The Lost Girls (27 page)

“And my heart fell,” said Onil. “I just dropped, not physically, but I hit the ground after he said that.”

Onil Castro then strenuously denied knowing anything about the women being in his brother’s house, or how they had gotten there.

Later that day, Deputy Sheriff Jacobs interviewed Ariel Castro’s mother, who provided background information about the family. Lillian Rodriguez said that Ariel had never lived with Onil or Pedro, and avoided his elder brother because of his drinking problem. The Castro matriarch said it had been years since she had been inside 2207 Seymour Avenue, and denied ever meeting her granddaughter Jocelyn.

It was late afternoon when two Cleveland police officers arrived at Lillian Roldan’s house to bring her to the Justice Center for questioning.

“They asked me, ‘Do you know why?’” said Lillian. “And I said, ‘I know it has to do with Ariel Castro.’ So I went downtown with my husband and my daughter, and they interrogated me for two hours.”

During the interview, Lillian was asked if Ariel Castro had ever mistreated her during their three-and-a-half-year relationship.

“And I said, ‘No, there’s nothing bad about him,’” said Lillian. “‘I have nothing bad to say about him, because there isn’t.’”

She was also asked if she knew that Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry had been in the house, when she had stayed over.

“So I said, ‘I’m aware because they said it on TV, not because I knew about it,’” she recalled. “Because if I would have known something, I would never leave those girls there. I have a daughter of two years old and I would never do that to anyone.”

Less than a mile away, at the Cleveland FBI Office at 1501 Lakeside Avenue, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were photographed and interviewed in far greater detail than they had been the night before. The interviews were conducted by the FBI Child/Adolescent Forensic Interviewer Catherine Connell, with Cleveland Detective Karl Lessmann observing.

Once again the three victims recounted how Ariel Castro had tricked them into his house. They all went into harrowing detail about all the beatings, rapes and mental abuse, which were then broken down into various time periods to allow prosecutors to frame charges against Castro.

Michelle Knight was also closely questioned about her five pregnancies, and how Ariel Castro had forced her miscarriages.

Later, back at the MetroHealth Medical Center, Michelle’s brother Freddie Knight came to visit her.

“She was as white as a ghost,” said Freddie, who was now thirty-two. “But she told me, ‘Come over here and give me a hug. It’s been ages.’ She was happy to see me. It was emotional.”

That night, Barbara Knight flew to Cleveland from Naples, Florida, complaining to reporters that she still had not spoken to her daughter.

On Tuesday afternoon, Officer Larry Guerra was escorting a prisoner through the Cleveland Central Prison Unit, when he heard a familiar voice.

“Hey, Chiqui, what’s happening?” asked Ariel Castro.

Guerra turned around to see Castro, whom he had grown up with, smiling at him in a holding cell.

“I really fucked up now,” Castro told him in Spanish, “but I’m a victim too.”

Explaining he was now a policeman, Guerra asked how he could possibly be a victim. Castro replied he had been molested as a child.

“Yeah, but you know Felix [DeJesus],” Guerra told him. “You know the family.”

“I’ve known the family my whole life,” replied Castro, “but I didn’t force her into the car.”

“Yeah,” said Guerra, “but it’s been ten years, how can you watch this on the news every anniversary?”

Castro said he understood what he was saying, and then asked how his daughter, Jocelyn, was doing.

“Yeah, that’s your daughter out of consequences?” asked Guerra.

“I didn’t rape her,” Castro declared, “she did it willingly.”

Then the officer asked what part his two brothers had played in all this.

“Nothing,” Castro replied. “They knew nothing about this. This was my secret.”

“How did you keep it a secret for ten years?”

“It was hard, but it was my secret and I’m glad it’s over. Now I can die in prison. But I’m a victim too.”

“Okay, I’ll see you later,” said Guerra, who continued on to the booking area with his prisoner.

Immediately afterward, he informed his superior about his strange conversation with Ariel Castro, and wrote out a report.

At ten on Tuesday night, Anderson Cooper presented his entire
Anderson Cooper 360°
show from outside 2207 Seymour Avenue.

“First, we’re live from Cleveland, Ohio, with many new developments here,” said Cooper. “Three women who were missing for about a decade are finally free, after allegedly being held captive at a home across the street from where I’m standing. It’s that white house with the lights still on, on the porch.”

Then the CNN host interviewed Charles Ramsey, who had just been saluted by McDonald’s for the part he’d played in Amanda Berry’s escape. A few days later, the company would award him complimentary burgers for a year, for all his free advertising.

That afternoon, Angel Cordero and Aurora Marti had challenged Ramsey’s version of what had happened on local TV news, claiming Angel was the real hero. But as he could not speak English, reporters had interviewed Ramsey instead. After hearing their accusations, Ramsey went on the offensive.

“So yesterday,” asked Cooper, “What happened?”

“I’m going to tell it all,” declared Ramsey. “Heard that girl scream and saw him run across the street and I went outside. And Amanda say, ‘I’m stuck in here. Help me get out.’”

“So [Angel Cordero] don’t know English that well or panicked. He just looked at me and was like, ‘It’s a girl.’ And that’s all he did. So I come with my half-eaten Big Mac and I looked and I say, ‘What’s up?’ And she’s like, ‘I have been trapped in here and he won’t let me out, me and my baby. I said, ‘Well, you ain’t going to talk no more. Come on.’

“I’m trying to get the door open and can’t because he’s torture-chambered it some kind of way and locked it up, right? So I did what I had to do and kicked the bottom of the door. She grabs her baby, which threw me off. All right, so fine. I got some girl and her kid.”

Then Cooper asked if he felt like a hero, as a lot of people were now calling him.

“No, no, no,” Ramsey replied. “Bro, I’m a Christian, and American, and I’m just like you. We bleed the same blood, put our pants on the same way.”

Cooper said many people might have ignored Amanda’s screams and kept walking down the street, but he had not.

“You have to have some cojones, bro,” Ramsey told him. “That’s all it’s about. It’s about cojones on this planet.”

Cooper then asked if the FBI had mentioned a reward, as there was a $25,000 one out there.

“I will tell you what you do,” said Ramsey. “Give it to them. You know, I got a job, anyway. Just went and picked up [my] paycheck. What that address say?”

Then Ramsey thrust his paycheck into Anderson Cooper’s hand.

“I don’t have my glasses,” said the anchor, fast losing control of the interview. “I’m as blind as a bat.”

“That’s sad,” said Ramsey, taking back his paycheck. “Twenty-two-zero-three Seymour. Where were them girls living? Right next door to this paycheck. So yes, take that reward and give it to that little girl.”

Four hundred miles away, at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., Jaycee Lee Dugard was being honored at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s annual Hope Awards. During her speech she alluded to the three women in Cleveland, who had been rescued the previous day.

“What an amazing time to be talking about hope, with everything that’s happening,” said Jaycee, who had been imprisoned as a sex slave for eighteen years in Antioch, California. “These individuals need the opportunity to heal and connect back into the world. This isn’t who they are, it’s only what happened to them. The human spirit is incredibly resilient. More than ever this affirms we should never give up hope.”

That night Ariel Castro went to sleep on suicide watch in administrative segregation to protect him from the other inmates. A judge had also extended the period that the three Castro brothers could be held without being charged from the normal thirty-six hours to forty-eight, to give investigators more time to prepare a case.

But incredibly Ariel Castro seemed unfazed by everything that was going on and slept like a baby.

On Wednesday morning, First Lady Michelle Obama spoke about the dramatic rescue of the three missing Cleveland women, and how moved she had been by it.

“My heart just … swells up with relief,” she said on NBC’s
Today
show, “because just imagine first losing a child and not knowing whether they’re alive or dead or in harm’s way. And to be holding out hope for a decade and to finally have those prayers answered is just probably the best Mother’s Day gift … that these families will receive.”

All three network morning shows were reporting live from outside 2207 Seymour Avenue. It would soon become a must-see tourist destination. Finally, a faded black-and-white photograph of Michelle Knight as a high school freshman had emerged, giving the media a face to put to the name.

On the
Today
show, Cleveland Police Chief Michael McGrath described all three women’s physical condition as “very good, considering the circumstances.

“We have confirmation that they were bound, and there were chains and ropes in the home.”

He said the three suspects were talking to police and that the victims were still being interviewed.

Then Barbara Knight, whom NBC had flown in from Naples, Florida, the previous night, was interviewed by Savannah Guthrie, outside the house where her daughter had been imprisoned for eleven years. She admitted having “a complicated and sometimes troubled relationship” with her daughter, whom she had still not spoken to since the escape.

Guthrie asked if she thought Michelle wanted to see her.

“Well, the way I understood it by certain people,” said Knight, “they told me that maybe she didn’t want nothing to do with me. But still in my heart I thought, ‘No,’ because I know my Michelle.”

Knight said that after Michelle had disappeared in 2002, she had filed a missing-persons report, and then waited to hear something.

“They just told me,” she said, “if she breaks the law or [if they] spot her they’ll let me know, but nothing happened. Well, because she was twenty, they figured that she had just left because of the upset of the baby and everything.”

Then Guthrie asked what she would say to Michelle if she did get to see her.

“That I love you and I missed you all this time,” she replied, “and hopefully whatever happened between us, if something did, I hope it heals, because I really want to take her back to Florida with me. I don’t want to leave her in Cleveland.”

Savannah Guthrie then interviewed Julio “Cesi” Castro and his daughter Maria Montes by a police barricade outside the house.

“Mr. Castro,” asked Guthrie, “did you have any inkling that these nephews could be involved?” asked Guthrie.

“Nothing whatsoever,” replied Cesi, who was smartly dressed in a suit and tie, adding that he had not seen Ariel for six years.

“Maria,” asked Guthrie, as the three Castro brothers’ mug shots came on screen, “what do you know about these men?”

“Ariel [is a] beloved cousin,” she replied. “This is an incredible thing to believe, but one of the things I want to say, Savannah, on behalf of the Castro family—you know we are elated obviously that these girls have been found and that they are alive. And our hearts are full of joy for this reason. At the same time this family is suffering a great sadness to know that these girls have suffered at the hands of family members of ours.”

Then on behalf of the Castro family, Montes apologized to Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight for everything they had gone through.

“And we want them to know,” she said, “that if they ever need anything … we are here for them. We certainly hope that an entire family is not judged over the actions of one person.”

Guthrie then asked if in hindsight they had seen anything suspicious over the years.

“No, absolutely not,” said Montes. “[If] anyone had ever told my father, who lives in this neighborhood, that they thought anything suspicious was going on with his nephew or that house, no one in this entire family would have kept anything secret or protected them.”

Cesi was then asked how close his family was to Gina’s family.

“We grew up together,” said Cesi, “especially the Ruizes. Gina’s grandfather moved to Florida years ago, but we’re still in touch. He was one of the first persons I called, to inform him that his granddaughter had been found and how happy I was.”

Then Guthrie asked about reports now surfacing that Nilda Figueroa had filed charges against Ariel Castro for his violence.

“No idea,” replied Montes. “Obviously this is a story that is unfolding with the investigation. We as a family are just as shocked and stunned and we’re hearing all of these things for the first time as well. There has been a distance with these cousins for some time, and it’s shocking and very hurtful and very shameful to hear all of this at this point.”

At 9:00
A.M.
on Wednesday, Ariel Castro was back in the interview room at the Sex Crimes/Child Abuse Unit for his second interview. Once again he seemed keen to talk, answering every question, however difficult, that Deputy Sheriff Jacobs posed. First he was also shown an explicit “sexual image” that the FBI had found in his cell phone, which he admitted was his.

Jacobs also asked about the Luger gun police had found in his house, and Castro said it had been part of his father’s gun collection, which he had inherited.

“I showed the gun to the girls as a form of control,” he told the deputy sheriff.

Then Jacobs asked him about his victims’ claims that he had used the gun to play a Russian roulette–type game of trust, removing the bullets without them knowing.

“His response was that he didn’t recall,” said Jacobs, “but if the girls said it, then it probably happened.”