by John Glatt
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For Emily and Jerry Freund
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At Ariel Castro’s sentencing, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Gregory Saathoff described his crimes as “unprecedented,” squarely placing him in an evil class of his own. For more than a decade Castro terrorized Cleveland, abducting girls off the same street and then imprisoning them in his house without arousing any suspicion whatsoever.
The well-respected bass guitarist and mainstay of Cleveland’s Latin music scene cruelly tricked his own daughters’ friends into 2207 Seymour Avenue, brandishing a luger handgun and threatening to kill them if they ever tried to escape.
Over the long years of Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus’s captivity, there were many missed opportunities to catch him. Indeed, after his arrest Castro expressed surprise that he had not been caught years earlier, mocking the FBI for not doing its job properly.
In 2008, I wrote about the Austrian monster Josef Fritzl in Secrets of the Cellar, who imprisoned his own daughter, Elizabeth, for more than twenty years, fathering her seven children. Two years later, my book Lost and Found chronicled how Phillip and Nancy Garrido had abducted eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard in 1991, imprisoning her in their Antioch, California, house for eighteen years, with Phillip siring her two daughters.
But Ariel Castro case is perhaps the most cunning and evil of all.
“There are cases where there have been longer term abductions in length,” said Dr. Saartfoff, “but the specific nature of this—to abduct and keep this number of unrelated victims for this length of time within a neighborhood setting is completely unprecedented.”
The Lost Girls is the result of more than eighteen months of research and scores of interviews, both on and off the record. In September 2013, I spent almost two weeks in Cleveland, speaking to Ariel Castro’s friends and family to get an accurate picture of this evil enigma. I also visited his birthplace of Duey, Puerto Rico, where Castro spent the first six years of his life, which many believe could have shaped his future behavior.
First and foremost, I would like to thank Lillian Roldan for her exclusive interview about her three-and-a-half-year affair with Ariel Castro. Over an emotional lunch in Cleveland, Lillian broke down in tears as she spoke about her feelings for Castro, who she had once hoped to marry. Even now she cannot believe he could be capable of such crimes.
I am also thankful to: Tito DeJesus, Bill Perez, Councilman Brian Cummins, Cesi Castro, Chris Giannini, Craig Weintraub, Scott Taylor, Fernando Colon, Altagracia Tejeda, Angel and Rafael Diaz, Aurora, Daniel, Javier, and Jovita Marti, Angel Cordero, Joe Frolik, and Sgt. Sammy Morris.
Thanks are also due to: Yauco Police Officer Richard Gonzalez for all his help and acting as my translator, Monserrate Baez, Uriel Reyes, Edwin Torres, and Cuyahoga County Court reporter Nancy Nunes.
As always, I would like to thank my editors at St. Martin’s Press, Charles Spicer and April Osborn, for their continuing encouragement and support. The Lost Girls is my twentieth true crime book for them.
Much gratitude also to Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, who are always there for me.
I also want to thank my wife, Gail, Debbie, Douglas and Taylor Baldwin, G.K. Freund, Danny, Cari and Allie Tractenberg, Annette Witheridge, Dan Callister, Virginia Randall, Allen Alter, Roger Hitts, and Ena Bissell.
PROLOGUE
Around five-fifteen on a sunny spring evening, Aurora Marti dragged her green plastic chair onto her neighbor Altagracia Tejeda’s stone porch for a chat. There was a smell of barbecue in the warm spring air, and it felt good to be out after the long cold winter.
The oldest resident on Seymour Avenue on Cleveland’s tough West Side, Aurora arrived almost half a century earlier. The seventy-six-year-old grandmother was among the first wave of Puerto Rican immigrants who settled in the booming steel town after World War II.
At that time it had been a respectable street, but everything changed in the late seventies when I-90 was built, plowing through the neighborhood to connect Cleveland and Pennsylvania. Within a few years, Seymour Avenue had declined into a dangerous drug-infested no-man’s-land, full of boarded-up clapboard houses and vacant lots.
Predominantly Latino, the impoverished neighborhood’s median annual income is under $15,000 a year, with 70 percent of children failing to graduate high school. At night, drugs and prostitution run rampant, as drivers exit off I-90 to get whatever they need. While some West Side residents describe their under-policed streets as “close-knit,” others complain of heavy drug use and violence.
But crime was the last thing on Aurora’s mind that balmy evening in early May 2013, as she chided Altagracia for not taking her allergy medicine and chatted with their friend Angel Cordero.
Suddenly a frantic scream pierced the evening calm. It came from the white house across the street, flying a Puerto Rican flag. Aurora looked up to see a woman’s hand frantically waving through a narrow gap in the front screen door.
“Help me! Help me!” the woman yelled. “My name is Amanda Berry and I’ve been captured for ten years!”
* * *
Like everyone in Cleveland, Aurora knew about Amanda Berry and her mysterious disappearance a decade earlier, on the day before her seventeenth birthday. Then, a year later, fourteen-year-old Gina DeJesus had also gone missing a couple of blocks away from where Amanda was last seen. Detectives believed the two girls’ disappearances were connected, and over the years they had become one of the city’s biggest mysteries.
Everybody had a theory of what had happened to Amanda and Gina, with most assuming the worst. Indeed, Aurora had often discussed it with her neighbor Ariel Castro, the owner of 2207 Seymour Avenue opposite, where the woman’s screams were now coming from.
“Amanda Berry’s dead,” Aurora shouted across the street. “Everybody knows that.”
“No,” the woman shouted, “I’ve been kidnapped in this house for ten years by Ariel Castro.”
Aurora had known Castro for more than twenty-five years and liked him. The gregarious school bus driver was popular in the neighborhood, as well as being one of Cleveland’s top salsa musicians. But Aurora also knew he had a terrible temper and could be violent. More than once, he had beaten his former wife and mother of his four children, Nilda Figueroa, so badly that she had run over to Aurora’s house, begging for sanctuary. Then, after one particularly brutal attack during Christmas 1993, Nilda had taken the children and left the house forever.
Since then things had quieted down at 2207 Seymour Avenue. Ariel Castro now lived alone, and had become increasingly reclusive over the years.
Now, as they crossed the street toward the Castro house, Angel Cordero said they should not get involved in his business. But Aurora insisted on helping the woman, telling Altagracia to stand lookout in the middle of the road and warn them if Castro returned.
Aurora and Cordero then came up
on the porch and tried to wrench the glass storm door open, with Amanda pushing as hard as she could from the inside.
“Kick it! Kick it!” Cordero told her, but the storm door was chained shut and wouldn’t budge.
Two doors away, Charles Ramsey was eating a burger on his porch, when he heard the commotion. At first he thought someone had been hit by a car, but after seeing Aurora and Cordero rush across the street, he came over to help the screaming woman.
He and Cordero began kicking the bottom panel of the screen door together, until it finally broke. Then Amanda Berry crawled out into the bright sunlight, wearing a dirty white tank top and blue slacks. A few moments later, a little girl crawled out behind her, in a black wig and pink tights.
“Let’s get out of here,” Cordero told them, “because if Ariel comes back he’s going to kill us all.”
* * *
After picking up the little girl, Amanda Berry ran across the street to Altagracia’s porch, yelling for a phone to call 911. The child was hysterical, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” At one point she tried to run back across the street, and as Cordero restrained her, her dirty wig fell off.
Altagracia then handed Amanda her cordless telephone.
“Help me, I’m Amanda Berry,” she yelled into the phone.
“Do you need police, fire, or ambulance?” replied the 911 operator.
“I need police.”
“What’s going on there?” asked the operator.
“I’ve been kidnapped. I’ve been missing ten years. I’m here. I’m free now.”
* * *
Cleveland police officers Anthony Espada and Michael Tracy were in their squad car on Lorain and Twenty-fifth Street, when a Code One alert came in at 5:52 P.M. The dispatcher told them she had just received a call from a hysterical woman claiming to be Amanda Berry.
“So my partner and I looked at each other in amazement,” said Officer Tracy, “and said it could be her.”
Officer Tracy then turned on the overhead siren and flashing lights, and hit the accelerator, racing toward 2207 Seymour Avenue.
“Before I could even stop the car she was right there at the window,” said Tracy. “I recognized her as Amanda Berry and I look at my partner … in disbelief.”
Officer Tracy’s first question was if there was anyone else still in the house.
“Yes,” replied Amanda, “Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight.”
ONE
ARIEL CASTRO
1
ROOTS
Ariel Castro was born on July 10, 1960, in Duey, Puerto Rico, the third child of Pedro “Nona” Castro and Lillian Rodriguez. He had two elder siblings, Marisol Alicea and Pedro Jr., and his younger brother, Onil, was the baby of the family.
Duey is a tiny village on the outskirts of Yauco, the coffee capital of Puerto Rico. Over many generations, the Castro family had become the preeminent family in the isolated mountainous barrio, owning most of the land in a section called La Parra.
Despite the family’s preeminence, however, their living conditions were primitive. Ariel was born in his father’s little wooden shack at the very top of La Parra. At that time there was no running water or electricity, and all the cooking was done over coal on the dirt floor. Every morning, Pedro would drive his jeep several miles down the steep mud track to a well to fill up large plastic water buckets. He would then haul them back up the hill so that his family could wash and have fresh drinking water.
When Ariel was a young child, his father started an affair with a young girl named Gladys Torres, who lived one house away down the mountain. Over the next few years Pedro lived a double life, dividing his time between his wife, Lillian, and his girlfriend, who bore him four children.
“Lillian never suspected anything was wrong,” said Ariel Castro’s aunt, Monserrate Baez, who was married to Lillian’s brother Milfon Rodriguez. “Nona had another family, unknown to us, just a few yards down the mountain.”
In 1962, Lillian finally discovered Pedro’s secret family.
“Lillian was pregnant with her last child when she found out he had another woman and children,” said Monserrate. “She was furious.”
When Lilllian confronted him, Pedro announced he was leaving her and the children forever. He then packed his bags, moving in next door with Gladys and their children. They married soon afterward.
In despair, Lillian then relocated to Reading, Pennsylvania, with her father, Americano Rodriguez. She left her four young children behind to be brought up by their grandmother, Hercilia Carabello, rarely returning to see them.
“I was abandoned by my father and later by my mother,” Ariel would write. “My grandma raised me.”
The Castro children had little parental supervision as they grew up. Ariel would later claim to have been sexually abused at the age of five, by a nine-year-old male friend of the family.
Years afterward, Ariel would be asked by a psychiatrist why he hadn’t reported the abuse, which lasted more than a year.
“People who are abused keep quiet,” he said, “so I did.”
He also said he had begun masturbating as a child, starting a lifelong obsession with sex.
In 1966, Lillian Rodriguez sent for her children, who joined her in Reading, where they lived at 435 North Second Street and Ariel was enrolled at Lauer’s Park Elementary School.
He would later claim that his mother physically abused him every day, using “belts, sticks and an open hand.” He also accused her of verbal harassment, “yelling negative things and cursing at us.”
“I would ask God for her to die,” he told the psychiatrist.
One Christmas, Ariel’s uncle Julio Castro, better known as “Cesi,” arrived from Cleveland, bearing presents for his nephews and niece.
“He took Ariel a little guitar,” said Cesi’s daughter, Maria Montes, “and [we] saw music bud in him.”
Little Ariel loved the guitar and soon started entertaining at Castro family gatherings. Cesi Castro took a special interest in Ariel, telling him he was his “special nephew” and a natural musician.
“[He had] the smarts,” said Cesi. “There are very few people who can teach themselves how to play bass.”
* * *
In 1968, Pedro Castro left Puerto Rico with Gladys and their children to settle down in Cleveland, Ohio, where he already had family.
Pedro had a good head for business and opened a used-car lot on Twenty-fifth Street and Sacket Avenue, which was soon thriving. In 1969, his brother Cesi joined him in Cleveland, opening the Caribe grocery store on Twenty-fifth Street and Seymour Avenue. They were followed by their brother Edwin, who opened Cleveland’s first Latino record store on Twenty-fifth Street near Clark Avenue.
In 1970, Lillian Rodriguez moved her family to Cleveland, as well, settling down at 2346 Scranton Road. By now her ex-husband and his brothers had established themselves as successful businessmen, becoming one of the leading Puerto Rican families in the city as they had been in La Parra. And they kept Yaucano traditions alive, later financing a social club and an annual coffee festival to commemorate their hometown.
“The Castro clan is a big clan,” explained Adrian Maldonaldo, who grew up on the lower West Side, where the Castros flourished. “They are very industrial- and business-minded.”
But in 1971, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that FBI agents had raided Cesi Castro’s Caribe bodega in a Bolita numbers’ racket sting. According to the article, agents seized cash, guns and numbers’ records from eleven family members, including Pedro and Cesi.
* * *
In September 1973, thirteen-year-old Ariel Castro started at Scranton Elementary, before joining Lincoln Road West Junior High School a year later. He was a below-average student, with poor test results for cognitive ability, but he did make the wrestling team, played softball and was in the school band.
While in junior high, Ariel was suspended for “touching a girl’s breast,” and punished for fighting classmates.
In Sept
ember 1976, Ariel moved to Lincoln West High School, where his elder brother, Pedro, Jr., had just graduated as a straight-A student.
“Ariel was just a regular kid,” recalled Daniel Marti, who was a year below him. “He was smart and already into bikes and classic sports cars.”
At Lincoln, Ariel joined his first Latin band, Los Steinos, playing bass with them in local churches. He was also drinking beer and smoking marijuana.
“He was popular, outgoing and smart,” said Marti. “He played the bass real good and had girlfriends. Everybody knew him.”
Daniel’s brother Javier Marti was in the same class as Castro at Lincoln West High School.
“The guy was just a regular Joe,” Daniel recalled. “He’s got a great family and always had nice cars and bikes.”
* * *
On June 30, 1979, Ariel Castro graduated from Lincoln West High School, near the bottom of his class, with a C average and a low grade-point average of 2.15. Over the next several years he worked a variety of menial jobs, including bagger and cleaner for the Pick-N-Pay supermarket on West Sixty-fifth Street. He also began establishing himself as one of Cleveland’s most promising Latin musicians, playing weddings, bar mitzvahs and anything else he could get.
“It was mostly like every weekend,” he would later tell a judge, “but there were times we did perform two or three times a week.”
Still living at home with his mother and two brothers, Ariel now had money to indulge his passions for expensive clothes, sports cars, motorbikes and musical instruments.
In early 1980, Lillian Rodriguez moved the family to a new house at 1649 Buhrer Avenue, just a mile down the road from where they had been living. Ariel soon noticed a shy seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican girl named Nilda Figueroa, who lived opposite with her parents and five siblings. Whenever they passed each other on the street, he would compliment Nilda on her looks, and the insecure girl was flattered by his attention.
