True Crime Addict

by James Renner

  FIFTY

  Eucatastrophe

  May sixth. I was sitting with the other parents in the lobby of Flytz Gym in Cuyahoga Falls, waiting for Casey to finish tumbling class, when I got the first text:

  Amanda and Gina just walked out of a house on the West Side, was all it said.

  “Holy shit,” I said, out loud. Some of the other parents looked at me with concern. I ignored them. A miracle had happened in Cleveland, and soon they would hear it for themselves. A collective “Holy shit!” was about to echo out from Northeast Ohio and travel across the world. Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus had just returned from the dead. They were alive! Together. After all this time.

  Then another text: There’s a third woman here.

  “Holy shit,” I said again.

  A woman crinkled her nose at me.

  As soon as practice ended, I drove Casey home. I dropped him off and explained to Julie what was happening. The news channels didn’t have it yet, but they would soon. I wanted to be in Cleveland when it broke. I had to be up there for this. I took the Vibe and jetted north up 77. By the time I was out of Akron, the first radio bulletins were coming in.

  Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus are alive. Another woman, Michelle Knight, was rescued, too, missing for over ten years. Suspect in custody. Nobody dead.

  It’s one of those stories that’s too good to be true. Something so good and full of grace it causes you to reevaluate how you see the world, the reverse of that feeling we felt in our hearts the morning of 9/11. It was Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, made real. Only, in this story, instead of eagles the deus ex machina was a black man named Charles Ramsey, who pulled Amanda out of that evil house, and who spoke in earnest bon mots: “I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl runs into a black man’s arms.”

  As I drove for Cleveland, I wondered who the suspect could be. Could he be the boogeyman responsible for all the other unsolved abductions in the area? Was it the man who took Amy Mihaljevic? How much closure could this one day bring?

  Instead of driving to the crime scene on Seymour Avenue, I chose to head to MetroHealth Medical Center, where the victims had been transported. I parked my car out front by the media trucks. Every local station was there. Reporters milled about the front portico, waiting for the first official press conference. I jogged past them like I knew what I was doing. A guard let me in the door without questioning me. I was wearing a suit. He probably thought I was a lawyer.

  I sat in the reception area, leaned against a wall, and busied myself on my laptop, watching people come and go. About forty-five minutes after I arrived, Gina’s mother came in the back. She recognized me from when I worked on her daughter’s story and gave me a hug.

  “I’m so happy for you,” I said.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I … I just can’t believe it.”

  A large woman in uniform stepped between us, a liaison with the Cleveland Police Department. “How’d you get in?” she asked.

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said. “Not anymore, anyway.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Someone needs to tell the family how bad this is about to get,” I said. I pointed at the glass doors, at the circus setting up outside. “That’s just the local media. In an hour, you’ll have CNN out there. Fox News. NBC. Probably Nancy Grace. Everyone will want this, and you have to take control of it and set the terms before it gets crazy. The families need a media liaison. But they should do it together.”

  I gave her my number and asked her to pass it along. My brief intervention probably didn’t change anything—the crisis management firms were already reaching out to the families by then, I’m sure. But the women did what I proposed. They united behind a local firm, Hennes Paynter, and successfully weathered the storm of the media onslaught. Of course, after surviving Ariel Castro, the stalker reporters were nothing to fear.

  That name: Ariel Castro. Soon as I heard it, I felt my stomach tumble out of my body. I knew that name: Castro. I knew I knew it.

  At home, I went through my old notes and e-mails from the months I spent researching Amanda and Gina’s disappearance. There it was. Castro. Gina’s father had given me the name of Ariel’s daughter, Arlene Castro. I’d meant to interview her, but because she was a juvenile, my editor and I had agreed to leave her alone.

  What if I had spoken to her? Would she have said something to cast suspicion on her father?

  It was exactly two weeks later that I got the call from my mother. I could tell by her tone that something was wrong, really wrong. “Jimmy,” she said. “A man is stalking your sister.” I listened, and as she talked, I felt that quiet rage turn my blood to ice.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Contempt

  It took me three tries to get the phone number right. Julie answered on the second ring.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “In the car,” she said. “With Casey and Lainey.”

  “Can you pull over?”

  “Why?”

  “I need you to write something down and I don’t want you to get into an accident.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just pull over.”

  “I’m in a driveway. What?”

  “I need you to call a lawyer named Roger Synenberg.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m in jail,” I said.

  * * *

  Let’s jump back a bit. There’re some things you should know before we get into this.

  My mom. She lived in a house on the nice side of Lakewood, with three of my sisters. Barb, the middle one at twenty-two, shared the first floor with our mother. Barb had two dogs, one of which was an American Bulldog, a beast of an animal. I had been trying to talk her into getting rid of it for the better part of the year. Barb reminds me of Maura in many ways and I often asked her for perspective on this mystery as it progressed. She was athletic, like Maura, attractive, quiet. Supersmart, but struggling in college. Studied nursing. Knew her way around bars.

  The trouble started when her bulldog attacked another dog outside her house. The dog’s owner filed a report and an animal control officer came to the house. He was a young man, Barb’s age. Skinny guy, squinty eyes; let’s call him Brian. After that first meeting, Brian inserted himself into my sister’s life in increasingly odd ways. He started dropping by the house, calling her on the phone. Funny thing, though: Every time he visited, every time he called, he made a point to tell Barb that he was “off duty” and the visits were “not official business.” This behavior escalated over several weeks. When Barb didn’t answer his calls, Brian called our mother at work to ask where she was. Then he showed up at the house again and told Barb to let him inside so he could look around the first floor. What he was doing was way beyond the scope of his powers. My first thought when I heard all this was that this man was casing the place.

  My mind is an encyclopedia of deviant behavior, and Brian’s actions reminded me of Dennis Rader—BTK—the serial killer who terrorized Wichita, Kansas, from 1974 until 2005. Rader worked as an animal control officer and used that position to gain information about his victims: whether they had a guard dog; the layout of their homes.

  Our mother caught Brian outside the house a few days before she called me. He was out of uniform. He told her that he happened to be walking down their street, off duty, because he lived in the area. But when I ran his background, I found he lived in Westlake, two towns over.

  Barb was due in court to answer questions about the dog that day, a Monday. I left the kids with the babysitter and drove up to the Lakewood muni building and got my first look at Brian as he walked into the courtroom. The young man gave me the heebie-jeebies. He sat ten feet from my sister, and leered at her.

  The judge came in: Judge Patrick Carroll, an old, cantankerous judge with a reputation for busting chops. He was particularly harsh on drunk drivers.

  When he called Barb’s name, I escorted her around the partition.

  �
��Who are you?” the judge asked.

  “I’m her brother.”

  “If you’re not a lawyer, you can’t be here.”

  “I know,” I said. “But there’s something going on that you need to hear about.”

  “Let me ask you again. Are you a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Then get out.”

  I turned to Barb then, realizing, a little late, that this was not going to work out in our favor. Not there. Not then. “Just plead not guilty,” I said. “We’ll come back.”

  “Out!”

  A police officer who had been standing by the door stepped toward me. I put up my hands to let him know I was leaving. But as I went, I made myself heard. “That man,” I said, pointing to the animal control officer where he sat by the prosecutor, “is stalking my sister. Somebody needs to check him out.”

  I was at the door by the time the judge gave me the ultimatum. “If you say one more word, I will find you in contempt.”

  It felt like someone had thrown open a door inside my mind. CREEEK! Out comes the rage monster. My mind was a whir of memories. What did I know about Judge Carroll? What could I say that would make the most impact, show him how much contempt I really did have for him. Ah yes. The one thing you could never call Judge Carroll …

  “You’re just a drunk!” I shouted. An audible gasp went around the room. I turned my back on him and walked out the door.

  The officer by the door was a young fellow by the name of Anthony Ciresi. He’d just escorted a man from jail. That’s why he was there. Ciresi followed me out of the courtroom and then threw me across the hall, hard, into the concrete wall. I lost my breath. Couldn’t breathe.

  I had two distinct thoughts.

  Thought one: Oh shit. The rage is still in control. Wait. Wait. Give me a second to calm down.

  Thought two: Okay, asshole. You want to fight? Good. Because I’ve been waiting for a long time to fight someone and you’ll do just fine.

  I felt hands on my wrists. I spun, grabbed Ciresi’s arm, and flipped him away from me. It was like tossing a bail of hay off a truck. I looked down at him as he picked himself up off the tiled floor, saw the fear in his eyes. Loved it. Loved it if nothing more than for the fact that for the rest of his career, when he feels like roughing up a perp, he’ll remember me and how easily I got the drop on him.

  I was ready to pounce. I wanted a few swings at that smooth face before anyone could interrupt us. But that other part of me, that newer part of me, that part that is a father and a lover, stepped forward and spoke up: Don’t make it worse!

  It gave Ciresi time to reach his belt. He pulled a weapon. At first I thought it was a gun. But then I noticed that it was bright yellow. A Taser. It was aimed at my heart.

  I raised my hands. “Okay,” I said.

  “Turn around,” he growled.

  I complied. In a moment, he was cuffing my wrists, digging into the skin as far as it would give, pushing my face against the wall. I turned my head and saw a woman sitting in the hallway, waiting to pay a bill. She’d seen everything, the only witness. Her mouth was open in a comical look of shock. I smiled, tried to look friendly. “Did you see him throw me into the wall?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “I’ll need your name,” I said.

  Ciresi pulled me around and marched me down the hall, around the corner, toward the police station on the other side of the building. Other officers were running toward us, in response to the sound of the fight in the hallway. They slowed down when they saw I was cuffed. A couple of cops clapped Ciresi on the back and said odd things such as, “Like father like son.” I would discover later that Ciresi was actually the son of the guy who’d run the Lakewood Police Department’s detective bureau for many years. Dumb fucking luck.

  “I’m not some drunk piece of white trash,” I said, trying my best to put the Hulk away, lock that door up before I got myself in deeper. “What you did back there is called ‘excessive force.’”

  “That right?”

  “You’re going to be writing parking tickets in a month,” I said.

  He sighed and wrote something down in his notepad. I had picked the worst thing to say, again.

  They charged me with “Assault on a Peace Officer,” a felony of the fourth degree. Eighteen months in prison, if convicted. I was given one call, which I used to reach Julie. After that, I was assigned an orange shirt and pants. Someone handed me a bedroll. Another officer escorted me to my cell.

  I lay down on the mattress and replayed the events of the day in my mind, tried to figure out just how much trouble I was in. There were about eight other dudes in the jail with me, sitting in the common area, watching TV. They wanted to know what I was in for, but I wouldn’t talk to them. I was going to be out soon. I knew I would. I didn’t belong there, with them. I pulled the door to my cell shut and locked myself inside.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Hard Time

  “Geez. When he told you to say one more thing, you really made it count,” said Dominic Coletta. We were in one of those movie trope situations: me in orange scrubs, behind a pane of plexiglass, speaking into a dirty phone, the lawyer on the other side in a nice suit. When Julie called Roger, Roger had called Dominic. He was a rising star in the world of Cleveland defense lawyers, Roger’s protégé. Thin, handsome, dark hair, Italian. He had an economy of words, already.

  “Here’s the deal, James,” he said. “I’m going to get you out of here but it’s not going to be today. In the morning, we’ll go in front of Judge Carroll. You’ll apologize. Profusely. And then you’ll plead guilty to contempt. There’s no wiggle room there. You’ll plead guilty and he’ll sentence you to some jail time. But that’s not what you should be concerned about. Our concern is the felony. They’ll have to indict you in Cuyahoga County. But we need to keep you out of county lockup. You don’t want to end up there. You want to do your time in a muni jail.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I’m a special instructor at the University of Akron.”

  “You’ll probably lose your job if you end up with a felony on your record, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. How many kids?”

  I held up two fingers.

  “Good. We’re gonna get you out of here,” he said again.

  “One more thing,” I said. “I need my Cymbalta. Soon. I can’t go through withdrawals in here.”

  * * *

  I found a dog-eared copy of Dan Brown’s early novel Deception Point in the common area and brought it back to my cell. I’d always wanted to read it. Finally had the time. I lay down on the bed and got into it.

  A while later, a man came with dinner on one of those industrial school trays. Dry chicken nuggets, bread, corn. A plate of carbs. I didn’t touch it. Gave it to the other guys, who were grateful enough for the extra food that they stopped harassing me.

  Around nine o’clock, I remembered that I hadn’t given Julie instructions about where to pick up Lainey’s prescription. She’d been sick for a couple days and her doctor wanted to give her something for her cough. I pressed the button next to the intercom on the wall above the steel toilet.

  “Yeah?” came a gruff male voice.

  “I have to make a call.”

  “That right?” he said, and laughed. “I’ll get right on that.”

  He never let me make that call.

  It was beginning to sink in: I was in control of nothing.

  * * *

  In the morning, I was brought in front of Judge Carroll. This time I wore an orange suit. Julie and Barb sat in the back of the courtroom.

  “I’m sorry,” I told the judge. “I’m embarrassed at how I acted. I’m not sure how it all happened.”

  He didn’t look at me. I was sentenced to ten days, an exorbitant sentence for a simple contempt of court. But I’d made it personal.

  The cop at my cuffs let me kiss Julie on the way out. I told her I was sorry. And th
en they returned me to my cell. I sat on the bed and cried and when I was done crying I read. I slept and read. That night I paid the felony bond and around midnight they transferred me to a new jail in the suburbs. “It’s the Hilton of local jails,” the police officer who drove me there said. “Best place to do time in Cuyahoga County.”

  They gave me my own room, a narrow concrete stall with a thin bed and a stainless-steel toilet/sink combo. It had a drinking fountain, too, but it wouldn’t stop running until you flushed the toilet again. From 7 A.M. to 11 P.M. my door was unlocked and I could sit in a common area that had a TV, a pay phone, and a shower. Two other rooms opened onto this space. For most of the time I was there, it was just me and two other guys in the pod.

  Casey was overcurious, as always. I talked to him every night, using the collect-call phone when the other guys were napping. “Did the handcuffs hurt? Is your bed scratchy? Mom says the bed’s scratchy and your clothes are itchy. I told the dentist that you were in jail. How long are you going to be in jail?”

  We decided not to keep any of this from him, to be entirely truthful about the experience. Our hope was that maybe he would find it a little scary and want to do better in school, that seeing what happens when you fight as an adult would motivate him to stop fighting with his teachers.

  “I’m going to get you out,” he said, his voice sounding far older than five. “I’ll bring a hundred other Caseys and we’ll get a ladder and a saw and we’ll bust you out!”

  “Casey, please don’t do anything like that,” I said.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you. To the moon and back.”

  * * *

  I noticed the shakes the second morning in the new jail. I couldn’t rest my left hand. It wasn’t until the migraine started behind my right eye that I understood what was happening. Even though they’d given me the Cymbalta, I was going through withdrawals. I’d been drinking more than I’d realized. Looking back on it, I can see how it happened, gradually: a beer at the end of the day, then two, then a few more and a whiskey chaser. Every night. For something like five months. And, to be completely candid, I’d started dipping into the bottle of oxycodone Julie kept after childbirth. Every other night for a while. Weed. NyQuil, too.