The Lost Girls (6 page)

Ariel Castro was driving his old orange Chevrolet around Clark Avenue when he spotted Michelle Knight nervously asking people the way. He immediately recognized her as one of Emily’s friends, thinking Michelle was probably around the same age as Emily.

He pulled up on the next corner and watched her walk into the Family Dollar store. Then he got out of his car and entered the store. As he walked toward Michelle, he overheard her asking an employee the way to the social services office. Suddenly, he realized it was a perfect opportunity to put his long-cherished plan into action.

He strolled up to Michelle with a friendly smile on his face, saying he knew exactly how to get there.

“[He] was right beside me,” said Michelle. “He was like, ‘Well, I know where that’s at.’”

Michelle recognized “AC” from the photographs on Emily’s cell phone. He looked harmless enough, with a goatee and a thick long-sleeved flannel shirt, his large belly hanging over his tight black jeans.

“I [said], ‘I think I know you,’” said Michelle, “‘your daughter’s name’s Emily, right?’ He was like, ‘This is a small world.’”

Then he offered to drive her to the social services office, saying his car was right outside. Michelle immediately accepted, and on the way out she told him about her fight to get her son Joey back.

Ariel Castro opened the passenger door and Michelle got inside. As he closed the door, she noticed there were no handles inside the car and wondered why. Then he turned on the engine and started driving. She saw a small sign on the windscreen, saying he had puppies for sale. Making small talk, Michelle mentioned that Joey loved puppies, and Castro said he had to swing by his house on Seymour Avenue to check up on them. He reassured her it was on the way.

At around 3:00
P.M.
, Castro pulled into the driveway at 2207 Seymour Avenue. Michelle said she’d wait in the car, as he got out and walked through the front gate and the back door of the house. A few minutes later he came out again, asking Michelle to come in and choose one of the puppies for Joey.

Michelle agreed and he led her into the house, through the back door. As they went upstairs, she wondered why it was so quiet and she couldn’t hear any puppies barking. She saw a photograph of Emily on the wall, and Castro told her his daughter was downstairs in another room, and she’d see her soon.

Then he guided her up the stairs into a small pink bedroom, slamming the door behind him and locking it. Michelle screamed in fear, pleading to be let out so she did not miss her appointment.

As Ariel Castro came toward her, the smile had gone from his face. Then he put a strong hand over her nose and mouth, placing the other against the back of her skull and pulling off her glasses, which fell to the floor. Michelle was no match for her attacker, who weighed 180 pounds.

“I’ll kill you if you scream again,” he yelled, as he threw her to the floor and she passed out.

When Michelle came to a few minutes later, Ariel Castro was standing over her with a menacing look in his eyes. He ordered her not to move. Then he grabbed her pocketbook and threw it against the wall, and went into the next-door bedroom to look for something.

While he was gone, Michelle looked around the dark room, which had obviously been carefully prepared beforehand. There were two large metal poles set up on either side of the room, with a taut cable strung between them, several feet above the floor. Finally Castro reappeared carrying a stool and two orange electrical extension cords.

“Lie still!” he commanded, as Michelle attempted to stand up. Then he reassured her everything was going to be okay, promising not to harm her if she obeyed him and that he would free her soon.

Sitting down on the stool he grabbed Michelle’s legs, as she desperately tried to kick him away. But he was far too strong for her. Then he started binding one of the cords around her ankles so tightly they went numb. When she tried to punch him away, he grabbed her wrists, pulling her arms behind her back and binding them together. He then wound the other end of the cord around her neck and tied it.

He then pulled down his pants, took out his penis and began masturbating over her, as she lay tied up on the floor. As he became more and more excited, he became strangely emotional. He told Michelle that he really wanted them to be friends, and how lonely he had been since his wife and kids had abandoned him.

“All I want is for someone to be here for me,” he said breathlessly. “I need you.”

Then he climaxed.

After finishing, Castro pulled up his pants and ordered her to stay still. Michelle screamed and started praying, thinking he was about to kill her. Then he punched her hard on the side of her head, telling her nobody could hear her screams, as he pulled out a gun and threatened to shoot her.

He rolled her over onto her stomach and tied the second orange extension cord around her hands, feet and neck, trussing her up like a chicken. After connecting her tiny body to the thick taut cable, stretched between the two poles, he hoisted her up about a foot above the floor, so she was hanging in front of the window.

“I was tied up like a fish,” she would later say. “An ornament on the wall.”

Finally, he stuffed a filthy gray sock in her mouth and wound duct tape around her head. Then, saying he was off to get some food, he turned on a radio and walked out, slamming the door, leaving Michelle suspended helplessly over the floor.

At 6:02 on Friday afternoon, Barbara Knight went to the Cleveland Police Department to report Michelle missing. She told Officer Westley Edrington that Michelle had last been seen the previous morning by her cousin Deanna, on West 106th Street and Lorain Avenue. She described her twenty-one-year-old daughter as four feet seven inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, with blue eyes and wearing glasses.

The missing-persons report classified Michelle as disabled, and noted that she went by the alias “Shorty.”

“Reporting person states that missing person adult has a mental condition,” it stated, “and that she is confused of her surroundings, a lot.”

Investigators then checked local hospitals, a relative’s house and the morgue, telling Barbara that they would let her know when her daughter was found.

Barbara would later claim that the police did very little to try to find Michelle.

“They figured that she had just left,” she said, “because of the upset of the baby.”

After Ariel Castro left Michelle Knight hanging like a wounded deer, he got in his car and started driving to clear his head. He would later say that he hadn’t intended to kidnap a girl that day, but the opportunity had presented itself and he had taken advantage of it.

That night he went to his mother’s house for dinner with his brothers and was his usual jovial self. Then, after having a couple of beers, he left to return to 2207 Seymour Avenue.

Michelle Knight could never be sure how long she was left trussed up in the bedroom, gagging with the dirty sock in her mouth. She spent agonizing hours staring out the window, as night fell and she could hear the radio upstairs, playing loud Spanish music. She wet herself several times, and her throat was sore from dehydration and her stomach aching from hunger.

Eventually, Ariel Castro returned with a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin for her to eat. He ripped off the duct tape over her face and took the sock out of her mouth. When he pushed the sandwich into her mouth, Michelle screamed and tried to fight him off, but he grabbed her jaw and held her mouth open, ordering her to eat. When she refused, he threw the sandwich onto the floor.

Without a word, he untied the extension cord attaching her to the poles, so she fell hard onto the floor. Her arms and legs were numb. When she screamed and tried to sit up, he called her a “slut,” telling her to stay still. Then he held her down as he untied the cord binding her wrists and ankles.

He told her to get up but Michelle sobbed, saying she was unable to as her legs hurt so badly. So he picked her up and slung her over his shoulders, carrying her into an adjoining white-walled bedroom.

After throwing her down on a filthy, stained mattress, he ripped off all her clothes and attacked her. For the next hour he raped her repeatedly, while she screamed in pain. Again and again she tried to fight him off, but she never stood a chance.

When he was finally satisfied, they both lay naked on the mattress, now covered in Michelle’s blood. Composing herself, she tried to reason with her attacker, promising not to tell anyone what he had done if he let her go.

Suddenly, a change came over Ariel Castro. He began talking to Michelle as if she were his girlfriend, pouring out his heart to her. He spoke about being molested back in Puerto Rico when he was five, and how upset he was when Nilda had taken their kids and left.

“I didn’t mean to beat her,” he told Michelle, “but it’s like I ain’t got the power to stop myself.”

Finally, he got off the bed and started to get dressed. Then he pulled some dollar bills out of his pocket and threw them at her, saying it was payment for her services.

After ordering Michelle to put on her blood- and urine-stained shorts and T-shirt, Ariel Castro dragged her down to the first floor, with her head hitting each stair on the way down. Then he took out a key and unlocked a heavy wooden door and opened it.

Michelle’s heart froze as she saw a long flight of stairs leading into his basement. After dragging her down, he threw her onto a pile of dirty clothes on the concrete floor. Although it was dark and she had lost her glasses, she could make out a large white pole in the middle of the basement, reaching from the floor to the ceiling.

When he turned on a light, Michelle could see dirty clothes strewn everywhere. At one end of the room was an old washing machine next to a sink, and hundreds of X-rated pornographic videos stacked up against the wall. There was a small window covered in dirt, and an assortment of heavy rusting chains of various lengths, strewn around the floor.

“This is where you are going to stay,” he told her, “until I can trust you.”

Castro then picked up two lengths of chains and held them up to Michelle, who started crying uncontrollably. He ordered her to stop, picking up a dirty sock from the floor and thrusting it into her mouth.

Then he dragged her over to the pole in the center of the basement, wrenching her arms behind her back and fitting plastic restraints over her wrists. He wrapped a length of rusty chain around her waist to secure her to the pole, before winding another chain around her neck and head. Some of the chain went into her mouth, so she could taste the rusty metal.

Finally, he padlocked both chains together and placed a motorcycle helmet over Michelle’s head to muffle her screams. Then she passed out.

That fall, Ariel Castro began a strict routine, keeping his life tightly compartmentalized. He would get up early and dress in his burgundy-colored uniform, and leave to pick up his yellow school bus. After dropping off the children at school on his morning route, he drove back to 2207 Seymour Avenue, parking his school bus outside for a few hours. Then he would feed Michelle stale McDonald’s hamburgers before raping her.

Then, leaving Michelle chained up in the basement, Castro would get back in his bus in time for his afternoon route, driving the children home.

After finishing work, Michelle would hear him upstairs watching pornographic videos and smoking marijuana. She dreaded the sound of the key unlocking the basement door, knowing he had come to rape her again. When he had satisfied his lust, he would throw paper napkins at her to clean herself off with, and then “ram” them down her throat.

On weekends, he played the Cleveland salsa clubs with his various bands, and seemed happier than he had been in years.

Lillian Roldan still spent the occasional night at 2207 Seymour Avenue, and Michelle could hear them making love upstairs. Lately, Ariel Castro had been particularly attentive to Lillian, as they discussed their future.

“One night we were lying in bed,” Lillian remembered, “and he took out his guitar and sang to me. It was a Marc Anthony song called ‘
El Ultimo Beso’
[‘The Last Kiss’], which we both liked. It was so romantic and became our song.”

For the first few weeks of her captivity, Ariel Castro kept Michelle chained to the pole with a motorcycle helmet on her head. He raped her up to seven times a day, and if she ever complained he would beat her up.

“There’s not a day that went by that I didn’t get messed with,” she said later, “or hurt in any type of way.”

He brought in a plastic bucket for her to use as a toilet, placing it just close enough to the pole for her to reach. Most days he fed her only one meal, usually consisting of a McDonald’s burger and a glass of orange juice.

“Most of the time I was hooked on a chain … in the basement,” she said. “I was just passing out. That’s how the time went.”

Michelle managed to endure the endless days and nights lying chained up in the basement by thinking about her son, Joey. Whenever she wanted to die, she’d conjure his face in her mind. Thinking about being reunited with him one day gave her the strength to survive.

About a month after he kidnapped her, Castro brought Michelle out of the basement and back upstairs to one of the bedrooms, chaining her up naked to a bed. All the windows had been covered with sheets of gray wool with barbed wire across them, and the only way she could tell day or night was through the smells of her captor frying bacon for his breakfast every morning.

In late September, Michelle Knight became pregnant with Ariel Castro’s baby. She recognized the symptoms, but was too scared to tell him, uncertain of how he would react. One day he noticed her nipples were leaking and asked if she was pregnant. Michelle said she thought she was and he attacked her.

“He punched me in my stomach … with a barbell,” she said. “I fell to the floor.”

Over the next few weeks he starved her and beat her. Chained to the bed, Michelle often fainted, had nosebleeds and vomited. Finally, after approximately six weeks, she had a miscarriage.

“And then when I did miscarry he blamed me,” said Michelle. “He said I hated him [and] I killed his kid. He punched me in the face, saying that it was all my fault.”