by John Glatt
At 6:00 P.M. on Good Friday, more than a hundred Cleveland residents gathered at the intersection to pray for Gina, many clutching her photograph. Among them was Ariel Castro, who had also joined the search earlier that day and handed out fliers.
Police blocked off West 105th Street from traffic, as the crowd surrounded Gina’s parents and her siblings, who were all holding large burning candles, to pray for Gina’s return. Yellow ribbons and MISSING posters had been posted to telephones poles around the pay phone and intersection where Arlene Castro had called her mother, before Gina had left to walk home.
News reporters and local TV camera crews covered the vigil, which was led by West Side community activist Khalid Samad.
“We believe in total community involvement,” he told the crowd. “We know that without the community this situation will not be solved. We just want to bring this baby home.”
An emotional Nancy Ruiz also addressed reporters, the stress of losing her daughter visibly taking its toll.
“I can feel her near me,” she said. “I know she’s out there somewhere and close.”
Earlier that day, a man had been arrested in Dayton, Ohio, in connection with an attempted abduction on Cleveland’s East Side. And a buzz went through the crowd that maybe he had taken Gina. Police were careful not to raise expectations.
“There was a man arrested,” a Cleveland police spokesman told a WEWS-TV reporter. “We’re just pursuing a lead, but right now there’s nothing connected to what’s going on [here].”
At the end of the vigil, as the crowd held hands, a friend of the DeJesus family appealed for everyone to carry on the search for Gina.
“Continue to pray,” she said. “Continue to take out the fliers and hopefully we’re going to get Gina back very, very soon.”
* * *
Earlier on Friday, after an anonymous tip believed to have come from Ariel Castro, the FBI picked up Fernando Colon for questioning. Colon, who had recently graduated from the police academy, was now working security at the Westown Plaza. On Friday morning, special agents arrived at his house and brought him downtown to FBI headquarters. For the next few hours, Colon was interrogated about Gina’s disappearance, undergoing a polygraph test, which he passed. His security patrol car was also forensically examined for any evidence linking him to Gina DeJesus.
“I had nothing to hide,” said Colon in 2013. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you whatever you want me to tell you, because when that girl disappeared I was working.’”
As an FBI agent was driving him home later, Colon advised him to take a close look at Ariel Castro as a possible suspect.
“I told them to investigate Ariel Castro,” recalled Colon. “Because he knows Gina and her parents and where they live.”
But the FBI ignored Colon’s advice, never once questioning Ariel Castro about Gina’s disappearance. Years later the FBI would vehemently deny that Colon had ever told them to investigate Ariel Castro.
* * *
At nine Saturday morning, more than two hundred people assembled at the Zone Recreation Center on Lorain Avenue to spend the day searching for Gina DeJesus. Before they fanned out in groups through the West Side of Cleveland, Mayor Jane Campbell told them she was praying for an “Easter miracle.”
For the rest of the day the volunteers handed out fliers to passersby, and knocked on doors asking for any information. That afternoon, Felix DeJesus canvassed Seymour Avenue, speaking to residents outside Ariel Castro’s house, where MISSING posters for Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus hung together on a pole.
“Gina’s father came round,” said Daniel Marti, who lived directly opposite, “and I remember talking to him and telling him how sorry I felt.”
* * *
On Saturday night, millions of viewers coast to coast saw Arlene Castro on America’s Most Wanted, in a segment about Cleveland’s two missing girls, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry. Arlene described the last few minutes before her best friend disappeared, and calling her mother to see if Gina could spend the afternoon at their house.
“I decided to call my mom and ask her,” Arlene told reporter Tom Morris. “So [Gina] gave me fifty cents to call. My mom said no, that I can’t go over to her house, and so I told her I couldn’t. And she said, ‘Well, okay, I’ll talk to you later,’ and she just walked.”
The program also featured Amanda Berry, who’d disappeared just across Lorain Avenue almost a year earlier.
“Two attractive teenaged girls,” said Morris. “They disappear in similar circumstances along the same busy avenue. What does it mean? A lot of the local people around here are talking about it, and how they’re getting a little bit scared for their children as well.
“Whether or not these cases are connected, police and the families of these two girls need your help.”
* * *
Ariel Castro had turned down playing a gig that night so he could stay at home and watch Arlene on the top-rated FOX TV show. He must have felt smugly satisfied that he had gotten clean away with his third kidnapping, and Cleveland police and the FBI were absolutely clueless.
Indeed, he felt so confident he had outsmarted law enforcement that right after taking Gina, he congratulated himself by buying a sports utility vehicle with the money his father had left him.
* * *
Michelle Knight first met Gina DeJesus a couple of weeks after she arrived in the house. In the days leading up to it, Ariel Castro kept telling Michelle that his daughter was coming over and he wanted them to meet.
At their first brief meeting, Castro put them in the bathroom together for a couple of minutes while he went to the kitchen.
“I whispered into her ear, ‘You’re Gina DeJesus,’” recalled Michelle. “And she looked at me and she was like, ‘You know who I am?’”
Then Michelle, who had now been in the house almost two years, gave Gina some advice on dealing with their abductor.
“I told her not to tell him that I know who you are,” Michelle said. “That there will be consequences to you telling him.”
Then she promised to tell Gina more when they next saw each other.
Then Castro came into the bathroom and told Gina to put Michelle’s hair into twists, and stayed to watch. But when Michelle thanked Gina for making her hair look so beautiful, Castro became incensed. He then took both of the girls upstairs, chaining Michelle to the bed in the pink bedroom, before bringing Gina back down to the basement.
A few days later, he moved Gina upstairs into one of the bedrooms, where he’d pinned up one of her MISSING posters on the wall.
* * *
One night a drunken Ariel Castro brought Michelle Knight downstairs and offered her some shots of rum. She refused, and after her captor took a large swig from the bottle, he told her how he used to follow a young girl home from Wilbur Wright Middle School every afternoon. He said she looked like Gina, and he had gotten them mixed up.
“He said he didn’t know that he’d kidnapped his daughter’s friend,” said Michelle, “until he saw Gina’s name on the news.”
* * *
After Gina’s disappearance, Arlene Castro fell into a deep depression and started self-cutting. Nilda took her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.
“She was Gina’s best friend,” her mother would later explain, “and she was with her when she disappeared. So it traumatized Arlene because she felt responsible for [Gina’s] disappearance.”
12
“SOMEBODY KNOWS WHERE AMANDA IS”
Wednesday, April 21, 2004, marked the one-year anniversary of Amanda Berry’s disappearance, and the day before her eighteenth birthday. That morning, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Regina Brett wrote a column about the tragic case, headlined, SOMEBODY KNOWS WHERE AMANDA IS.
“One year ago today,” wrote Brett, “Amanda Berry fell off the face of the earth and her mother landed in hell. Louwana Miller hasn’t heard her daughter’s voice in a year. Hasn’t seen her face in 365 days. Hasn’t slept a si
ngle night without worrying, without wondering, Where is she?”
Since Amanda’s disappearance, Brett wrote, Louwana has been tormented by images of her daughter, as a drugged-out sex slave or being dead and buried. She was now afraid to leave home in case she missed a call from Amanda, and scared of answering the phone to hear about yet another sighting of Amanda “pregnant, prostituting herself or prancing happily around in Florida.”
All the sleepless nights had taken their toll on Louwana, now forty-two, who had visibly aged since Amanda disappeared.
“As the months passed,” wrote Brett, “the posters faded, the yellow ribbons fell down, and the media lost interest. No one seemed to care about Amanda—until another girl disappeared two weeks ago.”
Since Gina DeJesus went missing, there had been renewed interest in Amanda by the media, with new MISSING posters of Amanda suddenly appearing all over Cleveland.
In the article, Louwana criticized Cleveland police and the FBI for taking so long to admit that Amanda was not a runaway. She also questioned whether her daughter might have been found if the FBI had traced the two strange phone calls she had received from Amanda’s cell phone.
“If she’s dead,” said Louwana, “can somebody out there tell me? I’m living in hell.”
* * *
On Saturday, FBI Special Agent Robert Hawk updated the Cleveland Plain Dealer on the search. Since Gina’s disappearance, more than five hundred tips had been followed up without any success. Police had questioned around a thousand people, and given polygraph tests to seven people close to her. But Hawk admitted they were no further forward than they had been on day one.
That weekend, the DeJesus family and their supporters canvassed the West Side yet again, hoping for any scrap of information that might lead to her. And on Sunday night, Gina’s parents attended a prayer rally for Amanda Berry at West 110th Street and Lorain Avenue, where she disappeared. From then on Felix, Nancy and Louwana Miller would become close, working together in a common mission to find their daughters.
* * *
Four days later, Ariel Castro assisted in a Cleveland police investigation, after an angry mother boarded his school bus, threatening to kill a nine-year-old student. Castro had then contacted the student’s parents, who called in police.
The mother denied all of Castro’s allegations, saying she was merely protecting her daughter, who was the victim of bullying. The police report said Castro had described how the mother had lashed out at the student on his bus.
“She told him she would ‘Fuck him up’ and ‘Kill him,’ Castro told police, “[if] he ever hit her daughter.”
There is no record of any further criminal action taken against the mother.
* * *
The first week of May, the FBI’s Quantico-based Behavioral Analysis Unit arrived in Cleveland to build a psychological profile of who might have taken Gina. The unit, which specializes in missing-children cases, advised that Gina’s MISSING posters should be in English and Spanish, and an aerial map of the path Gina took from Wilbur Wright the day she disappeared should be given to the media. A special tip line was also established for any anonymous information that might lead to Gina.
“They are confident that there is someone out there who has information that would resolve this investigation,” FBI Special Agent Hawk told the Plain Dealer.
Felix DeJesus was becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress. Each night since Gina had gone missing, Felix and several friends went out scouring the streets for her. And when police asked him to stop, he refused.
“I will not give up,” Felix declared. “As long as she’s out there missing, I’m going to be out there with her.”
He was also actively investigating sex offenders living on the West Side. One night he and some friends reportedly broke into the apartment of a known sex offender, just a block away from where Gina disappeared.
Police were called to the apartment on West 104th Street and Lorain, but although no criminal charges resulted, Felix was again asked to stop this line of inquiry.
“I’m not a vigilante,” he told the Plain Dealer. “I’m desperate to find my daughter.”
While Felix was out searching, Nancy lit candles on her porch and prayed for her daughter’s safe return. She had also constructed another shrine in their living room, full of Gina’s photographs, toys and tchotchkes.
* * *
On June 1, 2004, a $20,000 reward was offered for any information leading to the discovery of Amanda Berry or Gina DeJesus. A couple of days later, a twenty-two-year-old Bowling Green University journalism student named Ariel Castro, Jr., wrote an article for the Cleveland Plain Press community newspaper.
Headlined GINA DEJESUS’ DISAPPEARANCE HAS CHANGED THE NEIGHBORHOOD, the article, bearing the byline “Ariel Castro,” focused on how radically his old Cleveland neighborhood had changed since Gina had disappeared. Castro interviewed Gina’s mother, Nancy Ruiz, as well as several parents and a community organizer.
“Since April 2, 2004,” his article began, “the day 14-year-old Gina DeJesus was last seen on her way home from Wilbur Wright Middle School, neighborhood residents have been taken by an overwhelming need for caution.”
Castro noted that everybody in the neighborhood felt deeply connected to the DeJesus family, and had come together for a single cause.
“You can tell the difference,” Nancy Ruiz was quoted as saying. “People are watching out for each other’s kids. It’s a shame that a tragedy had to happen for me to really know my neighbors.”
Ariel, Jr., also interviewed parents waiting for their children to be let out of Wilbur Wright Middle School, where Gina had left that fateful day with his sister Arlene.
“I really believe there needs to be more security,” Vaneetha Smith told Castro, as she waited for her niece. “We have too many kidnappings and they should crack down on all the sex offenders in the area.”
Castro noted how the Ohio Electronic Sex Offender Registration and Notification database listed 133 sex offenders living or working near Gina’s home.
“I have been notified of only one sex offender,” Ruiz told him, “and he lives only about 1,000 feet away from here.”
* * *
Around this time, Ariel Castro brought Gina into the pink bedroom with Michelle. Several days earlier he had removed the bucket Michelle had been using as a toilet, replacing it with a larger white plastic portable one.
He then ordered Gina onto the dirty queen-size mattress with Michelle, padlocking a long rusty chain around Michelle’s neck, and attaching the other end to Gina’s ankle. When Gina asked how they were supposed to use the toilet if her leg was chained to Michelle’s neck, Castro unlocked the chains and shackled their feet together instead. Then he threw some T-shirts and sweatpants on the bed for Michelle, who was still naked, leaving the girls on the bed chained together.
13
REVENGE
At the beginning of June, Ariel Castro started buying his daughters Emily and Arlene expensive presents for no apparent reason. He now visited them every day, paying them more attention than he had ever done before. Although suspicious, Nilda allowed him more access to their daughters, hoping he might have changed for the better.
“He was bringing them a lot of stuff,” she said later. “Putting too much attention on them.”
Over the next few weeks, he bought them expensive cell phones, iPods and perms, even promising to buy them cars when they turned eighteen.
“He began having a lot of contact with Arlene,” said Nilda. “He would pick her up from school or from my home, or contact her by telephone quite often. He purchased Arlene a lot of clothing. Some of the clothing is inappropriate for her age and I will not let her wear it.”
When he gave each of the girls a thousand dollars from his father’s will, Nilda insisted on taking the money on their behalf, so they wouldn’t waste it.
He also began probing into the most intimate parts of his daughters’ lives, quizzi
ng them about their periods, to the embarrassment of their mother.
“Are you sure you started your period,” he asked each of his daughters, “or did somebody stick their finger up your vagina?”
* * *
As Ariel Castro insinuated himself into his daughters’ daily lives, he began turning them against their stepfather. In the seven years since Nilda had become engaged to Fernando Colon, he had become the disciplinarian of the family. And his strictly enforced rules against smoking, hanging out in bad company and maintaining curfew did not endear him to Emily and Arlene.
“I was [strict] with them,” said Colon, “because I didn’t want them to get into drugs or become pregnant.”
In June 2004, after a fight with her stepfather, sixteen-year-old Emily walked out of the house, moving in with Colon’s sister, Sonia Lebron. Her mother was powerless to stop her.
“She would push me around,” said Nilda, “and do what she wants to do. She used to stay up all hours of the morning [and party].”
Then, on July 4, Arlene was grounded for several weeks for breaking her curfew. She was furious, complaining that her stepfather had no right to order her around.
“[Fernando] wanted the rules of the house followed,” explained Nilda. “[Emily and Arlene] didn’t like the rules. They told me, ‘He’s not my dad, so why should he ground me [and] tell me what to do.’”
Now being treated for depression, Arlene Castro was regularly playing truant from Wilbur Wright Middle School.
“Sister Caroline called me from the school,” said Nilda, “and told [me] that she wanted to expel Arlene because she’s constantly lying. She’s always saying she has a baby at home and that’s why she couldn’t attend school. Other children told me [Arlene] was pregnant.”
In late July, Ariel Castro told Nilda he still loved her, asking her to dump Fernando Colon and move back in with him.
“He’ll put his arm around me,” said Nilda, “or he’ll come in the house to try and kiss me. Because I’m his property. He says it all the time.”
But Nilda told him she would never return to 2207 Seymour Avenue because of “his abusive nature.”
