by Amanda Berry
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 sh
e 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.