Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

by Amanda Berry

Less than a month after Louwana Miller died, new tenants moved into the second-floor apartment she had shared with Amanda. For Beth and Teddy, it became simply too sad having strangers living upstairs, so, just less than a year later, they moved to a new house on West 129th Street. They put up photos of Louwana and Amanda and hung “missing” posters on the porch.

  Beth had not been well and was dropping weight. She had been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease when she was seventeen, and it had recently been flaring up. She was unable to work, and she and Teddy were struggling to pay the rent and raise their three kids. Still, nearly four years after her sister vanished, they continued passing out flyers about Amanda in every store they visited, hoping to keep her disappearance in the news. Beth believed that Amanda was alive and just might be watching TV. She was grateful that her new friends, Nancy Ruiz and Felix DeJesus, were spreading the word even more widely. They were as certain that Gina was still alive as she was about Amanda, and they seemed inexhaustible.

  June 2007: Finding a Voice

  Wealthier families who had missing children often drew media attention to their cause by offering huge rewards, but because Gina’s family had little money, Nancy found other ways to keep her daughter’s case in the public eye. She sewed a big banner that read THE MISSING and set up a booth at events like Cleveland’s annual Night Out Against Crime, where hundreds of people gathered. She traveled to missing-children events in Akron and Columbus and marched down busy Cleveland streets with the Guardian Angels, once coming within a block of Ariel Castro’s house, chanting, “Who do we want? Gina! When do we want her? Now!”

  She learned from a friend about the work of Dennis Bair, a former Minor League Baseball pitcher who had started BairFind, an organization dedicated to bringing home missing children. Bair had been featuring Gina’s photo and description in one of his poster campaigns in Minor League ball parks. When Nancy called to thank him, the two struck up a friendship and started working together. Nancy handed out flyers with pictures of Gina and other missing kids at ball parks around Ohio and Pennsylvania, even throwing out a couple of ceremonial first pitches—anything to keep people looking for Gina.

  On June 14, 2007, the Cleveland Cavaliers featured Gina’s and Amanda’s pictures on their giant display screen during Game 4 of the NBA finals. With LeBron James trying to keep the San Antonio Spurs from sweeping the series, the girls’ photos were seen by a huge national TV audience. Nancy stood outside the arena and gave interviews to local TV stations. No longer terrified of the microphone, she was committed to the cause of missing children.

  Spring 2007: Digging a Grave

  Gina

  “Come downstairs,” he orders.

  “Why?”

  “Just come downstairs!”

  It always makes me nervous when he tells me that, because it usually ends the same way. But I have no choice. This time, though, when we get to the kitchen, he surprises me.

  “I need you to help me bury my dog,” he says.

  Poor Kashla. She was a big brown pit bull that he kept chained outside in the driveway, and last week he backed over her accidentally with his car. “The stupid dog saw me coming and didn’t move,” he said. Typical. It was the dog’s fault.

  Kashla lived for a few days afterward, but then she stopped eating and died. He threw her body in the garbage can outside, where it’s been since yesterday. I bet he’s worried, because you’re not supposed to put dead animals in the trash, and the garbage men might report him.

  “I have to disguise you,” he tells me, handing me a jacket, a black wig, sunglasses, a white surgical mask, and a cowboy hat. The getup is so completely over the top that it’ll probably attract more attention than just dressing normally. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky, and somebody will see me and think it’s so weird that they call the cops.

  It’s about noon when we start digging with two shovels he got from the garage. I think he picked me to help him because I’m the strongest, and he knows I love dogs. It’s more like a used car lot than a yard out here, and the ground is hard and packed down from all the cars that have driven over it. It’s cold and drizzly, and we chip away at it for hours.

  He drags the garbage can over and dumps Kashla’s body into the hole. We start shoveling the dirt on top of her, and I quietly tell her that I’m sorry. She deserved better than to die in this awful place.

  June 2007: Seamstress

  Gina

  I really like the T-shirt he bought me at a thrift shop that says YOUNG AND ANGRY across the front. It used to fit me, but I’ve lost a lot of weight, and now it’s too big. So I cut out the words, glue them on construction paper, and tape the piece to my wall. That’s me! I’m young and I am angry.

  I have a hole in my jogging pants, so I ask him for a needle and thread and start sewing. When I’m done he says I did a good job, and he never says anything nice.

  “Can you sew these buttons back on?” he asks, handing me a shirt and the popped buttons.

  I do that quickly and then stitch a ripped blanket, too. I like sewing. I taught myself in here, and it’s fun and makes time move faster. I suddenly think of a million more things I can fix, and what I can do with the secondhand shirts and dresses he has bought us. They will look a lot better if they’re not four sizes too big. He says he’ll get me more thread, and I hope he hurries up about it.

  October 2007: A Place to Crawl

  Amanda

  Finally, after almost ten months, he brings in a piece of burgundy carpet to cover my floor. I wish it was softer, not the cheap industrial kind for offices, but at least it’s brand-new and smells good. I hold Jocelyn while he and Gina move the bed and lay down the carpet that will widen Jocelyn’s world.

  Joce is ten months old and needs space to crawl. Since she was born, I’ve been keeping her on the bed because I don’t want her on the dirty floor. He’s in and out of here all the time with his muddy boots, and I’m worried about Joce picking up germs.

  He nailed a purple foam exercise mat over my door to the hallway to muffle any sound in case he had people downstairs. Then he screwed two wooden doors over my bedroom windows so nobody outside could hear Jocelyn crying. I covered the doors with a shower curtain that has cute green frogs on it, and I pasted hearts, triangles, and other shapes on the foam so it looks like a classroom. I don’t want my daughter to know she is growing up in prison.

  I read that babies are supposed to start eating solid food when they are six months old, but he says baby food is too expensive. I tried to give her watermelon and mushed-up beans, but she spit them out. Thank God she keeps taking breast milk.

  He rapes me less since she was born, but he hasn’t stopped. He just waits until Jocelyn falls asleep, then he climbs in the bed. It makes me sick that he does this to me with my daughter lying next to me. I am only safe when she’s awake.

  I can see he’s fallen in love with her. He calls her “Pretty.” He shifted my furniture around so that even with the chain I can sit in the rocking chair. The seat is busted, so I put a pillow on top of it, rocking and feeding Joce for hours. He comes home from work almost every afternoon on his lunch break, sits in the rocker, and holds her, making sweet baby talk and sometimes singing her to sleep.

  “She’s my life now,” he says.

  He made a little mobile out of string and plastic Easter eggs and hung it from the ceiling over the bed where Joce and I sleep. He even broke down and bought her some baby supplies. He came back from Unique with two blankets and a little bouncy chair. He shops at the thrift shop on Monday when everything is half off, so the cheap stuff is even cheaper.

  I just found a strange-looking bag in the freezer and asked what it was, and he told me it was my placenta! I couldn’t believe it. He keeps everything. He said he was afraid that if he threw it away, the garbage men might see it and get suspicious.

  Joce loves crawling on the new carpet, but now I have new challe
nges. Because my chain only reaches so far, if she strays too far from the bed, I can’t reach her and need to coax her to crawl back to me. And I need to keep her away from the plastic toilet—it’s so gross.

  Gina

  I pick up the little cooler filled with Jocelyn’s dirty diapers and bring it downstairs. Amanda has the baby, and he and Michelle are always fighting, so I do most of the laundry and cleaning in the house; it’s like I’m the maid. But most of the time I don’t mind because it gives me something to do and it’s better than watching TV all day.

  I hand-wash the diapers and baby clothes in the bathroom sink. Jocelyn is too big now for using socks as diapers, so he cuts up old towels and gives Amanda a couple of safety pins. He also put a little plastic cooler in her room, big enough for a six-pack, to store the dirty ones and help with the smell. When the clothes are washed I bring them upstairs, and Amanda helps me hang them on clotheslines he has strung across her room.

  I like helping out with Jocelyn and playing with her. She’s so cute with her dark brown eyes and long, beautiful eyelashes. I make her laugh, and she makes me forget where I am. Amanda and I have been talking more since I’ve been helping with the baby, and she is nicer to me. He’s in a better mood these days, too, and that’s good for all of us.

  Life is better with Jocelyn here.

  Castro’s Story: Neighborly

  Ariel Castro’s shabby two-story house stood on a short block of Seymour Avenue that connects two major thoroughfares, West 25th Street and Scranton Road, an unremarkable stretch of urban neglect, more shortcut than destination. The neighborhood butts up against trendy comeback areas, where young professionals restore historic homes and cafés sell $12-a-glass pinot noirs.

  The white wooden house, built in 1890, was valued at $36,000 in 2012, and was one of the tidier ones on the street. Police paid more attention to the bandos, abandoned houses that the desperate would break into and steal wire and copper pipe from to get quick cash for crack or heroin. The house at 2207 Seymour Avenue was flanked on one side by a house where four men, including a restaurant dishwasher named Charles Ramsey, each paid $75 a week to rent a room, and on the other side by a home that became a bando when a Puerto Rican family moved out around 2009. A century-old redbrick apartment building, the Vera, sat derelict across the street.

  Horst Hoyer had been pastor at the Immanuel Lutheran Church, four doors down from the Castro house, for fifty-seven years before he retired in 2013. He recalled that German immigrants dominated the neighborhood when he arrived in the 1950s, and his church still offers Sunday services in German. But the neighborhood is now a mix of races and ethnicities after successive waves of newcomers settled there from the American South, as well as Hispanics from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Hoyer said it is not as cohesive as it was when a single immigrant group dominated. The block still has a handful of longtime residents, but today it is mostly home to itinerant, low-income people.

  Castro moved onto Seymour in 1992 and was well-known on the block. Several neighbors remembered the days when he would walk down to the corner of West 25th Street with his young children to buy candy at his uncle’s Caribe Grocery. In addition to family photos, the market’s walls were covered with photos of political figures, including one of Bill and Hillary Clinton, with a handwritten note from Bill Clinton thanking Cesi for donating to his presidential campaign. Many people hung out there and remember talking to Castro.

  After Castro and Nilda split in 1996, neighbors said they didn’t see him as much, although they often saw his big yellow school bus parked on the street around lunchtime.

  Castro became increasingly private, and his house was almost always dark at night. From the outside it did not look boarded up but simply as if the drapes had been drawn, because he had hung curtains over the windows before he nailed wood over them from the inside.

  Aurora Marti, who lived across the street from Castro for more than twenty years, was touched when he stopped by to offer condolences after her husband died. Henrietta Bell, a neighbor for thirteen years who lived in a house built by the nonprofit group Habitat for Humanity, saw Castro outside talking to neighbors now and then and doing yard work on summer evenings. It was a nuisance when he parked his school bus in front of her house, but not enough to complain. Bell was more concerned about the addicts breaking into the Vera apartment building, which was next door to her home, and police came to the street several times in response to her calls.

  Shortly after Charles Ramsey moved in next door to Castro in October 2012, Castro came knocking at two in the morning to complain about Ramsey playing loud music. “Hey, I know you just moved in,” Castro told him. “But I have to get up early to drive a school bus.”

  Not long afterward he told Ramsey that a lightbulb was missing from his front porch, and he suspected that someone was stealing from him. “I need you to watch my property,” he told Ramsey.

  Castro was friendly enough with Ramsey but made it clear that no one was welcome on his property. He would occasionally barbecue in his backyard and bring a plate to Ramsey, but never invited him over.

  Castro played regularly in bands at Belinda’s Night Club at West 96th Street and Madison Avenue. That building is a symbol of the changing face of Cleveland’s immigrant communities. For decades it had housed the West Side Irish American Club, but as the Irish migrated to the suburbs, Spanish-speaking immigrants moved in and the music turned from Celtic ceilidhs to salsa and merengue. William Perez, owner of Belinda’s, thought it was unusual that Castro would buy huge amounts of food from the club to take home at three in the morning after a gig. He struck Perez as odd and a little hard to work with, but otherwise unremarkable.

  Altagracia Tejeda, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who lived directly across from Castro, recalled that Castro once invited her entire family to see his band play at Belinda’s.

  She said Castro liked her homemade popsicles and bought them when she set up a stand on her front porch on hot summer days. One day Tejeda saw a woman behind Castro’s house. She had long hair and big, dark sunglasses, and Tejeda assumed that Castro finally had a girlfriend after all these years.

  March 23, 2008: Easter

  Amanda

  “What have you got there, Pretty?” he asks Jocelyn from behind the video camera. “Is that candy? Tell Daddy what you have.”

  He is sitting on the floor of our room recording her. I had begged him to take photos of her so that someday she would have pictures of herself growing up, but he said he couldn’t risk developing them in a store. What if someone asked who she was?

  “Get a Polaroid, and you don’t have to worry about that,” I told him.

  He soon found a Polaroid camera at a yard sale but then had trouble finding film for it, so he settled for an old video camera and started recording his little girl taking her first steps and, today, enjoying her first Easter basket.

  He let me look through the piles of things scattered all over this house, and I found a purple plastic Easter basket that one of his kids must have had. I made a butterfly out of purple felt and black pipe cleaners and attached it to the handle. Butterflies still remind me of my mom, and I want her to be part of this holiday.

  Joce looks so adorable in the pink dress, white shoes, and white lace socks he bought her. I gathered the wisps of her hair on top of her head into a scrunchie, so she looked like Pebbles Flintstone. She yanks it out while he’s filming, and he and I both laugh.

  “Where are your eyes?” he asks her, and she covers them with her little hands.

  She sits down to examine her basket and the colorful plastic eggs and candy in it, and takes out a big Hershey’s bar and tries to eat it with the wrapper on. I help her open it, and he starts singing, “La la, la-la-la-la-la.”

  “Pretty, sing!” he says. “La la, la-la-la-la-la!”

  She smiles. It’s a peaceful, happy moment for us all.

 
April 22, 2008: Milestones

  Amanda

  I know they call them the terrible twos, but it’s more like the exhausting twos. Joce has so much energy that it’s overwhelming and hard to keep her occupied every minute in such a confined space. We play games, color, draw, read books, and when I need a break, watch cartoons. He took a piece of an old crib and made a gate and rigged up a plastic kiddie swing in the doorway between our room and Gina and Michelle’s. She loves the swing, and Gina pushes her on it, too.

  I’m always thinking of ways to keep her busy, to pass the hours and days in this room, and usually when she takes a nap, I crash, too, physically and mentally exhausted. I dream of going outside, pushing her in a stroller around a park or a mall and watching her play with other toddlers. Joce has never even been outdoors yet.

  I’m trying to get her on a schedule, but it’s tough. We have no natural light in the room, so there’s little difference between morning and night. That makes it harder to get up and go to sleep at the same time every day.

  She has started saying a few words—“Mama” and “Dada” and “nose.” She loves to touch her nose.

  I mark down her milestones in my diary:

  Dec. 13: She Took Her First Step Holding onto the Bed!

  Feb. 2: She started walking by herself!

  Feb. 15: She had her first high fever. This was the first time she was really sick, but she took some medicine, and the fever broke the next day.

  He’s been better to me. He still comes for me when she’s asleep. It’s not exactly like it used to be, since I have learned to accept it. I still consider it rape, because what else do you call sex with a prisoner on a chain? But it’s not like it was before, not so rough and angry and hateful. He tries to make it easier for me.

  I know it’s wrong, but I feel closer to him. I appreciate that he treats Jocelyn well and buys her clothes and toys—she loves Daisy, the big doll he just brought her. He’s even giving us better food and put a microwave on my dresser so I can warm up her mashed potatoes, beans, and rice. We all sit and watch kid movies together, and it almost feels normal, or at least a lot better than it used to.