Ariel Castro was born in the lush green hills of rural Puerto Rico, and his journey to Seymour Avenue began with his father, Pedro Castro, who arrived in Cleveland in the mid-1960s with big dreams and a chopped-off hand.

The elder Castro, known as Nona, joined the post–World War II flood of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland. He came from Yauco, a town in the southwestern mountains, where coffee and bananas were plentiful but jobs and money were not. In the 1950s and ’60s, Cleveland’s steel mills, railroad yards, and manufacturing plants were drawing people from struggling Appalachian hamlets as well as eager immigrants from Ireland, Hungary, other European countries, and Puerto Rico.

Nona followed his brothers to Cleveland, where the Castro family was establishing itself as a well-regarded clan of small businessmen in the city’s near west side, just across the Cuyahoga River from downtown. Nona’s older brother, Julio Cesar “Cesi” Castro, had opened the Caribe Grocery, a bodega that sold Caribbean food and became a social and political hub for the growing Puerto Rican community. His brother Edwin started Isla Music, which featured Latin music and quickly became a local landmark. Another brother ran a hardware store.

Nona opened a used car lot on West 25th Street and was an unforgettable salesman, with a prosthetic left hand that he would put on and take off. He often told people that his hand had been mangled when someone accidentally slammed it in a car door. But the real story eventually made its way around Cleveland: He had lost the hand in Puerto Rico in a fight over a woman.

 • • • 

The man who had sliced off Castro’s hand at the wrist, and left him with scars on his back and head, was named Jose “Pepe” Rodriguez, a neighbor of Castro’s in La Parra, a tiny cluster of cinder-block houses on a narrow mountain road on the outskirts of Yauco.

A half century later, relatives of both men, who have since died, aren’t certain of the exact cause of the machete fight, but they do remember that it had something to do with Nona’s complicated relations with women.

Nona began his first family with Lillian Rodriguez in a one-story house on top of a hill in La Parra. Starting in 1958, they had three children in three years. The third, Ariel, was born on July 10, 1960.

About a year later, when Lillian was pregnant with their fourth child, Nona left her and the children and took up with another woman, Gladys Torres, who lived farther down the country lane. Both women were pregnant with Nona’s children at the same time, in a village where just about everyone was related to one woman or the other.

It was around then that Nona lost his hand.

Monserrate Baez, Lillian’s sister-in-law, recalled the sight of Nona driving his Jeep up the steep road with one hand, then stopping to fetch water from a communal well. He didn’t let anything stop him from going about his business.

Aurea Rodriguez Torres, Pepe’s niece, said that Nona and Pepe eventually became friendly again, though there were plenty of bad feelings in the village about Nona’s having abandoned Lillian and their four kids.

Nona, like so many other men who had been working on farms, soon left for higher wages on the mainland. In Cleveland he quickly earned enough money to send for Gladys, who now had two children with him.

When Ariel was around four, Lillian also went north, moving to Reading, Pennsylvania, where some of her relatives had settled. She left Ariel and his siblings with her mother in Puerto Rico and got a job operating a sewing machine in a factory. She sent money and presents home and when Ariel was about six, she returned to Yauco, gathered her children, and brought them all to Reading.

But during the year or two that Ariel was living with his grandmother, he said something horrible happened.

 • • • 

When he was about five years old, he said he was sexually abused by a boy, about nine or ten years old, who lived nearby. He said the abuse continued for about a year, but he never reported it to anyone.

Castro would later give the same account to FBI agents and court-appointed psychiatrists examining him to determine if he was mentally competent to stand trial.

“It’s known that people who are abused keep quiet, so I did,” he told the psychiatrists.

Because the abuse is alleged to have taken place nearly fifty years ago, it is difficult to verify, but near the end of his life Castro talked about it frequently. Law enforcement officials believe Castro might have fabricated the story as a way to defend his own behavior, possibly in the hope that a judge would be more lenient with him.

Castro also repeated the allegations in a four-page handwritten letter that police found in his kitchen on the day after his arrest. In that document, he identified his alleged abuser by his first name and the first names of his parents.

In La Parra, relatives and friends recognized those names immediately. They said the alleged abuser, now about sixty, was a neighbor of Castro’s when they were boys and he still lived in the area. When contacted by phone in the summer of 2014, the man was at first cordial and friendly, but when he heard the name “Ariel Castro,” he became angry and hung up.

 • • • 

Castro was twelve, in the spring of 1973, when Lillian moved the family from Reading to Cleveland. She later told police that even though she and Nona had split up, she wanted the kids to be closer to their father.

Castro had virtually no relationship with his father as a young boy, and he often described his relationship with his mother as terrible. In the letter found by police, he complained of being “abandoned by my father and later my mother.”

“My mother was an abusive parent,” he wrote. “Her ways of discipline were very bad. For this made me grow hatred for her. There were times I wished she would die.”

He told the court psychiatrists that his mother constantly hit him with “belts, sticks, and an open hand,” sometimes causing bruises. He said she was always “yelling negative things and cursing at us,” and “I would ask God for her to die.”

But in one of the many contradictory statements he made, Castro also told the psychiatrists that his mother had done “a good job” raising him. In fact, as an adult, he spent a great deal of time with her. She lived only a few blocks from Seymour Avenue, and he would visit her often, helping her with chores and eating dinner with her. When police reviewed his cell phone records after his arrest, it included a long list of calls to her.

Lillian Rodriguez, a small woman with white hair, visited him frequently when he was in jail awaiting sentencing. She has stayed largely out of the public eye since his death.

 • • • 

In Cleveland, Ariel Castro attended Lincoln Junior High, where, he later told law enforcement officials, he was suspended for “touching a girl’s breast.”

When police interviewing him after his arrest asked him if he had ever sexually abused anyone other than his three captives, Castro said: “I had a girlfriend in junior high school. She would let me go under her shirt. I wanted to go farther, and she would say no. I tried to force her. I guess that was an early indication that I wanted to be in control.”

During his years at Lincoln-West High School, he played bass guitar in the school band and worked part-time at a Pick n Pay grocery store on West 65th Street. He was a shy teenager with acne, the Puerto Rican kid who worked produce and didn’t have that much to do with his coworkers, many of whom were Irish American or Italian American. Sometimes, though, Castro would be seen in the parking lot with them, drinking beer and smoking dope after work.

From a young age, he was openly prejudiced against African Americans and called them “niggers” or other slurs. When Castro was playing with a BB gun one day and shot a black kid from the neighborhood in the hand, nobody believed it was an accident.

Castro stayed in school at a time when many others were dropping out, graduating in 1979. A year later, when he was twenty, he met the woman who would in many ways become his first prisoner.

 • • • 

Ariel Castro noticed immediately when a pretty, dark-haired girl moved in across the street from his house on Buhrer Avenue, a few blocks from Seymour.

Grimilda Figueroa, a petite seventeen-year-old also from Yauco, hated her first name and told everyone to call her Nilda.

Their courtship was quick. One summer evening not long after they met, Castro took her on a date, and they spent hours parked on the shores of Lake Erie. When they returned home very late, Nilda’s mother was furious that her daughter had spent all that time alone with a man. She told Castro that he was now responsible for Nilda: “Now you have to take her with you.”

Nilda moved across the street to Castro’s house. They didn’t marry but considered themselves common-law spouses. After one miscarriage, their son, Ariel Anthony Castro, was born in 1981, when Nilda was just eighteen.

At first Nilda’s younger sister Elida and the rest of her family thought Castro was fun, a talented bass guitar player who didn’t drink too much and smoked weed only now and then. He owned a car and took Nilda’s younger siblings on adventures. He got them a free McDonald’s cheeseburger by bringing his half-eaten one back to the counter and lying about finding a hair in it. He kept that burger, too, saying he might as well give it to his dog.

But sometimes he also frightened the neighborhood kids, especially with an unnerving mannequin, a female torso with dark hair, that he had bought at a yard sale. He used to startle people by propping it up in the passenger seat of his car when he was driving around.

Castro also quickly became possessive about Nilda, ordering her to wear long skirts and forbidding her from wearing V-necks or anything even slightly revealing. If she wanted to dress in something that he thought was too provocative, he threatened her, saying, “You better not.” Eventually he began buying all her clothes at thrift stores. He told her that her place was at home and hated when she went outside without him, even if just to go shopping.

“I can’t believe this,” she told her sister Elida. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

Castro worked in a series of low-paying jobs, first as a machinist at Les-Ner Products Co., a company that made tips for car antennas, then at a plastics company and a used-car dealership. In the evenings he played in several bands.

“Where were you?” Nilda asked him one night when he came home especially late. “Why do you always leave me here alone with the baby?”

“Don’t worry about what I do. I do what I want,” he told her and then slapped her hard across the face.

Not long afterward Elida came to visit her sister and was shocked to find Castro shoving her into a cardboard washing machine box, closing the flaps, and yelling: “You’re not getting out of here until I tell you to get out!”

Elida, who was only twelve, was terrified and ran to get her mother from their apartment downstairs.

“What is going on here?” the mother demanded.

“Ah, nothing,” Castro said, letting Nilda out. “We were just playing.”

Everyone was growing concerned about Castro’s increasingly violent behavior, but no one knew what to do. After their second child, Angie, arrived in 1983, and they were living on the top floor of a duplex on Riverside Avenue, he would lock the deadbolt from the outside and take the key so Nilda couldn’t leave, telling her he was just trying to keep her safe.

“I feel like a prisoner,” Nilda told Elida.

Even Elida could no longer freely visit, because she couldn’t get past the bolted door. Castro didn’t like Nilda visiting family or friends, or going anywhere, unless he accompanied her. One day in 1985, when Castro had left the door unlocked, Nilda walked to the grocery store. When she returned, she was climbing the steep, wooden stairs to the second-floor apartment, carrying full bags in her arms, and Castro leaped out and shoved his mannequin toward her.

Nilda was so shocked that she fell backward down the stairs, smashing her skull when she landed at the bottom. She was rushed to the hospital and had emergency surgery. Nilda told her sister that Castro intentionally caused her fall because he was angry that she left the house alone.

Nilda confided in Elida that she wanted to leave Castro, but didn’t see how she could. No one in her family had the means to support her and her children. Castro had threatened to harm her if she ever tried to take the kids away from him, and she wouldn’t leave them alone with him. She had no job, no income, and nowhere to go.

The abusive behavior only became worse. Castro made wild accusations about Nilda having affairs. He hit her whenever she said or did something he didn’t like. One day, in a rage, he broke her arm and her ribs, and punched her so hard that he broke her teeth, sending her to the hospital and requiring dental surgery.

After that beating, Nilda’s family had had enough. Her father, brothers, and a few friends grabbed Castro in his yard, pummeled him, and warned him they’d kill him if he ever touched her again. Castro just smiled, never apologized, and left them with the impression that he was going to get even. When Nilda’s father’s garage later burned down, they suspected Castro.

On the evening of September 30, 1989, one of Castro’s brothers came to the house to pick him up, and Nilda asked where they were going. “Don’t worry about what I do. I do what I want,” he yelled at her, furious that she had questioned him. He then slapped her and slammed her several times against a wall and the washing machine. Nilda ran to a neighbor’s house and called the police. She told the officers who arrived that she had been assaulted by Castro several times before, and they advised her to file a formal complaint with the county prosecutor’s office.

Nilda later told her sister that Castro threatened to kill her or take her kids if she pursued any charges against him, and he promised he wouldn’t hurt her again. She didn’t file a complaint.

There were good times between his violent rages. In February 1991, Castro was hired as a bus driver for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Angie Castro, who was then seven, recalled that her father was so proud on the day he got his bus driver’s certificate that the family, now with four kids, had a big celebration.

In April 1992, Castro bought the house at 2207 Seymour Avenue for $12,000 from his uncle, Edwin Castro, and the family moved into the little two-story home.

Castro treated Angie and his other two daughters well, and Angie said it was fun when he would take the kids for rides in his school bus. When he was in a good mood he could be a good father. But on his worst days he continued to beat Nilda, and he began smacking around his son, Ariel Anthony, who was just ten. Nilda cried when she told her sister that he was forcing her to have sex when she didn’t want to, and when the children could hear them.

Castro started nailing the windows shut, saying it wasn’t a safe neighborhood. He would often act as if he were leaving, but then sneak back into the house and listen to Nilda’s phone calls from an extension in the basement.

“What’s that noise?” Elida asked Nilda one day when they were on the phone.

“Oh, I think that’s Ariel listening on the other line.”

Nilda told her sister that she wanted to take her kids and go far away, but she was afraid of what Castro might do.

“If you ever take my kids, I will kill you,” he told her.

Nilda never felt well again after crashing down the stairs and suffered from chronic headaches and blood clots. In late 1993, eight years after the fall, doctors at the Cleveland Clinic discovered a tumor and operated to remove it. It was a meningioma, a type of tumor that is sometimes linked to injury or trauma to the brain, and the prognosis was not good.

“Ariel did this to me,” she told Elida.

On the day after Christmas in 1993, about a month after Nilda’s surgery, Castro got drunk and started hitting her, then left the house. She called 911 and told officers that Castro had beaten her, even though she had recently had brain surgery and was very weak.

While the police were searching the neighborhood for him, Castro returned to the house, banging on the door and screaming at Nilda to let him in. Angie, then ten, was upset that her father was outside in the cold and didn’t realize he had just beaten her mother. She stood next to the Christmas tree in the living room and screamed: “Let Daddy in! Let Daddy in!”

Nilda relented, and when she unlocked the door he began beating her again. As the terrified children watched, she fell to the floor and he began to stomp on her head with his boot. When Castro realized that his son was running to call the police, he chased after him out the front door. Police officers saw Castro running away from the house, captured him, and took him to jail. Nilda, pushed past her limit, went to the police station the following day and gave a more detailed, formal statement. The case was referred to the county prosecutor, who decided there was enough evidence of domestic violence to present it to a grand jury.

A felony conviction could have put Castro behind bars, but on February 9, 1994, a grand jury declined to indict him. Because Nilda refused to testify, there was insufficient evidence. Castro had been staking out the entrance to the Justice Center courthouse and stopped her just before she entered to testify, offering her money and a car if she remained silent. He also threatened her, called her a bitch, and warned her: “You know what will happen to you if you do.”

Nilda called her sister and said Castro threatened to kill her and their kids if she testified before the grand jury. Convinced that he was capable of fulfilling his threat, Nilda turned around and walked away from the courthouse.

 • • • 

Fernando Colon first saw Nilda Figueroa in the summer of 1995 in the emergency room of Grace Hospital near downtown Cleveland. She was bleeding, had a broken nose, a missing tooth, and bruises on her face.

Colon, a security guard at the hospital, had encountered her there several times with similar injuries and knew that she was being beaten. Recently divorced, he had just moved from New York to Cleveland, where he was hoping to start over. He wanted to be a police officer.

Hospital staff were suspicious about Nilda’s injuries, but she insisted that she had fallen down the stairs, or made up some other story. She confided in Colon that the beatings would only get worse if she told doctors the truth.

When Nilda returned for a follow-up visit, Colon found her sitting on a chair in the hallway, looking frightened.

“You all right?” he asked her.

“Yeah, well,” she replied, “for the moment I’m okay.”

“Do you want to talk?”

Nilda then began recounting her years of abuse at Castro’s hands, including the times he beat her with barbells. She was in constant pain, suffering from seizures, and was losing vision in her left eye.

Colon and Nilda stayed in touch, and during one of her hospital appointments he said to her, “If I help, will you leave? You can’t go through this no more. That dude’s going to kill you.”

When Nilda said she wanted help but was afraid of Castro, he told her, “Don’t worry about him. Let me worry about him.”

Nilda started making plans to leave Castro, and one day in early 1996, nearly sixteen years after she moved in with him, Colon drove over and took her away from Seymour Avenue when Castro was not home. She packed three of her kids and some belongings in his car, and he brought her to her mother’s house. Angie, who was twelve, insisted on staying with her father.

When he discovered what had happened, Castro tracked Colon down by phone and yelled: “You have my wife!”

“You’re abusing this woman,” Colon shot back. “I got copies of the medical records from the hospital. If you want trouble, I’m going to give you trouble. So you either back off or you’re going to end up in jail.”

Nilda and the children eventually moved in with Colon, and one day Castro followed one of his daughters home to see where Nilda was living.

“What you did was wrong,” he screamed at Colon.

“No, what I did was right, ’cause you was gonna kill that woman.”

“I’m not like that,” Castro said.

In March 1996, Nilda filed a Juvenile Court petition seeking full custody of all their children. She told the court that Angie was living with her father and being “improperly cared for” and that she feared for her safety because of Castro’s “record for long-term spousal abuse.”

Nilda said that Castro had been “able to remove my children from school because of his position as a Cleveland Public School bus driver.” At times she had gone to the bus stop to pick up her children after school only to find that Castro had already taken them.

The case dragged on for months, but in January 1997, Nilda was awarded sole custody of all four children, including Angie, who came to live with her.

 • • • 

For Lillian Roldan, it was love at first sight.

She met Ariel Castro in 2000, at a friend’s house. He was sitting in the living room, playing his bass, well dressed and attractive.

Castro was forty, almost twice her age. He lived alone, had been separated from his ex for four years, and though the oldest of his kids was almost Lillian’s age, she found him charming and funny, and they began going out almost immediately. She went to his gigs and brought him to her parents’ house, and he charmed them, too.

She would occasionally spend the night at Castro’s house on Seymour Avenue. They slept in the master bedroom upstairs, and the house seemed completely normal to Lillian, apart from the fact that he kept the basement door locked with a padlock. When she asked about it, he explained that he kept his cash in the cellar, so he wanted to make certain it was secure.

The relationship went well until one day in late 2002, when Lillian received a letter from Castro in which he said he loved her, but not enough to keep the relationship going. He told her to call him if she ever needed help, but that they were no longer a couple.

Castro later told police that he broke it off with Lillian several months after he kidnapped Michelle Knight in August 2002, explaining that he “couldn’t juggle both of them.” On the day he abducted Michelle, he chained her in the basement and then left to spend the night with Lillian at her home. He tried to find excuses to keep Lillian out of the Seymour house, but it was getting more and more difficult. One day when they were standing in the driveway, she noticed a TV on upstairs, and she asked why, since there was no one in the house.

“It was a close call,” Castro later admitted to police. “My heart started beating.”

When Lillian’s mother died in Puerto Rico a few months later and she didn’t have enough cash to fly there to take care of the arrangements, she went to Castro’s house to borrow money. He made her wait in the driveway while he went inside and got her a thousand dollars.

By then Amanda Berry was also locked in Castro’s house.

Lillian later repaid him, but never saw him again.

 

April 2, 2004: Family Friend

Gina

It’s six thirty on a drizzly Friday morning. Time to get up.

My mom is drinking coffee downstairs at the dining-room table, and my two little nieces are up already, too. I open the cabinet, find the Pop-Tarts, and drop two in the toaster.

“We gotta go! Let’s go,” says my dad as the girls run all over the kitchen, giggling. Though it’s still dark outside, the house is already noisy. It’s always like that. Seven people live here: my parents, Nancy Ruiz and Felix DeJesus; my brother, Ricky; my sister, Mayra; her two daughters, Tatiana and Nancy; and me. It’s a small home, and we all share one bathroom. My dad talks about building an addition, but it never seems to happen, because there’s never enough money.

My mom stays home and takes care of all of us, and my dad works in a factory that makes blades for industrial saws. They’re both from Puerto Rico and have huge families. We have big reunions with tons of relatives and close friends we call cousins but who are not actually related. On holidays it feels like our front door never stops opening.

Sometimes it’s actually a little too crazy for me. I’m only fourteen and shyer than everybody else in the family. When we have big parties, I take the little kids upstairs away from the music and noise. We play games and laugh, and that’s just fine by me. Everybody’s always hugging, and I don’t like being touched. I don’t even like making eye contact with strangers. My mom’s always trying to get me to look people in the eye. I know she’s right, but it makes me uncomfortable. I love all the fun we have in our busy house, but I also love peace. I like things quiet.

It’s getting late, so I hurry. I grab a few bites of a Pop-Tart and tell the girls they can eat the rest.

When it’s cold outside, my dad and I have a morning routine: He goes out first and gets the car warm for me. We have an old white Nissan Sentra that my dad bought for $500 from my friend Arlene’s dad, Ariel Castro. It’s kind of junky, but at least we have a car. A lot of people in my neighborhood can’t even afford one. And our car’s heater works really well.

“Bye, Mom! Love you!” I yell as I grab my blue coat with white fur lining. “See ya later!”

“Bye, Gina. Love you,” she says. “See you after school!”

We live on West 71st Street, two blocks from the railroad tracks. The trains race through our neighborhood in the middle of the night and are really loud, especially when they blow their horns. Lots of people cut across the tracks to get to Kmart and Big Lots on West 65th Street, but my mom never lets me do that. A few homeless people sleep by the tracks, and people sell drugs there. There’s an empty warehouse on our street, and a couple of abandoned factories near the tracks.

My mom says this neighborhood isn’t safe, so she lets me play in our front yard, but that’s it. One day the cops were chasing a guy, and he threw baggies filled with dope into our bushes, then came back later to get them. After that my dad cut down all our bushes. Another time a lady right down the street got mugged in her own garage, so now she has a huge fence and padlocks everywhere. Mom says it looks like Fort Knox.

This is a neighborhood where families live for a while, then move farther west toward the suburbs when they get some money. Four years ago we moved out of an apartment over on Scranton Road and bought this house so we could have more space. I don’t know how long we’ll stay. I think my mom would leave now if we could.

As my dad and I drive away from my house, I turn the radio to 96.5 KISS FM and listen until they have a commercial, then switch to a different station. Dad says he is amazed at all the lyrics I know. It doesn’t matter who comes on—Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, Usher, Kanye West—I sing along with the radio the whole way to school, and my dad smiles.

He and Mom were understanding last week when I lost my glasses. I dropped them in the street and they were run over by a car. They were new prescription ones with gold wire rims. I need them because my left eye is weaker than my right, so I have an appointment in two weeks to get another pair.

My dad is quiet like me. We love to go out in the backyard at night, just the two of us, and stare up at the stars. He came to Cleveland from Puerto Rico when he was twelve, dropped out of high school, and started working in factories. When he was twenty-one he met my mom at a bar, and then they went to a party where a couple got into such a big fight that she started throwing all his clothes out the window. My dad couldn’t stop laughing, and my mom fell for him right then.

He played softball and football with the guys from the neighborhood, but he also hung out with a tough crowd that got him into trouble with the cops. But that was before I was born. Now he is always telling me to be careful about who my friends are. I’m his baby, and he’s my big teddy bear.

My mom was born in Cleveland in 1960, but when she was nine she moved with my grandparents back to Yauco, a coffee-growing town in Puerto Rico where many people in Cleveland had come from. Life was simple and healthy there. The family would “eat off the trees,” with oranges and avocados and other fruits and vegetables they grew on their own land. They caught their own fish and walked everywhere. Mom lived there until she was seventeen, when my grandpa Benny moved the family back to Cleveland. She cried for days because she couldn’t get used to it. She weighed a hundred fifteen pounds when she got here, then gained sixty pounds in a year. In Yauco, breakfast would be coffee with a little goat’s milk and crackers—maybe toast once in a while. But in Cleveland, the kitchen was filled with gallons of milk, cereal, bread, and cans of spaghetti, and Mom ate like crazy.

Mom dropped out of high school on the day she turned eighteen and started working as a breakfast waitress at a pool hall called La Cue, which was owned by Cesi Castro, the great-uncle of my friend Arlene. It was at the corner of Seymour Avenue and West 25th Street, which was the heart of the Puerto Rican community back in those days. When they were dating, Mom and Dad met at the Seymour Café, right there on the same corner, which is maybe a mile from where we live.

Dad is hurrying down Lorain Avenue this morning because he has to be at work by seven thirty, the same time the doors open at Wilbur Wright Middle School. So again today I’m one of the first seventh-graders here, and I wait in the cold with a few other kids until they let us inside.

I’ve been in special-ed classes since a teacher in the first grade said I was a slow learner. That’s why I go to Wilbur Wright, which is kind of far from my house. It’s a huge school with all kinds of classes. I used to go to a different school, but they had one of those little buses to pick me up, and I would get teased about it. Everybody knew those “short buses” were for kids going to special classes. I hated when neighborhood kids made fun of me. They called me “slow,” which really hurt. There’s no way I’m going to take a school bus again, so my dad drives me in the morning, and I take the city bus or walk home. That makes my mom nervous, and she tells me to always try to walk with other kids who are going my way.

A few days ago I got great news. My teacher told me I was doing really well. Last quarter I had an A in science, a B in math, and C’s in English and reading. Social studies was still a D, but it was a pretty good quarter. If I kept this up, my teacher said, I could move into regular classes, maybe even this year. She said that if I worked hard, there was no reason I couldn’t go to college someday. College! My mom would be so proud. She and my dad didn’t finish high school, and she’s always telling me how important school is. So if I could get my high school diploma and then go to college, she would be crazy happy. Maybe I could go to Florida State University. My grandpa Benny—my mom’s dad—lives in Florida, and I might be able to live with him. I would love to make my parents so proud and be the first person in our family to go to college. That would surprise everyone!

School today is the same old stuff: science, reading, math, social studies. Nothing special at lunch, just pizza and chocolate milk. I’m extra hungry, so I buy potato chips with some of the $1.50 in bus money my mom gave me. That means I won’t have enough left for the bus later, so I guess I’m walking home. It’s about two miles, but I don’t mind.

At 2:30 the bell rings, and I climb the stairs to my locker on the third floor, talking with my friends Beverly, Marilyn, Anela, and Juan. It wasn’t a bad day, but I’m a tiny bit bummed because I lost my lip gloss. My gym teacher made me hand it over last week because students aren’t supposed to carry anything into the gym, and today when I remembered to pick it up, he said he couldn’t find it. He says I should have come back sooner. Oh, well.

I’m laughing with my friends as I head out of school for the weekend. At the front door, I run into my friend Arlene Castro, who’s in the same grade as me. I really like Arlene.

“Hey, let’s go skating!” I say to her. “It’s Friday!”

I like ice skating and I try to imagine myself as an Olympic skater on TV. Once when I was watching them, I pretended to do a triple axel in my kitchen and fell and split my chin open. My poor mom freaked out, and I still have the scar.

But I love roller skating even more. I spend every weekend at Cleveland’s big roller rinks, gliding along the polished floors, skating to the music. I’d go every day if I could.

Arlene and I skate a lot, and I’m excited that maybe we can go tonight. But as we start walking together the four blocks down West 110th Street to Lorain Avenue, the main street with lots of restaurants and shops, I remember: I’m grounded. Three weeks ago my parents caught me smoking cigarettes in my room. I haven’t been allowed out with friends since.

“But wait,” I tell Arlene. “I think I can still have people over. Can you come to my house?”

“I think so. Let me call my mom.”

We walk to the pay phone on Lorain at West 105th Street. A couple of kids at school have cell phones, but not too many. And we sure don’t.

I give her two quarters from my bus money, and Arlene dials. I can tell by her face what the answer is.

“She says I gotta go home.”

“Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll see you. Call me later.”

We give each other a quick hug, and I start walking home. I’d better hurry. It’s still drizzly, and it’s about a forty-minute walk. If I’m late, my mom will worry.

 • • • 

I have walked only a block when a guy in a Jeep Grand Cherokee pulls up and rolls down the passenger window. I can’t quite hear him, but he’s talking to me.

I know him. He’s Arlene’s dad. He drives a school bus. My parents and I were hanging out with him a few months ago at the Christmas choir concert, where Arlene and I were both singing.

“Hey, have you seen Arlene?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, pointing behind him. “She just went that way.”

“Can you help me find her?”

I tell him she just left a second ago, so she can’t be far.

“Okay,” he says, “but can you help me?”

He really wants me to help. I don’t know why. But okay.

I get in the Jeep and tell him to turn the car around. But he starts driving straight, in the wrong direction.

“Aren’t you supposed to turn here?” I ask him.

“I need to go to my house for a minute to get some money,” he says.

This is a little weird, but I tell myself to chill. My parents know him. He’s Arlene’s dad. If he needs to get money at home, what’s the big deal?

He’s talking a lot as he drives, mostly about Arlene and his other kids. We turn onto Seymour Avenue, the same street my aunt lives on just a couple of blocks down. She has great parties in the summer. Lots of people from Puerto Rico live in this neighborhood, and we have some friends who live around here.

He pulls into the driveway and stops behind the house.

“I’m going to get my money—I’ll be right back,” he says.

His front yard is neat, but as I wait in the car I see that the backyard is messy and filled with cars and motorcycles. The trash cans are overflowing with plastic garbage bags.

He’s back in a minute and says, “I have a speaker I want to put in the car. Can you help me move it?”

“Okay,” I reply. Why not? I walk over to the back door and step inside.

 • • • 

The door leads to a small room, then his kitchen. It’s nasty, with cobwebs on the ceiling and grease stains on the walls.

“Sit there for a minute,” he says, pointing at the kitchen table. “Take your coat off and get comfortable.”

It’s one of those fold-up tables, the kind you put up at a backyard party. One leg is busted, so he has propped it up against the wall. I sit on a folding chair with a pink cushion.

He’s in the bathroom now, which is right off the kitchen. The door’s open, and I can see him looking at himself in the mirror, trimming his eyebrows and fussing with himself like ladies do. Weird!

“You have to take me home now,” I say loudly. “My mom is waiting for me.”

He walks right up to me, so close. He tries to touch my breasts, and I freak out.

“What are you doing? Don’t! I want to get out of here!” This is crazy!

“Okay,” he tells me, like everything is normal, “but you can’t go out the same way you came in.”

He’s leading me toward a door and says that we have to go downstairs to get back outside. I can’t believe what’s happening. As soon as we walk down a few steps I realize it’s a mistake. The next thing I know I’m on my back on the cold concrete floor, and he’s on top of me.

“Get off me! Get away from me!” I scream.

He puts a pillow over my head and yells, “Shut up!”

I keep screaming into the pillow. It’s dirty and smelly.

There’s a pipe on the floor beside us and he picks it up.

“Shut up or I’ll hurt you with this!”

He’s sitting on me. I’m kicking as hard as I can.

“Are you done?” he yells.

I keep kicking. I’m pretty strong, but I can’t get free. He’s so heavy and I’m so little. I give him one good kick, which makes him mad.

“Are you done?” he asks again, and when I still keep kicking, he says, “I’m going to chain you.”

Chain me? What?

I have to think of something—do something—to get out of here.

Maybe if I pretend not to resist, I can trick him. So I stop kicking, hold out my arms flat on the floor, and say, “Go ahead; chain me.”

He slides off me to get the chain, and I jump up and run. I don’t even make it to the first step before he grabs me. As I try to get away I pull some boxes of junk down, and they crash all over the place.

“You should not have done that!” he shouts.

He pulls me back over to the pole and puts a chain around my neck, tight. Then he puts another one around my stomach. They hurt. The chains look brand-new.

He pushes me down. I’m sitting in front of the pole, chained to it. He pulls my hands behind my back, behind the pole, and ties them together.

“It’s plastic rope,” he says. “Don’t move, or it will cut you.”

He picks up a filthy gray rag from the floor, winds a piece of rope around it, and pushes it into my mouth, smashing my teeth against my lower lip until it’s bleeding. Then he puts duct tape over my mouth. I’m trying to scream but I can’t. It’s hard to breathe. All I can do is cry.

“How am I supposed to take you home if your eyes are bloodshot?” he asks.

I’m so scared. I need to stop crying.

He pulls his pants down and starts rubbing himself. He is only inches away from me, and I try to turn my head and look away, but it’s hard because of how tightly he has my neck chained. I’m so scared he’s going to rape me. I’m praying over and over in my head: Please, God, please don’t let him do this to me.

Then, when he’s done, he pulls up his pants and without saying a word walks upstairs.

 • • • 

My head is pounding, and I can’t concentrate on anything. I’m trying to think of ways to escape, but my mind is blank. I want my mom. I wish my dad would come save me. I just want to be home. I think he’s going to kill me, and I can’t stop crying.

It’s terrifying down here, so much stuff and tons of empty bottles of laundry detergent and empty giant-size pop bottles. What is he keeping them for? He’s got boxes filled with magazines—I can see a bunch of pornos. What is this place? Has he brought other girls down here?

In a few minutes he comes back down with a radio. My whole body freezes up when I see him. I look down at the ground.

He doesn’t say anything but just plugs in the radio, starts blasting it, and leaves. My mouth aches from the rag and rope. My lips are still bleeding, and I can’t move my tongue. The chains around my neck and stomach are so tight that it’s hard to breathe. I didn’t know I could cry this much.

It’s completely dark and freezing. I wish I hadn’t listened to him and taken my coat off. I’m so scared. I’m praying to God. I need Him now. Don’t let this man kill me.

 • • • 

It must be morning, because a little sunlight comes in when he opens the door to the basement. He brings a little black-and-white TV and turns it up loud and then turns the radio up even louder.

He rips the duct tape off my face and yanks the rag out of my mouth, making me scream because it hurts so bad when the tape pulls at my face and hair.

“If you scream any more, this will go right back in your mouth,” he warns me. “I’m going to put it here to remind you.” He drops the rag on top of a pile of clothes, right where I can see it.

After all the screaming I did yesterday, I know nobody can hear me. What’s wrong with the neighbors around here? I don’t know what he wants with me, but he knows I can tell my parents who he is, so there’s no way he’ll let me go.

I’m shaking, but I stay quiet. The last thing I want to do is make him mad.

He takes the chain off my neck, and I can breathe better.

“Don’t scream. Nobody will hear you.”

He grabs my breasts and squeezes them. I worry that he is going to do more disgusting things, but then he just stops, turns off the overhead lightbulb, and leaves. I’m alone again, and it’s dark except for the TV. It’s on WB 55, all sitcoms, and I can’t reach it to change channels. It’s hard to follow anything on TV because of the blaring radio. It’s like having two people screaming in my face about completely different things. My skull aches.

I have to go to the bathroom. The concrete floor is so cold.

Why is Arlene’s dad doing this to me?

I wonder if he was planning this. I’ve seen him so many times in my neighborhood in the past year. He’d be sitting in his school bus, parked on Dearborn Avenue, right around the corner from my house, and would wave at me. Other times he would drive by me slowly, smiling and waving. I always waved back. I figured my neighborhood must have been on his bus route. Now I bet he was stalking me.

 • • • 

I’ve been here hours, and suddenly I hear his heavy black work boots on the wooden stairs.

Is this it? I start shaking.

“I brought you some food,” he says, handing me a plate of rice and beans. “My mom made this—it’s good.”

I’m so hungry, but I won’t touch it.

“I’m only eating my mom’s cooking. I want to go home!”

My mom’s food is famous. Before the holidays she spends days cooking and baking. She makes chicken and pork and Puerto Rican specialties, like arroz con gandules—rice and pigeon peas. I try to imagine the salty taste and rich smell of my mom’s hot food, right off the stove.

I wish I could do a drive-by! That’s what we call it when somebody has to work on a holiday and can’t come for dinner at our house. They call ahead, pull up outside, honk the horn, and Mom runs out with a plate of whatever she made that day. It’s making me sadder to think about home, and I can’t stop crying.

“Okay, I don’t care if you starve,” he says and takes the food back upstairs.

How long will he leave me here? It feels like hours and I’m getting more and more scared as time passes. I’m crying so hard that it hurts, and my stomach aches because of the chain.

Now he’s back, this time carrying a McDonald’s bag.

“You must be hungry by now,” he says. “You gotta eat.”

I’m starving, so I can’t help it. I eat the cheeseburger and fries in seconds.

“We’re going upstairs—don’t try anything.”

He unlocks me, but it’s hard to stand up since I’ve been sitting on the floor since yesterday. My legs wobble as I walk upstairs in front of him. When we get to the top, I ask if I can use the bathroom.

“Hurry up,” he says, standing right beside the toilet until I’m done.

Then he takes me to the dining room, where he has a twin bed pushed up against the wall. On top of the bed is a box made out of wood lattice fencing, the kind you see around gardens, with blankets draped over the whole thing. It looks like a fort that a kid would build to play in.

He makes me stand at the edge of the bed and wraps a chain around my ankle, attaching the other end to the bed frame.

“Get in,” he orders.

So I crawl into his weird box, and he follows me. There’s barely enough space for both of us. I’m having trouble breathing, I’m so scared. His hands are all over me, and he grabs my breasts as I close my eyes and pray. Then he just falls asleep.

I lie there wide-awake. The police must be looking for me. I know my parents have called them by now.

Somebody has to find me.

 

April 2004: Searching for Gina

Nancy Ruiz was expecting Gina home by about three thirty at the latest.

She would have been home sooner if she had taken the RTA bus, but knowing Gina, Nancy figured that she had probably walked. Factoring in time to chat with friends and a stop at the corner store for Funyuns and a Pepsi, she usually walked in the door between three and three thirty.

Nancy was planning to take Gina to the Parmatown Mall for their monthly mother-daughter shopping trip. Because Nancy didn’t drive, they usually caught the bus near their house and made an evening of it. When Gina didn’t show up by four, Nancy walked to the corner store on Clark Avenue and asked if anybody had seen her.

She returned home and started calling her daughter’s friends. Nobody knew anything. Now Nancy was scared. She raced down to the corner again, and when there was still no sign of Gina at five thirty, she called 911.

A police car came immediately, and Nancy gave the officer a photo of Gina.

“Oh, your daughter is at that age,” the officer said. “She’s probably with her boyfriend.”

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Nancy told him. “She’s fourteen. I’m telling you, she would call me. Something happened to her.”

Nancy asked the police to issue an Amber Alert, but the officer explained that they couldn’t do that unless they were certain there had been an abduction, and they had at least some description of an abductor or a vehicle.

“Don’t worry, she’ll show up,” the officer assured her before leaving.

Nancy did not feel reassured and ran outside to meet Felix when he returned home a few minutes later.

“Gina is missing!” she shouted. “She never made it home from school!”

Felix immediately drove off to check around the school and drive the route she would have taken home. Nancy continued to call Gina’s friends while Gina’s older brother, Ricky, went looking for her in his own car.

By seven thirty Gina’s family was in a full-blown panic. They began searching the neighborhood on foot, walking along the railroad tracks, through vacant lots, and around the area’s factories. Nancy stayed by the phone in case Gina called.

Nobody slept that night as the search continued. In alleys behind bars, several people, clearly drunk, came out at closing time and asked what they were doing. When they heard a young girl was missing, they pitched in and started picking through Dumpsters.

 • • • 

On Saturday afternoon Cleveland police lieutenant Marge Laskowski arrived at 2:30 for her shift. She was the shift supervisor that day, so the missing-persons report on Gina was referred to her for follow-up and she drove to Gina’s house.

Laskowski, an eighteen-year veteran police officer, spent an hour with Nancy, sitting on Gina’s bed, listening to the tearful, distraught mother describe their tight-knit family. Laskowski had responded to scores of missing-children reports, and most of them turned out to be nothing. But something about this one felt different, and she believed Nancy when she said that Gina would never run away.

Back at the station she told a detective, “This is bad. I think this one is real.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Lieutenant,” he replied. “I guarantee you, she’ll be home before midnight.”

Laskowski was annoyed. She suspected that the detective’s response would have been different had Gina lived in a wealthy suburb, but because she came from a poor urban neighborhood, he assumed she was just another runaway shacked up with her boyfriend.

She passed her concerns directly to District Commander Gary Gingell, who immediately assigned detectives to work the case.

 • • • 

When news of Gina’s abduction reached Brian Heffernan late Saturday night, it hit him like a punch to the gut: Oh, my God, it happened again.

He immediately called Tim Kolonick at the FBI, with whom he had been investigating Amanda Berry’s disappearance for the past year, beginning and ending every workday by going over the case. Heffernan wanted all the manpower he could muster on this new one, and on Sunday morning he and Kolonick went to interview Nancy and Felix. On the way there, Kolonick called FBI agent Phil Torsney, who was at home packing his car for the long drive to Quantico, Virginia, for firearms training. Torsney drove over to join them, his car fully loaded for the trip, thinking the case would be resolved quickly and he would be on his way.

Torsney, who had been an FBI agent for more than twenty years, specialized in finding people. In 2011 he would make news around the world for his pivotal role in locating and arresting James “Whitey” Bulger, the infamous Boston mobster who had been a fugitive for sixteen years.

Torsney was a wiry, old-school agent who enjoyed strapping on his body armor and kicking in bad guys’ doors. Patient and methodical, he made ten peanut butter sandwiches every Sunday, putting two in his car for Monday and freezing the rest, removing two each morning the rest of the week so he didn’t have to leave a stakeout to eat. He, too, had been working the Amanda Berry case, and had spent hours sitting in his car at Westown Square, watching, hoping that something would catch his eye—someone out of place, someone stalking young girls, anything unusual.

Torsney got a bad feeling when he heard the details of Gina’s case. It was too soon to conclude that Amanda and Gina had been abducted by the same man, but there were too many similarities to ignore, and something dangerous was clearly happening in this part of Cleveland.

By noon, Gina’s house was swarming with media interviewing Nancy, Felix, and the police. Gina’s vanishing made the news within forty-eight hours, and reporters were raising the possibility that the two cases were related.

Using dogs and flashlights, police officers and FBI agents combed through the neighborhood, tracing Gina’s two-mile walk home, picking their way through abandoned houses and empty factories. They interviewed Arlene Castro, the last person to see Gina, and her mother, Grimilda Figueroa—Ariel Castro’s ex.

 • • • 

On Monday morning, several students at Wilbur Wright Middle School told police they had seen a suspicious white two-door car, driven by a Hispanic male, with a distinctive sticker on its back window: an image of a rainbow and a wolf. Police put out an alert for a vehicle of that description and began searching the Internet to try to identify the sticker, but could find nothing. They questioned every person who appeared on tapes recovered from a surveillance camera in the school’s office, but a camera at the school’s main door had been out of order that day. Had the camera been working, it would have recorded Ariel Castro entering the building. As school was letting out, Castro had walked in the school’s front door, looking for Arlene, and asked a security guard, a man he had grown up with, if he had seen his daughter. Nothing about the exchange had seemed unusual to the security guard, and because Castro worked for the school system, he didn’t think to mention the incident to the police.

Police also photographed a blue jacket, black pants, white hoodie, and blue-and-white sneakers that matched the outfit Gina had been wearing and put them on a “missing” flyer that they posted around the neighborhood.

On Monday evening, as Felix was helping post flyers along Lorain Avenue, a man walked out of an apartment near where Gina had disappeared and asked what he was doing. When Felix explained, the man said, “I’ll be looking out for your daughter.”

Felix thought there was something a little odd about him.

On Tuesday, police officers with a bloodhound searched the area around the pay phone on Lorain Avenue where Gina had last been seen. The dog picked up Gina’s scent and followed it, but the trail went cold around the corner of 104th Street, near McKenna’s Irish Pub—almost the exact spot where the man had asked Felix about Gina the night before.

That didn’t seem like a coincidence to Felix and his brother, Fernando. Without informing the police, they and some friends forced their way into the man’s apartment, roughing him up and demanding to know if he had had anything to do with Gina’s disappearance. He hadn’t, and Brian Heffernan soon got an angry call from the building’s owner, complaining that a door had been broken down. Heffernan explained that Felix was a distraught father looking for his missing daughter, and the man eventually calmed down and did not press charges, but Felix did have to pay him $900 in restitution, a huge sum for the family.

 

April 2004: Early Days

Gina

After I spent a few freezing days on the concrete in the basement, he finally gave me an old twin mattress to sit on and a thin, pink blanket to pull around me, but I’m still cold.

Days and days are passing, all the same.

He leaves me alone in the basement until he comes to take me to sleep with him in the strange covered bed upstairs. He gropes me, then falls asleep for the entire night.

The chains are digging into me, my whole body aches, and I’m always hungry.

I used to think time moved slowly in social studies class, but it’s nothing like how it drags by now. I sit and wait, jittery, for the next horrible thing to happen. I hate how he strokes my hair, how he wants me to sit on the couch with him and watch TV. It’s like he thinks we are friends. I’m terrified of him.

I see myself on the news! There’s a story about how the police are looking for me and another girl, Amanda Berry, who disappeared a year before me, near where I did. I’ve never heard of her, but I have never watched the news before now.

I see my mom and dad on TV, and all I can think of is them. I imagine my dad running down the stairs, ripping open these chains, picking me up, and carrying me home. I picture myself hugging my mom and never letting her go.

It makes me feel better to see that so many people are trying to find me, but I bet they have no idea where I am.

Lots of people know him, but no one gets how messed up he is. He goes to work every day, talks to his kids, acts normal—he even played in the high school band with my mom. Will anyone ever figure out that he is the perv who took me?

I start thinking about when he used to wave to me from his bus.

“Were you following me all those times?” I ask him.

“Yeah, I was,” he says. “You turned me on. I liked your cleavage. I liked it when you wore a black V-neck shirt and a jeans skirt. That was my favorite.”

I wonder if at the Christmas concert, when he was talking to my parents, he was already planning to kidnap me.

 • • • 

He takes me upstairs for dinner: Tonight it’s doughnuts, the grocery-store kind in a white box with a mix of powdered sugar, cinnamon, and chocolate. He gives me so little food that when he does, I’ll eat anything.

I have been asking him to let me write a letter to my family so I can tell them I’m alive, and one night in the kitchen he hands me a pen and piece of notebook paper. “Don’t say where you are, or who you’re with,” he warns. “But you can say you’re okay and you’ll be home soon.”

I don’t really think he will give my letter to them, but I want to believe he will, so I start writing.

Dear Everybody,

How are you? I am okay. I love you.

Mom and Dad, I love you. Don’t give up hope. I am not dead.

I want to come home now. People from my school who like me, and people who don’t like me, were on TV participating in my vigil. I want to say thank you to them.

Tell Chrissy not to go skating without me.

When I go home I want my family and friends over and we can cry together and have fun.

I tell my brother, Ricky, that he is funny sometimes, and that I miss him, and I tell my sister, Mayra, that I love her. And then I write: P.S. I want mom to know I cut my hair.

My hair had grown all the way down my back, and I used to like it that way. But I just chopped it off with the little kiddie scissors I use to cut pictures out of newspapers, because it makes me crazy how he keeps touching it. I hope he hates it short, and that he’ll now leave me alone. I put my ponytail in a plastic bag, and I’m going to give it to my mom when I get out.

Before I give the letter to him, I draw hearts at the top of the page and write in the margins, “Miss you a lot,” and on the envelope, “I love you” five times. I imagine them getting the letter and realizing I’m alive.

He takes me into the dining room and chains me up to the weird bed. When he leaves, I try for the millionth time to break free.

I keep staring at the padlock and then have an idea. I grab a pencil near the bed and push the tip of it into the lock. Maybe I can pick it. I fiddle with it, like they do on TV, but the pencil snaps, and the tip gets stuck in the keyhole. I lean back and start crying.

He laughs at me when he comes back into the room and points at the lock. He must have been watching me.

“I told you not to try anything. If I can’t trust you, I’m not sending your letter.”

He hands it back to me, and I hold it close to me and cry.

 • • • 

Every morning when he goes to work, I have to go back to the basement, where I feel like I’m in a dark hole. I can’t stand being with him upstairs, but I also hate being below ground with no light. So I wait until he seems to be in a good mood, and I work up my courage to ask him to move me.

“Do you have other rooms? Somewhere else I can stay in the day?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “I got rooms upstairs.”

“Well, can you put me up there? I can’t stand the basement anymore.”

“The other rooms are not fixed up. I’ll have to clean them.”

He actually seems to be considering the idea. I pray that he does.

Two days later he announces cheerily: “Okay. Your room is ready!”

He takes me to the second floor, where I have never been, and pushes open one of the closed doors. The room looks like a prison cell, with dirty yellow walls, a big bed with no sheets, and an old dresser and a TV. There is a thick chain with one end tied to a big steam radiator. He picks it up and says the other end is for me, and wraps it around my ankle.

At least I’m not underground anymore.

 • • • 

They keep showing Amanda Berry’s picture on the news, and there is something familiar about her. Then I realize: she looks just like the picture of a blond girl taped to the mirror in my new room.

I point to the photo and ask him who she is.

“Oh, that’s my ex-girlfriend.”

But I get a sick feeling. I’m sure it’s Amanda Berry. Why would her photo be in his house? What if he kidnapped her, too? Oh, my God, I bet he killed her.

“Did you take her?” I ask him.

“No.”

I don’t believe him.

We sit there for a long time watching TV, then I ask him a few more questions about Amanda Berry. The more I think about it, the more scared I am. She’s been missing for a year. If he did kill her, he’s probably going to kill me.

He can see how terrified I am and finally admits that he has her.

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

He unlocks me and takes me into the hallway outside my bedroom.

“You can look in, but pull your head back fast so she doesn’t see you,” he says.

He opens the door to the room right across the hall from mine, and I see a girl with blond hair sitting on the bed with her back to the door, watching TV.

He closes the door quickly and then, almost bragging, says, “I have another one, too.”

Oh, my God! There are two other girls in here!

I’m too shocked to respond, but I finally ask: “What’s her name?”

“Michelle.”

He leads me to another door in the hallway, opens it, and I look quickly and see a girl with dark hair lying on a bed, also watching TV. She doesn’t see me.

Who is this Michelle?

April 2004: Hiding Something

April 4

Amanda

I’m watching the news, and there’s another girl missing: Gina DeJesus, a seventh-grader at Wilbur Wright who disappeared at Lorain and West 105th. That’s so close to where I got taken! You can see the Burger King where I worked from there.

It sounds just like what happened to me, so I wonder if he had anything to do with it. But I haven’t heard anybody else in the house.

I do know that the other girl is still here. He told me her name is Michelle. She’s in the room right next to me, and she’s aggravating. I hate the head-banger music that she plays and sings along with.

“You should be more like her; she doesn’t cry at all,” he says.

He keeps telling me that she’s happy. He says her family is screwed up, and they are paying him to give her a place to live. He says he’s doing them a favor, and that her life here is better than the one she had before.

I’ve never talked to her to find out what is really going on, because he keeps us apart. Every once in a while we’re both downstairs at the same time, and we say hello, but I’ve seen her only briefly, and maybe ten times this whole year. Once when we were in the kitchen together and he went into the other room for a minute, I whispered to her, “My name is Amanda Berry.”

“I know who you are,” she said. “I’ve seen you on the news.”

But then he came back in, and we couldn’t talk anymore.

Now he’s in my room yelling at me again: “Stop it! Stop it now!”

“She says you’re making noise,” he says. “What are you doing?”

One of his big rules is that we have to be quiet. The only noise allowed is from the TV and radio.

“I’m sitting here watching TV,” I say. “What noise could I be making? When I stand up to pee, maybe she hears my chain. Does she have her ear to my wall?”

I’m not making noise. Why is she telling him lies about me?

April 7

“I only took your freedom,” he tells me.

He’s actually suggesting I should be grateful to him because he didn’t kill me. I want to kill him. His sick strategy is to take everything from me, then make me feel lucky and appreciative when he gives me a sandwich or lets me take a shower.

“It’s really hard to lose everything,” I tell him. “It’s so hard to sit here, stuck in this house. Everybody else is going on with their life outside, and you have me chained to a wall.”

“Don’t think like that,” he says.

He talks as if I have no right to be upset, as if all he has done is inconvenience me. Oops, I didn’t mean to burn your toast, sorry. That’s his tone. He acts as if it’s his right to do whatever he wants to me.

He’s not God. He can’t decide my life for me.

It would be so much easier if I just died, but I can’t think like that.

I can’t let him win.

April 10

I’m on America’s Most Wanted! They are showing pictures of me and Gina DeJesus together, because we both disappeared in the same neighborhood.

I’ve watched that show so many times, never once imagining I would be on it. They said Gina and I would be on next Saturday, too. Maybe somebody saw him with me, and this TV show will jog their memory.

 

April 10: I Feel Like She’s Close

Louwana had lost about thirty pounds in the year since Amanda had disappeared, and Beth could feel her mother was breaking. All the rage, sadness, and drinking were taking their toll. Louwana had not been able to go back to work and was now surviving on welfare checks.

She often felt guilty about the little arguments she’d had with Amanda before she disappeared. She knew Amanda was thinking of skipping work on the day she went missing, and she wished she let her. Regret ate at her.

Beth decided that she needed to be a positive force, because that was the most important thing she could do for her mother and her sister.

“I’m not going to eat today,” Louwana would say. “What if Mandy didn’t get to eat today?”

“It won’t do Mandy any good if you get sick,” Beth would reply.

She kept her mother busy putting up “missing” flyers and yellow ribbons around town, and she made sure her daughters kept their grandmother company. The kids sat and watched movies with her and often spent the night.

Louwana and Beth were constantly calling reporters and asking for coverage of Amanda, appealing to them on holidays like Mother’s Day or Christmas, or with any other hook they could think of. Sometimes the reporters came to interview them, but mostly not. Louwana yelled at them when they ignored her, but Beth reminded her that some coverage was better than none.

Beth hated public speaking, so to get over her fright she imagined that when she was looking into the lens of the TV camera, she was talking directly to Amanda and telling her everything would be okay.

One day a producer from America’s Most Wanted called and said that John Walsh, the show’s host, wanted to give Amanda’s case national exposure. A crew came to film in Cleveland, and Beth took the lead in the interviews: “We love you, Mandy. We want you home. We’re always going to be looking for you. We’ll never give up.”

Beth knew the odds were not good that Amanda would be found alive, but her instincts were telling her something different.

“My heart doesn’t feel empty like it would if she was gone,” she told her mother after the camera crew left. “I feel like she’s close.”

April 16

Amanda

He takes me downstairs to have a shower, the first one in days. As we’re walking through the dining room I see something strange. He sleeps down here a lot on a bed pushed over by the wall but now he has a strange, boxy contraption on top of it, like something kids would build. He pretends to not even notice it as we walk by. He seems like he’s hiding something.

Oh, my God, I bet Gina DeJesus is in there.

He must have taken her, too.

April 20

I’m in a new room now. He just moved me across the hallway into a smaller bedroom that’s painted blue. He didn’t say why, but I wonder if it’s because he put Gina in my old room. I still haven’t seen or heard her, but I sense something different in the house. I think she’s here.

I hate this room. It’s not like I loved the other one, but I had gotten used to it after almost a year. Change here usually means trouble.

He has a mirror set up on one wall of my room so he can stand in the hallway and see what I’m watching on TV. He put another mirror downstairs over the sink in the kitchen, so when he’s standing there he can keep an eye on what’s happening behind him. It’s awful to be watched every second. I’ve been crying all the time since he moved me.

“A baby doesn’t even cry that much,” he tells me.

I hate him.

“Did you take that girl, Gina?” I ask.

“No, of course not,” he says.

“I don’t believe you. I think she’s here.”

“Stay out of my business,” he snaps.

I smile to myself because I hit a nerve. So she is in this house!

“You told me if you ever got another girl, I could go home. So now that Gina is here, I should be home. Unless that was just another lie.”

That makes him really mad, and his voice gets deeper and meaner.

“You better shut up,” he says. “I’ve gone this far, I don’t know what I’m capable of now.”

He claims he moved me so he could sleep in my old room. Why does he lie? Does he think he can hide another girl in this little house, and I won’t find out?

He keeps the door to my old room shut and locked. Why lock it if nobody’s in there? The radio is blasting in the hallway, so I can’t hear if anybody’s moving around in there.

Maybe the police looking for Gina will find this house and rescue me and Michelle, too. I have to believe that every time he kidnaps another girl he is more likely to get caught.

April 21

“You think you are a victim, but I am a victim, too,” he says.

“What are you talking about?”

He tells me that when he was a boy in Puerto Rico, he was sexually abused by a boy who was a few years older.

“That doesn’t give you the right to do this to me.”

“Shut up!” he says, looking furious.

Does he really want me to feel sorry for him? Because someone hurt him, he thinks he can hurt other people? I don’t even know whether to believe him.

It’s been exactly a year since he took me and there’s been a lot about my case on TV today. I guess he’s decided to tell me now about his childhood because the news reports are talking about how sad my story is, and he’s so selfish that he doesn’t like me getting all the sympathy. On the eleven o’clock news I see my mom and Beth crying, and they’re showing Gina’s sister bringing flowers to my house. If Gina really is here, it’s great that our two families are together. Maybe someday when this is over we can all be friends.

A few weeks ago I saw my mom on the news, and she was burning a candle for me. I asked him to get me one just like it, and he did. It’s in a tall, red glass container with a picture of Jesus that he got at Marc’s discount store. I lit it today and I’m going to light it on all my important anniversaries and family birthdays. It makes my room feel a little warmer.

I think for a second about setting the room on fire. I have the candle and a cigarette lighter he gave me. Somebody might see the smoke and call the Fire Department, and they’d find us here. But the neighbors seem so clueless that they might not even call, and I could be dead by the time the firefighters got here. I guess he knows I would never risk it.

It makes me lonelier to see my family on TV, but it’s also a gift. At least one day a year, on the anniversary of my kidnapping, I know they will appear on the news, and I’ll be able to see if they look healthy, what they are wearing, if they’ve changed their hair, how my nieces are growing up.

April 21 is My Day.

April 22

It’s my eighteenth birthday, and he comes into my room like he’s Santa Claus or something.

“Happy birthday! Can I get you a cake?”

He doesn’t seem to understand how much I hate him. Who chains someone up and then offers to get them a birthday cake?

“No,” I tell him in a dead, cold voice. “I don’t want anything.”

But really, there’s a lot I do want for my birthday.

I want to be able to take back my stupid mistake of getting into his van. I want to take back every mean thing I ever said to my mom. I want to be a normal eighteen-year-old, having fun and saving up to go to college. I want my own room back and my clean, pressed clothes. I want to wash and cut my hair. I want to take a shower, twice a day, like I used to. I want to talk on the phone, walk outside, go shopping. I so, so, so want a Dr Pepper.

I don’t want to need counseling for the rest of my life.

I don’t want to always be scared of everyone I ever meet.

I want this to be over.

 

April 2004: Get Away from Me!

On the afternoon of Friday, April 16, Ariel Castro’s daughter Angie and her husband, Sam Gregg, came home to find the message light blinking on their answering machine. They had just moved and had a new landline number. They assumed the message was from either Angie’s mother or her father, as they were the only two people who knew the new number.

When they listened to the message, at first they heard only muffled sounds, like the caller’s phone was in a purse or a pocket—as if someone had inadvertently “pocket dialed” them. Then they heard the voice of a young woman, sounding terrified, screaming, “Get away from me!”

Angie and Sam were so shaken that they called the police. When officers came to their house and listened to the message, they said it was probably a prank call.

“Didn’t a girl come up missing around here?” Angie asked them.

Gina DeJesus’s disappearance two weeks earlier had been covered extensively by the local news, and Angie’s sister Arlene had been the last person to see Gina. Angie wondered if Gina, or someone holding her, had called her.

“Does Gina DeJesus know your phone number?” the officer asked.

“No,” she said.

“Why would she be calling you?” the officer asked.

“I don’t know,” Angie said.

The officers called a detective to come out and listen to the tape. After making a recording of it, he asked Angie if Gina had ever been to her house. Angie said she didn’t know Gina, and that Gina would have had no way of knowing her phone number.

Brian Heffernan passed the one-minute, forty-nine-second tape on to the FBI, and Tim Kolonick brought it to Nancy’s house and played it for her. Nancy thought it was Gina’s voice.

The FBI checked Angie’s phone records and traced the call to a cell phone belonging to a woman, who had lent it to her boyfriend, Richard Rogers. They interviewed Rogers, a local roofer, and he said that he had been at a family party at the time with many young teens, including his two kids, who had been fooling around, dialing random numbers. They didn’t remember who they called or what they said.*

April 2004: Suspects and Leads

Early in their investigation of Gina’s case the FBI focused on Fernando Colon, Arlene Castro’s stepfather, as a suspect.

When the two girls said their good-byes at the phone booth on the day Gina disappeared, Arlene crossed the street and walked directly to Westown Square, where Colon worked as a security guard, and he gave her a ride to their house on West 106th Street, only a few blocks away. The FBI figured that Colon would have needed no more than five minutes to drop Arlene off and then go back for Gina. Colon raised red flags for the FBI because he knew Gina, he carried a gun, and he had opportunity.

Five days after Gina had gone missing, the FBI picked up Colon for questioning. The FBI was familiar with Colon, as they had recently given him an award for helping them solve a bank robbery at Westown Square. While he was being questioned downtown, agents searched his car and his office, using Luminol to look for traces of blood, but they found nothing. Colon agreed to a lie-detector test, which he passed.

Colon and the FBI have starkly different memories of one aspect of his interrogation that day. Colon insists he told the agents that they were talking to the wrong man, and that they should turn their attention instead to Arlene’s biological father, Ariel Castro. He claims he informed them that Castro not only knew Gina but was a violent man who had been abusive to Arlene’s mother, Grimilda Figueroa. Kolonick and Torsney insist that Colon never mentioned Ariel Castro.

 • • • 

The FBI pulled police and court records listing sex offenders, parolees, and people with outstanding arrest warrants who lived in Gina’s and Amanda’s neighborhoods. Courts are often so backlogged that police can’t keep up with warrants issued for everything from assaults to traffic violations and Torsney started serving these outstanding warrants to get access to hundreds of homes to check for any signs of the missing girls. Sex offenders, those convicted of possessing child pornography, forcible rape or other crime involving a sex act, were a particular focus. Required by law to register their address, dozens were living in Amanda’s 44111 zip code and the FBI paid special attention to them, because sex offenders often repeat their crimes and are frequently linked to missing-children cases.

 • • • 

When the kids at Wilbur Wright reported seeing a suspicious Hispanic man driving a white car, it immediately reminded police of Amanda’s boyfriend, DJ Diaz. They had been keeping a close eye on DJ for the past year, but had never found any evidence linking him to Amanda’s case.

On Saturday, eight days after Gina’s disappearance, police spotted him driving a stolen car, arrested him, and got a search warrant for his house. They found plenty of marijuana but nothing to suggest that he was abducting girls.

 • • • 

Three weeks after Gina went missing, the FBI brought Arlene Castro in to be hypnotized.

Arlene, distraught about her friend’s disappearance, was eager to help police in any way she could. Investigators wanted to see if hypnosis could help her remember any detail—a car, a person, anything that she hadn’t already mentioned.

Heffernan and Kolonick sat with Arlene’s mother, Nilda Figueroa, during the session, which was conducted by a psychologist hired by the FBI. Arlene, who was thirteen, recounted events exactly as she had told police in her statement. There was nothing more.

 • • • 

In early May 2004, Torsney stood on Lorain Avenue near where Gina was taken and where Amanda had disappeared the year before and wondered if a serial killer was at work on this stretch of road. He and Kolonick feared that a careful killer had taken the two girls, then dropped their bodies in some Dumpster that had been carted off to a landfill.

Both men knew that the odds were against Amanda still being alive a year after her disappearance. But it was possible, they kept telling themselves. They spent a lot of time with Gina’s and Amanda’s families and they badly wanted to solve their cases.

One May afternoon, Torsney stared up at the apartment windows overlooking Lorain and had an idea. He climbed the stairs of one of the buildings on the street and knocked on a door. The man who answered was clearly drunk, but his apartment had a perfect panoramic view of Lorain Avenue.

Torsney proposed a deal: The FBI would set up video surveillance gear in the man’s apartment for a few weeks, and they would pay him for his trouble. He happily agreed.

FBI technicians positioned thousands of dollars’ worth of video cameras in the space, which recorded every person and car that passed on Lorain. Agents pored over the hours of footage but didn’t find anything useful.

The surveillance continued for several weeks. Then one day when an FBI agent came to put in a new set of blank tapes, he discovered that all the expensive gear was gone. The man who lived there said it had been stolen by burglars.

 

May 2004: Friends

Gina

It’s May 7. I know that because they mentioned the date on TV, and that means I’ve been here a month and five days. I’m on the news all the time and I keep waiting for the cops to break down the door and rescue me. Where are they?

He keeps asking if I’m a virgin.

“Of course I am. I’m only fourteen.”

“When we have sex,” he tells me, “I’m going to get, like, a hundred points, because you’re a virgin.”

When we have sex. His words ring in my ears, and I’m scared he’s going to rape me. A hundred points? What is he talking about?

I start talking about my mom and dad, hoping he’ll feel guilty because he knows them.

“If I knew you were Felix’s daughter, I would have left you alone,” he replies.

Why is he claiming that he didn’t know who I was? When he was stalking me, he saw me walk into my house. He knew I was Arlene’s friend and saw me with her just before he took me. Does he just like to lie?

We watch TV for a while until he says, “Let’s go talk in the living room.”

I never know what he’s thinking. Why do we have to talk in the living room? But I do what he says because I have no choice. He says he’ll put me back in the basement if I don’t obey him.

I sit down on the couch.

He stands in front of me and starts to take off his clothes.

“What are you doing?” I ask, terrified.

“Just shut up and take your clothes off.”

“No!” I shout, but he’s on top of me in a second, tugging at the sweatpants and T-shirt he makes me wear. And then he rapes me.

He’s so much bigger than I am and hurts me horribly as he slams against me. He seems angry, like he wants to hurt me as much as he can. I’m screaming and crying and beating him back, but it’s useless.

I’m crying and bleeding. I’ve been terrified he would do this. But having this old pig on top of me was even more horrible than I’d imagined. He just took something I’ll never get back. I want to die. I try to cover myself with my clothes.

“We gotta celebrate!” he says, standing up and pulling his pants back on. “That was your first time!”

He goes to the kitchen and returns with a bottle of red wine and two glasses, then pours one for each of us.

“Now you’ll never forget me,” he says. “I was your first, and you never forget your first.”

I can’t look at him.

He makes me take a drink. I have never had wine before, and it tastes awful.

 • • • 

Now that he’s started raping me, he can’t stop.

It’s three or four times every day.

Day after day it’s the same: He comes in, takes off his clothes, and climbs on me. He’s so hairy everywhere, even his butt. He’s the most disgusting man I can imagine.

He makes me look at him and tell him all this ridiculous stuff. “I love it.” “I want it.” “You’re so sexy.” If I don’t say it, he yells at me and makes it hurt more.

He doesn’t even unchain me.

 • • • 

“Do you want a friend?” he asks one day.

He knows I do. I’m desperately lonely and I have nobody to talk to but him. I’ve told him how much I miss my parents, my brother and sister, my cousins and friends. I have been here for over a month.

“I can go kidnap your friend Chrissy to keep you company,” he says.

“No!” I scream. I told him once that I missed Chrissy, and I should never have mentioned her name.

“Well, if you help me clean up, I’ll bring one of the other girls here to talk to you,” he says. “But only if you do what I tell you to.”

I’m almost always alone. He knows how sad I am, so he’s started giving me cigarettes, a lot of them. It feels weird to smoke so much, since I got grounded for sneaking just one cigarette at home. Now I’m going through a pack every other day because I have nothing else to do.

He gives me alcohol, too. I can’t stand the taste of wine or beer, but Mike’s Hard Lemonade is okay.

I wonder how the other girls are dealing with him. He says Amanda doesn’t like to talk to anyone and keeps to herself. A couple of times Michelle and I have both been downstairs together, but he didn’t let us talk, except to say hello.

Now he tells me that he’s going to take me over to Michelle’s room. But he has rules, like always. “You can talk to her, but you can’t tell her your real name,” he says. “Tell her you’re Arlene.”

“I look older than Arlene,” I remind him. “She’s only thirteen, and I’m fourteen. I’ll say I’m your daughter Emily.”

I don’t want to do every little thing he says. If he is going to make me pretend I’m somebody else, at least I can pick who it is.

“All right, I don’t care,” he says.

He unlocks me from the radiator but leaves the chain around my stomach, then walks me to Michelle’s room down the hallway. She is sitting on her bed, but I can see her chain sticking out from under the blanket.

“My daughter wants to say hi,” he tells her.

“I’m Emily,” I say.

She looks at me curiously and says, “I’m Michelle Knight.”

That’s the first time I’ve heard her full name. I’m dying to talk to her more. I wonder how she got here. I wonder if he treats her as badly as he treats me.

But he’s standing right there, so we talk about nothing much, just TV and music.

“I like to do people’s hair,” I say. “I could do yours sometime if you want.”

“That would be nice,” she says, smiling.

We try to talk more but he cuts us off, snapping, “That’s enough.”

“Nice talking to you,” I tell her.

 • • • 

A couple of days later, he tells me I can come downstairs and fix Michelle’s hair.

“You can use the bathroom. There’s a mirror in there.”

I’m happy to have something to do. I am learning to read his moods and right now, thank God, he seems to be in a good one. He’s not yelling that I’m “good for nothing” and calling me mean names. When that happens I know not to talk to him, or even look at him. But when he’s in a good mood, I can get favors, like the other day when I asked for an empty cardboard box to draw on.

“I need some rubber bands,” I tell him as we go into the bathroom. He must have some in all his piles of junk. He doesn’t throw anything away. There are rows of big plastic pop bottles filled with water sitting in the closets and the hall. He says they’ll be handy if there’s ever a fire. That makes me wonder: What would happen to us if the house caught fire and we were locked in our rooms?

I don’t want to push my luck, but I also ask: “I see you have some hair gel. Can I use a little bit?”

“Sure,” he says.

Why is he being nice today?

I bring a kitchen chair into the bathroom, and Michelle sits down. I ask her how she’d like her hair.

“I’m going to be right here in the kitchen,” he warns us, “and I can hear everything.”

I start styling her hair, and we talk about music and clothes. He ducks in, says Michelle’s hair looks good, and then goes into the living room. I lean over and whisper in her ear, “I’m not really Emily. I’m Gina DeJesus.”

“I know who you are,” she whispers back. “I’ve seen you on TV.”

He walks back into the kitchen, and we go back to talking about hair.

May 23, 2004: America’s Most Wanted

Gina

“You want to see your family on TV?”

“Of course I do!” I tell him.

“Amanda recorded America’s Most Wanted, and your family is on it. Let’s go watch.”

The guy who kidnapped me wants me to watch a TV show about my kidnapping! He unchains me, and we walk into Amanda’s room, directly across the hallway. I have seen her a couple of times, but we haven’t talked. One time our doors were open at the same time, and we waved to each other, but that was it.

We all sit on her bed, and she only says “hi,” so I try to make conversation.

“I like your nails,” I tell her, noticing that he must have bought her polish. “And your rings are really pretty.”

“Thanks,” she responds, though she’s not smiling, and it’s pretty clear she doesn’t want to talk. She seems tough. On TV they say she has been missing for a year. A whole year—how has she been able to stand it? I would love to ask her.

The show starts with my mom crying and talking about the day I disappeared. Then Arlene comes on, describing how we said good-bye at the pay phone. She says my last words to her were: “Well, okay. I’ll talk to you later.” I remember that, too. I wish she knew what happened next. It’s crazy that they’re showing pictures of me and Arlene being happy together while her father is keeping me prisoner.

Now they’re showing pictures of Amanda, her mom and sister, and people walking near the Burger King with signs that read WE LOVE YOU, MANDY. They say the police aren’t sure if our two cases are related.

It’s intense sitting here, all of us on Amanda’s little bed, watching this. I think he likes it. He keeps smiling, especially when Arlene is talking. He doesn’t seem worried that millions of people are watching this show all over the country. Doesn’t he care that people are looking for us and our kidnapper?

As soon as the show is over, he tells me I have to go back to my room. Amanda is crying, and I start, too. I was so happy to see my parents, but now that the TV is off, I feel worse, like my mom and dad have been taken from me again.

I haven’t cried this hard since the first couple of weeks, and that seems to annoy him.

“I guess I shouldn’t have let you watch it,” he says.

 

May 2004: Poinciana

Nancy Ruiz was afraid that if she left her house, even for a minute, she might miss a call from Gina, or that Gina might actually walk in. So for a long time she stayed in her kitchen, barely stepping outside. When for the first time in weeks she finally did go out, the neighborhood seemed entirely different. Every person she saw looked suspicious, and houses that had been familiar now frightened her. When reporters showed up, she would freeze in front of the cameras and let Felix do the talking.

Felix, meanwhile, continued to organize searches in every alleyway in the city. Nancy had fixated on one house a couple of blocks away that had broken windows covered with Christmas wrapping paper. One night she noticed a bright light inside, as if someone was trying to make an abandoned home look occupied. When she walked by again at three in the morning and saw the light still on, she called Phil Torsney, who found an old, mentally ill man living there, but no sign of Gina.

Nancy told Torsney about a suspicious house in her neighborhood where the curtains were always drawn, so he knocked on the door. When the owner gave him permission to go inside, the stench was so overpowering from the large number of dogs who lived there and had defecated everywhere that one officer had to step out to vomit.

Nancy kept passing on leads to police and even investigated some herself. She searched around Gina’s school and in nearby neighborhoods, always hoping she would see a poinciana blossom. Gina loved to draw the red tropical flower, and Nancy thought she might have drawn one where she was being held, a signal that only her mother would understand.

May 2004: Ariel Castro, Interviewer

One afternoon in May 2004, Castro’s son, who was named Ariel after his father, knocked on the door of Gina DeJesus’s house on West 71st Street.

The young Ariel, who was twenty-two, had been studying journalism at Bowling Green State University and wanted to write a story about Gina’s disappearance for the Plain Press, a community newspaper on the west side of Cleveland. He said he was very sorry about what had happened.

Nancy had met him with his father when he was a young boy, and because she was eager for any publicity about the case, she invited him in. For the next few hours she recounted everything she knew about Gina’s disappearance, and he listened politely.

His story appeared the following month:

Since April 2, 2004, the day 14-year-old Gina DeJesus was last seen on her way home from Wilbur Wright Middle School, neighborhood residents have been taken by an overwhelming need for caution. Parents are more strictly enforcing curfews, encouraging their children to walk in groups, or driving them to and from school when they had previously walked alone.

“You can tell the difference,” DeJesus’ mother, Nancy Ruiz said. “People are watching out for each other’s kids. It’s a shame that a tragedy had to happen for me to really know my neighbors. Bless their hearts, they’ve been great.”

On Cleveland ’s west side, it is difficult to go any length of time without seeing Gina’s picture on telephone poles, in windows, or on cars along the busy streets.

“People are really looking out for my daughter,” Ruiz said.

For seven weeks, Gina’s family has been organizing searches, holding prayer vigils, posting flyers and calling press conferences. Despite the many tips and rumors that have been circulating in the neighborhood, there has been no sign of her.

One thing is for certain, however. Almost everyone feels a connection with the family, and Gina’s disappearance has the whole area talking.

 

July 21, 2004: Chains

Amanda

At night, the heavy chain around my stomach makes it hard to sleep, and during the day it makes it impossible to forget where I am.

My chain is actually a few different chains linked by padlocks, and it stretches five feet from the radiator to my stomach. So five feet has become the size of my whole world.

I shift the chain around so the padlock rests on my belly, then on my side, and finally on my back. But nothing feels better. I am covered with bruises and calluses. Just looking at the chain makes me cry. It’s like a snake in the bed with me, threatening to squeeze me to death.

“I can’t take this anymore! Can you at least move it to my ankle?”

He thinks about it for a minute and says, “Okay.”

I’m surprised.

“Which ankle?” he asks.

I try to figure out which one will give me more room.

“Right,” I tell him, holding it out.

“There,” he says, as he winds it around my ankle several times. “Try that.”

I take a few steps and feel lighter, freer, without the extra pounds around my stomach. I lie down on the bed and roll from side to side.

After he leaves, I am happier for a moment, then suddenly scared. There was absolutely no way to get that chain off my waist, but my ankle is so skinny. Maybe I can slip it off. Could this be my chance to escape? Would I have the nerve to try? I feel like he knows what I’m thinking and he’s testing me, so I try to think about something else.

“I need to know I can trust you,” he always says. “You know what I can do to you.”

I never know when he is watching me or even when he is home. I think he just went downstairs, but I’m not sure because of the noise from the radio. What if he’s just outside the door and looking at me through the hole where the doorknob should be? I decide to not fiddle with the chain. If he saw me trying to take it off, he might move it back to my waist, and I couldn’t take that.

An hour passes. I slowly flex my ankle back and forth and feel the painful new sensation of heavy metal there. I think again how I might be able to slide the chain off. It’s tempting and terrifying.

I hear his footsteps on the stairs, and then they stop outside my room. He must be watching me. I keep my eyes on the TV and don’t even look at the chain.

Finally he unlocks the door, hands me a bag of Wendy’s, and takes a long look at my ankle to see if I tried anything. I knew it.

August 2004: One Bullet

Gina

He seems to treat me better than the other girls. I have the nicer room, and he brings me downstairs more often than them. He lets me eat first, so when he brings home a pizza that has ten slices, I can take four, and the other two get three each. I feel guilty about having more, but I’m hungry all the time, and it’s hard to wait for hours and hours to eat. I wonder if he’s kinder to me because I’m the new girl, and I wonder what happens when I’m not new anymore.

I want to go back to before this all happened, to when I could just walk to the refrigerator if I was thirsty or hungry, to when I had fun doing cartwheels with my friends and playing pranks on my mom. I remember once sneaking up to our big front window when she was sitting on the couch watching TV with her back to me. I smacked the window hard, and she jumped straight up. It was the funniest thing ever, and she laughed when she saw it was me.

I’m daydreaming about all that when he comes into the living room with a gun.

Michelle starts freaking out, but he’s not pointing it at us and he seems to be in a good mood.

“Let’s play a game,” he says.

He opens the gun to show us that it is loaded with one bullet. He takes it out, puts it back, and spins the chamber around.

Michelle is scared and moves as far away as she can. But I just keep staring at the gun. When he brought me here, he told me he had a revolver and would kill me if I tried to escape. He brought it from the kitchen, so he must keep it hidden on top of the refrigerator or in one of the high cupboards. He’s always telling us we are short and can’t reach anything. I’m the tallest and I’m not quite five-foot-two.

He explains the game: If I’m willing to take the risk, he will put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. If I live, he’ll give me a chance to put the gun to his head.

“Come on,” he says. “Want to play?”

“Okay,” I tell him. “I’ll play with you.”

He seems surprised. Michelle looks shocked and says it’s a bad idea.

“What do I have to lose?” I say. “I’ll play.”

“You understand I’m going to pull the trigger, right?” he asks.

I’m getting more nervous as I have time to think about it. But I can’t stand what’s happening in this house anymore, so I say a prayer to God and then to my parents to forgive me.

“I’m ready,” I tell him.

He puts the gun to my temple and pulls the trigger.

I hear a click and then open my eyes. My heart is beating fast. I don’t know what I feel, but he seems excited.

“Let’s keep playing,” he says. “Will you pull the trigger on me? If you do, it means you hate me. And if you can’t, it means you don’t hate me.”

Is he serious? Doesn’t he know how much I hate him?

“Think about it,” he says.

He gets on his knees and says he needs a minute to pray. He bows his head and closes his eyes. Then he looks up and tells me again: “If you pull the trigger, it means you hate me.” He’s been drinking beer, and maybe he’s had more than I realize, because it should be obvious to him by now that I’d love to blow his head off.

He hands me the gun and I don’t waste a second. I put it right to his head and pull the trigger.

Click.

I was hoping he’d be dead on the floor, and I would run out of the house, and we’d all be free. Now I’m afraid that I might be in big trouble, but he stands up and doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t seem mad. It’s like he doesn’t care at all.

August 2004: Summer

Gina

I can’t take being here anymore. It’s been four months. I can’t stand what he’s doing to me. I’m scared every time the door opens.

“I want to kill myself,” I tell him.

“Okay, he says. “Let me help you.”

He leaves and returns in a minute with a rope. He ties it into a noose and hands it to me. “If you really want to die, take this. I’ll watch.”

When he first kidnapped me, all I cared about was staying alive because I was sure he was going to kill me. I kicked and clawed and screamed. But now I feel hollowed out. I have nothing left, no strength.

I desperately want to go home, but I don’t see how this will ever end.

I put the rope around my neck.

He stands there watching me. He doesn’t seem to care if I die.

I start thinking about what he will do with my dead body, so I ask him.

“I’ll bury you in the backyard,” he says. “Nobody will ever know.”

I think about my parents and start crying. They’ll never know Arlene’s dad did this to me. I don’t want him to get away with this.

I lift the rope off.

“I’ll keep this in your closet in case you need it later,” he says.

 • • • 

I don’t even bother to turn on the TV anymore. I spend all day lying down, staring at the ceiling, trying to forget where I am. Sometimes I stay like this for days at a time, barely moving.

Every few hours back. Even after he leaves the room, I can still feel his hands on me.

I tried to shoot him and I’ve looked in the kitchen for knives to stab him. I daydream about shoving him down the stairs and running out of the house, or finding a window he hasn’t boarded up and climbing out onto the roof. But it’s no use because of these chains, and I’m losing strength. Instead of trying to kill him, I’m now just trying to push him out of my head.

“I can bring a friend into your room,” he says one day. “This is a big bed. You can share it.” He says Michelle can stay in this room with me. I would like to have someone to talk to, but I don’t want to share a bed, so I don’t answer him.

He leaves and comes back with Michelle, orders her to sit on my bed, and chains her ankle to the radiator. I guess he made up his mind: I’m going to have a roommate. He leaves and locks the door.

Neither of us says anything for a while, then Michelle tells me he’s worried that I’m going to set the room on fire with my cigarettes. The other day, I emptied my ashtray into a cardboard box we use for trash, and it started smoking. He pretended that he was concerned that I was depressed, but I guess the real reason that he brought me a roommate was so that I don’t burn down his house.

I’m glad I have Michelle here, but then he ruins everything. He comes in and starts taking his clothes off. He climbs on Michelle, and I roll away and try not to watch. I can’t stop crying.

Then it’s my turn.

 • • • 

Michelle and I have been talking for days, telling each other everything. She’s been here for two years, since she was twenty-one. He got her into his car by saying that he had puppies at his house and that she could have one.

She knows his daughter Emily, so of course she didn’t believe it when I said I was Emily. I can’t believe we’re both friends with his kids.

She says her family is messed up. She has a son, but somebody else had been taking care of him even before she got here, and she has no idea where he is now. She’s never been on the news, so she thinks her family didn’t even report her missing.

She knows everything about my family and Amanda’s because she sees them on TV all the time. She and Amanda were in this house together for a whole year before I got here, but he’s kept them separate so they’ve never talked—just said hi a few times.

It’s like he’s collecting girls. I wonder if he’s going to kidnap any more.

We’ve actually been laughing a little and trying to cheer each other up. We sing to the radio and do silly stuff like throw spitballs. We can’t move around much because we’re chained, but I’m happy to have somebody to help me pass the time.

Then he’s back, and it starts all over again.

 • • • 

We’ve been watching the Olympics in Athens almost every night. He gets so excited at the sight of these gymnasts. I don’t get it. These girls are so small and young.

“Wow, look at her,” he says.

I don’t want to, but he makes me.

Then he rapes me.

I used to love to watch the Olympics, but now I’ll never watch them again.

August 2004: New Strategy

Amanda

Those two girls in the next room make it even harder to be here. They bug me, laughing and talking all the time. I can hear them through the door, and they actually joke with him, like everything’s okay. They sing constantly with their radio up loud. I feel like I’m the only sane person here, but I guess everybody has their own way of coping with being kidnapped.

He tells me that they’re nice to him, and that they say I’m stuck up and won’t talk to them when we are all together downstairs. We’re all in the same mess, but it feels like it’s me against them. He does treat them better. Lots of nights he takes them downstairs to watch movies, and I can hear them having fun. Sometimes he asks me to join them, but I think that’s messed up. I can’t feed his fantasy that we’re a big happy family.

But I am starting to wonder if I’m handling this wrong. Being mad at him all the time is getting me nothing but more abuse. I had a bad headache tonight, and he wouldn’t give me any aspirin. I’m still hungry all the time, and he feeds them first. Last night I didn’t get Chicken McNuggets until two a.m., which is when their movie ended, I guess.

Maybe those girls have the right idea. Maybe I should try being nicer to him. I might as well try anything to get better treatment. I can pretend to like him. That’s going to be my new strategy.

August 30

He can’t wait to tell me his news.

“I saw your mom at Value City!” he says. “I was walking out, and she was walking in with two other ladies I didn’t recognize.”

“Was she okay? Did she look healthy?” I ask him as I start to cry.

“Yeah, she looked good,” he says, like it’s no big deal.

What are the chances that he and my mom would come face-to-face? I wonder if she felt anything when she was close to him. She has strong intuition, so could she have sensed me, even for a second, as she passed him? I hope so. I would give anything to feel her close to me.

 • • • 

My new plan seems to be working. I’ve been laughing a little more and crying a little less. I’ve been talking to him and acting less miserable, and he likes it. He’s been nicer to me. He got me six goldfish, which I’m calling Ry, Riss, Chica, Blanca, Harley, and Shady, and he got me an Eminem picture in a frame. He even let me shave my legs for the first time since I got here almost a year and a half ago. It’s good to have my legs as smooth as they used to be.

I’ve been going downstairs with him to watch TV, which means I get a little time without my chain. The other night he rented The Passion of the Christ, the Mel Gibson movie that he really wanted to see. It was weird to sit beside such an evil man and watch the story of Jesus.

October 8

He thinks I don’t notice that he treats Gina and Michelle better. I see him going into their room and I’ll bet he’s bringing them things he’s not giving to me. He treats them like friends but uses me for sex.

As hard as this is to admit, I want him to talk to me, just not about sex. I need someone to talk to. I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone in eighteen months. When I try to talk to him, I’m careful not to mention family or anything that’s bothering me. He always wants to talk about sex, but I try to get him to talk about music or anything else. He plays his bass in the house, and he’s actually good. He sings, too, and thinks he’s great, but his voice is terrible.

“Why can’t you talk normally to me?” I ask him. He doesn’t reply.

I’m having a terrible day—even the last of my fish died. I’ve been crying since I woke up.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, sitting on the edge of my bed.

“Can I have a hug?” I say. “I just really need a hug.”

I can’t believe I said that. I know it’s not right. It’s strange. But just now I do need a hug. It’s hard to be so filled with anger and hate all the time. He puts his arms around me and holds me.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “everything is going to be okay. I’m going to take you home one day, and you’ll be back together with your family.”

“When?” I ask.

“I don’t know—soon,” he says.

I’m so tired of waiting that I begin sobbing into his shirt.

“It’s okay, it’s normal to cry,” he says. “I want to tell you something.”

“What?” I ask, wiping my tears.

“I have feelings for you.”

That’s crazy. How can he say that? He treats me like garbage. He has ruined my life. And he has “feelings” for me?

I’m so confused. I decided to be nicer to him so he would treat me better. But I don’t want to be his girlfriend. Why did I ask for a hug from this monster? Is this what prison does to you?

October 11

He is doing laundry and says that we all have to help, so I go to the basement with him, Gina, and Michelle.

We’re looking at one another awkwardly. We’ve been together as a group only a few times but have never had a real conversation. Gina and Michelle live in the same room, so they talk all the time, but I’m by myself.

He stays there with us as we fold and hang clothes, so we really can’t talk about anything other than TV shows and movies. Gina and Michelle actually seem nice and it feels good to talk. We even laugh a little. There is so much I’d like to ask them. How did they get here? Do they know any way out?

I think about escaping all the time. I have fantasies about prying open a window and jumping.

I never thought I could hurt anybody, but now I find myself daydreaming about whether I could actually kill him. I picture trying to stick a knife in his back when we’re in the kitchen, but he has only two or three sharp ones, and he knows exactly where they are all the time. I could hit him over the head with a beer bottle. But what if I only wounded him? If he ever thought I was trying to kill him, he’d kill me first.

He has a handgun—I saw him put it in a closet near the basement steps. He says he found it at his father’s car dealership after his father died last January. He took it out to show me once. I can’t get it out of my head because I know he would use it.

He weighs 180 pounds—he talks about his weight all the time—and we’re all tiny. Gina’s about my size, and Michelle is even smaller, not even five feet tall, so if we attacked him it would be like three puppies trying to kill a grizzly bear. I wonder if that’s why he picked us. The only thing we have in common is that we’re all petite, and we all have big breasts. I guess that’s his type.

November 16, 2004: Psychic

Amanda

This is huge! Mom’s going to be on The Montel Williams Show.

I just saw a promo on TV, which said she’s going to be on tomorrow with Sylvia Browne, that cool psychic. I love her. This is amazing! Mom and I used to watch Montel all the time and we loved it when Sylvia was on. She made some amazing predictions.

I’ve been praying that Montel saw me on America’s Most Wanted and that he would have Mom on with Sylvia. Now it’s happening. I hope Sylvia can see that I’m kidnapped and that I’m right here, so close to home. I want my mom to know I’m alive. Sylvia has to tell her!

November 17

There she is! My mom’s on TV, sitting right there with Montel and Sylvia. And they show Beth sitting in the audience. They must have flown to New York for the show. This is so exciting!

Sylvia is asking Mom about a “Cuban-looking” guy who is short and stocky. It’s him! He’s Puerto Rican, not Cuban, but it’s close.

“Can you tell me if they’ll ever find her?” Mom asks. “Is she out there?”

Then Sylvia says: “I hate this when they’re in water. I just hate this. She’s not alive, honey.”

What? Why did she say that?

Mom’s face just drops. I start crying and shouting at the TV. I’m not dead! I’m alive and I’m right here!

Now Sylvia’s describing how the Cuban guy wears his pants really low. What is she talking about? I can’t believe this.

My mom sounds desperate: “So you don’t think I’ll ever get to see her again?”

“Yeah,” Sylvia tells her. “In heaven, on the other side.”

This is awful. When I get out of here, I’m going to have a few words with Sylvia Browne. She is a fraud. Now my poor mother is going to be convinced I’m dead, because she trusts Sylvia. This is going to crush her. She has to ignore what she was told and keep believing I’m alive and fighting to bring me home. If she doesn’t, how can I keep hoping?

They cut to a commercial, and my mom is gone.

November 21

“I wrote a letter to my mom,” I say, handing it to him. “Please let me send it.”

As he takes it from me and starts reading, I tell him, “I don’t say anything about you. I just tell her not to listen to Sylvia Browne, and that I’m alive. It breaks my heart that she thinks I’m dead.”

“It says you’re being held hostage,” he says.

“Well, what do you call this?” I snap back. “I am being held hostage. Please, I don’t mention anything about you. I just say that I want to come home, but I can’t.”

I’m crying now. I didn’t mean to sass him, because that makes him mad. But I’m so upset I can’t help it. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I’m sick to my stomach worrying about my mom.

“You shouldn’t believe in psychics anyway,” he says. “It’s stupid.”

“I know, but I just want her to know I’m alive.”

“You can’t send this,” he says and then tears the letter up and hands the pieces back to me.

December 5

My mom has been on the news a lot and she seems different, sadder. She says she took down the yellow ribbons at our house, washed them, and left them in my room.

He brought me the Plain Dealer because there’s a story about me, and it says my mom took down the posters in my room and gave away my computer. She says she’s not even buying me a Christmas present this year because she’s not sure anymore that I’m alive.

All because of Sylvia Browne, that fake. She put a knife right in my mom’s heart because it made for good TV ratings. The article says my mom is 98 percent sure that what Sylvia told her is true, that I’m dead. She said she “lost it” after that show.

I write down what she told the reporter Stephen Hudak: “Please don’t misunderstand me. I still don’t want to believe it. I want to have hope but after a year and a half what else is there?”

I am crying so hard that I’m shaking. I wish God would show her some sort of sign that I’m alive. I get my strength from knowing that my mom is fighting for me. If she gives up, I’ll feel like I don’t exist.

 

December: Psychic Fallout

On the drive back to the airport after her appearance on Montel Williams’s show, Louwana stared out the window in silence. She and Beth talked a little about 9/11 as they drove near Ground Zero, but Louwana didn’t mention Sylvia or Amanda. When they returned home Louwana, who had been so angry for so long, now seemed only sad. Beth tried to cheer her up, but nothing seemed to get through.

On the first Christmas that Amanda had been gone, Louwana had bought her an Eminem poster and a gold bracelet, little things she thought Amanda would like. But this year there was no talk of gifts. Instead Louwana would lie silently on Amanda’s bed and listen to her radio for hours, smoking and drinking and alone.

April 2, 2005: Vigils

For a year after Gina went missing, Nancy and Felix held candlelight vigils every Friday on the corner where she was last seen. The crowds eventually waned, and they held the gatherings less often, but more than fifty people turned out on the cold, windy night of the first-year anniversary of her disappearance, standing in a circle at Lorain and West 105th Street, holding hands and praying. They then marched five blocks to Wilbur Wright Middle School, chanting Gina’s and Amanda’s names, along with the name of another girl who had been missing from the neighborhood for a decade, Christina Adkins. Beth marched with them.

Over the past year Nancy and Felix had become aware of what seemed to be an epidemic of missing children in America, and they felt an obligation to talk about not just Gina, but all of them. Nancy began making calls to groups that supported the cause, educating herself on the issue. She discovered that thousands of children disappear in America every year, and was struck by how little she had known about them. It seemed to her that no one was paying enough attention to the issue.

Nancy only learned about Christina Adkins after her own daughter never came home from school. She started to tell everyone she could: “People are taking our children, and we’ve got to stop it!”

She was determined to become a public advocate, a voice for the missing kids, but she was often crippled by sadness. One night when she thought she couldn’t take the pain any longer, she prayed, “Please take this burden off of me because I cannot carry it.” She felt immediate relief and a shot of new energy and kept praying, “Please, God, open your arms and wrap them around Gina.”

She remained certain that Gina was alive and that God would watch over her. In a quiet act of faith, Nancy opened a bank account for Gina and deposited twenty or thirty dollars in it every month.

August 2005: Testimony

On August 30, 2005, Fernando Colon stood trial on charges that he had molested Nilda and Ariel Castro’s daughters, Emily, age sixteen, and Arlene, age thirteen. The previous September, at a time when Castro was holding Amanda, Gina, and Michelle captive, he had taken his two daughters to a police station to file a complaint that Colon had touched them inappropriately while they slept.

Colon insisted that the charges were false and had been instigated by Castro, who he said had coached them into making the allegations. Nilda defended Colon in court, corroborating Colon’s testimony that Castro had persuaded the girls to make false charges in exchange for money and gifts.

“If anything inappropriate had occurred, my daughters would have been quick to tell me,” Nilda said in an affidavit filed in the case. She explained that Arlene told her that she’d had a dream that Colon had touched her, and that dream had become “an exaggerated story.”

Five days before Colon’s trial, Nilda reported to police that Castro was pressuring Emily, who was then living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to return to Cleveland to testify against Colon. Nilda said Castro told her he was going to “bring Emily back and beat your ass in front of her.”

Nilda sought a restraining order in domestic relations court barring Castro from coming near her or her children, telling the court about years of violence by Castro and that he had threatened to kill her and her kids. Even though Castro had no visitation rights, she said he “frequently abducts his daughters and keeps them from [her].”

The court issued a temporary restraining order that required Castro to complete “batterer counseling” and banned him from drinking alcohol, using illegal drugs, or possessing a deadly weapon. No home visit was ordered. The temporary restraining order raised no red flags at the school system where Castro was a bus driver. A prosecutor said there were so many domestic violence cases that it was virtually impossible to check them against all school and city employees. The court then scheduled a hearing to determine whether to make that restraining order permanent. On the day of the hearing, Castro and his lawyer appeared before the magistrate, as did Nilda, but her lawyer, Robert A. Ferreri, failed to show up because he had a hearing at the same time in juvenile court.

The magistrate would not proceed without Nilda’s lawyer present, and he gave her two weeks to file for a new hearing. Because she did not, her case was dismissed and Castro was free of any legal constraints. Nilda later told Elida that after her lawyer failed to appear, she lost her nerve to pursue the case.

But Colon’s case went to trial and provided dramatic courtroom testimony about Ariel Castro’s long history of violence against Nilda.

The defense’s central argument was that Ariel Castro was a violent, vindictive, and controlling man who was fully capable of using his own daughters as a means to settle a grudge against a man who was now living with his ex-wife.

“What did take place here is not exactly a love triangle,” Ferreri told the judge. “It’s kind of a power triangle. It’s kind of a control triangle. Mr. Castro is obsessed with power and control over Nilda.”

Just after lunch on Wednesday, September 1, Castro took the witness stand.

Prosecutor John Kosko asked for his address, and Castro told him 2207 Seymour Avenue, where at that moment he was holding Amanda, Gina, and Michelle.

“Does anyone live there with you?” Kosko asked.

“No,” Castro replied.

Under questioning, Castro acknowledged that his relationship with Nilda had been violent at times, but that she provoked it.

“We were always arguing, you know. She always—she always waited until I would come home, like especially on the holidays or something. She always waited for me to have a beer or two before she would start stuff, and I never understood that. Why? When I was okay, there was no fights, but for some reason, when I would have a beer or two, she always started fighting. So I couldn’t understand why.”

When asked if their confrontations had ever gotten physical, Castro replied, “There was times that she did get physical with me. She would throw herself on me, striking me. One time, yes, we struggled together, and we fell and she fell and hit . . . her head on the doorjamb.”

Castro denied more than twenty times that he had ever laid a hand on Nilda.

 • • • 

Nilda took the stand the following day, describing publicly for the first time what Castro had done to her over the course of many years.

“Did Mr. Castro ever physically assault you?” Ferreri asked.

“Yes.”

“Did he do that more than once?”

“Yes.”

“Did Mr. Castro ever strike you in such a way that you required medical attention?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ever do that more than once?”

“Yes.”

“Did Mr. Castro ever cause you to get medical attention at a hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever receive any cuts or any bruises from Mr. Castro?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever have any dislocated limbs from Mr. Castro?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever have any problems with your eyesight or your nerves in your face as a result of Mr. Castro?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever have any problems with your brain or the inner workings of your brain?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks to Mr. Castro?”

“Yes.”

Nilda recounted the first time Castro beat her, when a small disagreement escalated and he punched her in the face, grabbed her by the head, and threw her onto the concrete floor. She said Castro had punched her so many times in the face over the years that she required two reconstructive surgeries on her nose, as well as dental surgery.

She recalled that one time when she was pregnant, he demanded that she wash the dishes.

“I told him I was tired and to wait, and I yelled a little, but I don’t usually yell, but I was too tired, so he just punched me in the mouth and took my teeth out. . . . He dislocated my shoulders about twice by just throwing me around, most of the time pulling my arm to the back. He felt that it was some kind of punishment that I needed.”

“Did he always just hit you with his hand, or did he sometimes use other objects?”

“He used whatever he can get his hands on. Once he used a metal pipe.”

“And what did he do with the pipe?”

“He beat me over the head with it. It was always on the head. Most of the time.”

“And did the hospital do any surgical procedures on you at that time when he hit you with the metal piece?”

“Yes. I had maybe about twenty-five, forty stitches on my head at that time.”

“Did Mr. Castro ever hit you in the head again?”

“Yes.”

“Did he use his hand or did he use an object?”

“Then next time after that it was with a hand bar, weight.”

“An exercise weight?”

“Yes. I was nine months pregnant with Emily. . . . He hit me over the head with it, beat me.”

Nilda testified that Castro had punched her so hard in the eye that her sight was severely damaged, and it left one of her eyes permanently “squinty.” She said Castro repeatedly referred to her as “his property.”

“He says it all the time, repeats that to me all the time. . . . I’m scared of him.”

Asked about the prognosis for the tumor that had been discovered, she testified: “I have none. I mean, there’s nothing they can do for the tumor. They tried. But they couldn’t do anything.”

“Would it be fair to say that the prognosis is, in medical terms, terminal?”

“Yes.”

Emily and Arlene had testified at the start of the trial that Colon had touched them inappropriately many times. But Nilda asserted in her own testimony that she believed Castro had manipulated the girls into making up the allegations against Colon. She said both girls had emotional and behavioral problems, and Arlene’s had become much worse since her close friend Gina DeJesus had disappeared the previous year:

“I took her, Arlene, to a psychologist and he evaluated her with post-traumatic stress disorder. She was Gina’s best friend, and she was with her when she disappeared, shortly before that, so it traumatized Arlene because Arlene felt responsible for her disappearance.”

Gina’s vanishing had affected the entire family. Arlene had to change schools and repeat seventh grade and ultimately was expelled from her new school for poor attendance and disruptive behavior.

Ferreri pressed Nilda about why she hadn’t sought more help from the police over the years of beatings she endured.

“Because I always thought that he was gonna change.”

“In your culture, is it likely—or in your family, if there’s something that goes on, do you run to the police, or do you try to fix it up among yourselves?”

“Yes [we try to fix it among ourselves].”

“Do you consider it an intrusion on your family to bring the police into anything?”

“Yes.”

“And when Mr. Castro said, ‘I won’t hit you anymore,’ did you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Did you want to believe him?”

“I wanted—yes, I wanted to believe him because I thought that maybe he would change.”

“Did you hope and pray that he would change?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Do you believe he’s ever capable of change?”

“No.”

 • • • 

Colon was convicted of “gross sexual imposition,” a felony, and sentenced to three years’ probation, but was acquitted of the more serious charges of rape and being a “sexually violent predator.” Without any physical evidence or witnesses, the only evidence against Colon was the testimony of the two girls. John Kosko, the prosecutor, said that because the case was in the end a matter of “he-said, she-said,” the judge delivered a compromise verdict, which Kosko believed was fair. In the end Kosko didn’t believe the theory that Castro had orchestrated the entire affair, saying that the girls’ testimony was “pretty convincing.”

Nilda and Colon ultimately split up.

 

August 23, 2005: Back to the Basement

Amanda

“Pack up everything. I want it all out of here,” he says.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“My kids have been asking a lot of questions. They want to know why they can’t go upstairs and see their old bedrooms.”

I’ve always wondered why his mother has never been here, and why his brothers and kids don’t think it’s suspicious that he never lets them past the kitchen. He tells them he doesn’t want them to see upstairs because it’s such a mess. But I guess now they’re insisting, and his daughter Emily is coming for a visit from Indiana. She’s going to stay here for a couple of days, he tells me, “So I’m putting you in the basement.”

I can’t believe he’s going to take the risk of having his daughter sleeping in this house, and I hate the idea of going back to the basement. But what can I do?

He unchains my ankle and hands me a plastic laundry basket, and I start filling it with my stuff. I gather my pens, crayons, paper, my picture of Jesus and my mom’s photos and stack them neatly in the basket. I fold up the few clothes he has given me and I put them on top. I slip my diary to the bottom so he won’t see it, because I’m afraid if he reads it he might rip it up.

He walks with me down to the basement, where I leave the basket. We go back up to the room and he watches as I pick up my sheets and trash-can toilet and carry them downstairs, too. Then he helps me carry out the mattress and the TV.

Every trace of me is gone from the bedroom, except for the chains. They run through a hole in the wall and are attached to something in the next room. He pulls the chains through, then moves the dresser in front of the hole to hide it.

I pray that his kids notice something is not right. We’ve cleaned the room up pretty well, but maybe they’ll wonder why there’s wood covering the windows behind the curtains.

He takes me back to the basement, where this all started more than two years ago, and then goes back upstairs. I sit on the mattress on the floor, wondering how long I’ll be down here. I look around to see if there might be a way to escape, but the door to the backyard is bolted and padlocked.

After a while he comes down with Gina and Michelle. They’re carrying their own things and look scared. We’re all wondering what he really has in mind down here.

“I need more privacy,” I tell him. “I don’t want to go to the bathroom in front of them. It’s embarrassing.”

I can see his mind working. He always thinks that he can rig up some gizmo and find the answer to any problem somewhere in his piles of junk. And sure enough, he sees a dirty old wooden dresser and drags it to the middle of the room, like a divider.

Now when I’m sitting on my mattress, I don’t have to see them. I just wish I didn’t have to hear them.

Gina

I don’t want to be back down here. He kept me here for two weeks after he kidnapped me. This time I’m chained to Michelle and the pole.

Amanda’s ignoring us on the other side of the dresser. She’s trying to pretend that we’re not even here. He’s told us that she doesn’t like us, but I don’t know why.

“You know the rules,” he warns all of us. “You know what you’re not supposed to talk about.”

He loves rules. He has rules about which size spatula to use, which direction to flip an egg, what songs I can listen to. When I cook I have to keep the pan exactly in the center of the burner, or he calls me “retard” or “dumbass.” But his biggest rule is that we’re not allowed to talk about anything he says or does with us.

He must really be freaked out about his kids coming over if he’s putting us all together like this.

Amanda

I’m watching my TV, and they’re just a few feet away on the other side of the dresser, watching theirs. It’s a little hard to concentrate with two TVs playing different channels, but I try to tune out their shows.

We’ve been down here for a couple of hours, and we haven’t said anything to one another. I’m trying to keep to myself. But I am getting more and more curious. What is he so worried about? If he doesn’t want us talking, that seems like a good reason to do it.

Why the hell not?

I slide over and look around the dresser at them.

“Hey,” I say.

They both turn to look at me, surprised.

I’m whispering so that they understand that I’m trying to make sure he doesn’t hear us. It’s quiet upstairs now, so maybe he’s out. But for all we know, he could be hiding at the top of the stairs, testing us to see if we’re talking.

“What are you guys watching?” I ask.

“Just stupid stuff,” Gina says.

I move my chain so I can sit on their side of the dresser, and we start talking a little. It’s awkward at first, but we discuss music and TV shows. I mention that I like Eminem, and Gina says she’s into Christina Aguilera. She says she misses her family and her mom’s cooking.

I tell them about him driving by my sister’s house and telling me that he saw her girls outside wearing matching clothes. That really scared me, I tell them, because I knew it was a threat. He meant he could kidnap them if I didn’t do what he said.

“He did the same thing to me!” Gina says. “He told me that if I wanted company he would kidnap my friend Chrissy.”

The more we talk, the more I like them. Gina is nicer than I thought, and I think our families have a lot in common. We have seen them together on TV, so we make jokes about Tennessee hillbillies and Cleveland Puerto Ricans hanging out, and we actually laugh.

“Our families are better friends than we are,” Gina says.

A Will Smith movie is playing on their TV.

“He’s so cute,” I say.

“Oh, yeah, he’s cute,” Gina agrees.

“Does he tell you not to watch TV shows with black people?” I ask.

“Yes!” they both say.

We talk about what a horrible racist he is, and I tell them how he took my radio, opened it up, and stuck a little piece of a plastic spoon from Wendy’s inside, so I couldn’t turn the dial to the station that plays mostly rap music.

We make fun of how cheap he is. He insists that I water down the dishwashing liquid because he says a small bottle needs to last for at least two months. If I need more, I have to ask him, and he puts a little pea-size drop on the sponge. He has a fit if I use too much.

It feels good to talk, and to know that we’re all feeling the same things.

Gina

Amanda isn’t stuck-up at all, like I thought. She listens and cares when I tell her about all the sick stuff he does to me and Michelle, like how he rapes me and her while we’re chained together. It’s as horrible watching it happen to someone else as it is having it happen to you.

Amanda’s crying now as I tell her.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know he was doing that to you.”

She says that he told her that he was not having sex with me and Michelle, so she thought it was easier for us.

“He says he has me for sex, but you two are here to be his maids. I always figured he was lying, because why would you go to all the trouble of kidnapping two girls just to have them clean your house?”

We talk about how he says he has a “sexual problem,” and he calls his thing Charlie.

“He told me it’s not his fault,” I say. “He blames Charlie. He’s always saying, ‘What Charlie wants, Charlie gets.’”

Amanda

I realize now what he’s been doing. He lies to them about me, and he lies to me about them. That’s his way of dividing us and making sure we don’t trust one another. Screw him. We’re on to his mind games.

Conan O’Brien’s show comes on TV, and there’s a funny skit about a bear in a diaper that runs around being really obscene. It’s so silly that we all crack up. It feels great to laugh after we’ve been talking for hours and crying.

It’s late, and I’m about to fall asleep. But I feel like we need to get something straight first.

“Anything we talk about, we have to trust each other not to say anything to him,” I tell them. “Otherwise we’re going to get each other in trouble. We have to stick together.”

August 24

Amanda

I’ve barely gotten to sleep when I feel him next to me. He has his clothes off, and he’s pulling at my sweatpants. It’s humiliating. Gina and Michelle are on the other side of the dresser, and I know they’re just pretending to be asleep.

“They’re right there,” I whisper through my tears. “Stop it.”

He’s mad, but he gets up and unchains me. “Come upstairs,” he orders, loud enough for everybody to hear. “I need you to help me clean the kitchen.”

I walk upstairs with him and he takes me to the living room, where he finishes what he started downstairs.

When he’s done with me, he leads me back to the basement. It’s so hot in the house that I can feel his sweat all over me. I smell like him, and it sickens me. He twists the chain around my ankle again and snaps the padlock shut.

August 25

Gina

We’ve been down here all day, watching TV and playing with a PlayStation. We’ve been talking about how he kidnapped us—it was almost the same experience for Amanda and me. He tricked us into his car by talking about one of his kids.

We hear his footsteps across the kitchen floor, and as the basement door opens Amanda hurries back over to her side of the dresser.

“My daughter Rosie is coming over,” he says.

Oh, my God. That’s my friend Arlene. Rosie is her middle name, and a lot of people call her that. I haven’t seen her since that day I was taken, except when she was on America’s Most Wanted, crying about missing me.

“Don’t make a sound,” he warns us. “Don’t talk. Don’t get up to use the bathroom. Shut the TVs off. I better not hear any sound from down here.”

He turns off the light and leaves.

“She’s my friend,” I whisper as we sit in the dark. “We go to school together, and she was with me right before he kidnapped me.”

Amanda says he was dropping Arlene off at her mom’s house right before he kidnapped her. Poor Arlene. What will she think if she ever finds out?

We have other connections to his kids, too. Amanda tells us she went to school with Angie, his older daughter, and that she’s met his son, Anthony. Michelle says she knows his daughter Emily.

I hope the police notice all the connections we have to him and his kids.

We hear the back door open, then footsteps and voices in the kitchen.

Arlene is ten feet over my head.

Amanda

We can’t make out what they’re saying, but Gina can tell it’s Arlene’s voice. There’s somebody else up there, too. Maybe a friend of Arlene’s? They walk through the kitchen and up the stairs to the second floor. We’re too scared to make a sound.

Arlene lived in this house until she was about five or six, and he told me her bedroom was the one where he kept Michelle for a long time. So I guess she wants to see her old room.

After a few minutes we hear them coming back down, and then the living room TV comes on. It sounds like they are watching videos and having a good time.

“They’re up there laughing, and look where we are,” I whisper.

We’re all mad, but we can’t help being a little goofy, cupping our ears with our hands, as if that will help us hear them better. Of course it doesn’t work, but we’re giggling. It’s hard to stay completely quiet, especially when you know you have to.

“What if we scream?” Gina asks.

We’ve all been thinking the same thing, but I’ve been too afraid to speak it out loud.

“I don’t think so,” I say. It’s too risky. He’s smart, and Arlene is only fourteen. I’m sure he could come up with some story. He could tell her, “Oh, my girlfriend is downstairs with her friends, and they’re just messing around.” He could think of some lie that Arlene would believe. He’s that clever. I’ve seen it.

And what would he do to us?

He doesn’t make mistakes. I’m so worried the police and FBI will never figure it out. He seems like a nice, normal, middle-aged, friendly guy. He doesn’t look crazy.

That’s how he gets away with this. He hides in plain sight. He says he can get away with anything, including killing us. If his daughter found out about us, how do we know he wouldn’t do something terrible to her to protect himself?

I tell Gina and Michelle all this, but I don’t say what else I’m thinking: I’m still not completely sure I can trust them. We have become closer down here in the past few days, but maybe they are so afraid of him they would betray me. If we screamed for help, they could claim it was all my idea, and he might kill only me.

“I think we should just keep quiet,” I say. “It’s too dangerous.”

Gina

Amanda is right. We don’t know what he might do if we screamed.

I once told him my father was looking for me and asked him what he would do if my dad found us: “Would you shoot him?”

“I’m not going to talk about that,” he answered.

I do think he would kill my dad. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself.

After Arlene has been up there for about an hour, we hear them get up and walk out the back door. He comes down the basement stairs in a good mood.

“They’re gone,” he says. “You can watch TV now if you want.”

He’s talking a lot, which usually means he’s happy.

“Rosie wanted to see the basement, but I made up a lie,” he says. “I told her I couldn’t find the key, and it was a mess down there anyway.”

He’s so proud of himself.

He keeps talking about what a great time he had with Arlene, and how they were laughing as they watched old family videos.

August 27, 2005: Chained in the Van

Gina

We’ve been down in the cellar for four days. Between visits from his kids, he’s come down here a bunch of times to take Michelle upstairs to help with the “cleaning.” Yeah, right. We know what he’s really doing with her, and she tells us anyway. So why does he try to hide it? I don’t get it.

He takes Amanda upstairs, too, and she’s crying each time she comes back, but he hasn’t bothered me. I don’t know why. Maybe seeing Arlene has made him feel guilty. It’s so rare that I get this much time away from his disgusting body.

Late at night we’re all watching TV when we hear him come down the stairs.

“Okay,” he says. “Time to go.”

Thank God. It’s so damp and smelly down here.

“Emily is coming to stay overnight for a couple of days. I have to get you out of here. You’re going to the garage.”

The garage? Oh, no. Maybe Arlene or his other kids figured out there was something weird going on here, so he has to get rid of us.

He unlocks the chain tying me and Michelle to the pole and makes us stand up. We’re still chained together at the ankles. He tells us to pick up our pillows and sheets and follow him out the basement door up the steps and into the darkness of the backyard, like prison inmates in leg chains.

“Be quiet out here,” he orders. “No noise!”

“Are you going to kill us?” I ask him.

“If I were going to kill you, I would have done that already,” he says, laughing.

As we make our way across the backyard in the dark I realize it’s the first time I’ve been outside in a year and a half. I smell freshly cut grass and feel a breeze. We see lights in the neighbors’ houses on both sides, but I’m too scared to make a sound. The garage door is open, and I can see his van inside, facing out.

“Keep your heads down and walk straight to the garage,” he says.

We shuffle along the side of the van, looking at the ground. The side door is open, and he tells us to get in. The two seats in the back are folded all the way down, and he makes us lie down there, chaining us to the seats.

“I’ll be right back,” he says. “Remember—no noise.”

We lie in the dark, afraid to say a word, and he returns a couple of minutes later with Amanda. She has a chain around her ankle and she’s carrying her pillow. He has a small mattress that he wedges through the van door, and Amanda climbs in and sits on it. He locks her chains to the seats, too.

He brings out Amanda’s TV and a tiny fan, sets them between the front seats, and plugs them into the garage wall. He gives us a little blue bucket for a toilet and hands us some chips and a couple of old pop bottles filled with water.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” he says, locking the van doors.

It must be a hundred degrees in here. The little fan is swinging slowly from side to side, pushing around the hot, wet air.

August 28

Amanda

This van. It’s the one. It’s the same maroon van that drove me away from my life. I see that day happening all over again: He pulls up alongside me, and I get into that passenger seat. So stupid.

I’m lost enough in my thoughts that at first I don’t hear Michelle speaking.

“I always thought that you didn’t like me,” she says.

“What?” I ask.

“I wanted to be your friend at the beginning,” she says, “but I thought you didn’t like me.”

I’m too hot for this conversation. Sweat is pouring off me, and it stinks in here. The bucket is on the floor right next to my mattress and everybody has used it. I’m in a rotten mood and I snap back at her, “Don’t be stupid. I don’t need friends.”

I don’t know why I say that. I’m not trying to be mean, but I just gave her my super-bitch attitude. I think I’m just fed up with everything.

Michelle doesn’t say anything, but Gina speaks up: “Oooh, you are so cool!” she says to me sarcastically.

We look at one another for a second, and then all crack up. Gina totally called me out, and it was exactly the right thing to lighten the mood. It was like she popped a balloon, and all the built-up tension rushed out.

Amanda

Since we were taken to the basement five days ago the news on our little TV has been nothing but Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is underwater, and it looks like a war zone. We feel bad for all those poor people who lost their homes. Rain is falling hard on the roof of the garage, and the news says our storm in Ohio is what’s left of Katrina, moving north.

The garage door opens, and he comes in carrying a Georgio’s pizza and a bag of candy. When he opens the van door he cringes from the smell and takes the bucket, dumps it out in the yard, then brings it back. It still stinks because he didn’t bother to rinse it out. Even with the fan there’s no circulation, and we’re all feeling sick, so we ask him for some air. He cracks open one of the little sliding windows.

“Keep your heads down,” he says.

He opens the garage door for a few minutes while he putters around near the front of the van. He’s obsessed with making the house look normal so the neighbors don’t suspect anything. The people on one side are from Puerto Rico, and he’s always speaking Spanish with them. Usually on summer days he’s out in the yard or the garage working, so he says they might think something is strange if the garage door stays closed for days at a time. He doesn’t miss a detail.

He tells us Emily just arrived at the house.

Gina

I’m lying here, hot and sweaty, trying to think about anything but the heat.

Whomp!

What the hell? Somebody just smacked me with a pillow.

“Michelle!” I shout.

“I didn’t do anything!” she says. “That was Amanda!”

I look at Amanda, and she’s cracking up.

“Okay, girl!” I say, and I swing my pillow right back at her.

Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!

It’s a full-on pillow fight now. All three of us are slamming one another with our pillows and laughing like crazy.

“We better be quiet,” I warn.

But it’s no use. This is too much fun. I can’t remember the last time I had fun.

Whomp!

I hope he doesn’t hear us.

August 29

Amanda

I wake to the sound of the garage door. He opens it just enough to duck under and then pulls it shut again. I pretend to be asleep. I can’t tell if Gina and Michelle are sleeping or not, but they don’t move.

When the door was open I could see light, so it must be morning. He slips into the van quietly, crawls up next to me, and says, “Take your clothes off.”

“Please, they’re right there,” I say, nodding toward Gina and Michelle. “Please, no.”

“Just shut up and do it.”

He yanks at my sweats and is on top of me. It’s such a small space, and I know Gina and Michelle have to be hearing this.

I think of his daughter. She’s now sleeping comfortably in the house while he attacks me fifty feet away.

When he’s done, he’ll probably go inside and cook her breakfast.

 • • • 

We’re watching afternoon TV when the garage door opens again.

I guess it’s time for the daily show for the neighbors.

But instead he unplugs our TV and fan from the garage wall, gets into the driver’s seat, and puts the key in the ignition. What’s he up to?

“Okay, I’m going to take the van out of the garage for a couple of minutes,” he says. “Get under your covers. Don’t get up. Don’t move. Don’t do nothing.”

He starts the engine and pulls the van ahead just a few feet until it’s completely out of the garage. It’s so bright out that after all the darkness my eyes hurt.

He gets out of the van and leaves the engine running.

I peek out and see him go into the garage. Was the van blocking something he couldn’t reach?

Then I have an idea.

Gina

Amanda whispers that she thinks she can reach the gas pedal.

Her chain is too short, so she can’t actually sit in the driver’s seat, but she thinks she could probably press the gas pedal with her hand and ram the van through the gate across the driveway and out into the street.

Somebody would have to notice that!

“Do you think we should?” I whisper.

She’s never driven a car. I wonder if she even knows how to do it.

This is terrifying. We’ve been fantasizing in the garage about how we could escape. He has a lawn mower, a snow blower, and some tools there. We’ve been talking about how we could attack him with the lawn mower or hit him with a shovel.

But it’s just talk. We couldn’t reach anything because of the chains. And what if we hit him on the head with a shovel and didn’t kill him? Then he’d be so mad that he’d kill us.

But Amanda looks serious. She’s staring at that gas pedal.

“That’s crazy,” I say.

Amanda

I can do this. But I have to move, now.

I have to stretch myself into the front-seat area, put the car in drive, and push that gas pedal. I think the chain is long enough. If I can make a big enough crash, somebody will come to see what’s going on.

But what if nobody does?

I’m trying to get my courage up. I can do this. I have to do this. I’m breathing harder. All I can see is that gas pedal. Gotta go now!

Just then the driver’s side door opens, and he hops in and reverses the van back into the garage.

“Good job keeping quiet,” he tells us.

I feel my whole body deflate. Did I just miss our best chance of escaping? Maybe our only chance?

He plugs in the TV and the fan, locks the van, and closes the garage door. We were outside for maybe five minutes. Now we’re back in the dark.

Why did I hesitate? I keep replaying it in my mind, again and again and again.

August 30

Amanda

He’s back. It’s dark outside, and he’s in one of those nasty moods where you have to be extra careful.

“Emily’s gone, so you’re going back inside,” he says.

He unchains us, and we pick up our pillows. The only sound is the clinking of the chains as we walk across the yard. When we’re back in the house he tells us to fill the laundry baskets with our stuff. We’re all moving to new rooms.

I’m going back to the big room with the yellow walls that Gina and Michelle have been in together for a while. And they’re being put into the tiny room next to it, which is not much bigger than a closet. The only way into their room is through my room, which has the only entrance to the hallway. So by bolting my door, he has all three of us trapped inside. It’s simpler for him.

I don’t know why he put the two of them in the smaller room, and me by myself in the big one. Just when things are getting a little better between us, I’m afraid this is going to make Gina and Michelle resent me. When we have so little, it’s easy to get jealous over even the smallest things.

When we walk in, we see the chains waiting for us. He locks my ankle with one fixed to the big steam radiator. He links Gina and Michelle together by the ankles, and they sit down on one mattress.

I hope they keep their promise and don’t tell him anything that we talked about.

September 6

Amanda

Everyone in this house is a liar.

He just yelled at me for telling Gina and Michelle that he forces me to have sex, and he’s furious that I was thinking about trying to escape in the van.

I’m scared about what he’s going to do to me. Sometimes he hits me across the face. Sometimes he won’t feed me, or gives me only the worst leftovers. Other times he unplugs everything for days: my TV, my radio, my fan.

How could they have told him those things?

Maybe they didn’t. Maybe he was spying on us.

I go to their door and ask them why they talked. They claim they didn’t. They say he knows things about them that I must have told him, so they’re mad at me.

I don’t know what to believe, so I don’t believe anyone. I’m done trusting anybody in this house. The only person I can rely on is me.

Gina

I don’t know what Amanda is so angry about. I didn’t say anything to him.

He told us that she thinks we’re stupid, and that she’s helping him watch us. I can’t believe that’s true. She seemed so nice in the van, but I don’t know what the truth is anymore.

I’m so annoyed that he moved me and Michelle into this tiny room. It’s completely unfair. I guess I’m not the new girl anymore.

“Why does she have the big room, and the two of us are stuck in this shoebox?” I ask him.

“She has more stuff than you,” he says.

“You’re putting us in a shoebox!” I say, but he doesn’t care.

I just want to go home. I already missed my fifteenth birthday. I want out of here.

 

Christmas Day, 2005: Broken Heart

Amanda

My third Christmas here.

I wake up chained next to him, just as he’s leaving to go to a family Christmas party. At least I have my tree. It’s a little plastic green one from the dollar store that he bought for me. It’s about two feet tall, and it came in a box with some ornaments and a string of different-colored lights. I set it up on my dresser in early November to add a little cheer to this dull room.

I try to go back to sleep because at least when I’m asleep I don’t feel lonely.

When I wake up hours later it’s quiet in the house, so he must still be out. I plug in the tape I’ve been making of all the newscasts about me. My TV has a built-in VCR, so I can use it to tape over old movies. I record everything I can about my family on the news, so I can see them whenever I want.

I start writing in my diary, and note the time: 2:57 p.m.

Hi Mom! How are you? Are you having a good day? I hope you all are! I’m sitting here crying. I miss my life! We’re so close! I’m so lucky for that. I always had someone to talk to. Just the little things now are such big things—saying good night or good morning or I love you.

He comes in from his party. I think he’s been drinking.

“Merry Christmas,” he says.

“It doesn’t feel like Christmas. I’m in prison.”

I’m usually careful not to talk back. But I can’t help myself today.

“It’s not a prison,” he barks. “You have it good.”

“It’s worse than prison,” I tell him. “If I were in a regular prison my family would know that I am alive and they could come visit. Prisoners get to go outside for an hour a day. I can’t do anything. I can’t even feel sunshine on my face.”

I’m making him mad.

“You have TV! You have food!” he shouts. “If you were home you would be slumming. You would be still working at Burger King.”

He storms out, slamming the door, and bolts it from the outside.

I’m going to forget him and focus on happier things, like what’s happening at my house right now. It’s almost dinnertime, so I imagine my mom roasting a turkey and making ham and mashed potatoes. I bet she has music on. I wonder if Beth let Ry and Rissa open one present on Christmas Eve like we used to.

I start writing again:

This has taught me a lot—like NEVER take life or anything for granted! Sitting down and eating dinner with your family or watching TV with them and talking and laughing!

At six o’clock I turn on the television, and there is breaking news: my mom is in the hospital. She has some kind of pancreatic illness. She’s lost a lot of weight and is in bad shape. Here I am feeling bad for myself, and suddenly everything is worse! Maybe I should be grateful for what I have, like he says.

Please Lord, make her better. Don’t let her pass. Especially while I’m here. I need to see her. She’s my everything. She’s gotten me this far. If something happens to her, I don’t know what I’ll do.

I cry for hours, flipping around the channels for more news of her, but there is nothing.

I light my candle for Mom.

I put her picture on my bed and lie down next to it. It’s the only way I have to be close to her.

December 26

I’ve been up all night crying and watching the candle burn.

I’m wearing my glow-in-the dark plastic rosary. He had been keeping it in the bathroom as a kind of night light, and a few months ago I asked him if I could have it.

He’s not really religious anyway, so he doesn’t care. He goes to church sometimes, usually St. Michael’s, which has Mass in Spanish. But I think he goes mainly to get the free food they give away. He says his mother joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses and doesn’t celebrate Christmas anymore.

This is all my fault. If I hadn’t gotten in that van and been kidnapped, my mom would be healthy. I’m sorry for everything I put her through.

I keep having this dream: I’m free, I get to my house and run up the stairs and open the door, and my mom is sitting there watching TV, and I run to her and hug her so tightly.

December 29

Finally, on Channel 3 at six, Mom is back on the news. She has an infection called C. diff because some doctor didn’t wash his hands before doing surgery. They don’t say why she had the surgery, or when, but she had to have another operation today to stop the internal bleeding. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

“If my mom dies, will you let me go to the funeral?” I ask him.

“Sure,” he says.

Maybe he’d let me go in a disguise or come up with some other plan so that I could go out and he wouldn’t get arrested.

Hours pass until I hear another news update. It’s worse. Now they’re saying she’s in critical condition! There’s Beth at the hospital. She has a baby boy! I didn’t even know she was pregnant. I wonder when he was born. I have my candle burning for you, Mom. Hang in there, and when I get home I will take care of you.

December 30

On the news I hear that my mother went in for yet another surgery today. That’s two surgeries in two days.

I’ve heard her tell TV reporters that not knowing what happened to me is the hardest part. I understand exactly how she feels, because it’s terrible not knowing how she is doing.

December 31

It’s New Year’s Eve.

I have a little tape recorder he gave me, and I’m making a tape of Aerosmith songs Mom likes so I can listen to them and think of her.

All of a sudden the flame on my candle just got a lot stronger. I hope that’s a sign. Maybe it means she’s doing better. I keep watching the news, but they don’t have anything about her.

I miss my sister and can’t wait to hold her new baby. I don’t know his name, so I call him “Little Man.” I wish we could all be together on New Year’s, eating great food. We always have Tennessee Pride sausage, the roll that you slice into patties. Just thinking about it is making me hungry.

It’s almost midnight. Ten . . . nine . . . eight. Everyone on TV in Times Square looks so excited, but I am crying harder and harder. There goes the ball. This is the third New Year’s in a row that I’m not with my mom, locked up by myself in this room.

Now it’s 2006. Maybe this year will be better.

January 25

It’s been a month since there has been any news about my mom. Maybe she’s better and went home from the hospital.

He unplugged my lamp, my TV, and my radio because he was mad at me. So I just sit here in the dark, though I can still write in my diary, because I have the light from Mom’s candle to help me.

But now he comes in and he’s being a jerk and I can’t take it anymore, so I call him an asshole.

“Take it back,” he demands.

Take it back? What is he, six years old?

“You call me names all the time, and you never take it back,” I tell him.

“Apologize!” he says, more angry now.

When I tell him I won’t, he takes a needle and digs it into my toe until blood starts pouring out, and I scream.

March 2

His alarm goes off before six. I’m sleeping downstairs in the dining room with him. He’s been making me do that a lot. It’s Thursday, so he has to go to work. I still can’t believe they let him drive kids on a school bus.

He gets the key from the kitchen and unlocks the chain around my ankle. I don’t want to wake up but he walks me upstairs. He always stays so close behind me whenever I’m not chained that I can feel his breath. Like I’m going to run. Where would I go? I don’t need him hitting me or taking away my TV, and I do need sleep. I lie down on my bed, and he chains my ankle. I think I’m going to have scars for life from these chains.

I flip on the six a.m. news to see if there’s anything about my mom. They’re talking about the weather. It’s freezing rain outside: thirty-two degrees, with a wind chill of twenty-one.

Breaking news: LOUWANA MILLER, MOTHER OF AMANDA BERRY, HAS PASSED AWAY FROM A MASSIVE HEART ATTACK.

I can barely breathe. I stare at the TV. I’m numb. I don’t know what else to do. I pick up a pen and start writing:

March 2, 2006. 6:27 a.m.,
Thursday.

Hi Mommy. How are you? I know you’re doing better because you’re with the Lord now, in a better place. At least, I know you’re not in pain anymore. You were in the hospital for almost three months! I’m so sorry I wasn’t by your side. I didn’t get to hug or kiss you, and I never will be able to again.

Is this my fault? You were fine when I was there. I always pictured when I got to return I’d run into your arms and squeeze you and see your beautiful smile, your beautiful face. But now I never will. I know you’ll always be looking down over me and will always know where I am.

I hope Beth saves everything because I need to have your scent and your stuff close to me. God must have needed an angel. There’s no other reason he would have taken you. You’re so young.

Why did God do this? I won’t be able to even go to your funeral or touch you one last time. I love you, I love you, I love you. Thank you for never giving up on me and everything you’ve done for me.

R.I.P.

God bless you.

Love,

Me.

 • • • 

I watch the news all day. It’s the top story. People on TV are saying my mom was never the same after I disappeared and that she died of a broken heart.

Gina opens the door.

“Did you see the news?” she asks me.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I’m sorry about your mother.”

That’s kind of her. I know she’s being nice, but I don’t want to talk to her about this. I just want to be left alone. I want my mom.

He’s gone all day until he comes back with bags of Wendy’s for dinner. He’s standing in the doorway between our rooms when I hear Gina ask him, “Did you see the news?”

“What news?” he asks.

He acts like he doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t.

“My mom passed,” I say. I’m still crying.

He doesn’t say anything but just hands me a bag. I shake my head; I’m not hungry.

“I want a cigarette,” I tell him.

“You should quit,” he says. He’s been trying to get us all to quit, so I haven’t had a cigarette in weeks.

“My mom is dead and I really need a cigarette, please.”

“Okay, okay,” he says.

He goes out and returns a few minutes later with a pack of Marlboros. I light the first one and keep flipping the channels to find more news.

I watch all night, not getting any sleep, but it’s just the same stuff over and over. Nothing new.

It’s already morning when he pushes the door open.

That look in his eyes. I know what he wants. My mom just died, and this is what he wants from me?

“You can’t do this,” I say.

I can’t stop him.

March 5

Eminem’s movie, 8 Mile, is on TV when he brings me a copy of the Plain Dealer. There’s a story about Mom on the front page of Metro. It makes me smile to see what Regina Brett wrote about her:

She didn’t act the way moms of missing children do on TV, delicately wiping tears with folded tissues while whispering pleas for help. Louwana was angry. She chain-smoked Marlboros. She didn’t trust the police, so she put her own phone number on the flyers. She would cuss out the very people who tried to help her, then she would apologize and sob like a baby, tears rolling down her big, puffy cheeks.

That sounds just like her!

I also learned from the article that she named me for a Conway Twitty country-western song called “Amanda” that starts, “Amanda light of my life.” She used to sing it to me, but I didn’t know that’s where she got my name.

I hope Beth saves all her stuff. I want to keep her toothbrush, soap, shampoo, her cigarettes and lighter. Everything she touched. The clothes, hairbrush, pillows. I want to sleep in her bed.

“You told me if somebody close to me dies, like my mom or dad, you would let me go to the funeral,” I remind him.

“I never said that,” he says.

“Yes, you did!” I shout.

Now he’s mad.

“No!” he says.

“I want to go to her funeral. Please let me go.”

He walks out.

March 7

The news shows clips from the funeral, and I see Beth carrying her new baby, and Teddy and Aunt Theresa. I can’t see anybody else, because they’re filming it from the back of the church. I wonder if Daddy is there.

I see the casket. It’s white. That’s what I hoped they’d get. It has gold trim and pink flowers on top.

At least Mom doesn’t have to be in pain anymore because from heaven she knows where I am, and that I’m alive.

I don’t know where she’s buried, but when I get free I’m going to visit her grave all the time.

I wish I had a cigarette or some weed for my nerves, but he has cut me off. He says it’s too expensive.

April 2

He tells me he saw a storage truck in front of my family’s house. I don’t know why he drives by there, but I’m glad to hear that Beth is saving Mom’s stuff.

Mom died a month ago today. I made her a butterfly with hearts on it. I saw on TV that she made a “missing” poster for me with butterflies, so they are going to be our special thing.

I’m so sad and lonely, I can barely eat.

I want to die so I can be with her.

April 22

Happy birthday to me. I’m twenty. I have a secret. I think I’m pregnant. I missed my period, and I’m throwing up all the time.

I think this has something to do with Mom. It’s crazy. All this time and I’ve never gotten pregnant. But then she dies, and now I’m pretty sure I am.

I think my mom sent this baby. It’s her way of giving me an angel. Someone to help pull me through, give me a reason to fight.

I think she is sending me a miracle.

May 2006: First Trimester

Amanda

Yuck, Fritos. When I was in high school, I ate them by the bag. Now all it takes is one whiff, and I’m puking my guts out. He has been leaving bowls of Fritos out in case he doesn’t get home by dinnertime, and I can’t escape the smell. I try to move the trash-can toilet as far from my bed as I can, but I need to keep it close enough that I can retch into it. I had no idea that’s what pregnancy does to you.

I worry about what he’s going to do when he figures out that I’m having a baby. He’s already begun to notice that the only thing I can keep down is milk and cereal. For every meal I ask for the same thing: Peanut Butter Captain Crunch or Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. I’ve been telling him I have the flu, but this is getting to be the world’s longest illness. I feel dizzy and faint, too, and I think my blood sugar is out of whack.

I weighed about a hundred twenty pounds when he kidnapped me, and I’m probably ninety-five pounds now. I wish he had a scale, because I still seem to keep losing weight.

Last year, when he put us all in the basement and the van, Michelle told me that he beat her to make her miscarry. I once saw him slam Michelle into a wall. He said they were “play fighting,” just messing around, but Michelle said later that it was because he was trying to force her to have a miscarriage.

If he didn’t let her carry that baby, will he let me?

He gets home from work and brings Burger King food to Gina and Michelle, and then comes into my room with a burger and fries.

“No thanks,” I tell him. “I’m still too sick. I can’t keep anything down but cereal.”

He looks at me suspiciously. “Are you pregnant?”

I feel the breath sucked right out of my lungs.

“I think so. I missed my period.”

He doesn’t say anything. I’m trying to read the expression on his face. Is he furious? Happy? Worried? He stays silent, but his eyes are saying, Oh, shit.

I can tell he’s thinking. I’ve seen this before. Whenever he has a problem, his mind starts turning as he figures out how to solve it. I’m frozen with fear as I watch him deciding how to solve this “problem.”

Finally he says: “We could always bring it to a church right after it’s born, and leave it on the steps. Somebody would take care of it.”

“Please,” I say softly. “I want to keep the baby.”

He doesn’t answer but only looks confused.

Gina

I hate summer in this house. It’s the worst time of year. It must be a hundred degrees in my room, sometimes hotter. I sweat so much that I soak my sheets. Sometimes it feels good to roll over into the puddle of sweat, because it’s a little cooler.

It doesn’t help that Amanda is puking constantly. The smell from her room is horrible. She lies, too. She’s been telling us she isn’t pregnant, but then he tells us she is. I make fake puking sounds just to bug her and to let her know that I know she’s pregnant.

He gives her special treatment. She has the bigger bedroom to herself and she has the nicer TV. I have to scrub the floor on my hands and knees, and she never does. He says she doesn’t want to because it will mess up her nails. He always tells us that we have to have sex with him because she doesn’t want to. She gets first choice of the food that he brings home. I used to be the favorite one, but those days are over. Now it’s Amanda for sure. I think he actually likes her. And weirdest of all, when he’s with me now, it’s like he’s trying to hide it from her.

“Let’s go downstairs to clean,” he tells me, loud enough that everybody can hear. Then we go to the living room, where he forces himself on me. It’s almost like he thinks Amanda would be jealous. Maybe she would be, because things are just getting stranger here.

I know it’s mean but it’s fun to get on her nerves. She told me she hates the sound of people chewing with their mouth open, so when he gets me gum I make sure to chew it really loudly. She comes to the door between our rooms and gives me a dirty look. It’s so funny. I do it with bananas and hamburgers and fries, too, so it sounds like a cow, and Amanda goes crazy.

She also hates the hip-hop song “Laffy Taffy,” so whenever it comes on the radio, I turn up the volume. She screams at us to turn it down, and Michelle and I can’t stop laughing and we sing as loud as we can: “Shake that Laffy Taffy!”

I don’t know why I think it’s so funny. I just do.

July: Second Trimester

Amanda

I just watched the July 4 fireworks on Channel 3. He went to a barbecue at his mother’s house and now he’s back with leftovers. For the first time in over two months, food smells good. In fact, it smells delicious. He brought us back ribs, salad, rice and beans. I can’t stop eating.

“Wow, you were hungry,” he says, sounding like he actually cares.

I’m startled because I remember all those times when I was hungry and begged him for food, and he said no. But now he’s being kinder. I hope this lasts.

It’s been a month since I told him I was pregnant. I don’t feel nauseous anymore, but I keep fainting. Even though I’m finally eating real food I know I’m still not eating right. I wish I had vitamins, but he says I don’t need them.

One day I passed out and fell down on the floor of my room. He picked me up, put me on the bed, and made me ramen noodle soup. But another time I fainted in the hall upstairs, and he just left me lying there. He was with me when it happened and decided that while I was passed out he would go into Gina and Michelle’s room and get what he always wants. I must have been lying there for fifteen minutes, if not more, and when I came to I saw him zipping up his pants and leaving their room.

I don’t know how he can treat me this way. I’m having a baby. What if there was seriously something wrong with me or the baby? Doesn’t he care? I’m hurt and angry that he’s still having sex with them, but I don’t understand why I feel this way. He tells me that he’s not and he’s always calling Gina his “cousin” and saying he wouldn’t touch her. But it’s obvious that he is. I hate it that he sneaks around and lies. I want to kill him, but I also want to be with him. God, what’s wrong with me?

September 22: Digging for Gina

Gina

“Hey, you’re on TV!” he shouts, waking me out of a dead sleep. It’s about noon, and I was up all night, like I usually am.

I jump up and turn on my TV and see lots of cops at some house I don’t recognize. The reporters say the police got a tip that some guy named Matthew Hurayt buried my body under his garage, so they’re ripping the place apart with big machines.

He comes to sit on the end of my bed, watching with me.

“They ain’t gonna find you,” he says.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “No kidding.”

“What a waste of taxpayers’ money.” He thinks it’s funny that the cops are looking in the wrong place.

It’s bad for me because it means they have no idea where I actually am. They’re so close! The house is on West 50th Street. I could easily walk there in maybe ten minutes.

I watch the live news coverage all day long. Hundreds of people are on the street watching. They say Hurayt served time for molesting two little boys. The concrete floor in his garage is new, so the reporters are saying they think maybe he put it in to hide my body. They’re even digging up under a doghouse.

What if they do find a body under there? Maybe they’ll tell my parents it’s me, just to keep them quiet. If they say it’s me, then they won’t have to look for me anymore, and it’ll get my mom off their backs. No more vigils, no more explaining why the police haven’t found me yet. I think they could do that.

At about eight o’clock the police announce they didn’t find a body.

My mom is on the TV again and she’s crying. “I know deep in my heart that my baby’s still out there,” she says. “I just want whoever has her to let her go. Just let her go so she can come home.”

October: Third Trimester

Amanda

“My ears are ringing,” he says, like it’s a national tragedy.

I’m six months pregnant, my breasts and legs are sore, I can’t sleep because of the chains, I’m getting more and more scared about delivering a baby alone in this house, and he thinks I care that his ears are ringing?

“So why don’t you go to a doctor?” I tell him. “Maybe you should take me to the doctor, too. Pregnant women are supposed to go to the doctor.”

That came out a little sassy, but I’m so miserable that I don’t care.

He ignores me, thank goodness, and says, “I’m going to the library.”

An hour later he’s back with a thick medical encyclopedia and starts reading all the reasons that his ears might be ringing. We’re sitting in the living room, and I wait until I think he might be done worrying about himself.

“Can I look at that?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says. “But only down here. You can’t take it upstairs.”

“Why not?”

“Just do it.”

I know exactly why he won’t let me take it upstairs. Somehow he figured out my plan to leave “Help me!” notes in his library books. I dreamed of doing that when I first saw that he was borrowing books. I thought about writing on a page inside, “This is Amanda Berry. Please call the police. I am being held hostage by Ariel Castro at 2207 Seymour Avenue.” Then I would wait until the next person checked out the book and found the note. I imagined the cops bursting through the door to rescue us, saying they got my message.

But he thought of that, too, and now makes a big point of showing me how he checks every page of a library book before he returns it. He does the same thing with the movies he borrows, giving us the disc but always keeping the case. He doesn’t want us to slip a note inside the cover.

I take the medical encyclopedia and look up pregnancy. It says that at six months the baby is already more than a foot long. Amazing.

I’d love to know if I am having a girl or a boy. I’d love to have a sonogram. I’d love to hear my baby’s heartbeat, and have a doctor tell me everything is going to be okay.

I keep thinking about Beth being in labor for eighteen hours with her first baby. She was in so much pain, but she was in the hospital. What will it be like for me in here? Is he going to help me deliver the baby? Do I have to ask Gina or Michelle?

One good thing is that he seems interested in the baby. I still can’t tell what he’s planning to do when it’s born, but for now he’s less mean to me. I told him yesterday I was craving butter pecan ice cream, so he went out and bought some. That’s something.

“I think you’re going to have this baby on Christmas,” he says. “It will be like a Christmas miracle.”

December 19

Until today I haven’t written a word about being pregnant in my diary. I’ve been too scared. If I write down that I’m having a baby and then he takes the baby away, somehow I think it will be sadder. I want this child.

Hi Mommy! I guess I should tell you—I’m pregnant! Like 8 months or 9! I should be having the baby anytime. He says I can’t keep it—because of “the situation.” I’m not really ready, but I don’t want the baby out in this cruel world without me.

I keep writing to my mom. It’s like talking to her. I tell her that this baby is part of me, living and growing inside me, not him. I used to worry that if I had the baby it would remind me of him for the rest of my life. But I don’t anymore. This is my baby.

I’m so close now. I am still pretty small, maybe a hundred fifteen pounds, less than when I arrived here, but my stomach looks huge to me. I already feel more like “we” than “I.” Whenever I’m sadder or more depressed than usual, or when he does something especially mean and my hope starts slipping away, I rub my belly and talk to my baby.

Christmas Day 2006: New Life

Amanda

The pains started a few hours ago and they’re getting stronger. I wish I was in a hospital. I’ve been trying to get myself mentally ready for weeks, but I’m still so worried.

It’s 12:30—after midnight, so it’s now officially Christmas. I’ve been watching TV while he’s asleep next to me in his bed in the dining room. Lately I’ve been sleeping down here most nights. He wants me to, and it’s easier just to do what he wants. Sometimes it’s even comforting to sleep beside him because it makes me feel less alone and less scared about being pregnant in this house.

The bathroom is right next door, which is an even bigger deal now that I’m pregnant and have to pee all the time. But most nights he still makes me go in a bucket so he doesn’t have to get up to unchain me.

“Wake up, I have to use the bathroom,” I tell him. “I’m in a lot of pain.” He grunts, sits up, and goes to the kitchen and reaches into the red Pringles can on the table where he keeps the keys to my chains. He unlocks the padlock on my ankle. The chain seems even heavier these days, and it drops to the floor with a thud.

The heat is on, but because there’s no radiator in the kitchen, it’s freezing all winter. I hurry through it and into the bathroom. He’s standing there half-asleep, leaning against the sink, waiting. He looks worried. He’s already had four kids and he thinks I could be in labor.

“Do you think you’re having the baby?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

Then I hear something go “pop.” It startles me. He heard it, too, and I show him that there’s a little blood.

“I think your water just broke,” he says.

“But I didn’t feel any gush.”

I’m starting to get more scared. What will I do if everything doesn’t go just right? He won’t take me to a hospital. I don’t want to die here.

I have to stay calm.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but you might be having the baby,” he says. “Let’s go upstairs.”

He wants me to have the baby in my room because the windows are so well covered there. It would be hard for anybody to hear me screaming while I’m in labor, or to hear a baby crying.

He walks with me up the stairs, slowly. I sit on my bed as he opens the door to Gina and Michelle’s room.

“I think Amanda’s water broke,” he tells Michelle.

Michelle and I haven’t been getting along and I don’t want her near me, but I don’t think I can do this without help. He has no idea what to do. But Michelle had a baby before she was kidnapped, so she knows what to expect. And she said that she also helped deliver a baby for somebody in her family. Besides, he told her she had to help me, so she has no choice.

He keeps Gina locked in the room.

He runs upstairs to the attic and comes back with a plastic wading pool that he sets on the bed. It’s white, with blue lines and a whole bunch of colorful fish, and nearly covers the whole queen-size bed.

“Okay,” he says. “Get in here.”

This is his idea for how to avoid making a huge mess because he doesn’t want me to ruin his mattress. It’s weird and uncomfortable, but I’m in pain and not arguing.

I take off everything but my T-shirt. It’s cold, especially with my bare skin against the plastic. I’m shivering and feel helpless and exposed.

“Can I have a sweater, please?” I ask.

He goes into another room and comes back with a warm black sweater.

The contractions have really started now, and the pains are sharper.

“You’re not breathing right,” Michelle tells me.

“I don’t know how to do it,” I say, wishing I had a nurse to show me.

It really hurts, and Michelle takes my hand.

“You’ve got to calm down,” she says gently. “You’ve got to breathe like this.”

She’s shows me how—puff, puff, puff—and is being really nice.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says.

These pains are freaking me out and I start squeezing her hand so hard that she yells “Ouch!” She’s just teasing and trying to make me smile. It goes on like this for what seems like hours.

He sits down in an old rocking chair that he brought into the room and is reading a medical book—the chapters about pregnancy and birth.

I scream as the contractions come faster.

“Be quiet!” he shouts. “Don’t be so loud!” Handing me a shirt he tells me, “Bite on this.”

I ball it up and put it into my mouth to muffle the sound. It’s harder to breathe.

The cloth is drying out my mouth, and I tell him, “I’m thirsty.”

He says he read that ice chips are best, so he hurries down to the kitchen to get some.

He’s barely out of the room when I push, and the baby slips out.

The next few moments are a blur. I think I passed out.

Gina

I’m in my room listening and I hear Amanda scream, “The baby’s not breathing! The baby’s not breathing! Do something!”

For a minute there’s no sound, and I’m so scared.

Then I hear a baby crying.

Amanda

He comes back into the room, sees the baby. “It’s a girl,” he says, smiling. “Wow!”

He seems so excited to be a father again. His eyes are wide as he gently takes her from Michelle and cradles her in his arms.

“Let me hold her,” I say.

He and Michelle wrap her in a towel, and he hands her to me.

I hold my baby on my chest and touch her for the first time. I can’t believe her little face. Her eyes are wide open. She’s so cute. And so quiet. In the movies, new babies are always crying. She’s just lying here with me, so calm. I’m amazed.

I stare into her eyes. She’s all I can see.

“Cut the cord,” he tells me.

He’s handing me my stubby little school scissors, the ones I use to cut pictures out of magazines.

“No. I’m scared,” I tell him. I’m worried that I’ll do it wrong and hurt her.

“No,” he insists. “You should do it.”

Finally he sees that there’s no way I’m going to do it, so he takes the little scissors and snips the cord. Soon after that I push out the placenta.

He says we should go downstairs and get everybody cleaned up. He turns up the radio in case the baby cries. It’s Christmas music.

He carries the baby as we walk down to the bathroom. I’m sore and still sort of in shock. He wants me and the baby to get into the tub with him. It’s tight, but we figure out how to cross our legs so we all fit. He’s washing her tiny body.

“She’s so small,” he says. “You have to be really careful with her because she’s so fragile.”

The look in his eyes is amazing. He’s so in love with this little girl already. He’s always telling me that his kids are the most important thing in the world. They are older now, and it’s been a long time since he’s had a little kid who depends on him for everything.

There’s not a lot of good in his life. It’s his own fault, but sometimes I think he’s as stuck in this house as we are. He and Nilda split years ago, he hates his job, and he’s going to prison forever if the police find out what he’s done to us. Now he’s sitting here holding this beautiful baby who is nothing but pure goodness, and he’s happy. I think she gives him new meaning in his life.

He gives me a pair of his one-piece red long johns to wear, and they’re soft and comfortable. It’s almost morning, and we’re all hungry, so we step into the kitchen. It’s so cold that Michelle holds the baby with a towel over her face to keep her warm.

He starts frying eggs and sausages while I make toast. He tells me that it’s unbelievable that I’m standing up cooking breakfast just hours after giving birth, with no drugs or anything.

I take the baby from Michelle, and she gets some food for her and Gina, and we all walk upstairs. He goes into their room and chains Michelle again.

I crawl into bed with my new baby. As he fastens the chain around my ankle, I think about my daughter being born into this prison, and who her father is. But I try to focus on happier thoughts: She seems healthy and she’s beautiful. I am going to protect her, and the rest we will figure out as we go.

He finds a brown cardboard box to use as a bassinet. We put some towels and a little pillow in it and set it on the bed, and he lies down next to it. He is smiling. I can’t remember ever seeing him this happy.

“Oh, my God,” he says, a little awed. “I can’t believe I’m a dad again.”

A couple of weeks ago, we had been watching The Polar Express on TV when the baby started kicking like crazy. I reached for his hand and placed it on my stomach, wanting him to feel connected to the baby. I knew my baby would be safer, and would have a better chance of staying with me, if he was excited about being a new father. I think it worked, because he seemed thrilled to feel the kicking in my belly.

Then, one night when I was trying to sleep on my stomach because the padlock was hurting me, he told me, “You can’t sleep on your stomach because you’ll hurt the baby.”

I guess he had been starting to care, but I don’t think he had ever been completely sure, right up to today, that he’d let me keep this baby.

Now he can’t stop looking at his daughter.

 • • • 

I wake up a few hours later when I hear the baby crying. I try to get her to breastfeed, but no matter how hard I try, it’s not working.

“Can you please go to the store and get some formula?” I ask him.

“No,” he tells me. “You can feed her yourself.”

He says he doesn’t want anyone to see him or risk that a store camera might film him buying baby things. We don’t have a blanket, or diapers, or formula—nothing.

He tells me to watch a breastfeeding video. He didn’t have to get one for me, because he already had one in his porn stash. He is so obsessed by breasts that it even turns him on to watch breastfeeding.

Hours pass, and the baby is not latching on, and she’s still crying but takes a few drops of water from a little spoon. What will I do if she gets sick in here? I’m just a few blocks from a big hospital, but I might as well be shipwrecked on a desert island, since I have no chance of getting her to a doctor.

“She needs diapers,” I tell him.

He leaves the room and comes back a few minutes later with scissors and a handful of old white athletic socks. He trims the top off and then cuts two little holes in the toe for her legs. We slip her into it, and that’s her first diaper.

Then he takes another sock and cuts a bigger hole in the toe for her head, and two little holes for her arms. We slip it over her head, and it’s like a little dress.

It’s her first outfit.

I want to call her Priscilla, but he hates that name. I don’t know why I care what he thinks about the name, but I do. I need him to feel like he’s a part of her life. I want him to feel invested in her, because I think that will keep her safe.

I can’t think of too many other girls’ names that I like, so he gets a phone book, and we start going through it. He suggests some that I hate, mainly Spanish ones, and I like some others that he rejects. Finally I think, Jocelyn. When I was little I had a friend called Jocelyn, and I always loved that name. He’s not crazy about it, but he says okay.

I want to give her a middle name to honor my mom. But there is no way I am calling her Jocelyn Louwana, because Mom never liked her name.

But Mom loved Aerosmith, and one of the songs she always sang to me was called “Jaded.” So I decide: Jocelyn Jade.

Jocelyn Jade Berry.

 • • • 

Jocelyn is three days old and has not eaten anything yet. All she’s had is water, and she has been crying a lot.

I tell him I’m doing my best, but she’s a baby—she cries. He walks around with her to try to get her to quiet down. He goes kind of crazy when she wails, so he turns the radio up even louder. The neighbors won’t hear Jocelyn crying, but the loud music makes it harder for her to sleep.

I have given up asking for formula. He says it’s expensive, and it never goes on sale. I keep trying to get her to breastfeed. C’mon, baby. We can do this. I start praying that my mom makes my little baby a fighter.

After hours and hours she finally latches on and doesn’t let go. She’s drinking, and I know she’s going to make it.

Someday I’m going to have a lot to explain to her.