The Lost Girls (3 page)

“That’s the only way he would let me into the hospital,” Nilda later explained, “because he wanted me to die that day. He wanted me to bleed to death.”

Although the doctors at Grace Hospital were aware of the abuse she suffered, they were powerless to call in the police without her permission.

“They weren’t too happy about me going home,” she said.

During one attack in 1987, Castro punched her in the eye, causing permanent damage.

“He came at me full force with his fist,” she later testified. “He punched me in the eye. There’s a lot of nerve damage.”

Then in January 1988, when Nilda was pregnant again, he hit her over the head with a barbell.

“I was nine months pregnant,” she said. “He hit me over the head with a hand weight. Beat me.”

Amazingly, just a few days later, Nilda gave birth to a healthy baby girl they named Emily Lisette.

Over the next two years the savage beatings continued, but on September 30, 1989, it became a police matter. At six that night, Onil Castro arrived at their apartment, wanting to go out for a drink. When Nilda asked where he was going, Ariel started slapping her in the face. When Nilda tried to run away, he grabbed her, slamming her hard against the wall repeatedly. Finally, she managed to escape and ran up the stairs to her neighbors, who called the police.

Ariel Castro was then arrested and taken into custody on suspicion of assault. Nilda and two of her small children were taken by ambulance to St. John’s Hospital, where she was treated for a bruised right shoulder and interviewed by police.

A Cleveland Police Department report of the incident states that she told officers she had been Ariel Castro’s common-law wife for nine years.

“Victim states she was assaulted by the suspect on several other occasions,” it read, “but made no official complaint.”

As Nilda was still too scared to swear out a criminal complaint against Ariel Castro, police had to let him go without charging him.

“Life with my father growing up was abusive and painful,” said Ariel, Jr., who was just eight years old when he witnessed this attack. “He was a violent, controlling man and my mother was the one who bore the brunt of his attacks, although I wasn’t spared either.”

Many times the brave little boy attempted to protect his mother, only to receive a beating himself.

“I remember crying myself to sleep,” said Ariel, Jr., “because my legs were covered in welts from belts and seeing my mom getting beat up in our home. No one should ever have to see their mom crumpled up in a corner on the floor the way I did so many times.”

A few months later, a young salsa piano player named Tito DeJesus was at a rehearsal with his fianc
é
e, when he met Ariel Castro for the first time. The bassist immediately made a lewd comment to her.

“He came off to me a little weird,” recalled DeJesus. “My fianc
é
e had jeans on and was sitting on a table with her legs open. Ariel said, ‘Hey, do you want me to take a picture, since you’re smiling already?’ And he didn’t mean it facially. I just looked at him … who is this guy? Later my fianc
é
e explained that Ariel had always been trying to get in her pants.”

Nevertheless, Tito became close friends with Castro, as they often played in the same bands together.

“He was one of the best bass players in Cleveland,” said Tito. “He didn’t read music all that well, but he would sit down and listen to a tape or CD and practice hard and play it almost [perfectly].”

As a freelance musician, Castro performed with many of the top Cleveland Latino bands, including the Roberto Ocasio Latin Jazz Project, Sin Ti, Groupo Fuego, Groupo Kanon and Los Boyz Del Merengue.

But he was often argumentative and difficult at rehearsals, making himself unpopular with many bandleaders, who did not want to work with him.

“At rehearsals,” said DeJesus, “Ariel would ask the bandleader, in front of everyone, why he was doing these songs. He’d say, ‘This song is too tough. We don’t have to be doing this stuff.’ And the bandleader didn’t want to hear it: ‘Listen, just do your job.’”

Then Castro would argue and argue and deliberately play it his way at the show.

“That was his nature,” said DeJesus. “If you tell him the sky is blue, he would try and find reasoning to tell you the sky was red. He was a controlling person.”

At the beginning of 1990, Nilda became pregnant again, giving birth on September 6 to Ariel Castro’s third daughter, Arlene. She would be their last child together.

They were now living in an apartment on West Ninety-eighth Street and Western Avenue, and soon after Arlene was born, Castro was fired by Cumba Motors for laziness.

On December 11, 1990, he filled out an application to become a school bus driver for the Cleveland Board of Education. It asked what qualified him for the job and what his future goals were.

“I enjoy working with children,” he wrote. “I have a good driving record. I speak English and Spanish. I plan to drive a bus and working [
sic
] with young people.”

Listing his clerical skills, he wrote he could use a calculator and adding machine, and gave the names of three friends as character references. He also filled out an affidavit, stating that he had not been convicted of any crime involving “moral turpitude.”

On February 19, 1991, Ariel Castro was officially hired by the Cleveland School District to drive a school bus at ten dollars an hour. After taking a road test and passing a physical examination, he reported for training at the Ridge Road Bus Depot.

On April 29, 1992, Ariel Castro, now thirty-two, bought 2207 Seymour Drive from his uncle Edwin Castro for $12,000. It was just a couple of blocks away from his uncle Cesi’s thriving Caribe bodega.

The two-story white clapboard house was on the south side of Seymour Avenue. It had five bedrooms and a bathroom, as well as a small front lawn, a backyard and a 760-square-foot basement. Nestled between the busy I-90 freeway and Scranton Cemetery, Seymour Avenue had been scarred by race riots in the 1960s, when many middle-class whites had fled. They had been replaced by immigrants, including many from Puerto Rico, looking for cheap accommodation. When Castro moved in, it was ground zero of a crack epidemic, making it one of the most dangerous places in Cleveland.

Perhaps its one symbol of stability was the redbrick Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church, at the end of the block. It had been built in 1880, and every Sunday Pastor Horst Hoyer would ring the bells to call his parishioners to worship.

After all the years of living in confined apartments, Nilda and her four children might have hoped for more space. But that was not to be. Immediately after moving in, Ariel Castro started installing padlocks everywhere. He turned the basement into a dungeon with a heavy trapdoor, adding a layer of bricks and curtains to soundproof it.

“Growing up in Seymour Avenue … my father was always very secretive,” said Ariel, Jr., who was eleven at the time. “He kept a lock on the attic and on the basement door. He nailed the windows shut. There were places we could never go.”

After finishing his training, Ariel Castro became a professional driver, earning $14.66 an hour. Early every morning he’d leave the house to pick up the children on his route and drive them to school. Then at midday, he’d often leave the bus parked on Seymour Avenue for a couple of hours to tinker on his cars and motorbikes in his garage.

He soon became a well-known presence on Seymour Avenue, chatting to his neighbors and often playing at their cookouts. He also played his bass on a rehearsal stage at the back of his uncle Cesi’s grocery store.

“He became part of our lives,” said Ariel’s cousin Maria Montes. “He used to stop into my parents’ store rather frequently. His daughters used to play with my sister.”

“He was a good neighbor and good friend,” said Jovita Marti, who then lived across the street with her mother, Aurora. “We saw him every day when his wife was there. We had parties, and he used to come over to my mom’s house all the time for coffee on the porch.”

Tito DeJesus was also a frequent visitor to the house, where he and Castro would rehearse together.

“I went to his house a few times,” DeJesus recalled. “It was in the early days soon after I met him. He’d let me through the living room toward the dining room, but I never went past there.”

After rehearsing, the two Latin musicians would drink Corona beers together and gossip about the Cleveland music scene, before Castro would show him to the front door.

After Ariel Castro moved into 2207 Seymour Avenue, he unleashed a whole new reign of terror on his family. When Nilda became pregnant again Castro was furious, as he wanted no more children. So he started kicking and punching Nilda in the stomach, to make her abort the fetus.

“All hell started breaking loose,” remembered her sister Elida. “I would go over to the house and be knocking at the door, and she was there and he wasn’t. I’d say, ‘Open the door!’ and she’d say, ‘I can’t. Ariel has the key.’ He locked her in.”

Castro also ordered Nilda never to use the telephone, as he tried to cut her off from her friends and family. And he constantly spied on her to see if she was disobeying him.

“He would go creeping downstairs,” said Elida, “spying on her. See who she’s calling. Next thing you know he’ll pop upstairs.”

Frank Caraballo said Castro beat his sister-in-law Nilda relentlessly, pushing her down the stairs and breaking her nose again, as well as fracturing her ribs and dislocating both shoulders. Finally, Frank came to blows with him.

“I was hitting him too,” he said, “because I was tired of [Nilda] being abused.”

Their young son Angel Caraballo was terrified of his uncle Ariel, whenever he went to the house to play with his cousins. Angel remembers padlocks on every door, and the basement always bolted shut. When he and his parents arrived, Castro would make them wait outside the front door for thirty minutes or more before letting them in. No one was ever allowed to go past the living room.

Soon after he moved in, Ariel Castro acquired a creepy life-size mannequin with slanted eyes, which he clothed in a long dress and a black wig. He delighted in placing it in the backseat of his sports car, and then driving around Cleveland scaring people. He also would leave it propped up against a wall in the house as a warning.

“He threatened me lots of times with it,” recalled Angel. “He would say, ‘Act up again, you’ll be in that back room with the mannequin.’”

On one occasion, Nilda came home with bags full of groceries. As she walked in, Castro leapt into the doorway in front of her, brandishing the mannequin. The poor woman was so terrified she fell down the stairs, smashing her head open.

One day their eldest daughter, Angie, managed to pick the lock on the basement door and sneaked downstairs.

“We went snooping,” she recalled, “and I remember there being a fish tank down there, which is odd because there was nobody … to look at the fish.”

She also saw the mannequin as well as a “porch-type, two-seat swing.” After poking around she relocked the basement door, and her father never found out she had gone down there.

Ariel Castro had now joined the Roberto Ocasio Latin Jazz Project. And whenever he was away overnight playing out-of-town gigs, he’d lock Nilda and the children in the house.

“He would go out for days,” said Chris Giannini, a private investigator who later interviewed Nilda. “He had the windows tinted, so you couldn’t see inside, and the doors were padlocked. He would go out to play music and even her sister couldn’t see her.”

Tito DeJesus accompanied him on several out-of-town gigs, and will never forget a weekend trip to Youngstown, Ohio, in summer 1992. Castro had called him up, inviting him to come along, and Tito agreed. The following Saturday, Castro drove him to Youngstown in his blue Mustang. The gig went well and Castro had the bandleader call Tito up onstage to play a couple of numbers.

It was past midnight when they set off on the seventy-five-mile drive back to Cleveland. During the drive, Castro, who had been drinking beer all night, announced he needed to urinate. Tito said they should stop at the next rest area.

“He goes, ‘No, it’s late and I want to get home,’” Tito remembered. “I’m like, ‘Well, park the car off the road.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t want to stop. Grab the wheel.’”

Then, as his passenger nervously took the wheel, Castro opened the driver’s door and started urinating out of the car, as they were traveling around ninety miles per hour up the Ohio Turnpike.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked a terrified Tito. “Are you crazy? We’re going to get in an accident.”

But Ariel Castro just laughed as he retook the wheel, and put his foot down hard on the accelerator.

On Wednesday, March 10, 1993, Ariel Castro called the Cleveland police, accusing two parents of physically assaulting him on his school bus. According to a police report, Castro claimed they had boarded his bus without permission, shoving him back into his driving seat when he attempted to stop them. He said he was uninjured and refused any medical attention.

Later that day, the parents explained to police that their son was being bullied on Castro’s bus, so they took him to the bus stop to protect him. After putting him on the bus that morning, they saw him being attacked by other boys.

“They got on the bus to stop it,” read the police report. “However, [they] were shoved by the driver.”

The case was turned over to the Cleveland School Security Department, but no charges were ever filed.

In October, Ariel Castro pushed Nilda down a flight of stone steps, cracking her skull and causing her permanent brain damage.

“[He] broke her skull from the front of her head to the back of her head,” said her sister Elida. “Even after her injuries to her head he would still be mean to her.”

Ariel, Jr., grew up in a battlefield, seeing his mother beaten and humiliated on a daily basis. He dreaded the sound of his father’s car in the driveway at night, knowing he would have to protect his mother, and probably be beaten in the process. On one occasion his fatherdragged him down into the basement dungeon and whipped him with a dog chain. Afterward, he told his son how fortunate he was not to have a father who had abandoned him, like his own father had.