The Lost Girls (8 page)

In fact, Louwana had already printed up fliers with Amanda’s photo and a brief description, which friends were now handing out around West 110th Street and Lorain Avenue.

“Mother also stated that [today] is Amanda’s birthday and a birthday party is planned,” wrote Detective Scaggs in his report. “Amanda took no money or change of clothes with her on the day that she left. She only had her Burger King work clothes. When ask[ed] about Amanda using drugs or alcohol they stated she does smoke weed and drinks beer but does not use any hard drugs. Mother and sister supplied me with info on Amanda’s friends.”

Louwana also told the detective that Amanda had called her from work before she disappeared, upset about her son-in-law Teddy Serrano’s affair.

Detective Scaggs then interviewed Serrano. He readily admitted the affair, saying it had upset Amanda and “he was going to kick the ass” of the person who had told his wife about it.

“He and his wife have worked things out,” the detective wrote. “He does not know who told on him.”

After leaving the house, Detective Scaggs drove to West Ninety-ninth Street to interview Amanda’s boyfriend, Danizo Diaz. DJ said he had spoken to Amanda several times on Monday, and they had arranged to meet at 10:00
P.M.,
after she had her nails done. Amanda was supposed to call him to arrange a meeting place, but she never had.

At around midnight, DJ said he had received a call from Amanda’s cell phone, but his phone battery was almost dead and he could not hear anything.

“But he knows it was Amanda,” wrote the detective, “because he had caller ID and it was her cell number.”

He said that he had then gone out all night in his convertible, searching for Amanda.

“To be honest with you,” DJ told the detective, “I think she was kidnapped.”

From then on, DJ would become the prime suspect in Amanda Berry’s disappearance.

Ariel Castro was now in possession of Amanda’s cell phone, and was carefully listening to every message left for her by her worried mother, sister and boyfriend. Every day he would listen to their increasingly frantic calls. In time, he would even erase the messages to make room for new ones.

A few nights after she arrived, Amanda Berry tried to escape. But Ariel Castro easily overpowered her, holding her down as he taped her legs and mouth, savagely raping her again. Then he chained her back to the pole, placed a motorcycle helmet on her head and left her in the dark basement.

The next day he brought Amanda upstairs to the bathroom, where he raped her again, before bringing her into a bedroom and chaining her bound and gagged to a heater.

From now on, Ariel Castro would freely sexually assault Amanda whenever he felt like it.

On Monday April 28, one week after Amanda Berry went missing, Cleveland’s WEWS-5 led off its ten o’clock news with the story. A tearful Louwana Miller appeared on camera, pleading for any information to find her daughter.

“It’s been a whole week and it’s getting harder,” she sobbed. “Somewhere between home and [Burger King] something happened. Nobody can figure it out.”

A reporter called it “a mystery” and Cleveland police were completely baffled.

“Her sister is posting Amanda’s picture,” said the reporter. “She fears the worst but hopes for the best.”

Then, as Amanda’s face came up on screen, Beth Serrano appealed for her to come home, if she was watching.

“I’m hoping she’s out there somewhere,” said Beth. “I mean, I don’t care. Just come home. I hope nothing happened to her [and] maybe somebody’s got her, drugged her or something. Just bring her home.”

Ariel Castro watched the newscast from his living room at 2207 Seymour Avenue. A few minutes later, he picked up Amanda’s silver cell phone and dialed Louwana Miller’s number on speed dial.

“I have your daughter,” he told her. “She’s healthy and okay.” But when Louwana asked to speak to Amanda, he rang off. Two minutes later he called back.

“He said Mandy was going to be his wife,” Louwana recalled in 2005. “He wanted to marry her. Mandy wanted to be with him. And then he hung up and that’s the last I heard.”

After dialing Amanda’s number and leaving several messages, Louwana called FBI Special Agent Robert Hawk, who was leading the investigation. Hawk believed it might be a hoax and Amanda was part of it, as the caller had said she was fine and would be home in a couple of days.

Michelle Knight was also watching the news bulletin that night, with more than a little interest. Earlier, Ariel Castro had burst into her bedroom, where she was still chained, and turned on the television.

“If you watch the news tonight,” he told her cryptically, “you might find there’s a tragedy in Cleveland.”

The moment she saw Amanda’s face on the television screen, she realized that “the Dude,” as she now called him, had kept his word and kidnapped another girl.

“The reason why he turned on the TV,” Michelle said later, “is that he wanted me to know that there was another girl in the house.”

But it would be several weeks before her captor brought a young blond girl, wearing a pair of boy’s pajamas, into Michelle’s room. Beforehand, Castro told Michelle to put a blanket over her naked body and hide the chains. Although he introduced the girl as his brother’s girlfriend, Michelle immediately recognized her from the television news. She was embarrassed for Amanda to see the filthy conditions she was imprisoned in. The floor was covered with rotten sandwiches and pizza slices and it stank of urine.

“There were flies flying around the room,” Michelle said. “It was pretty disgusting.”

But as soon as Amanda saw Michelle she smiled warmly.

“I think she was happy to see there was another person there,” said Michelle, “and she wasn’t alone.”

Michelle also noticed how clean and fresh Amanda looked and that she was wearing clothes, while she was naked in chains and had not showered in months.

Then Castro led Amanda out of the room and it would be months before the girls saw each other again.

On May 3, 2003, the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
ran its first story of Amanda Berry’s disappearance in its “Law & Order” column. Under the headline
CLEVELAND FBI SEARCHING FOR MISSING GIRL,
it offered an unspecified reward for any information leading to her whereabouts.

“Authorities need help finding Amanda Berry,” it began. “The FBI and Cleveland police said Amanda left work at 7:30
P.M.
in a car with an unidentified driver. FBI agent Robert Hawk said the agency is treating the case as a kidnapping.”

In the days following Amanda’s disappearance, her mother embarked on a relentless campaign to keep her story in front of the Cleveland media. Nervous and chain-smoking Newport cigarettes, Louwana Miller aggressively courted local journalists to keep the story alive, praying that heavy media exposure would eventually lead to her daughter being found.

One morning, Louwana arrived at the
19-Action News
studios demanding to speak to investigative reporter Bill Safos. When he came out, she handed him one of her homemade missing person posters, with Amanda’s photograph and description.

“And just seeing [Louwana’s] face,” recalled Safos. “The tears in her eyes and how desperate she was with that handmade poster. I thought a mother shouldn’t have to go through this, so I paid a lot of attention to her.”

Safos and a cameraman then drove to Louwana’s house, where he interviewed her in Amanda’s bedroom. It was exactly as she’d left it the day she disappeared. Her rosary was hanging on the doorknob and her Eminem posters on the wall by her CD collection. Her clothes were folded neatly on the bed.

Then Louwana opened a drawer, showing Safos the hundred dollars of Amanda’s birthday money, lying untouched.

“That was
the
red flag to me,” said Safos. “A kid’s not going to run away without money.”

Louwana also befriended
Plain Dealer
columnist Regina Brett, who would devote many of her columns to Amanda over the next few years, becoming personally involved in the search.

On May 11, three weeks after Amanda went missing, Brett wrote about Louwana’s desperate battle to find her daughter.

“Louwana can’t sleep or eat,” read her column. “She lives on cigarettes and blind faith. Sitting on the couch in a cloud of smoke, she uses the coffee table as a desk, with two phones ready, a stack of business cards from detectives and FBI agents.”

Brett described how Louwana avoided her daughter’s bedroom, which lay untouched in suspended animation, as it was just too painful. And how every time the phone rings, she prays it’s Amanda.

“I don’t know if she’s out there being held,” said Louwana. “I don’t know if she’s out there lying on the side of the road somewhere. Who gave her that ride?”

Three days later, FBI Special Agent Robert Hawk told the
Plain Dealer
that several people were now being interviewed in connection with her disappearance. He said investigators now believed that Amanda Berry had got into a white four-door sedan with three men inside. What he didn’t reveal was that Amanda’s boyfriend, Danizo Diaz, who owned a similar car, was now the prime suspect.

In the initial police report, Detective Scaggs had expressed some surprise that a sixteen-year-old would be driving such a flashy sports car. So investigators impounded DJ’s four-door white Dodge Intrepid convertible for forensic examination and searched his home. DJ was also given a lie detector test, which he passed.

Agent Hawk also revealed that Louwana Miller had received a mysterious phone call from her daughter’s cell phone a week after her disappearance. The FBI were still trying to determine if it was a hoax.

Louwana had now recruited a crack team of volunteers who pinned up
MISSING
posters and yellow ribbons to trees and telephone poles all over Cleveland. They also went farther afield, distributing the posters to truck stops and post offices all over the East Coast.

The poster, which had two photographs of Amanda, read:

MISSING

AMANDA BERRY

MISSING FROM CLEVELAND, OH

IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT AMANDA: CALL THE CLEVELAND, OHIO FBI (216) 522-1400

Date Missing: 4/21/03

Date of Birth: 4/22/86

Age at Disappearance: 17 years

Race: Caucasian

Sex: Female

Height: 5’1”

Weight: 110 lbs.

Eyes: Brown

Hair: Sandy Blonde, long

Other: Surgical scar on lower Abdomen and pierced left eyebrow

Last Seen Wearing: Burgundy Burger King shirt, black pants And a black hooded jacket Amanda was last seen walking home from work at the Burger King at W. 110th and Lorain in Cleveland, Ohio on April 21, 2003. She has not been seen or heard from since

AMANDA IS BELIEVED TO BE ENDANGERED

Even though Ariel Castro now had two girls hidden at 2207 Seymour Avenue, he still had Lillian Roldan over to stay. One night, she heard Michelle Knight’s television in an upstairs bedroom and asked him who was watching it.

“And my heart stopped beating,” Castro later told detectives, “and I was like, ‘Okay, she’s probably catching on to something.’”

Castro then made an excuse and changed the subject. From then on he stopped inviting her to his house, saying he had more rehearsals to go to.

“When we first met he only played on weekends,” said Lillian. “And then all of a sudden he had to rehearse Wednesdays and then play Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. And the relationship was going down. I told him, ‘Why don’t I stay with you more?’”

Now Castro would stay over at Lillian’s house and even had his own key. But he never gave her any money for anything.

“When he was living with me,” Lillian said, “I used to pay for everything.”

Ariel Castro was now a member of the Roberto Ocasio Latin Jazz Project, one of Cleveland’s top Latin bands. But he was erratic and often failed to turn up for rehearsals or shows.

“He wouldn’t call,” said Daisy Cortes, who was engaged to the band’s director, Roberto Ocasio. “He wouldn’t show up.”

At that time, Cortes was a news anchor for a Cleveland Spanish TV station, and often covered the Amanda Berry story. During set breaks Castro would seek her out, when she was sitting with her nine-year-old daughter, Bianca, asking for the latest news on the case.

“I was helping to find that girl,” said Cortes in 2013. “I was sharing the story with him.”

As Cortes told him what she had heard through the police grapevine about the Amanda Berry case, Castro would just say, “wow, wow,” as he ran his fingers through Bianca’s hair.

“No emotion at all,” recalled Cortes. “Nothing.”

Several years earlier, Emily Castro, now fifteen, had been diagnosed with manic depression and put on strong medication. The troubled girl had been expelled from Wilbur Wright Middle School in eighth grade and was now at a special school studying for her high school diploma. At times she would stop taking her prescribed medications and become unstable.

Nilda Figueroa blamed Ariel Castro for their daughter’s problems, wanting him to have as little to do with her as possible. But in early 2003, Castro started taking more interest in his two youngest daughters, Emily and Arlene, and would arrive without warning to take them out.

“He was trying to make our lives miserable,” said their stepfather, Fernando Colon. “He would just show up and ask to take the kids.”

One afternoon, when Castro drove Emily back to her home on West 110th Street, Nilda confronted him in the street about taking her. As they argued, Emily went back inside the house.

A couple of minutes later, Fernando Colon came out to see what was happening. When Castro saw him coming he walked back to his van. But Colon came after him, ordering him to leave the children alone.

“At first he was arguing with my mother,” said Ariel, Jr., who witnessed it. “And then Fernando came out … to back her up. So my father and my stepfather were also arguing.”

Then, after swearing to get even with his rival, Ariel Castro drove off in a fury.