by John Glatt
“Lie still!” he commanded, as Michelle attempted to stand up. Then he reassured her everything was going to be okay, promising not to harm her if she obeyed him and that he would free her soon.
Sitting down on the stool he grabbed Michelle’s legs, as she desperately tried to kick him away. But he was far too strong for her. Then he started binding one of the cords around her ankles so tightly they went numb. When she tried to punch him away, he grabbed her wrists, pulling her arms behind her back and binding them together. He then wound the other end of the cord around her neck and tied it.
He then pulled down his pants, took out his penis and began masturbating over her, as she lay tied up on the floor. As he became more and more excited, he became strangely emotional. He told Michelle that he really wanted them to be friends, and how lonely he had been since his wife and kids had abandoned him.
“All I want is for someone to be here for me,” he said breathlessly. “I need you.”
Then he climaxed.
After finishing, Castro pulled up his pants and ordered her to stay still. Michelle screamed and started praying, thinking he was about to kill her. Then he punched her hard on the side of her head, telling her nobody could hear her screams, as he pulled out a gun and threatened to shoot her.
He rolled her over onto her stomach and tied the second orange extension cord around her hands, feet and neck, trussing her up like a chicken. After connecting her tiny body to the thick taut cable, stretched between the two poles, he hoisted her up about a foot above the floor, so she was hanging in front of the window.
“I was tied up like a fish,” she would later say. “An ornament on the wall.”
Finally, he stuffed a filthy gray sock in her mouth and wound duct tape around her head. Then, saying he was off to get some food, he turned on a radio and walked out, slamming the door, leaving Michelle suspended helplessly over the floor.
* * *
At 6:02 on Friday afternoon, Barbara Knight went to the Cleveland Police Department to report Michelle missing. She told Officer Westley Edrington that Michelle had last been seen the previous morning by her cousin Deanna, on West 106th Street and Lorain Avenue. She described her twenty-one-year-old daughter as four feet seven inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, with blue eyes and wearing glasses.
The missing-persons report classified Michelle as disabled, and noted that she went by the alias “Shorty.”
“Reporting person states that missing person adult has a mental condition,” it stated, “and that she is confused of her surroundings, a lot.”
Investigators then checked local hospitals, a relative’s house and the morgue, telling Barbara that they would let her know when her daughter was found.
Barbara would later claim that the police did very little to try to find Michelle.
“They figured that she had just left,” she said, “because of the upset of the baby.”
* * *
After Ariel Castro left Michelle Knight hanging like a wounded deer, he got in his car and started driving to clear his head. He would later say that he hadn’t intended to kidnap a girl that day, but the opportunity had presented itself and he had taken advantage of it.
That night he went to his mother’s house for dinner with his brothers and was his usual jovial self. Then, after having a couple of beers, he left to return to 2207 Seymour Avenue.
* * *
Michelle Knight could never be sure how long she was left trussed up in the bedroom, gagging with the dirty sock in her mouth. She spent agonizing hours staring out the window, as night fell and she could hear the radio upstairs, playing loud Spanish music. She wet herself several times, and her throat was sore from dehydration and her stomach aching from hunger.
Eventually, Ariel Castro returned with a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin for her to eat. He ripped off the duct tape over her face and took the sock out of her mouth. When he pushed the sandwich into her mouth, Michelle screamed and tried to fight him off, but he grabbed her jaw and held her mouth open, ordering her to eat. When she refused, he threw the sandwich onto the floor.
Without a word, he untied the extension cord attaching her to the poles, so she fell hard onto the floor. Her arms and legs were numb. When she screamed and tried to sit up, he called her a “slut,” telling her to stay still. Then he held her down as he untied the cord binding her wrists and ankles.
He told her to get up but Michelle sobbed, saying she was unable to as her legs hurt so badly. So he picked her up and slung her over his shoulders, carrying her into an adjoining white-walled bedroom.
After throwing her down on a filthy, stained mattress, he ripped off all her clothes and attacked her. For the next hour he raped her repeatedly, while she screamed in pain. Again and again she tried to fight him off, but she never stood a chance.
When he was finally satisfied, they both lay naked on the mattress, now covered in Michelle’s blood. Composing herself, she tried to reason with her attacker, promising not to tell anyone what he had done if he let her go.
Suddenly, a change came over Ariel Castro. He began talking to Michelle as if she were his girlfriend, pouring out his heart to her. He spoke about being molested back in Puerto Rico when he was five, and how upset he was when Nilda had taken their kids and left.
“I didn’t mean to beat her,” he told Michelle, “but it’s like I ain’t got the power to stop myself.”
Finally, he got off the bed and started to get dressed. Then he pulled some dollar bills out of his pocket and threw them at her, saying it was payment for her services.
* * *
After ordering Michelle to put on her blood- and urine-stained shorts and T-shirt, Ariel Castro dragged her down to the first floor, with her head hitting each stair on the way down. Then he took out a key and unlocked a heavy wooden door and opened it.
Michelle’s heart froze as she saw a long flight of stairs leading into his basement. After dragging her down, he threw her onto a pile of dirty clothes on the concrete floor. Although it was dark and she had lost her glasses, she could make out a large white pole in the middle of the basement, reaching from the floor to the ceiling.
When he turned on a light, Michelle could see dirty clothes strewn everywhere. At one end of the room was an old washing machine next to a sink, and hundreds of X-rated pornographic videos stacked up against the wall. There was a small window covered in dirt, and an assortment of heavy rusting chains of various lengths, strewn around the floor.
“This is where you are going to stay,” he told her, “until I can trust you.”
Castro then picked up two lengths of chains and held them up to Michelle, who started crying uncontrollably. He ordered her to stop, picking up a dirty sock from the floor and thrusting it into her mouth.
Then he dragged her over to the pole in the center of the basement, wrenching her arms behind her back and fitting plastic restraints over her wrists. He wrapped a length of rusty chain around her waist to secure her to the pole, before winding another chain around her neck and head. Some of the chain went into her mouth, so she could taste the rusty metal.
Finally, he padlocked both chains together and placed a motorcycle helmet over Michelle’s head to muffle her screams. Then she passed out.
* * *
That fall, Ariel Castro began a strict routine, keeping his life tightly compartmentalized. He would get up early and dress in his burgundy-colored uniform, and leave to pick up his yellow school bus. After dropping off the children at school on his morning route, he drove back to 2207 Seymour Avenue, parking his school bus outside for a few hours. Then he would feed Michelle stale McDonald’s hamburgers before raping her.
Then, leaving Michelle chained up in the basement, Castro would get back in his bus in time for his afternoon route, driving the children home.
After finishing work, Michelle would hear him upstairs watching pornographic videos and smoking marijuana. She dreaded the sound of the key unlocking the basement door, knowing he had come to rape her
again. When he had satisfied his lust, he would throw paper napkins at her to clean herself off with, and then “ram” them down her throat.
On weekends, he played the Cleveland salsa clubs with his various bands, and seemed happier than he had been in years.
Lillian Roldan still spent the occasional night at 2207 Seymour Avenue, and Michelle could hear them making love upstairs. Lately, Ariel Castro had been particularly attentive to Lillian, as they discussed their future.
“One night we were lying in bed,” Lillian remembered, “and he took out his guitar and sang to me. It was a Marc Anthony song called ‘El Ultimo Beso’ [‘The Last Kiss’], which we both liked. It was so romantic and became our song.”
* * *
For the first few weeks of her captivity, Ariel Castro kept Michelle chained to the pole with a motorcycle helmet on her head. He raped her up to seven times a day, and if she ever complained he would beat her up.
“There’s not a day that went by that I didn’t get messed with,” she said later, “or hurt in any type of way.”
He brought in a plastic bucket for her to use as a toilet, placing it just close enough to the pole for her to reach. Most days he fed her only one meal, usually consisting of a McDonald’s burger and a glass of orange juice.
“Most of the time I was hooked on a chain … in the basement,” she said. “I was just passing out. That’s how the time went.”
Michelle managed to endure the endless days and nights lying chained up in the basement by thinking about her son, Joey. Whenever she wanted to die, she’d conjure his face in her mind. Thinking about being reunited with him one day gave her the strength to survive.
About a month after he kidnapped her, Castro brought Michelle out of the basement and back upstairs to one of the bedrooms, chaining her up naked to a bed. All the windows had been covered with sheets of gray wool with barbed wire across them, and the only way she could tell day or night was through the smells of her captor frying bacon for his breakfast every morning.
* * *
In late September, Michelle Knight became pregnant with Ariel Castro’s baby. She recognized the symptoms, but was too scared to tell him, uncertain of how he would react. One day he noticed her nipples were leaking and asked if she was pregnant. Michelle said she thought she was and he attacked her.
“He punched me in my stomach … with a barbell,” she said. “I fell to the floor.”
Over the next few weeks he starved her and beat her. Chained to the bed, Michelle often fainted, had nosebleeds and vomited. Finally, after approximately six weeks, she had a miscarriage.
“And then when I did miscarry he blamed me,” said Michelle. “He said I hated him [and] I killed his kid. He punched me in the face, saying that it was all my fault.”
Castro then picked up the tiny fetus and placed it in Michelle’s hands, asking if she wished it were alive and saying that she had caused its death.
* * *
As the weeks stretched into months, Michelle began to get some sense of time. On Sunday mornings she could hear the bells of nearby Immanuel Lutheran Church ringing. And one evening a drunken Castro came into the basement wearing flashy black clothes and a panama hat. He began boasting about his Latin band, and what a great bass guitarist he was. Soon afterward he warned Michelle, who was still chained up and wearing a motorcycle helmet, not to make a sound, as his band was coming over later to practice.
That night she heard voices downstairs speaking Spanish, and loud live music. This started happening regularly and Michelle deduced that the rehearsals were being held on Fridays or Saturdays.
Cleveland musician Rickie Sanchez regularly rehearsed with Castro, drinking beer and eating dinner afterward.
“I used to go there and cook,” Sanchez recalled, “and being from Puerto Rico we like rice and beans.”
One night, he heard some strange boom-boom noises coming through the walls, and asked Castro where they were coming from.
“And he said he had some dogs on the second floor,” recalled Sanchez. “Then he took out the radio and cranked it all the way up. It was hard for you to hear him unless you were screaming, because of the music. It was always loud.”
* * *
That winter, Michelle Knight almost froze to death. There was no heating in the house and it was a brutally cold winter. Castro refused to give her any blankets or clothes to keep warm.
“It was always very cold,” said Michelle. “He didn’t have heat and I only had one sheet. [It was] so cold that my lips would turn blue and you could see my breath.”
Castro told Michelle that he would not give her blankets or clothes to wear until she had proved he could trust her. She was also filthy, as Castro had not allowed her to wash or use the shower since he had taken her, and he seldom emptied her toilet bucket.
If she disobeyed him in any way, he would stop feeding her. He would also show her his loaded .357 Magnum caliber revolver—the exact same firearm Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character talks about in the 1973 movie Magnum Force—threatening to shoot her dead if she ever tried to escape.
At Christmas, Castro gave her a puppy to keep her company. She named it Lobo and lavished it with love. But when Lobo came to Michelle’s defense during one of his beatings and bit Castro, he picked it up and broke its neck right in front of Michelle. Then he carried Lobo’s body out to the backyard and disposed of it.
* * *
On December 24, Ariel Castro celebrated the holidays with Lillian Roldan at her father’s house. After dinner, he got out his guitar and began playing to entertain the family.
“He was playing and singing Christmas songs with my father,” said Lillian. “And I said, ‘Do you know what, it’s the twenty-fourth and it hasn’t snowed, so for me it’s not Christmas. I need a white Christmas.”
So Castro suddenly started strumming Bing Crosby’s White Christmas.
“Suddenly, I looked out the window,” said Lillian, “and it was snowing. I said, ‘Oh my God, Ariel, you made it snow.’ It was the best Christmas gift ever.”
On Christmas Day, Ariel Castro raped Michelle Knight, and then started tormenting her because Joey was not there to celebrate with her.
“He rubbed it in my face that I wasn’t with my son,” recalled Michelle. “That I’m spending my holidays with somebody else. And he’d say, ‘He’s better off without you.’”
* * *
In early January, Michelle tried to escape. Ariel Castro had finally brought her downstairs to the bathroom for a shower, and while his back was turned she found a needle and hid it. After the shower, he brought her back to the bedroom and chained her up before leaving for work.
“I picked the lock,” said Michelle. “But I didn’t know he was in the backyard.”
After getting free, Michelle was halfway out the window when she heard Castro running up the stairs.
“I’m panicking,” she said. “I run back to the bed.”
She then threw the chains back on, trying to pretend nothing was out of place. But Castro was suspicious and after searching the room, he found the needle under the pillow.
“What are you doing with this?” he demanded to know.
Michelle said she had used it to self-mutilate her arms, and Castro took the needle away, saying he disapproved of the practice.
“He figured it out,” said Michelle. “The chain wasn’t put on right … that’s the last time that I had a chance to get out.”
As punishment, he dragged her back to the basement and chained her to the pole. Then he told her that she was not the “only one” who had been down here, showing her a little shrine in a corner of the basement. Inside was a sign with the words REST IN PEACE, along with a girl’s name that had been scribbled out.
“I couldn’t really see,” said Michelle, “because I didn’t have glasses.”
A few weeks later, he brought her back upstairs and gave her a battered old television to watch, so she would have something to occupy her time. She was still te
thered to the wall on a three-foot chain, but at least she could pass the time watching her favorite shows.
* * *
In April 2003, Michelle Knight became pregnant again and dreaded what Ariel Castro would do when he found out. This time, he kicked her in the stomach so hard that she fell backward and hit a door. Ten days later she miscarried.
* * *
When Castro wasn’t abusing Michelle, he would often talk to her. He constantly told her how he himself was a victim who had been abused as a child. He also spoke of his obsession with pornography and his hatred of African Americans. Once he confided that he regretted not getting to JonBenét Ramsey first, and that he would have loved to have kidnapped Elizabeth Smart.
He also told Michelle that he was now actively looking for another girl to kidnap, and this time he wanted a blonde.
“He had an obsession with blondes,” said Michelle. “He would always say, ‘I’ve seen this girl and I’m just sad I didn’t get her in my car.’ He would let me know what girl he was trying to abduct and where she worked.”
8
AMANDA
Amanda Marie Berry grew up on West 111th Street, less than three miles north of Seymour Avenue. She was born on April 22, 1986, to Johnny Berry and Louwana Miller, who already had a daughter Beth, who had been born two years earlier.
Her father reportedly had a history of violence, serving jail time for sexual battery and aggravated assault. When Amanda was four years old, her parents split up and Johnny moved to Elizabethton, Tennessee, where he had family. Louwana remained in Cleveland, to raise her two daughters.
Every summer, Amanda visited her father and extended family in Tennessee, and was especially close to her grandmother, Fern Gentry.
“Commando Amando,” as her father nicknamed her, was a “real firecracker” and loved the rural countryside, where she played with her cousins in the Blue Ridge Mountains.