The Lost Girls (19 page)

At 8:35
P.M.
on Thursday, June 12, 2008, Ariel Castro was stopped by Cleveland police for driving his motorcycle without a license or a helmet. Officer Jim Simone was patrolling the West Side when a motorcycle whizzed past him at high speed with its license plate tilted sideways. The seasoned cop knew it was an old trick, used to obscure the plates, and quite illegal. In fact, the plates did belong to another vehicle.

Officer Simone then pulled him over at a nearby gas station. Castro, wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt, looked visibly nervous as Officer Simone approached him—his dash-cam video filming the entire incident.

“Your driver’s license, please,” demanded the patrolman.

“Excuse me?” replied Castro.

“Let me see your driver’s license, please.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Castro defensively.

“First off,” replied Simone, “your plate is improperly displayed. It has to be displayed left to right, not upside down or sideways. You have to be able to read them from behind.”

“I just got it out, sir.”

“Can I see your motorcycle license?”

“That, I don’t have,” said Castro.

Then as Castro ran his fingers through his hair nervously, the officer asked why he was not wearing a helmet or carrying a driver’s license.

“And you subject yourself to being arrested,” Simone told him. “Is that what you want?”

“No, sir. I don’t,” Castro replied.

“You’re getting deeper and deeper,” the officer warned. “Just stand by your bike and take out your insurance documents.”

“I know,” said Castro. “But I just got off work. I’m a school bus driver. I’m going to get all this taken care of.”

Then Castro asked Officer Simone to give him a break, explaining he could lose his job if he was arrested.

“Normally I would arrest people for that,” explained Officer Simone in 2013, “but he was very polite and explained to me he was a school bus driver.”

Officer Simone then ran a background check on his patrol car computer, as Castro waited by a gas pump anxiously combing his hair.

“He only had a few traffic violations,” said Simone, “and no criminal background.”

Then Officer Simone let him off with just a warning and a couple of tickets.

“You gotta get the plates changed over,” he told Castro. “You gotta get all the things that are required by law. This is an arrestible offense. You could be going to jail over something silly, you know.”

The officer ordered him to push his motorbike the mile back to his house, following in his patrol car. Then, as Ariel Castro wheeled his motorbike through his front gate of 2207 Seymour Avenue, Officer Simone drove off without giving him another thought.

As Jocelyn grew into a toddler and began to talk, Ariel Castro gave his prisoners aliases. He ordered them never to use their real names again, in case his daughter ever realized who they were with the ongoing TV coverage.

“I’m going to give you different names,” he told Michelle one day. “I don’t want her to know your real names.”

He renamed Michelle, “JuJu,” after Jujubes candy, and Gina became Chelsea, but Amanda appears to have been allowed to keep her real name.

Soon afterward he removed their chains, after Jocelyn started pulling on Michelle’s, saying, “JuJu lock?” Now, he occasionally allowed them to roam around the house under his strict supervision, satisfied that they were too terrified to try to escape. But just as a reminder, he always had his Luger service revolver on his hip as a warning.

“He didn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart,” said Michelle. “It was because Jocelyn was getting old enough to understand what was happening around her.”

Each evening after work, Castro would bring everybody into the kitchen for dinner. Michelle would hold Jocelyn and gently rock her to stop her crying, while Gina cooked a meal. Castro would chat away to Amanda about his day, as if she were his wife.

Occasionally, they would all gather in the living room to watch his favorite TV show,
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
, while he made obscene comments about Kim Kardashian.

During the interminably long days, while they were locked inside the boarded-up pink bedroom, Michelle and Gina could hear Amanda playing with her new daughter in the adjoining bedroom.

Everybody loved the innocent little toddler and pitied her for being born into slavery. Michelle and Gina spent hours making baby clothes from dirty old T-shirts, using needles and thread that Castro provided. He also brought in old toys for Jocelyn to play with, promising to buy proper clothes for his daughter, but never did.

After years of intense emotional and physical abuse by Ariel Castro, all three women were suffering from Stockholm syndrome. The condition was first identified in 1973, when a gang of bank robbers took employees at the Kreditbanken in Stockholm, Sweden, hostage for six days. During that time they became emotionally attached to their captors, resisting rescue attempts by the police and later refusing to testify against their kidnappers. The term was first coined by Swedish psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who had advised police during the incident.

A year later, American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst went even further, after being kidnapped by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army. She joined the group, participating in several bank robberies, subsequently serving a two-year jail sentence, later commuted by President Jimmy Carter.

Dr. Frank M. Ochberg, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University, who helped define Stockholm syndrome, says Ariel Castro’s three victims are classic cases.

“He degraded, demeaned and diminished them,” said Dr. Ochberg. “Some acts terrify, others degrade. To be bound, gagged, deprived of a toilet—to be treated in a less than human way—causes not only fear, but profound shame and humiliation.”

And when this is done relentlessly over a period of many years, it drastically changes a victim’s sense of self.

“We become bonded to the person who aggresses against us,” said Dr. Ochberg. “And that’s the Stockholm syndrome.”

As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, and the months into years, the three captives did whatever they had to do to survive. Ariel Castro held the power of life and death over them all, robbing them of their basic humanity.

“You’re made like an infant,” explained Dr. Ochberg. “And when you’re treated so you can’t eat, you can’t sleep, you can’t use a toilet, you can’t move without explicit permission, you are … infantilized.

“But then little by little, you are given what it takes to survive. And in your mind, unconsciously, you deny that this is the person who did all of this to me. And you start to feel the way you did as a little baby with your mother, who is the first source of nourishment—of life itself.”

Castro also practiced a barbaric barter system. After raping the women, he would throw money at them, telling them he was paying for their sexual services as if they were prostitutes. Whenever they needed something special from the store, he would then demand payment out of the cash he had given them.

After Jocelyn’s birth, they became a bizarre travesty of a family, with him as the father, constantly telling them to respect their elders.

“In his own demented mind,” explained Michelle, “he loved all of us because he thought we were all family. That goes back to his fake world where he wanted a family and he didn’t have it. He always complained how his family had … abandoned him.”

Castro now began taking his infant daughter to church every Sunday, telling people that it was a girlfriend’s baby. He would also shoot home videos of himself playing with Jocelyn, acting out the part of devoted father.

Meanwhile, the only one in the house that dared to stand up to Ariel, and refused to play into the happy family charade, was Michelle Knight, who suffered the consequences. He would spit in her face, punch her and try to humiliate her in front of the others, calling her worthless and continually telling her that no one was even looking for her.

“What’s wrong with you?” he’d scream at her. “You’re supposed to be happy.”

In early 2009, Arlene Castro posted a photograph of Gina DeJesus on her MySpace page. Now reinventing herself as hardcore rapper, Cheri Alize, Arlene captioned the photograph, “This is gina Dejesus. she is now 19 years old. she has been missing since April 2, 2004. i pray in my heart that she is okay!! i love u gina.”

At around 4:00
P.M.
on April 3, Ariel Castro made an illegal U-turn in heavy traffic, outside Robinson G. Jones Elementary School, as he couldn’t be bothered to drive around the block. Several teachers watched in horror as he put his busload of students in danger, immediately reporting him to the Cleveland School District. Two weeks later, Castro stood in front of a disciplinary board, on two charges of disregarding his passengers’ safety and negligence.

“[It] was not only dangerous to the students and other motorists,” his boss Ann Carlson wrote to the disciplinary board, “it was totally unnecessary. I recommend a sixty-day suspension.”

Castro persuaded the school’s principal, Joshua J. Gunvalsen, to write a letter on his behalf.

“I did not witness what occurred,” he wrote, “but I do want to say that I have known Mr. Castro to be an effective bus driver. I have witnessed him trying to work with students, families and myself to handle student issues. If you have any questions about the kind of service that Mr. Castro has provided to my school, please contact me.”

Nevertheless, his bosses ordered a sixty-day unpaid suspension. A few months later, Castro’s Teamsters Local 407 representative appealed the sentence, and it was reduced by five days.

During his suspension, Ariel Castro drove to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to visit his son and two daughters. Before leaving he had warned them that he could not stay the night, and would drive straight back to Cleveland.

While he was in Fort Wayne his car broke down and he became very upset. Despite his family’s pleas to stay over and get it fixed the next day, Castro told them he “needed to get home and feed the dogs.”

In late August 2009, Jaycee Lee Dugard suddenly reappeared in Antioch, California, eighteen years after she had gone missing. Now grown up, she told a chilling tale of how Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, had held her captive since 1991, when she was eleven. Jaycee was repeatedly abused and raped by Garrido, who married her in a bizarre wedding ceremony and had two daughters with her. Over the years of imprisonment he brainwashed her into becoming his devoted wife, as Nancy was relegated to the role of housekeeper.

Jaycee’s story captured the world’s attention and made headlines for weeks. It also gave renewed hope to Amanda and Gina’s families that their daughters might also be found one day.

In October, Oprah Winfrey devoted a special show to Cleveland’s missing children, concentrating on Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Ashley Summers.

“We’re on Cleveland’s West Side,” FBI Special Agent Phil Torsey told Oprah’s global TV audience. “Three girls have disappeared from the area within blocks of one another.”

Also featured in the show were Amanda’s sister, Beth Serrano, Gina’s mother, Nancy Ruiz, and Ashley’s mother, Jennifer Summers.

“Jaycee’s story gives me hope,” Summers told Oprah, “because it makes me believe that Ashley will come home.”

The DeJesus family had also been participating in a new docudrama about Cleveland’s missing children called
Where’s Gina?—A Look at Missing Children.
Directed by local filmmaker Ruben Reyes, professional actors worked with Gina’s parents to re-create how she had gone missing five years earlier.

On Saturday, October 24, the film premiered at the First Spanish Baptist Church, and the WOIO-TV news team interviewed Gina’s parents about it.

“The family of Gina DeJesus will never give up the search for their daughter,” said a reporter. “This documentary is another way to keep the search for Gina alive and raise awareness about the eight hundred thousand children who go missing each year.”

Felix DeJesus said he and Nancy had participated in the movie to raise awareness of the missing children in Cleveland.

“I am the voice for them now,” he said. “It doesn’t get any easier.”

Felix said he had never given up hope that his daughter was still alive and would come home one day.

“I don’t have that empty space in my heart saying that she’s gone across that line,” he said. “She’s out there somewhere and I want her if she sees this to know that her father is still searching and fighting.”

A few days later, on October 29, a fifty-year-old Cleveland ex-marine named Anthony Sowell was arrested on suspicion of murdering eleven women. Police had first gone to his Imperial Avenue house on Cleveland’s East Side, after a young woman had accused him of rape. When police arrived with an arrest warrant, the convicted rapist was nowhere to be found. But police did find a freshly dug grave, containing two dead bodies.

Over the next few days they would discover more rotting bodies in the living room, in crawl spaces, under a basement staircase, and in the back garden, as well as a woman’s skull in a bucket. For months neighbors had complained about the putrid smell on the 12200 block of Imperial Avenue, which many blamed on Ray’s Sausage Company next door.

Sowell, a registered sex offender, was finally arrested and the media dubbed him the Cleveland Strangler. He was by far the city’s most prolific serial killer, and over the next few weeks cold-case detectives pored over missing-persons files looking for more possible victims, including Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus.

“When I first heard about the bodies on Imperial Avenue,” wrote Cleveland
Plain Dealer
columnist Regina Brett, “I felt sure that Amanda and Gina would be unearthed. But no, this serial killer didn’t go for young girls.”

Anthony Sowell’s subsequent high-profile trial and conviction for murdering the eleven women raised many disturbing questions about the way the Cleveland authorities handled its hundreds of missing-persons cases. Most of Sowell’s victims were black and impoverished, either homeless or living alone with severe drug and alcohol problems. And their families questioned how these unfortunate women had been allowed to disappear, without any questions being asked.