Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

by Amanda Berry

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

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

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

  The line went dead.

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

  A minute later, the phone rang again.

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

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

  Without another word, he hung up.

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

  • • •

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

  June 2003: First Summer

  June 3

  Amanda

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

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

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

  1x.

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

  Writing things down makes me feel closer to my family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  June 10

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

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

  June 17

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

  He’s back from work.

  1x.

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

  “In a little while,” he says.

  “Why not? It’s too hot.”

  “In a little while.”

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

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

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

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

  June 23

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

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

  June 24

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

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

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

  1x.

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

  “What happened to her?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  June 25

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

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

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

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

  August 20, 2003: Strangle

  Amanda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I feel a release. No more pain.

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

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

  He storms out of the room.

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

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

  November 22, 2003: Numb

  Amanda

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

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

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

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