April 21, 2003: Maroon Van

Amanda

I wake up at noon on the day after Easter. I was up late again listening to Eminem. His song “Superman” usually cheers me up: “They call me Superman, I’m here to rescue you.” I have his posters all over my bedroom—on the walls, my mirror, the closet door. But today even Em can’t help me feel better.

My mom pushes my door open and sticks her head in. I’m still in bed, upset.

“Mandy, I’m off to work. See you tonight. Love you!”

“Love you, too. See you later.”

We live in the upstairs part of a duplex at West 111th Street and Belmont Avenue, near Cleveland’s Westown Square Shopping Center. It’s not a bad place, except for the noise from all the cars and trucks whizzing by on I-90, the highway just beside the house. My older sister, Beth Serrano, lives downstairs with her husband, Teddy, and their two little girls, Mariyah, age four, and Marissa, age three.

Teddy is the reason I’m so miserable. He and my sister are having a fight. She’s furious. Teddy is the manager of the Burger King where I work and I don’t want to see him today because he’s made my sister so upset.

Outside my window I hear Beth drive off with my mom in her old Chevy Lumina. They work together at a tool and die factory over on Brookpark Road assembling metal parts: a thirty-nine-year-old mom and her twenty-three-year-old daughter standing side by side, putting little metal pieces together like a puzzle. No one ever told them what the part they make is for, but when they fill a box with a hundred of them, they start over on a new box.

A lot of parents in my neighborhood do hourly work like my mom, and then their kids drop out of school and join them in the same jobs, getting by but not going far. My dad moved back to Tennessee with another woman, so my mom works minimum-wage jobs and I try to pitch in and pay for things like my schoolbooks.

I blast more Em in my room. My stereo speakers are on my dresser, next to my porcelain angels and Nativity set. I keep the angels and baby Jesus out all year, not just at Christmas, because they make me happy.

I jump in the shower and stay under the hot water for an extra-long time, wondering if I should quit my job because of this mess with Teddy. I don’t want to. It’s the first job I’ve ever had and I’ve met some nice friends there. I started nearly a year ago when I turned sixteen, and I’ve already gotten a raise to six dollars an hour, almost a dollar more than when I started. Lots of people work there a long time and never get raises, so I guess they like me. It’s nice, too, to hear customers tell me I have a pretty smile.

I need money because one day I’m going to go to college. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to study—maybe clothing design. I love clothes and obsess over every detail, right down to my shoelaces, which I make sure always match my shirt.

If I did quit today, I wouldn’t miss this Burger King uniform: burgundy shirt, black jeans, and black sneakers. I drew the line at those nasty polyester pants. The shirt was bad enough, but they weren’t going to get me to wear those pants, too.

I pull my work shirt out of a drawer and leave two identical ones folded there. I like everything ironed and orderly. I have a system for hanging up my clothes: light pink shirts together, close to, but not mixed with, darker pinks. All my whites are together. Pressed jeans are organized from light blue to darker. I arrange my shoes on the floor by heel height, starting with flats and sneakers and moving up to wedges and high heels.

Tomorrow is my seventeenth birthday, and a few friends are coming over to celebrate with me, so I should be excited. I check my money hidden in a glittery pink box in the back of my bra drawer. I have a hundred dollars tucked away, and to celebrate I’m going to splurge on a new outfit and get my nails done.

Why not call in sick? It might be nice just to stay home and read my magazines. I have subscriptions to Entertainment Weekly, People, and Rolling Stone, and keep old copies stacked neatly in my room.

But I don’t want to work on my birthday, so I guess I should just go. It’s only the four-to-eight shift. I can do this.

I’d better hurry; it’s ten minutes to four.

I pick up my black Burger King baseball cap and carry it, because there’s no way I’m wearing that on the street. I pull on my black sweater and head out the front door into a gray April afternoon.

 • • • 

Work is a ten-minute walk. After I pass a couple of houses and turn right onto West 110th Street, I can see the traffic light ahead at the corner of Lorain, where the Burger King is.

I cross the long bridge over I-90 and watch the cars whizzing by, carrying people going places. Someday I’m heading somewhere better. I am not going to live like my mom, always worried about how to pay the bills. She has been a clerk at Kmart, a BP gas station, the deli counter at the Finast grocery store, and even the Burger King where I work now. Because she dropped out of middle school, she hasn’t been able to get anything better. After I graduate from college I am going to earn enough money to buy my own house. My mom can live with me, and then maybe I can make her life a little easier.

I pass Westown Square, where we buy just about everything: food at the Tops grocery store, movies at the Blockbuster, clothes at Fashion Bug. Beth has found cute outfits for the girls at the thrift shop, Value World.

Right at four I arrive at work. God, that smell. French fries and burgers. Grease. It never comes out of my uniform, even after I wash it. I feel as if it’s soaked into my skin.

I drop my sweater and my purse in the back, where the head manager, Roy Castro, hangs out. I’m working “back cash” today, which means I take the orders and money at the drive-through window.

After Roy sets up my cash drawer I walk over to my work station. My friend Jennifer is working “front cash,” at the main counter, and I see Teddy standing there. Our eyes meet, and I shoot him daggers.

I plug in my headset.

“Welcome to Burger King. May I take your order?”

Here we go again.

Time ticks by slowly. It would be easier if we were busier, but it’s the Monday after Easter, and it’s dead. I try not to talk to anybody. Roy knows I’m having a hard time, so around seven fifteen he asks if I feel like going home early. He doesn’t need to ask me twice. I’m so ready to get out of here.

I grab my things and sit down at a table to call my boyfriend, DJ, to see if he will pick me up. No answer. I call him again, but still no answer. I would love to see him tonight. We’ve only been dating for a month, but I like him. He holds my hand and opens doors for me. I first saw him when he ordered food at the drive-through. Jennifer knew him and said he was nice. He kept coming back and asking about me if I wasn’t there, then finally we went out.

Right now I just wish he would answer his phone. Where is he?

I almost never walk home. For one thing, more people are around in the evening, and I don’t like being seen in my Burger King uniform. But the big reason is that my mom doesn’t like me coming home alone at night. She never learned to drive, so she has Beth pick me up.

But Beth and Mom are still at work, and I am definitely not hanging out in this soap opera one minute longer than I have to. It’s seven thirty, still light outside, and I start walking.

 • • • 

My phone rings as I head home. Beth says she is cutting out of work now, and I tell her I’m doing the same thing.

“We can get you. What time should I pick you up?”

“No, don’t worry. I’m already walking home.”

As we start discussing Teddy, I see an old maroon van blocking the sidewalk ahead. A guy has turned into a driveway on West 110th, but hasn’t pulled all the way up.

I walk around the front of the van to get by. Because I’m still on the phone I’m not paying much attention, but I notice that the girl in the passenger seat looks familiar. I’m pretty sure she used to work at Burger King with me. The driver—it must be her father—is looking right at me and smiling. I smile back as I keep walking.

A minute later his van pulls up alongside me, and he rolls down his window. No cars are coming in either direction, so he’s just stopped in the middle of the street.

“Hey, you need a ride home?”

Now I can see him more clearly and definitely remember having seen him before, but I’m not exactly sure where. I’m halfway home, maybe a five-minute walk, and don’t really need a ride, but it’s nice of him to offer.

Still talking to Beth I nod “yes” to him and start walking toward the van.

When he reaches over and opens the front passenger door, I notice that his daughter is not in the car anymore. I rush Beth off the phone as I climb in.

“Beth, I gotta go because I’m getting a ride.”

He starts to pull away as I hang up the phone.

“Where is your daughter?” I ask, as I suddenly realize I am alone in a car with an older guy I don’t really know.

“So you work at Burger King?” he says, not answering the question but smiling and friendly. I’m still in my uniform, with my “Amanda” name tag, so it’s an easy guess where I work.

I’m starting to get a weird feeling, but he seems nice enough. He’s dressed cooler than guys his age: he’s all in black, from his T-shirt to his jeans to his boots, and he’s listening to 107.9, hip-hop and R&B.

“My son used to work at Burger King. Do you know him? Anthony Castro?”

That’s who he is! He’s Anthony’s dad. Anthony is no relation to Roy Castro, the manager, but I know Anthony, and so does my mom.

“Oh, yeah, I know Anthony. He came to my house one time. He’s friends with a friend of mine.”

I tell him I also went to Wilbur Wright Middle School with his daughter Angie. “How’s she doing?” I ask, more relaxed now that I know who he is.

“She’s good,” he says. “She’s at the house right now. Would you like to go see her?”

“Okay. I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

Why not go see her? I wasn’t looking forward to going home anyway.

He makes a few turns away from my house and then pulls out onto I-90, cheerfully talking about his kids.

“That’s a nice phone,” he says, looking over at the little blue phone in my hand. A few of my friends have cell phones, and I just bought this one a week ago, used, from a girl at work.

We turn off the highway at West 25th Street, take a few more turns, and then pull onto Seymour Avenue.

I know this neighborhood. It’s only about a ten-minute drive from my house, and I have cousins who live close by, on Castle and Carlyle. There are so many Spanish-speaking people here that they call it Little Puerto Rico.

We pull into the driveway at 2207 Seymour. It’s a white, two-story house. Nothing special, that’s for sure. He drives to the back, where a big, mean-looking dog is barking like crazy right outside the passenger side of the van. It’s one of those Chow Chows, with a huge bushy head. The dog is chained to a tree, but the chain’s long enough to reach the van. I’m glad I’m inside.

He mentions my phone again.

“That’s really nice; let me see it for a minute.”

I hand it to him.

“Wait, let me hold the dog back so you can get out,” he says, taking my phone with him as he jumps out of the van and pulls the dog away by its collar.

“Angie’s inside,” he says. “Let’s go see her.”

We walk to the back door. He unlocks it and we step inside a small enclosed porch cluttered with boxes. Then he unlocks yet another door into the house.

I follow him inside.

 • • • 

He turns on the light in the kitchen. It’s so messy. Definitely could use some cleaning up.

He points to the closed bathroom door.

“Angie must be taking a bath right now,” he says. “While she’s in there, let me show you around the house.”

“Oh, okay,” I tell him. “That’s very nice of you.”

We walk into the small dining room, then into the living room, which has dark wood paneling and a black leather couch. He has a big stack of old phone books, family photos all around, and the two biggest stereo speakers I have ever seen. I’m five-foot-one, so they must be four feet tall.

“C’mon, I’ll show you upstairs,” he says, when he’s already halfway up.

As I reach the top landing, I see that it’s pretty dark up there. There are a couple of closed bedroom doors, and he points at one of them.

“My roommate is in here,” he says. “She’s sleeping.”

That’s weird, I think. Maybe he got divorced from Anthony and Angie’s mom? I guess he has a roommate now to help with the rent.

“Take a look,” he says.

The doorknob is missing, and I bend down to look through the big hole where it should have been. A girl is sleeping there, with a TV on. I look only for a second, because it feels strange to peek into somebody’s room.

We walk into a big bedroom and then a smaller one beyond it. And when I turn to leave, he suddenly blocks the door.

“What are you doing?” I ask him, startled.

“Pull down your pants!”

“No!” I shout. I am panicking and can’t believe what he just said. “Take me home! I want to go home!”

There is a girl across the hall, and his daughter is downstairs, so what could he be doing?

I look directly at him for the first time. He’s maybe in his forties, older than my mom. He has curly brown hair, dark eyes, a receding hairline, and a goatee. He’s about five-foot-seven and stocky, with a bit of a beer belly. If I passed him in the mall, I’d never even notice him.

“Pull down your pants!” he orders again.

He has suddenly turned so scary—his voice, his eyes, his manner—and I do what he says. I stand there, crying, my jeans around my ankles. Why didn’t I see this coming? How could I be so stupid? Just because I know his kids doesn’t mean I should have gone with him to his house.

He pulls his pants down and starts playing with himself. It’s disgusting.

There’s a window behind him with lace curtains. He glances outside and says something about police. I look out and see a police car parked across the street. The cops are so close! He says he’ll hurt me if I make a sound.

He hurries what he’s doing and when he finishes, his voice changes back, and he sounds like the nice guy who was talking to me in the car.

“I’m going to take you home now,” he says and tells me I can pull my pants back up.

“Please,” I beg him. “Please take me home.”

I start praying, asking God to get me out of here.

We start toward the door but then he suddenly stops.

“Turn around, get on the bed, and take your pants down.”

“No! No!” I scream. “If you don’t take me home right now I’m going to call the police!”

I blurt that out even though I know I can’t call anyone. He still has my phone.

“Help! Help me!”

Doesn’t his roommate hear me? What’s going on in this house?

I run back into the bigger bedroom and try to open the door to the hallway but there’s no knob. I see a doorway next to it and run into it, but it’s a closet.

I’m cornered, crying, when he grabs me by the arms and drags me over to the bed, where he yanks off my pants and rapes me. He must be fifty pounds heavier than me, and it hurts so bad.

When he is done, he gets up and says, “I’m going to take you home now, but you have to be quiet.”

I’m terrified and I know he is lying.

“I’m going to tape your mouth so you don’t scream any more until I get you home,” he says as he reaches for a roll of gray duct tape, tears off a long piece, and slaps it over my mouth from ear to ear.

He slams my wrists together and tapes them, too, and then does the same to my ankles. Then he takes out a leather belt, and I freeze. Is he going to beat me with it? Hang me? I don’t move as he slowly wraps the belt around my ankles, over the tape.

He takes a motorcycle helmet from the closet and pulls it over my head. I can see out of the visor until my tears make everything foggy.

“Don’t worry,” he says, as if he is actually trying to help me. “I’m just doing this so I can carry you to the van and take you home.”

He picks me up and throws me over his shoulder. My head is dangling down by his butt, and every part of my body hurts. He carries me down to the first floor, then takes me into the basement.

He sits me down on the cold concrete floor and props my back against a pole. He takes a thick rusty chain, like a tow truck might use to pull a car, and wraps it around my stomach and the pole. He clamps it shut with a padlock and puts the key in his pocket. We are not going out to the van.

He pulls off the motorcycle helmet and turns on a little black-and-white TV, setting it on a tiny stool.

“Be quiet. Don’t scream. Don’t try to get away,” he says in an oddly calm voice as he switches off the one bare lightbulb and walks back upstairs.

I look around and see piles of clothes, boxes of junk, and dusty shelves filled with knickknacks. It smells like wet dirt, like the basement hasn’t been aired out in years. It is so creepy.

I have to break out of here. I put my taped hands up to my face and use my fingertips to pick at the tape across my mouth.

“Somebody help me! Somebody help me!” I scream when I get it loose. “Please! Someone hear me!”

I bite into the tape on my wrists and begin to chew it off, bit by bit. It takes forever, but I finally get my hands free and quickly pull the belt and tape off my ankles.

Now my nails are broken and my fingertips are bleeding. I struggle to get this chain off my waist, but it’s so tight I rip my shirt trying. My jeans are kind of thick, so I wriggle out of them, hoping that if I have that extra bit of room I can slip out of the chain. But I can’t.

“Somebody please help me!” I scream over and over, not knowing what else to do.

He’s going to come back and kill me, and I’m going to die because I took a ride from a dad who turned out to be a psycho.

I have no idea what time it is, but while I have been fighting with the chain many TV shows have come and gone, so hours must have passed. Cops is on as I finally fall asleep against the pole.

 • • • 

I wake to the sound of heavy footsteps. My body tenses up. He’s back. How long have I been asleep?

“I told you not to try to get away,” he says in a cheerful voice, looking at all the ripped tape.

It’s so strange how nicely he’s talking to me, like we’re friends playing a game.

“I brought us breakfast,” he says, holding out a Burger King bag. “But first we’re going to take a shower.”

He unlocks the padlock, loosens the chain, and helps me stand up. Since I couldn’t get my jeans back on, I’m wearing only my shirt and underwear. He walks me up the stairs, staying close behind, and guides me into the bathroom off the kitchen, where he tells me to undress and get in the shower. Then he takes his clothes off and comes in, too, and with a washcloth rubs away the sticky stuff from the tape around my mouth and ears.

“Here, let’s get this off,” he says sweetly, like he’s washing a baby, and then he begins to shampoo my hair.

I am disgusted by his touch. I want to run away from him, but I’m trapped.

I’m afraid he is going to attack me again, but instead he climbs out of the shower and finds some Band-Aids for my bloody fingers. He gets dressed and gives me a pair of jogging pants and one of his shirts, then takes me into the living room. We sit on the couch, and he hands me a cold ham-and-egg croissant.

He’s talking, but I’m in shock and can’t focus.

“It’s time to go upstairs,” he says after I finish eating.

What choice do I have? I follow him up the stairs and into the bedroom where he raped me.

“Just lay down and relax,” he says, pointing to the mattress, which has no sheets.

He lies down beside me, and I brace myself for what’s next, but he seems exhausted, like he was up all night. At least an hour passes, maybe more. He is inches from me, asleep, or pretending to be. I’m afraid to move or make a sound. My mom and Beth must be losing their minds, so scared about what has happened to me. I am so scared about what is happening to me.

Then, suddenly, he opens his eyes, stands up, and says, “Let’s go downstairs.”

He walks me back down to the basement, sits me against the pole, and locks the chains tight around my stomach. I cry and cry, but he only turns up the volume on the TV, shuts off the light, and walks back upstairs without a word.

It’s so dark.

Then I remember: It’s my birthday.

April 25, 2003: Alone in the Dark

Amanda

He has moved me upstairs into the bedroom where he first raped me. It’s not pitch-black like the basement, where I spent the first two nights, but it’s still dark. There are two small windows covered with heavy gray curtains that were probably white once.

I have to lie sideways on the queen-size bed, my toes hanging off the edge, because of the way he has me chained to the radiator. The padlock on the rusty chain around my stomach feels like a big rock. Its weight makes it hard to sleep, and it’s giving me huge purple bruises.

He came in yesterday and put some old socks around the chain so it wouldn’t hurt me so much. I don’t think he felt bad for me but was just tired of me complaining. He fastened them with plastic zip ties, and now those are digging into me.

The chain is just long enough that I can stand up next to the bed to use my “bathroom”—a tall, beige plastic trash can. He put a trash bag over the top, but it still smells so bad that it’s making me sick.

The chain isn’t long enough to let me open the curtains, or reach the switch for the overhead light. So when he leaves for work in the morning and turns it off, I have to sit in the dark until he comes back. He told me that he kept the light out of my reach so that I couldn’t flip it on and off to attract the neighbors’ attention.

He’s careful. He constantly peeks out the window to check if anybody is watching the house. Whenever he leaves he keeps a radio blasting in the upstairs hallway. That way, he says, nobody can hear me if I scream. It’s hard for me to even hear my TV. Is that girl he called his roommate still here? Who is she and why isn’t she helping me? After the first nights in the basement, I lost my voice screaming, so I don’t bother anymore. I know nobody can hear me over the radio. Sometimes he stays out all night, and that means it’s impossible to sleep with the noise, or even to think. I have a constant headache.

He has a weird mannequin, a woman’s torso with black hair that he dresses in a red fishnet tank top and props up in the kitchen. Sometimes he lays it down on the living room couch when he goes out. He says if a burglar tries to get into the house, he’ll see it and think somebody is home.

I still don’t know his first name. I can’t believe I know his kids. I met Anthony only once, and I haven’t seen Angie in a while. Why did I agree to come here to see her? I was having a bad day and made a bad decision. Now I will probably die because of it.

 • • • 

I hate wearing his ugly, baggy clothes. I even have to wear his underwear—big, nasty briefs. It’s like I’m wearing a prison uniform. The only thing I have left of my own is the bra I was wearing when I got here. I used to hate my work uniform, but now I’d give anything to have it back.

I eat once a day, if I’m lucky, McDonald’s or Burger King that he brings for me when he comes home. Often that’s at five or six in the evening, but sometimes it’s midnight, and I am so hungry.

After I finish eating, he tells me to strip, and he does it again.

When I’ve been here four days he asks, “Do you want to come downstairs and watch TV?”

The last thing I want to do is spend more time with him. But I’d love to get out of this room and away from the smell and these chains, even for a few minutes.

“Okay,” I say, trying not to look at him.

He unlocks the chain and walks me downstairs. The door to his roommate’s bedroom is closed.

We sit on the couch and he turns on the news. My mom and Beth are on Channel 5, being interviewed in our house.

“It’s been a hard week, and it’s getting harder,” my mom tells the reporter, wiping her eyes with a tissue. She’s sitting on the couch, where I used to cuddle up beside her. “She never made it home. Somewhere between there and here, something happened, and nobody can figure it out.”

Beth is crying. “I’m hoping she’s out there somewhere,” she says. “I hope nothing happened to her. Maybe somebody’s got her, drugged her or something. Just bring her home.”

I’m crying, too, but glad I’m on the news, because that means people are looking for me. Maybe somebody will see this interview and remember something.

“Your mom looks really upset,” he says. There’s no sympathy in his voice, it’s just an observation, as if he had nothing to do with her misery. He flips around the channels looking for other news reports about me and finds them on Channel 8 and Channel 3. He can’t take his eyes off the TV.

I look at him. He has an odd expression on his face, and then I realize what it is: He’s proud. He’s admiring his work, he feels like he’s done something big.

This makes him feel important.

April 27

It’s Sunday. I’ve been gone six days. And so far, he’s raped me at least twenty-five times. It’s been four or five times every day.

He’s out the door at five a.m. to go to work. Then he’s back around eight or nine and strips off his bus driver’s uniform—black jeans and a burgundy shirt with a little yellow logo for Cleveland Public Schools. After he’s done with me, he goes back to work and drives little kids until lunchtime, when he comes home and forces himself on me again.

Then in the evening, he does it again—sometimes several times. He always leaves my chains on.

He slobbers on my face and is obsessed with my breasts. He’s always touching my chest and telling me, “These boobs are mine.”

I am learning that the more it hurts me, the more he likes it, and that it’s over quicker when I don’t fight. What would be the point, anyway? I’m chained to a radiator, so where could I go?

I told him I would like something to write on, and he asked if I wanted a journal. I said yes, and he came home today with a blue diary with flowers on its cover.

“You can write what you want,” he says, “but don’t write any names.”

I know he might read this, so I have to be careful about what I say. But I’m going to write to my family. Maybe that will feel like talking to them on the phone or sending them a letter. I miss them so much. I want to let them know I’m alive.

When he leaves I begin my first entry, by the light of the TV:

4/27/03. Sunday. One week.

I never thought I would miss my mom sooooo much! But it’s sooo true. You never know what you got ’til it’s gone! I just can’t wait to go home. I’m 17 now, but don’t have a life. But he told me I’m young and will go home before summer. Another two months! Tomorrow it will be a week I’ve been here—so I’ve survived this long. I’ll just try not to think about it. But it’s hard.

I saw my mom and Beth crying on TV. My mom said, “Mandy I love you” and I started bawling. I love you Mom. See ya sooooon!
Love, Amanda.

It feels good to write that. I am glad they don’t know how horrible it is here.

Eminem’s new song, “Sing for the Moment,” is on the radio. I can’t believe it has some of Aerosmith’s music in it, the chorus from “Dream On,” my mom’s favorite. As I listen to it I get lost in the music, and it takes me back home for a few minutes. I can picture myself there with my mom, safe and free.

I know I haven’t always been the best daughter. Sometimes I would argue with her over some pretty stupid stuff. I wish I hadn’t. When I get out of here, I won’t do that anymore.

He controls when I eat, what I see, what I hear. But he cannot control what I think, so I am going to take my mind somewhere else when he climbs on me.

I have almost nothing in this room, but I have an idea. I have a few pictures of my mom, dad, and nieces in my purse, and I’m going to make a family album. To make a frame I carefully rip apart an empty box of Crunch ’n Munch that he got me. I chew a piece of gum and then separate it into tiny pieces that I stick on the back of the pictures and press them into the cardboard from the box. Then I prop it up on the table next to my bed.

When he is doing horrible things to my body, I look at my mom’s face. I imagine her laughing. I picture her smoking her cigarettes and gabbing on the phone, or cooking in the kitchen. I look into her eyes and lose myself in her.

And my mom and I get through it.

April 28

I see my mom on the noon news. She is showing a reporter my bedroom and the pink box where I keep my money, insisting that there’s no way I could have run away from home. Who would run away in a Burger King uniform, leaving all her clothes at home and a hundred dollars in her dresser? She says I’m not the runaway kind of kid, anyway. And I’m not.

It’s so weird to see pictures of myself on the news, and my mom giving strangers a tour of my room. I never thought I’d ever be on TV. We’re a normal, nothing-special family, kind of messed up like everybody, no different from all the other families around here just struggling to get by.

Now everybody knows my name, and they’re all looking for me. I’m in a big city, close to downtown and the crowds at the Indians baseball games and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Didn’t anybody see me getting into his van? Maybe a neighbor on Seymour saw me come in here? Someone has to rescue me.

The news says it’s nice outside today, but there could be a tornado and I wouldn’t know. The only light comes from the screen of the little black-and-white TV, the one I had in the basement. It’s maybe twelve inches and has rabbit-ears antenna. I have it on a little chair at the foot of the bed and watch Maury and other shows my mom likes. It’s comforting to think that we might be seeing the same shows at the same time.

All day long all I can hear is that annoying radio in the hall. When he’s home in the evening, he turns it off, and then I can hear lawn mowers and cars going by. I keep trying to make my mind wander away when he forces himself on me, but it’s hard.

“You said you’d take me home—when are you going to do that?” I ask as he gets dressed.

“You’re young. You have plenty of time. What’s a few months?”

I am furious but I reply quietly, “Maybe it’s nothing to you, but it’s a lot to me. This is my life you have taken.”

“Maybe the last week of June,” he says. “You just gotta be patient.”

Another two months, if he’s not lying. I don’t trust anything he says, but it helps me to think it will be over in two months. I can make it that long. I choose to believe him.

I never went to church much, but I know there is a God and I know he must have a different plan for me than this.

 • • • 

One day he comes in at midnight and sits at the end of the bed, holding my cell phone.

“I called your mother,” he says. “I told her that we are in love, and that you are my wife now.”

Shocked, I start crying and ask, “You talked to my mom?”

“Yeah, I called her with your phone,” he says. “She asked when you would be home, and I told her I didn’t know. I told her you were safe.”

“Can I talk to her?” I ask. “I want her to know that I’m okay.”

He ignores me. “I talked to your sister, Beth, too. I told them you were okay. I said you were with me now.”

Maybe this is good; they know I’m alive. Or maybe it’s bad, because they’ll think I’ve been taken by some crazy guy and are scared about what he’s doing to me. Why did he call them? Does he think that if they believe that I ran away, they won’t search for me? He doesn’t know my family. They’ll never stop looking for me. But he’s such a liar. I bet he didn’t even call them.

He lets me listen to a couple of the voice messages on my phone. One is from my little niece Mariyah, telling me, “Please come home.” Another one is from my friend Mary from Burger King. I guess she didn’t know I was missing, because she left a message saying, “Which one is your house? I’m trying to find it for your birthday party.”

Hearing their voices makes me cry so hard I can barely breathe.

“Can I please call them and tell them I’m alive?” I ask, begging him.

“You can write to them,” he says. “But there are rules. You have to tell them that you ran away. You left on your own and you’re okay, so they shouldn’t worry about you.”

“I won’t do that,” I tell him. “I’ll never tell my family that I ran away. That would hurt them so much. I would rather have them wondering what happened to me than think that I would leave them.”

“Okay,” he says.

He rapes me again.

April 29

They haven’t shown me on the news at all today. Over and over they run a story about bad lettuce making people sick. I don’t think he actually called my mom. If he did, that would be bigger news than lettuce.

I heard on the news about Elizabeth Smart, the girl in Utah who was kidnapped and released last month. The lunatic who took her also said she was his wife. He kept her nine months! If she can survive for that long, I know I can, too.

He’s back and he says he wants to stay with me all night long. He keeps calling me his “temporary wife.”

I move over to the very edge of the bed, as far away from him as I can get. But he cuddles up behind me and reaches around and takes my hand. It’s like he thinks we’re a couple.

I lie still until he falls asleep, then I slip my hand out of his.

He has ruined my life and my body. I’m filthy. My toilet is a trash can. I’m hungry and cold and chained up.

And he wants to hold my hand.

April 30

Getting to go downstairs to the bathroom is what I look forward to most. That crummy little bathroom has become the highlight of my week. I miss feeling clean. Today I finally get to shower and brush my teeth—it’s been days. It feels good.

I just start to feel the water wash him off me when he steps into the shower.

I think about killing myself. But if I do, he wins.

I have to keep it together until I can figure out how to escape. To keep from sliding into complete sadness I try to focus on anything good. I felt hot water today. I heard Eminem on the radio. I found a penny in the pocket of his old sweatpants and decide it’s my lucky penny. I have pictures of my mom and dad, and they remind me that I need to stay strong so I can see them again.

But it’s hard. These chains are so tight that even with the socks wrapped around them they cut into my stomach. It’s impossible to sleep, because I keep rolling over onto the padlock. But even worse than the physical pain is the mental torture of never knowing what’s next.

I’m learning that they have TV shows that teach everything—cooking, dance, languages. I saw one that teaches meditation, how to relax, how to rid your mind of what’s bothering you. I am going to look for that one. I have to get better at making my mind fly away from this place.

I close my eyes.

“Please, Lord, make this end. Please let me go home to my family. Please keep them safe and bring me home soon,” I say over and over.

I turn to my photo of Mom, kiss it, and tell her good night.

Tomorrow is May 1. A new month.

This is how I’m going to think about time: Every day that passes means I’m a day closer to this being over, a day closer to being home.

Hope is my only option.

May 2003: The Woman in the Other Room

May 1

Amanda

“Do you want to help me with the laundry?”

No, I don’t want to do his laundry. But I do want to get out of this room, even for a few minutes, even to wash his filthy clothes. “Okay, sure,” I tell him, and he takes a key off the keychain on his belt and opens the padlock on my stomach. The chains fall to the ground, and I feel fifty pounds lighter.

We walk into the hallway, and he points at the closed door of the bedroom where I saw that girl sleeping ten days ago.

“We have to clean up this room,” he says, unlocking the door.

I’ve been thinking about her. Why does he call her his roommate? Could she be part of this somehow? I thought about yelling out to her, in case she’s still here, but I never know when he’s home or not. Sometimes he pretends to leave, then creeps back up and opens my door. He tells me he’s testing me and says, “I don’t know if I can trust you yet.”

I notice now that her door is also locked from the outside. Oh, no. She must be another prisoner.

I step inside and see her sitting on the bed. We look at each other, and I can’t read her expression or tell what she’s thinking. She seems in a daze. I can’t see if she’s chained because she’s sitting under a blanket. She’s tiny and looks older than me.

“This is my roommate,” he says, but doesn’t tell me her name. “This is Amanda,” he tells her.

We both say hi. Neither of us says another word.

He hands me a plastic garbage bag and orders, “Pick up the trash.”

The room is a mess. I start stuffing pizza boxes and old bags from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King into the bag. Pizza crusts and dirty napkins are everywhere and look like they’ve been piling up for weeks. How long has she been here?

“It smells like a hamster cage in here,” I say.

I’m not trying to be funny, but that makes him laugh. She just watches and doesn’t say anything.

She has a TV. I’ve been on the news lately—my face, my name. She must know who I am. She seems as afraid of him as I am. Who is she?

“Okay, that’s enough, let’s go,” he says when I finish filling the trash bag.

I look at the girl again, but she doesn’t look back. He leads me into the hallway, locks her in her room, and stays close behind me as we go down the stairs. At the door to the basement, I stop. I haven’t been down there since those first two horrible nights. I hope this isn’t some kind of trick or new punishment. But I have no choice because he tells me to keep going.

“Start with these,” he says, pointing to a huge pile of dirty clothes.

I guess he really does want to do laundry.

I start sorting whites and colors. As I put the first load into the machine, something catches my eye amid all the junk in the basement: on top of a stack of photos is a picture of Jesus, with light radiating from around his head and his heart wrapped in thorns. He has beautiful eyes that seem to stare directly at me. There are some prayers in Spanish on the back: Novena al Sagrado Corazón de Jesús.

“Can I have this?” I ask him.

“Sure,” he says. “Why not?”

After he orders me back up to my room, chains me, locks my door, and leaves, I set the Jesus picture against the rabbit ears on top of the TV. Now I have my mom watching over me from the bedside table, and Jesus doing the same from the TV.

I decide to write in my diary every time he attacks me. I won’t use the word “rape” in case he ever reads it. But I need a record of what he is doing to me. I want him someday, somehow, to be held responsible for every single time he steals a piece of me. I can’t let him get away with this.

It was three times today—morning, lunchtime, and when he came home from work—so in the corner of my diary page, I mark 3x. He’ll never know what it means. I’ll never forget.

May 2

I’m crying, blaming myself for being so stupid for getting in that van. I was minutes away from home. It wasn’t that cold; why didn’t I just walk? Did I bring this on myself?

The FBI is on the news, announcing that there’s a reward of up to $10,000 for information about me—that makes me feel a little better. Maybe if somebody thinks there’s money in it, they’ll report something. I have to believe somebody saw me get in the van with him.

Help me, somebody, please.

4x.

May 3

The hours go so slowly, and I’ve told him how depressed I am. Today he brings me a coloring book and crossword puzzles, saying that they’ll help pass the time. It’s so dark, and I’m so hungry. A little after five, after I haven’t eaten all day, he brings me Pringles and gross little frozen pizza rolls.

DJ was on the news. He tells a reporter I called him twice for a ride when I was leaving Burger King, but he doesn’t say why he didn’t answer. I guess he just didn’t hear the phone. If he had picked up, I wouldn’t be here.

The news report also says that the police think I was taken by somebody I knew. They think I got into a white car with some guys. Who told them that? It wasn’t a white car!

He keeps coming in here. It never stops.

4x.

May 4

It’s late, and I finally get to eat—a burger and fries from Wendy’s. By now they’re just cold grease, but I’m so hungry.

3x.

I realize that he thinks if he feeds me, or gives me anything at all that I want, even a sheet of paper, he’s entitled to do whatever he wants with me. In his warped mind, he’s providing for me, so my body belongs to him.

May 5

I’m watching The Tonight Show with Jay Leno when he comes hurrying upstairs and says his daughter Angie’s going to the hospital because she has some problem with her teeth. He has to watch her son, and he says I have to help. He warns me to be quiet when she comes to drop the boy off, or else.

He’s back in a few minutes with a cute little kid, maybe two or three years old. I pull the covers up over my chain, because I don’t want to scare him.

“This is Angie’s son,” he says.

He doesn’t say my name, and I know I’m not supposed to either.

I wish he were older, so that he might be able to tell someone I’m here.

He is crying hysterically. I wonder if he can tell how sad I am.

I try to coax him over to me, but he won’t budge, and I can’t go to him because of the chain. He picks up the boy to calm him, but the crying doesn’t stop.

After a while he takes his grandson downstairs and a few hours later I hear Angie come back.

I am too scared to scream to her. I’ve seen how clever he is, and I’m sure he could explain it away, and then what would happen to me?

May 6

Another long day in the dark. I watch TV show after TV show, from Days of Our Lives to Wheel of Fortune. I miss talking to people. I’m going crazy alone in this room. My dinner is a Snickers and a Twix.

3x.

When he comes back into my room again, I’m praying to God that he doesn’t want more.

“Here, you want to listen to your messages?” he says, holding out my phone.

“Yes!” I tell him. I hold the phone up to my ear and hear Beth, crying and telling me to please come home. Then I hear Mariyah’s little voice saying, “Nandy, where are you? I love you and come home.” My family calls me Mandy, but Mariyah says “Nandy.”

There are messages from my cousin Crystal and my friend MJ, asking about my birthday party. Their voices shatter me.

“That’s enough,” he says, pulling the phone away, though I know there must be messages from my mom. He gives, he takes.

May 7

I just brushed my teeth for the first time in three days.

4x.

In my diary, I draw my heart with a dagger through it.

May 11

It’s Mother’s Day.

He brings me today’s Plain Dealer and shows me an article about my mom that says she is so upset and worried that she hasn’t eaten or slept since I disappeared.

“I don’t know if she’s out there being held, I don’t know if she’s out there laying on the side of the road somewhere,” my mom told the columnist, Regina Brett.

The article says that when my nieces see my picture on TV, they always ask when I’m coming home, and my mom tells them, “She’ll be home soon.”

My mom says she is keeping everything in my room exactly how I left it, and as I read that the tears are rolling down my face.

It turns him on to see how much it hurts me to read the article.

4x.

May 13

5x.

May 15

I’m on the news every day now. That’s a good thing. I know people are searching for me and I get to see my family on TV. Today the cops are saying they had dogs search DJ’s car, and they found a spot of blood and a knife in his trunk.

He’s watching the news with me, looking so proud, so happy. He loves that the police are focusing on the wrong guy.

May 16

He has been at his mother’s house for dinner and he brings me leftover rice and beans that she made. He seems to go to her place a lot, which seems weird to me because he’s always telling me how much he hates her. He calls her “whore” and “bitch” and says she beat him when he was little.

I don’t know whether to believe what he says about how his mother treated him, because he lies so much. But I’m grateful to get her homemade meals instead of another cold fast-food burger. I just wish she knew her son was feeding me her leftovers.

May 21

I haven’t gotten my period yet. I pray I’m not pregnant. What would I do? I can’t imagine going through that here.

I’ve been here for a month. I can’t sleep. I’m so lonely. I guess that girl is still in the other room, but I haven’t seen or heard her since that day I cleaned her room. I have no one to talk to but him.

I feel dead inside. I miss the smell of fresh air. I miss being able to get a drink when I’m thirsty. I miss the feeling of rain on my face. Everything I used to think was a pain really wasn’t. I even miss my mom hollering at me.

He hasn’t attacked me for two days in a row. That’s never happened before. Maybe things will get better.

May 30

I hear fireworks again. That means the Indians won another game tonight.

I see on the news that somebody donated money for a huge billboard with my picture on I-480, near West 130th Street. Thank God for whoever did that!

 

The Investigation: Searching for Amanda

Louwana knew her Mandy was never late. Never. So she and Beth were surprised she wasn’t home when they got there. They checked the shower; it was dry. She always took a shower after work. There was no sign of her uniform, either, so she hadn’t changed and left. They called her cell phone, but she didn’t pick up.

That was worrisome—she was never out of touch.

Louwana and Beth started making calls to Amanda’s friends to ask if anyone had seen her. Maybe she’d gone to see a friend after work? But no one knew anything, so they got into the car and began driving around the neighborhood. By now it was completely dark, and Louwana was becoming frantic, certain that something was wrong.

A little after nine she called 911. Police took the report but didn’t seem concerned. They told Louwana to keep looking for her, that the girl hadn’t been missing long and she’d surely come home soon.

By midnight, when there was still no sign of Amanda, Louwana called the police again, and this time two officers were dispatched and arrived in a patrol car just before one a.m. They took down Amanda’s description—five-foot-one, 120 pounds, long, dark blond hair—and told Louwana not to worry, that teenage girls ran away all the time and almost always came back in a day or two. Amanda was probably just with her boyfriend somewhere.

Louwana Miller had a short fuse, and when something ticked her off her temper could be volcanic. “Kids don’t run away in Burger King uniforms on their birthday and leave all their cash at home! Somebody must have taken her! Do something,” she told the police in a loud voice salted with profanity. She told them Amanda was a good kid who would never stay out this late without calling, had never run away before and had no reason to now.

The officers stood in the living room making notes, but Louwana and Beth felt they weren’t taking Amanda’s case seriously. They clearly thought she was yet another runaway whose mother was overreacting and wasting their time.

The two women stayed up all night, calling every one of Amanda’s friends they could think of and waiting for the phone to ring. In the morning they made flyers with her photo, a handwritten description of Amanda, and their home phone number. Louwana thought it was smarter to put her own number down rather than some police line, to make sure no tip was lost or ignored.

They drove around the neighborhood, taping the flyers on the door at Burger King, in the windows of shops in Westown Square, and on telephone poles.

Louwana’s phone kept ringing, and people told her they were sure they had seen Amanda at someone’s house, or in a store, or somewhere else. Louwana didn’t drive, so she got Beth or her sister Theresa to take her to investigate every tip.

When she called television stations and pleaded with them to cover Amanda’s disappearance, she was politely told that Amanda hadn’t officially been designated as a missing person yet, and they couldn’t run a story about every teenager who didn’t come home for a day or two.

“Isn’t anybody going to help us?” asked Louwana, who was getting angrier and angrier.

 • • • 

Louwana Miller grew up in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, just over the highway from Seymour Avenue. She was part Cherokee, and her mother wanted her to have a Native American name, which she hated because no one ever pronounced it properly. Instead of “Lou-WANNA,” people called her “Lou-Anna” or “Lou-Wanda” or Lou-something. And no one ever knew how to spell it.

Louwana left school by the seventh grade, and in 1976, when they were barely teenagers, she met Johnny Ray Berry, a skinny kid from rural Tennessee, with a wild side and a violent temper. He had moved to Cleveland with his family from a farm in Elizabethton, not far from NASCAR’s Bristol Motor Speedway.

Louwana got pregnant at sixteen and raised Beth with no help from Johnny Ray, who dropped out of school after the ninth grade and spent his nights drinking and partying. It was the same when Amanda arrived seven years later. By then Johnny Ray was working for Allied Van Lines, moving furniture. Louwana would make him coffee every morning, and as Amanda got older, he would sit and watch cartoons with her before he left for work.

There were good times during these years, but far more bad ones. Johnny Ray was in and out of jail, mainly for assaults and bar fights, and one of Amanda’s earliest memories is visiting him at the old Ohio state prison at Mansfield. He often beat Louwana, usually when they were both drunk, Louwana on a twelve-pack of Busch and Johnny Ray on whiskey. The police were often at the front door, called to stop the domestic violence.

When Louwana was young, she had Amanda’s thin face and high cheekbones. But by the time she was in her thirties, her face had become puffy and scarred from all the beatings, heavy drinking, and cigarettes. Because Johnny Ray drank most of his wages, she had to work one minimum-wage job after another, buying clothes at thrift shops and using layaway plans for Christmas gifts. While Johnny Ray celebrated Amanda’s thirteenth birthday by bringing her a joint and getting her high, Louwana tried hard to steer her girls clear of the path she had taken. She made sure they had regular checkups with the doctor and dentist, focused them on homework, kept the house spotless, and always put a home-cooked meal on the table.

When Amanda was thirteen, she picked up the extension on the home phone and discovered that her father was having an affair. She told her mother, who informed Johnny Ray that she had had enough, and two weeks later he moved to Tennessee with his new girlfriend.

Things became more peaceful when Johnny Ray left. Amanda and her mother loved to watch Lifetime and cop shows, and never missed America’s Most Wanted. But it wasn’t always easy between them. Amanda fought with her mother over the smallest things. Louwana would order her to turn down her music or go to bed, and Amanda would snap back and tell her to leave her alone. She called her mother stupid for having stayed with Johnny Ray for twenty-four years.

Determined not to repeat her mother’s mistakes, Amanda focused hard on school and did well. By the third grade she was enrolled in Major Works, a gifted and talented program in the Cleveland Public Schools, in which she earned mainly A’s and B’s.

By the eleventh grade, many of Amanda’s classmates had dropped out of John Marshall, a big, tough public high school near her house. Amanda eventually stopped going to classes too, sick of the drama and fights in the hallways. But she enrolled in a Cleveland Public Schools program that enabled students to study at home and send in work to be graded by teachers, paying $40 from each Burger King paycheck to cover it.

She earned a perfect 100 on her first test, in “Psychology for Life Today.”

Nine days later, she was kidnapped.

 • • • 

When he arrived for work that morning, Detective Rich Russell was just sitting down at his desk when his secretary told him, “Hey, Rich, a Louwana Miller called checking on the status of her daughter Amanda, who went missing yesterday.” Russell had been a police officer for sixteen years and he had handled hundreds of missing-child reports, and 99 percent of them turned out to be nothing—just kids spending the night with friends or off doing something they didn’t want their parents to know about.

But this mother had called again, so as Russell settled into his chair, he picked up the patrol officers’ notes about Amanda, which were on his desk in the routine report from the overnight shift. He looked to see if they had written “habitual” on the report, indicating that Amanda had run away before—but it wasn’t there. She was a first-timer. He also saw that it was her birthday, and that she had left a hundred dollars in cash at home. None of that felt like a typical runaway case.

Russell and his partner, Detective Laura Parker, drove over to check in with Louwana. She greeted them with a blast of cigarette smoke and four-letter words, cursing the police for not caring about her daughter. But she softened a bit when the detectives seemed more concerned than the cops the night before had been, and asked questions about Amanda’s friends, anybody she might be with, anybody who might have been angry enough to hurt her.

“DJ,” Louwana said immediately. She didn’t like Amanda’s sixteen-year-old boyfriend, who never bothered to come in and say hello when he picked her up. She told the detectives that he had a bad attitude, that he sold weed, and that she didn’t trust him.

Louwana had gone herself to DJ’s house on West 99th Street that morning and nearly banged his front door off its hinges. DJ kept the door chained and, speaking to her only through the crack, told her he had no idea where Amanda was.

After leaving Louwana, Russell and Parker paid their own visit to DJ, who told them his phone battery had died, so he had missed Amanda’s calls the night before. Though he seemed openly hostile to the cops, he let them check his bedroom. They found nothing, but the detectives agreed with Louwana that the kid seemed like trouble.

The police next interviewed Amanda’s coworkers at Burger King, who mentioned a guy named Axel, a Hispanic customer in his mid-thirties who had a crush on Amanda and frequented the drive-through all the time to see her.

Almost immediately, the police had two promising suspects: Amanda’s new boyfriend and a thirty-five-year-old guy who liked to hang around a sixteen-year-old girl.

 • • • 

On Thursday, three days after Amanda went missing, the police went to Axel’s apartment, but the building owner said he had gone on a bus trip to a casino out of town. In the meantime, police interviewing people in Amanda’s neighborhood got a lead from a man who had been waiting at an RTA city bus stop near Burger King on the day Amanda disappeared. He said he had seen her get into an old white car with two or three men. A heroin addict, he was a dubious witness, but for the time being he was the only person claiming to have seen Amanda after she left work.

“White car” got the cops’ attention. DJ drove a white car.

 • • • 

By Friday, as the “missing” posters multiplied along Lorain Avenue, the story hit the evening news, and tips started flowing in. Someone discovered a pair of sneakers in a Dumpster behind Westown Square. Somebody else found an apron they thought she might have worn at work. People reported sightings of Amanda at basketball courts, gas stations, convenience stores, and rest stops on the Ohio Turnpike.

Police looked into each tip, and none checked out.

They were nowhere.

 • • • 

Brian Heffernan, head of the First Division detective squad—Parker and Russell’s boss—decided it was time to make DJ’s life miserable.

Heffernan was the eldest of nine kids in an Irish-Catholic family, a soft-spoken tough guy. At six-foot-three, he was the 1978 Ohio state high school wrestling champion in the heavyweight division. As the father of three teenage daughters, Amanda’s case felt personal to him, and his cop radar was pointing him straight at Amanda’s smart-mouthed boyfriend.

DJ not only seemed to have a particular hatred of cops, but his story seemed inconsistent. He said he’d been with a friend fixing motorcycles on the evening Amanda disappeared and swore that she had called him at eleven that night. But when police had subpoenaed Amanda’s phone records, they revealed that her last calls to DJ were placed before eight. Was he remembering wrong, or was he lying?

When Heffernan learned that DJ was driving without a valid license, he had patrol officers pull him over, tow his car, and get a warrant to search it. They had a cadaver dog sniff it, but it found no traces. They sprayed it with Luminol, a chemical that makes blood show up under black light, and discovered bloodstains in the trunk. But lab results revealed that it was chicken blood that had probably leaked from a bag of groceries.

They also found a receipt showing that DJ had washed his car the day after Amanda went missing. The car wash was near a big park with large wooded areas, so officers searched it with dogs. When nothing turned up, they got a court order to attach a tracking device to DJ’s car to follow his movements and persuaded a friend of his to wear a hidden microphone.

“What do you think happened to your girlfriend?” the friend asked, with police listening.

“I don’t know what happened to her, and I don’t care,” DJ said, launching into a profanity-laced tirade about the police.

DJ infuriated the frustrated cops, who finally brought him into the station and gave him a lie detector test, which he passed.

They had absolutely nothing on him.

 • • • 

On Monday night, Louwana and Beth were at home, crying as they watched a report about Amanda’s disappearance on the eleven o’clock news.

Beth was growing worried about her mother. Louwana had never been a sound sleeper, but she had barely slept at all since Amanda had gone missing a week earlier. And while she had always been a heavy drinker, she was now drinking alarming amounts of beer.

Louwana taped a poster of Amanda over the living room fireplace, in the same place she used to hang her daughter’s Christmas stocking, and put a pink butterfly on it as a symbol of freedom and hope. “We miss you, Mandy. We love you,” she wrote on the poster. Every day, she kissed the photo good morning and good night.

Within minutes of Amanda’s face appearing on the news, the phone rang. As Louwana rushed to answer it, Beth was picking up the extension in the dining room.

“I have Mandy,” said a man’s voice on the other end. “She wants to be here because we’re married. But I’ll have her back home in a couple of weeks.”

“Please bring her home!” Louwana pleaded. “Drop her off at a store. Drop her at the corner. Anywhere! We don’t care who you are, we just want Mandy home!”

The line went dead.

Louwana gasped and sat down. She and Beth were struck that he had called her “Mandy,” because only family and her closest friends called her that. They thought he sounded like an older white man.

A minute later, the phone rang again.

“Don’t worry,” the same voice now said. “She’s okay and she’ll be home.”

Louwana and Beth both begged: “Please bring her home!”

Without another word, he hung up.

They reported the calls to police, and a trace confirmed they had come from Amanda’s phone. Louwana and Beth had new hope that Amanda was safe, but police viewed the calls as evidence proving only that Amanda had been abducted—not that she was still alive.

 • • • 

When Axel returned from his weekend at the casino, police searched his apartment, checked his phone records, and brought him in for a lie detector test, which was inconclusive. Though Axel had been coming to the Burger King regularly for months, after Amanda went missing her coworkers never saw him again.

 • • • 

Several callers told police they had seen Amanda working as a prostitute along Cleveland’s infamous Broadway Avenue corridor, near Fleet Avenue. Parker and Russell showed Amanda’s photo to some of the regulars there who said a blonde, who looked like her and called herself Amanda, had recently started walking their strip. So the two detectives began a stakeout, watching from their car and waiting for the young woman to appear. On the night of April 30, nine days after Amanda went missing, Parker was on her cell phone checking in with Louwana when the blond woman they were waiting for walked into view.

“I’ll have to call you back,” Parker told Louwana, and then called out to the young woman, “Girl, get your ass in the car.”

But Parker quickly realized it was not Amanda. She had the worn-down look of someone much older.

“You look so much like Amanda Berry,” Parker told her.

“Yeah, I know. That’s what people keep saying to me,” the woman said.

Parker called Louwana back and told her they were still looking.

 • • • 

When Heffernan heard that the young blond woman in the red-light district they had been tracking for days wasn’t Amanda, he decided to bring in the FBI. It had been ten days since Amanda had disappeared, all leads were exhausted, and the police needed help. Police receive huge numbers of missing-children reports, most of which involve children who intentionally ran away or went somewhere without telling their parents. Police only call in the FBI when they suspect a child has been kidnapped. Heffernan called his friend Tim Kolonick in the FBI’s big Cleveland field office on the shores of Lake Erie.

Kolonick had wanted to be a federal agent since the day in elementary school that he saw Secret Service agents guarding Rosalynn Carter on a visit to the west side of Cleveland. Tall, trim, and athletic, he rose quickly from Cleveland police officer to U.S. Secret Service agent to the FBI, where he worked on the violent crime task force.

As they drove up to Amanda’s house, Heffernan and Kolonick saw yellow ribbons tied to the chain-link fence, and they found Louwana waiting for them in a white-hot rage. She demanded to know why they weren’t working harder and why nobody had found her daughter.

She took them to Amanda’s bedroom, where Kolonick marveled at the twenty-five pairs of jeans Amanda had hung neatly in her closet and the rows of perfectly lined-up shoes. Louwana went through the details yet again—the untouched money, the birthday plans, the strange call from a man who said Amanda was now his wife.

From everything Kolonick could see, he felt certain Amanda hadn’t run away. He also knew that the longer she was missing, the less likely she would be found alive.

 • • • 

The FBI hoped the kidnapper’s first mistake would be to turn on Amanda’s phone again. It was 2003 and bureau engineers in Quantico, Virginia, had developed new cell phone–tracking equipment that could pinpoint a particular phone’s location, as long as it was switched on, and so on May 8 an FBI engineer arrived at Cleveland Hopkins Airport with several large suitcases containing a mobile computer lab. Seventeen days had passed since Amanda’s disappearance, and ten days since Louwana had received the call from her daughter’s cell phone.

Amanda’s phone records showed that her phone had been turned on repeatedly on the night she went missing and during the next day. Someone had been calling her voice mail and listening to the messages.

FBI agents determined that Amanda’s phone had been somewhere near two cell towers on the west side of Cleveland when the call to Louwana was made. The caller might have been driving, because the signal seemed to bounce from one cell tower to the other. The towers were on either side of I-90, and they covered a radius of about forty square blocks. For all the bureau knew, the caller could have been racing along the highway when he made the call and he—and Amanda—could be in California by now.

Hoping they were still in the area, Kolonick packed into a grungy gray van with the Quantico engineer and several other FBI agents and looked for a place to park somewhere between the two cell towers. They pulled into the parking lot of the Family Dollar discount store at Clark Avenue and West 30th Street, where their banged-up vehicle was inconspicuous, and turned on their gear: a device consisting of a computer screen, keyboard, and antenna. If Amanda’s phone was turned on for even a minute, they could pounce, along with an FBI SWAT team waiting in two Chevy Suburbans parked nearby.

Although Kolonick and his team didn’t know it, they were parked only about a thousand feet from the house where Amanda was being held, and could have walked there in a matter of minutes. The FBI had never heard of Michelle Knight, and they didn’t know that she was also being held in the same house. Nine months earlier, Castro had abducted her from the exact same Family Dollar lot where the FBI van was now parked.

The FBI agents continued their stakeout for eight days, changing shifts every twelve hours, but Amanda’s phone never went on. They knew she had left her phone charger at home and reluctantly concluded that by now the battery had died and there was little chance of it being used again.

On May 16 they drove the engineer and his gear back to the airport.

 • • • 

Samantha Farnsley looked remarkably like Amanda: same age, same height, same build, even the same piercing over her left eye.

Everyone noticed the uncanny likeness. On city buses she would hear people whispering: “Is that Amanda Berry?” An FBI agent spotted her one day in a thrift shop and followed her around the aisles, then tailed her into the parking lot. When she confronted him, he asked her if she was Amanda Berry, and when she said she was not, he still demanded to see her ID. Police stopped her eight or nine times in the months after Amanda went missing, and the situation became so bad that the FBI finally gave her a letter to carry certifying that she was not Amanda.

Samantha ultimately left Cleveland, but not until after a sad encounter with Louwana. When police booked Samantha on a truancy charge one day, they asked Louwana to come to the station and take a look. When she arrived and saw the back of the girl’s head and her long blond ponytail, she gasped. But then Samantha turned around and Louwana’s face fell.

“No,” she said. “That’s not my child.”

 

June 2003: First Summer

June 3

Amanda

I haven’t eaten in two days. I guess he just forgot about me yesterday. I’m feeling weak.

I’m not sure why he won’t spend much money on food for me, but he will buy me cigarettes and weed. Getting high dulls the pain of being here. If it weren’t for the weed, I would have killed myself by now. Maybe he knows that, and that’s why he gets it for me.

Before I was in here, pretty much everyone I knew smoked weed. It was just what teenagers in my neighborhood did. I liked to sit in my room, listen to music, and smoke a bowl once in a while. Now I’m smoking a lot and it takes me to a different place for a little while. But he doesn’t give me anything for free.

1x.

When he finally gives me a Mr. Hero sandwich, I keep the napkin. It’s very thin but has lots of white space where I can write. I’m keeping McDonald’s and Wendy’s bags too, because I can tear them open and write on the inside. The only paper I have is my diary, but that’s filling up. So I keep every scrap of paper I can find in case I run out.

Writing things down makes me feel closer to my family.

“Are you still going to take me home at the end of June?” I ask him. “You said you would.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe next year.”

“You told me you were taking me home!” I tell him, crying. “I need to see my family!”

He complains that I’m always talking about my family like I’m the only one who is missing someone. “Soldiers don’t see their families for years at a time,” he says, “and they don’t cry like babies about it.”

I just saw a TV news story about a female soldier from Cleveland who is in Iraq and who won’t be coming home before Christmas. I think about her on the other side of the world from her family and know it must be hard for her. But I also know she will make it.

Life is giving me a test. I have to pass. God wouldn’t give me anything I can’t handle. I can do this.

June 10

This morning Channel 19 has a story about a sixteen-year-old girl from Massachusetts, Molly Bish, who has been missing for three years. They found her body in the woods. I’m so sad and sorry for her and her family. What agony. I’m worried my mom is watching this too, scared that’s how they’re going to find me.

And now there’s another story about five women, as young as fourteen, who were sex slaves for fifteen years. Why do so many men hurt women?

June 17

He hates the feeling of air blowing on him, so when he sleeps in my room he turns off my fan. Without it I feel like I’m suffocating. Even when he sleeps downstairs or stays out all night, he sometimes turns off my fan, though he knows I want it. He keeps it just out of my reach so he can control it.

He’s back from work.

1x.

“Can you please turn the fan on?” I ask him.

“In a little while,” he says.

“Why not? It’s too hot.”

“In a little while.”

He’s like a prison guard who loves taunting, punishing, and taking away privileges. I make loud groaning noises to annoy him until he finally gets up and turns on the fan.

He smacks my arm hard. “Don’t be a baby!” he yells at me.

He is on me again. I don’t want him to see me crying because I hate giving him the satisfaction of knowing he hurts me. But I can’t help it, and my tears spill.

“You have been acting really strange lately, and you’d better stop,” he says when he’s done. “Stop crying so much. It’s only going to make you look old. You’re prettier when you laugh.”

June 23

I saw Ricki Lake’s show about sexual assault victims putting their lives back together. I hope when I get out of here that I am not scared of every man for the rest of my life. But I’m afraid I will be. I don’t want to be paranoid. I want my life back the way it was. Can I bounce back from this? I’m fighting back thoughts of killing myself.

At some point this has to end, doesn’t it? If I thought I was going to never get out of here before I died, what would be the point of even getting up in the morning? I have to believe that one day I will walk out that door, free, and it’s going to be like coming back from the dead.

June 24

I wake up in the morning and I hear a girl’s voice downstairs. Who is it? Another prisoner? Maybe one of his daughters?

I strain to hear over the radio, but I can’t make out what they are saying.

Hours pass, and it’s late afternoon when he unlocks my door.

1x.

“I had a girl here this morning,” he says afterward. He keeps telling me that he’s going to find somebody else to kidnap, and when he does he’s going to let me go. I want to be at home more than anything, but I don’t want somebody else to suffer through this.

“What happened to her?” I ask.

“You could have been going home tonight or tomorrow,” he says. “But people saw me bringing her in, so I had to let her go.”

He says he was driving by Meyer Pool, a public pool over by Lincoln-West High School. He went to that school, which is only a couple of blocks from here. He saw this young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, walking along and asked her if she wanted to get high.

She got in his car, and he brought her back here. He says that because he knew he couldn’t keep her, they just smoked weed and had sex on some blankets on the living room floor. He claims she was into it. Maybe he’s telling the truth. I don’t think he would rape her and let her go, because she knows where he lives.

After they were done, he says he gave her a ride back to the pool. But he’s mad at her because she stole his weed.

I can’t believe he came that close to having another prisoner. And I can’t believe there is a girl out there who came to this house and had sex with him willingly.

Girl, you don’t know how lucky you are. You have no idea how close you were to being chained to a wall.

June 25

I hear him on the phone with one of his daughters. She needs a bathing suit, so he’s going to bring her money to buy it. To everyone outside this house, he must seem like a nice, ordinary guy. He drives a school bus, talks to neighbors, works on cars in his backyard, buys presents for his daughters. I wish somebody would figure out what he’s doing inside this house.

It must be nice to be able to go swimming in this ninety-degree heat. I can smell grilling outside, the smell of summer. I daydream of barbecued ribs. I’m always so hungry.

There’s another story on the news about a soldier who won’t be home until the holidays, and I take it as a sign: I’ve been here two months. I can do six if I really have to.

I check the calendar and start counting. It’s 182 days until Christmas.

August 20, 2003: Strangle

Amanda

He wakes me up again. It’s whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. Even after four months, it’s still three or four times a day.

My strategy has become: Don’t fight. Don’t make him mad. Do whatever I have to do to stay alive and get home. But now he is making me lie on my stomach while he does that really nasty thing again. It hurts so bad. How would he like it if somebody stuck something into him that way? It’s horrible and he won’t stop. I can’t help it, so I scream, “Let me go home or kill me!”

He stops, sits me up, and looks at me funny.

“Do you want to die?” he finally asks.

“No, but I don’t want to be here!” It’s hard to get the words out through the tears. “If I was dead, at least I could see my family from heaven.”

He just looks at me for a while and then quietly says, “Okay.”

He steps out into the hallway and returns with an old vacuum cleaner, like one from the ’70s. He takes the cord and wraps it around my neck, and then starts tightening it. I feel it squeezing my throat, tighter and tighter.

I feel suddenly calm. I close my eyes. I am ready to die.

I pray silently: Please, God, save me. I love you, Mom. I love you, Beth. I love my girls. I love you all so much.

I feel a release. No more pain.

Then the cord suddenly goes loose, and he throws it on the floor.

“I’m not here to kill you!” he shouts. “I don’t want to kill you! This is just about my sexual problem!”

He storms out of the room.

No matter what he says, I know he could kill me at any minute. His anger comes out of nowhere, like lightning. I never know what’s going to set him off.

As I rub my throat and sit there thinking, I realize I have a mission, like the soldiers. This man enjoys hurting women, and I want people to know it. I don’t want him to get away with it. I need to outlast him.

November 22, 2003: Numb

Amanda

I’m out of paper, so I start writing on the napkins he’s brought from fast-food restaurants. I have to be very careful not to press down too hard with the pen, because they tear so easily. I take my time, because there is so much time.

I try to numb my mind with TV so I can forget that I’m shivering in this cold house: morning shows, soap operas, sitcoms, movies, Jay Leno, more movies, just filling time. The only thing I really care about is the news. Starting at five-thirty in the morning, if I’m awake, and I usually am, I flip through the channels, looking for anything about me. There’s usually nothing, but every once in a while I see my family.

I listen to the radio late at night after all the local news shows are over. He gave me an old CD player and an Eminem CD and I listen to “Lose Yourself” over and over, trying to believe when he sings: “You can do anything you set your mind to.” I’ve set my mind to getting to the next day. I go days without speaking.

Because the room is always dark, the light is no different at three in the morning than it is at three in the afternoon. He gave me cards and I play solitaire. I finished all the crossword puzzles in my book. I’ve colored every page of a coloring book he gave me. He brings me the newspaper sometimes and magazines that he must get for free because they are so boring and I’ve never heard of them.

Being alone is bad, but it is far worse when he comes in, and it always ends with me crying.

Today he wants to talk and is acting like he hasn’t done anything wrong, like we are friends. I don’t say a word to him and just keep staring at the TV.

January 2004: New Year

January 1

Amanda

“You’re so pretty,” he says as he starts pawing me again.

“Stand this way, stand that way, put your arms around me, you’re so beautiful,” blah, blah, blah. He has a whole little routine he makes me recite, about how much I love it, how much I want him. If I don’t say it, he’s rougher.

It’s been almost nine months since he kidnapped me. He’s always touching me like he owns me. He talks about the different parts of my body and says they’re his, that they belong to him. He says we are “together.” How can he think that if he has to lock me up to keep me here?

“You can’t just take my whole life away,” I tell him.

“What life?” he says, laughing. “Working at Burger King? That’s not a life.”

“What do you know about me? Nothing! You have no right to take my life away!”

He keeps touching me, and I feel like cutting off his hands, or something else. I hope I don’t catch any diseases from him. I’m desperate to see a doctor when I get out of here.

He’s raped me nine times in the past three days, but I’ve decided I’m not going to mark X’s in my diary anymore. I want him to be held accountable someday, but when I look back at these X’s, I remember every time all over again. It’s more than I can bear right now.

January 9

I keep thinking about the day I was taken. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d called in sick, or if I’d left work at the usual time, or if DJ had picked me up, or if I hadn’t gotten into the van.

Could I actually have been able to avoid all this?

He sits on my bed. I shift a little and move the chain around so it hurts less around my waist. I hate talking to him, but the loneliness is brutal. I have to talk to somebody.

“When are you going to take me home?” I ask him. “I’ve been here long enough.”

“You have to be patient,” he says. “Maybe after three years you might get to be free.”

Three years! That’s forever. I can’t take this for three years. I’ll kill myself. I’m not going to believe him. I’m getting out of here sooner than that—I know it.

I have all my belongings lined up. My clothes, my diary, my pictures and videos. That’s everything I have, and it all fits in a little box. If he said, “Okay, let’s go,” I could be ready in two minutes.

 

January 26, 2004: Cops at the Door

At around ten p.m. on Monday, January 26, 2004, two Cleveland police officers knocked on the front door of 2207 Seymour Avenue. They wanted to question the owner, Ariel Castro, because a mother had filed a complaint about how he had treated her four-year-old son on his school bus earlier that day.

That morning, Castro had punched in at 6:40 and drove his usual route, picking up sixty kids and dropping them off at two elementary schools. When he was done he volunteered for an extra midday shift and was assigned to pick up two children and deliver them to a two-hour program for children with ADHD at Wade Park Elementary School.

He picked up the children in a smaller bus and drove to Wade, where only one of them got off. The second, the four-year-old boy, was still on the bus when Castro drove to a Wendy’s restaurant for lunch. The boy later told police that when Castro realized he was on the bus, he ordered him, “Lay down, bitch.” It was a cold day, with heavy freezing rain and sleet, and the boy stayed in the bus alone while Castro went inside to eat.

Castro then drove to a parking lot and read the newspaper, and then went to a school building. Finally, after more than two hours, the child was taken to Wade Park Elementary, where a teacher told Castro that he should just drive him home, as school was over. Castro dropped him with a babysitter at his house, and the boy’s mother called the police when she came home and heard her son’s account.

When police did not find Castro at his home that evening, they got back in their patrol car and left, referring the case to detectives for follow-up.

Amanda was chained in a bedroom on the second floor, but she never heard anyone knocking. Castro, as usual, had left the radio blaring in the hall.

A month later, Castro was finally interviewed about the incident at the police station. He did not deny leaving the boy on the bus, but said it was an accident, an oversight. He said he only realized the boy was still there when he returned to the bus headquarters, and he insisted that he had never cursed at him.

He said he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t followed standard procedure and checked the bus at the end of his route.

“I was still mourning my father’s death, and I wasn’t quite right at that point in time,” he told police, noting that his father had died two weeks earlier. “I am very sorry for forgetting the student on the bus.”

Police referred the case to prosecutors, who declined to seek criminal charges.

The school system suspended Castro for sixty days without pay.