The Lost Girls (11 page)

Gina DeJesus’s disappearance was now front-page news, leading off every local news program. And there was real fear on the streets of the West Side that no child was safe.

“They called it the Bermuda Triangle,” remembered Michelle McDowell, who lived nearby. “It was really awful just to think about, and I was very scared because of my stepdaughters.”

West Side resident Lupe Collins said the whole community was living in terror.

“There was a fear,” she said. “It was hard for us. [Everyone] was afraid to let their daughters walk to school. We didn’t know what was going on. Where did they go? How did they just vanish?”

The two girls’ disappearances had also become a hot political issue. On Tuesday morning, Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell and a deputation of city leaders arrived at the DeJesus house to comfort Gina’s parents. Outside on the lawn was a shrine to Gina, bedecked with photographs, yellow ribbons and religious symbols.

The mayor met with Felix and Nancy, who then joined her for a news conference at the First District Police Headquarters.

“I have a fourteen-year-old daughter myself,” Mayor Campbell told the press, “and I know a little bit about what fourteen-year-olds are like. Nobody’s going to get into any trouble. Just tell us what you know.”

A weary-looking Felix DeJesus then thanked the community for all its help and prayers to find his daughter.

“It’s been hard,” he said.

After the conference, the media were given a photograph showing the clothing Gina was wearing the day she disappeared.

That night, the six o’clock news led off with the latest on the search for Gina.

“By air. On ground. Every inch of Cleveland’s West Side is under the microscope,” said a reporter, “as investigators along with bloodhounds work around the clock to track this missing girl.”

An unnamed female volunteer was then interviewed, echoing the feelings of so many others moved by the terrible plight of the DeJesus family.

“I knew I had to come out,” she said, “because I know what they’re going through. [I] just hope this case ends with a safe return of a precious life.”

The search was also being closely followed at 2207 Seymour Avenue. Michelle Knight had immediately recognized Gina as the younger sister of her high school friend Mayra. But when she asked Ariel Castro if he had taken a fourteen-year-old girl, he denied it.

“He would come to my room [and] tell me, ‘I didn’t take her,’” said Michelle. “And I’ll look up at him and [say], ‘You’re a damn liar. I know you took that girl.’”

On Wednesday morning, Cleveland police rounded up every known sex offender living on the West Side, questioning them about Gina’s disappearance. Seven men were arrested on warrants for other offenses.

“We’re just trying to shake some trees,” Cleveland police Chief Deputy Charles Corrao told reporters. “I’m personally tired of these animals taking our children.”

Cleveland police also combed through desolate wasteland and parks, looking for clues. And the FBI collected security videos from stores near where Gina had last been seen, studying them frame by frame. But they did not examine video from security cameras in and around Wilbur Wright Middle School, as Castro had so feared.

That night more than five hundred worried parents packed the Wilbur Wright Middle School auditorium for a public meeting, where they were addressed by Cleveland police, and city and school officials.

“We have followed up every possible lead,” said Mayor Jane Campbell, “and will continue to do so. We still do not have a grip on where Gina is. We have to have every bit of information.”

At one point, several angry parents were ejected by police, after heckling the mayor for ignoring other cases of missing girls, including that of Amanda Berry. When the meeting continued, police officials appealed to parents to question their children closely for any information that could help the investigation.

In the days following Gina’s disappearance, there had been a flood of ghoulish rumors that Gina’s body had been found. These had so upset the family that Gina’s cousin Sylvia Colon made a public appeal for them to stop.

“We’re hearing them daily,” she told the
Plain Dealer
. “It’s been very difficult. Help us by not perpetuating those rumors. Stop spreading them.”

On Thursday, April 8, Gina DeJesus turned fifteen, and the DeJesus family organized a candlelight vigil the following night, at the corner of West 105th Street and Lorain Avenue, where she was last seen.

At 6:00
P.M.
on Good Friday, more than a hundred Cleveland residents gathered at the intersection to pray for Gina, many clutching her photograph. Among them was Ariel Castro, who had also joined the search earlier that day and handed out fliers.

Police blocked off West 105th Street from traffic, as the crowd surrounded Gina’s parents and her siblings, who were all holding large burning candles, to pray for Gina’s return. Yellow ribbons and
MISSING
posters had been posted to telephones poles around the pay phone and intersection where Arlene Castro had called her mother, before Gina had left to walk home.

News reporters and local TV camera crews covered the vigil, which was led by West Side community activist Khalid Samad.

“We believe in total community involvement,” he told the crowd. “We know that without the community this situation will not be solved. We just want to bring this baby home.”

An emotional Nancy Ruiz also addressed reporters, the stress of losing her daughter visibly taking its toll.

“I can feel her near me,” she said. “I know she’s out there somewhere and close.”

Earlier that day, a man had been arrested in Dayton, Ohio, in connection with an attempted abduction on Cleveland’s East Side. And a buzz went through the crowd that maybe he had taken Gina. Police were careful not to raise expectations.

“There was a man arrested,” a Cleveland police spokesman told a WEWS-TV reporter. “We’re just pursuing a lead, but right now there’s nothing connected to what’s going on [here].”

At the end of the vigil, as the crowd held hands, a friend of the DeJesus family appealed for everyone to carry on the search for Gina.

“Continue to pray,” she said. “Continue to take out the fliers and hopefully we’re going to get Gina back very, very soon.”

Earlier on Friday, after an anonymous tip believed to have come from Ariel Castro, the FBI picked up Fernando Colon for questioning. Colon, who had recently graduated from the police academy, was now working security at the Westown Plaza. On Friday morning, special agents arrived at his house and brought him downtown to FBI headquarters. For the next few hours, Colon was interrogated about Gina’s disappearance, undergoing a polygraph test, which he passed. His security patrol car was also forensically examined for any evidence linking him to Gina DeJesus.

“I had nothing to hide,” said Colon in 2013. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you whatever you want me to tell you, because when that girl disappeared I was working.’”

As an FBI agent was driving him home later, Colon advised him to take a close look at Ariel Castro as a possible suspect.

“I told them to investigate Ariel Castro,” recalled Colon. “Because he knows Gina and her parents and where they live.”

But the FBI ignored Colon’s advice, never once questioning Ariel Castro about Gina’s disappearance. Years later the FBI would vehemently deny that Colon had ever told them to investigate Ariel Castro.

At nine Saturday morning, more than two hundred people assembled at the Zone Recreation Center on Lorain Avenue to spend the day searching for Gina DeJesus. Before they fanned out in groups through the West Side of Cleveland, Mayor Jane Campbell told them she was praying for an “Easter miracle.”

For the rest of the day the volunteers handed out fliers to passersby, and knocked on doors asking for any information. That afternoon, Felix DeJesus canvassed Seymour Avenue, speaking to residents outside Ariel Castro’s house, where
MISSING
posters for Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus hung together on a pole.

“Gina’s father came round,” said Daniel Marti, who lived directly opposite, “and I remember talking to him and telling him how sorry I felt.”

On Saturday night, millions of viewers coast to coast saw Arlene Castro on
America’s Most Wanted,
in a segment about Cleveland’s two missing girls, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry. Arlene described the last few minutes before her best friend disappeared, and calling her mother to see if Gina could spend the afternoon at their house.

“I decided to call my mom and ask her,” Arlene told reporter Tom Morris. “So [Gina] gave me fifty cents to call. My mom said no, that I can’t go over to her house, and so I told her I couldn’t. And she said, ‘Well, okay, I’ll talk to you later,’ and she just walked.”

The program also featured Amanda Berry, who’d disappeared just across Lorain Avenue almost a year earlier.

“Two attractive teenaged girls,” said Morris. “They disappear in similar circumstances along the same busy avenue. What does it mean? A lot of the local people around here are talking about it, and how they’re getting a little bit scared for their children as well.

“Whether or not these cases are connected, police and the families of these two girls need your help.”

Ariel Castro had turned down playing a gig that night so he could stay at home and watch Arlene on the top-rated FOX TV show. He must have felt smugly satisfied that he had gotten clean away with his third kidnapping, and Cleveland police and the FBI were absolutely clueless.

Indeed, he felt so confident he had outsmarted law enforcement that right after taking Gina, he congratulated himself by buying a sports utility vehicle with the money his father had left him.

Michelle Knight first met Gina DeJesus a couple of weeks after she arrived in the house. In the days leading up to it, Ariel Castro kept telling Michelle that his daughter was coming over and he wanted them to meet.

At their first brief meeting, Castro put them in the bathroom together for a couple of minutes while he went to the kitchen.

“I whispered into her ear, ‘You’re Gina DeJesus,’” recalled Michelle. “And she looked at me and she was like, ‘You know who I am?’”

Then Michelle, who had now been in the house almost two years, gave Gina some advice on dealing with their abductor.

“I told her not to tell him that I know who you are,” Michelle said. “That there will be consequences to you telling him.”

Then she promised to tell Gina more when they next saw each other.

Then Castro came into the bathroom and told Gina to put Michelle’s hair into twists, and stayed to watch. But when Michelle thanked Gina for making her hair look so beautiful, Castro became incensed. He then took both of the girls upstairs, chaining Michelle to the bed in the pink bedroom, before bringing Gina back down to the basement.

A few days later, he moved Gina upstairs into one of the bedrooms, where he’d pinned up one of her
MISSING
posters on the wall.

One night a drunken Ariel Castro brought Michelle Knight downstairs and offered her some shots of rum. She refused, and after her captor took a large swig from the bottle, he told her how he used to follow a young girl home from Wilbur Wright Middle School every afternoon. He said she looked like Gina, and he had gotten them mixed up.

“He said he didn’t know that he’d kidnapped his daughter’s friend,” said Michelle, “until he saw Gina’s name on the news.”

After Gina’s disappearance, Arlene Castro fell into a deep depression and started self-cutting. Nilda took her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

“She was Gina’s best friend,” her mother would later explain, “and she was with her when she disappeared. So it traumatized Arlene because she felt responsible for [Gina’s] disappearance.”

Wednesday, April 21, 2004, marked the one-year anniversary of Amanda Berry’s disappearance, and the day before her eighteenth birthday. That morning, Cleveland
Plain Dealer
columnist Regina Brett wrote a column about the tragic case, headlined,
SOMEBODY KNOWS WHERE AMANDA IS.

“One year ago today,” wrote Brett, “Amanda Berry fell off the face of the earth and her mother landed in hell. Louwana Miller hasn’t heard her daughter’s voice in a year. Hasn’t seen her face in 365 days. Hasn’t slept a single night without worrying, without wondering, Where is she?”

Since Amanda’s disappearance, Brett wrote, Louwana has been tormented by images of her daughter, as a drugged-out sex slave or being dead and buried. She was now afraid to leave home in case she missed a call from Amanda, and scared of answering the phone to hear about yet another sighting of Amanda “pregnant, prostituting herself or prancing happily around in Florida.”

All the sleepless nights had taken their toll on Louwana, now forty-two, who had visibly aged since Amanda disappeared.

“As the months passed,” wrote Brett, “the posters faded, the yellow ribbons fell down, and the media lost interest. No one seemed to care about Amanda—until another girl disappeared two weeks ago.”

Since Gina DeJesus went missing, there had been renewed interest in Amanda by the media, with new
MISSING
posters of Amanda suddenly appearing all over Cleveland.

In the article, Louwana criticized Cleveland police and the FBI for taking so long to admit that Amanda was not a runaway. She also questioned whether her daughter might have been found if the FBI had traced the two strange phone calls she had received from Amanda’s cell phone.

“If she’s dead,” said Louwana, “can somebody out there tell me? I’m living in hell.”

On Saturday, FBI Special Agent Robert Hawk updated the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
on the search. Since Gina’s disappearance, more than five hundred tips had been followed up without any success. Police had questioned around a thousand people, and given polygraph tests to seven people close to her. But Hawk admitted they were no further forward than they had been on day one.