor to meet you.”

Then he asks, “Do you have time to take a picture?”

It’s a funny question, since he’s the busy one, but I know he is just being nice.

We pose for a few photos with the president and vice president. And then he is off, saying, “I’ve gotta go deal with this Ukraine thing.” He’s making a joke, but it reminds us of exactly where we are.

The vice president asks us to sit down and then sits forward in his chair, looking at Gina and then me, focusing in hard, like we’re the only people in the world. “I can’t begin to imagine what you went through,” he says. “Nobody can begin to imagine what that was like.” He tells us about a terrible accident in 1972 that killed his wife and daughter. His eyes are filling with tears, and we’re all starting to cry, too.

“I didn’t have the courage to deal with it,” he says. “I just kind of quit. I didn’t have the strength to confront it.” He leans in close and looks me right in the eyes: “Like you do.” Then he turns to Gina: “And you do.”

I think to myself that it’s amazing how he got over his pain and accomplished so much. If he can do it, so can I. He was twenty-nine when that accident happened, and I’m twenty-eight. I have a new life ahead. And he’s right: After what I’ve been through, I can face anything. He’s not afraid to cry, and I don’t have to be either.

We talk for about forty-five minutes, and the vice president says he has to go, but he wants to treat us to lunch. So one of his aides escorts us to the White House Mess, which is not a mess at all. It’s a fancy dining room in the basement. It’s busy at lunchtime, and there are a couple of senators eating at the next table. I’m taking pictures of everything, including the presidential seal pressed into the butter—who thinks of something like that?

The room is so pretty, and we laugh and joke and sip bubbly water from crystal glasses, eating club sandwiches with white linen napkins.

Gina

The ballroom at the Ritz is absolutely huge.

More than five hundred people are sitting at round tables for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s dinner, all dressed in suits and fancy dresses. We’re at a table near the front, listening to speakers, including two teenagers who helped rescue a little girl abducted by some creep in a van in Pennsylvania. I wish they had been around when we were taken.

We go onstage last, and John Walsh, the host of America’s Most Wanted, whose son was kidnapped and murdered, introduces us. I’m so nervous. Amanda has a little speech written and she’s been practicing it. I have a few ideas about what I want to say, but I haven’t written anything down. I don’t know if I’ll be able to speak when I get up onstage. I have never spoken in public. I feel a little sick with nerves.

John Walsh finally says our names, and we step toward the microphone, with our families right behind us. I feel my heart banging in my chest.

Amanda goes first.

“It is really special to be here with Gina and our families. It means more than you’ll ever know.”

She starts tearing up and stops for a moment, then keeps going:

“I want to thank the center for everything they’ve done and continue to do—not just for us, but for all the missing kids and their families. If I could say only one thing, it would be this: Never give up hope, because miracles do happen!”

Now it’s my turn. I am thinking I probably should just say “thank you,” but at the microphone more words come out:

“Always believe in hope, even though sometimes it is hard to believe in hope. Just pray to God, and God will give you that hope.”

I did it!

Everyone is standing, cheering and applauding for us. It’s amazing. Amanda and I look at each other, and she smiles at me. I feel so alive.