by Amanda Berry
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.”