The Lost Girls

by John Glatt

  * * *

  On December 15, Nilda Figueroa swore out an affidavit, accusing Ariel Castro of manipulating their two daughters to frame Fernando Colon on rape and kidnapping charges. In the nineteen-point sworn affidavit, Nilda outlined the terrible injuries and abuse she’d suffered at his hands.

  “Ariel Castro and I were never married,” read her affidavit. “During our relationship he was very abusive. He was arrested and convicted of domestic violence in Cleveland.”

  She also outlined how in June, Castro had suddenly started taking an interest in Emily and Arlene, after ignoring them for years.

  “He would pick [Arlene] up from school or from my home,” she wrote. “Mr. Castro has also purchased Arlene a lot of clothing, compact discs, a Walkman and a cell phone with North Coast PCS service. Some of the clothing is inappropriate for her age, and I will not let her wear it. Emily recently told me that her father was going to give her the new SUV that he had just bought.”

  Nilda said the first she knew of her daughters’ allegations came after their being summoned to the First District police station to sign a release form so they could talk to detectives. Then Castro had confronted her outside, offering to buy her a new car if she supported her daughters’ allegations. She had refused.

  “I have never seen any inappropriate conduct between Fernando Colon and any of my children,” she wrote. “If anything inappropriate had occurred, my daughters would have been quick to tell me.”

  Soon after her stepfather’s arrest, Emily Castro was expelled from Wilbur Wright High School, and found a job as a cashier at Dave’s Supermarket. She was now back living with her aunt Sonia, in the same house as her stepfather Fernando Colon. And for the next three months they would live together under the same roof, as he awaited trial.

  * * *

  Saturday, April 2, 2005, marked the first anniversary of Gina DeJesus’s disappearance. That morning the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a front-page story with the headline FAMILY WAITS, HOPE FOR GIRL’S RETURN HOME—ONE YEAR AFTER DISAPPEARANCE, NO TRACE OF GINA DEJESUS FOUND.

  “When Nancy Ruiz woke this morning,” began the story, “her daughter’s bed was empty. The Cleveland mother doesn’t know where to find the teenager who fears the dark. She doesn’t know when the finicky eater who dislikes ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard last ate. She doesn’t know whether her daughter is alive or … the alternative, which makes the mother’s eyes tear.”

  The story said that in the year since Gina went missing, Cleveland police and the FBI had interviewed hundreds of people and searched the city, coming up with nothing.

  “The best hope they give me,” said Nancy, “is that they haven’t been here to tell me they found a body.”

  That night, the DeJesus family held a first-anniversary vigil on West 105th Street and Lorain Avenue, where Gina had last been seen.

  A week later, the FBI released a sketch of “a person of interest” wanted for questioning in connection with Gina’s disappearance. The green-eyed Latino man with a goatee had been seen near Wilbur Wright Middle School shortly before Gina went missing. He was described as being between twenty-five to thirty-five years old, weighing between 165 to 185 pounds, and about five feet ten inches tall.

  The sketch looks uncannily like Ariel Castro.

  On April 21, the second anniversary of Amanda Berry’s vanishing, Louwana Miller led a vigil march from the Burger King at West 110th Street and Lorain to her home on West 111th Street. When the marchers reached her home, Louwana led them in singing “Happy Birthday” to her daughter, who would turn nineteen a few hours later.

  Since losing hope of ever finding Amanda after TV psychic Sylvia Browne’s reading, Louwana had changed her mind and now believed she was alive.

  “Please make a phone call,” Louwana told her missing daughter in a TV interview. “Don’t be scared. If you have to disguise your voice, do that. Give an idea where [you’re] at.”

  That night Amanda Berry was watching coverage of the vigil on her TV with Ariel Castro. To celebrate the second anniversary of her abduction, Castro served her and his two other prisoners birthday cake. It would begin a ghoulish ritual of his serving a celebratory dinner and a cake on the anniversary of each abduction.

  * * *

  Over the next few months, Ariel Castro started giving his captives a little more freedom in strictly controlled doses. He no longer kept them chained up all the time, and they were free to roam around their darkened rooms. But they could not see daylight, as he had boarded up the reinforced Plexiglas windows with wooden strips.

  There was only one bathroom downstairs in the house, and Castro never allowed his prisoners to use it. Instead they had to make do with plastic toilets in their rooms, which he rarely emptied. Michelle and Gina, who shared the pink bedroom, were seldom allowed to take showers, and conditions were so filthy they suffered from painful bed sores.

  Castro also employed “psychological restraints” by repeatedly raping and beating the girls in front of each other, and employing cruel mind games as well. He would tell them he was going out, and then wait outside their doors. Then, if one of them tried to open her door, he would beat her and chain her to the pole in the basement again.

  “He used to play tremendous dumb games,” said Michelle Knight. “He’ll leave the door unlocked and he’ll sit there and say, ‘Well, if you try [anything] I’ll hang you upside down,’ or he’ll threaten [to hurt] somebody else in the house.”

  Withholding food and drink and taking away their portable toilets were also used as punishments. Other penalties included putting them in the freezing basement during the bitter winters, or in the boiling attic in the summer.

  Castro had also installed a series of mirrors inside and outside the house, so he could monitor everything. And he drilled little peepholes in the bedroom doors, so he could spy on his prisoners.

  “He can see directly into your rooms,” said Michelle, “to see what you’re doing.”

  He carried his Luger revolver around at all times, warning that he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot them if they ever tried to escape. And he also played Russian roulette with his terrified captives, as a demented game of trust. He would hand his revolver to one of the women, ordering her to put it to his head.

  “Pull the trigger,” he’d say. “If it’s God’s will that I die, I die. I’ll say my prayers.”

  The girls never knew his gun was always empty, and it was his way of finding out whom he could trust.

  Castro kept the victims in a state of powerlessness, making them believe that their physical survival depended on him.

  Several times he told them that they were not the first girls he had taken, with some making it home and others not. These continual threats and humiliation terrified the women into complete subservience.

  But perhaps the cruelest weapon of all was allowing them to watch the rest of the world go by on their televisions, as they were held in captivity.

  “I felt like everything was frozen,” said Michelle. “Nothing was moving at all. The only thing that was moving was the outside world and we were at a standstill.”

  15

  FRAME-UP

  In early June, as Fernando Colon’s trial loomed, Emily and Arlene Castro had second thoughts about testifying. Nilda Figueroa would later claim that Arlene had broken down one night, admitting that she had made it all up.

  “Arlene told me … that this didn’t happen,” said her mother. “That Mr. Colon never put his finger inside of her. I confronted her sister Emily about it the next day. Emily got loud with Arlene and told her, ‘Don’t say that! Don’t say that!’”

  Then Emily had stormed out of the house, calling Ariel Castro on her cell phone.

  “Emily spoke to her father first,” said Nilda “and then gave the phone to Arlene. And [he] started talking to Arlene and she went really quiet.”

  The next day, Nilda brought Arlene to Cuyahoga County Prosecutor John Kosko’s office to repeat her story that her stepfather had n
ever molested her.

  “I told Arlene to tell them the truth,” said Nilda. “She kept her head down and wouldn’t look at me.”

  Once inside the prosecutor’s office, Arlene insisted she had been telling the truth and had been molested by Fernando Colon.

  “She didn’t change the story,” said her mother. “She was scared to look at me.”

  * * *

  In early July, Emily Castro, now seventeen, discovered she was pregnant. The father was a young man named DeAngelo Gonzalez, who had recently moved in with her. Terrified of what Ariel Castro might do if he found out, Emily and Gonzalez relocated to Fort Wayne, Indiana, moving in with her elder sister, Angie, who was now married with children.

  “[I wanted] to get away from everything,” Emily later explained. “Just get away from Cleveland to start over.”

  On July 25, private investigator Chris Giannini, who was gathering evidence on Fernando Colon’s behalf, interviewed Ariel Castro in his van outside Castro’s uncle Cesi’s bodega, after serving him with a subpoena.

  “He would not meet me at his house,” said Giannini. “We met down the street at his uncle’s store, but we couldn’t talk there so we sat in my van.”

  During the interview, Castro was “very polite,” and the seasoned private investigator felt he was being manipulated. Castro denied ever assaulting Nilda, saying he did not know why she had called the police and had him arrested. And he accused her of striking him, saying he had been defending himself.

  “He recalls that she did have to go to hospital one time for a laceration,” wrote Giannini in his notes. “He does not remember how she got the laceration. He thought she hit herself or hit a door jamb.”

  Castro described himself as “a family man,” who had a good job and had always taken responsibility for his four children. He denied any “hard feelings” toward Fernando Colon, although he admitted being “hurt” when Nilda and the kids had moved in with him.

  He told Giannini that he had first discovered Colon had been sexually molesting Arlene, when she had mentioned he was “touching her behind.” When he questioned her about it, Arlene said she did not want him “getting mad.”

  “According to Ariel,” wrote Giannini in his notes, “Arlene told him that Fernando penetrated her vagina with his finger.”

  Castro said he had then asked Emily about her sister’s allegations.

  “Emily said that there was never any penetration,” wrote Giannini, “but he touched and spanked her behind.”

  Castro said he had had “discipline problems” with both his daughters for years, and Emily did drugs and smoked marijuana. He denied ever threatening to ruin Fernando Colon’s life.

  * * *

  On Monday, August 29, 2005, the day before Fernando Colon’s trial, Nilda Figueroa swore out a restraining order against Ariel Castro. She claimed that he threatened to kill her and her two daughters if Emily didn’t return from Fort Wayne to testify against Fernando Colon.

  The previous Friday, Nilda had filed a police report, accusing Castro of threatening their lives. That afternoon, a tearful Emily Castro had called her, complaining that her father wanted her back in Cleveland immediately, to testify at Fernando Colon’s trial. Emily did not want to go, but he was insisting on driving to Fort Wayne to collect her.

  “[Emily] was upset,” said Nilda, “she said her dad wants her to come over here, but [she] didn’t want to. She thinks she’s pregnant and she doesn’t want anybody to know. And plus the stress. I just didn’t want Mr. Castro to pick her up, because I know what he’s doing to them.”

  Nilda then phoned Castro, asking why he was pressuring their youngest daughter so hard about coming back to testify.

  “I asked him why he is making her cry,” said Nilda, “and why he is making her come back. He told me, ‘Look, bitch! If [you] don’t make her show up, I’m gonna beat the shit out of you … in front of her to see how you like it.’ That’s his words.”

  Then Nilda called her son, Ariel, Jr., concerned about how Emily would get to Cleveland.

  “My mom called me distraught,” he said. “She said because she has custody, if anyone’s picking [them] up it would be her.”

  Late Friday night, Nilda called Ariel Castro, telling him not to go to Fort Wayne to collect Emily.

  “[I said] I would make the arrangements,” she said, “and he started cussing me out.”

  Later it would emerge that over the last week before the trial, Ariel Castro had been in close touch with Cuyahoga County Prosecutor John Kosko, who had “begged” him to go to Fort Wayne to pick up his daughter, so the molestation case would not fall apart.

  * * *

  Early Sunday morning, before it got light, Ariel Castro rounded up his three hostages and brought them downstairs. He gave them brown wigs and sunglasses to put on, before leading them out of the back door in chains. Then he walked them across the backyard and into his garage.

  “I’m moving you into my van,” he told them, “’cause my family is coming over here soon.” Then he forced them into his large maroon Chevy van, which he had previously equipped with chains and padlocks.

  “It smelled really bad in there,” said Michelle Knight. “He locked Gina and me together on the seats, and he chained Amanda by herself in back.”

  He left just enough slack on the chains so his prisoners could use a portable pot as a toilet, but not enough so they could look out of the windows.

  “If I hear a sound,” he told them, “I will come out here and kill all three of you.”

  Then Ariel Castro got into his sports car and drove 227 miles west along I-90 to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to bring Emily back to Cleveland.

  On arrival, he drove straight to his daughter Angie Gregg’s house and collected Emily, taking her to a dress shop in Glenburg Square mall and giving her $60 to buy clothes.

  “I asked her, ‘Do you need clothes for court tomorrow?’” said Castro. “She says yes. So I took her there.”

  While Emily was trying on clothes, Castro met up with Ariel, Jr., and Angie. Later that night they all had dinner, before he drove Emily back to Cleveland, where she and Arlene spent the night at 2207 Seymour Avenue, without telling their mother.

  * * *

  The next morning, Nilda Figueroa appeared before Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Judge Timothy Flanagan, to apply for a restraining order. She accused Ariel Castro of repeatedly threatening her and their daughters’ lives. Castro, who had taken the week off from work for the Fernando Colon trial, was in court with his counsel, Jose Torres-Ramirez.

  Nilda told the judge that Castro had repeatedly beaten her over the years, twice breaking her nose, her ribs and dislocating each of her shoulders. His violent attacks had caused an inoperable blood clot on her brain, she claimed. Although she had full custody of their children, Castro frequently abducted his two daughters and kept them from her.

  Judge Flanagan granted a temporary protection order, forbidding Ariel Castro from contacting Nilda or his children, and requiring him to stay five hundred feet away from them. Castro was also ordered to appear at a Domestic Relations hearing in September.

  * * *

  Straight after the hearing, Ariel Castro walked across the street to the Cuyahoga Court of Common Pleas for the start of Fernando Colon’s trial. But the trial was delayed after Arlene Castro failed to show up. Her father spent the rest of the day looking for her, finally tracking her down at a friend’s house.

  That night Emily and Arlene Castro spent their second night under their father’s roof, as his three prisoners lay chained up in a van a few feet away.

  16

  WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION: ARIEL CASTRO

  On Tuesday, August 30, Fernando Colon went on trial, accused of twenty-eight criminal charges of rape, kidnapping, and sexual molestation. Colon, now forty, had pleaded not guilty, and the trial would be in front of Judge John J. Russo, without a jury.

  That afternoon, a visibly nervous Emily Castro took the stand to testify. Under
direct examination from Cuyahoga County Prosecutor John Kosko, Emily said she had first met Fernando Colon ten years ago at the age of seven, when her mother became his girlfriend. After briefly living with him at her grandmother’s house, Colon had bought a house, moving her mother and three siblings there.

  Under oath, Emily testified that her stepfather had first molested her when she was eight or nine years old.

  “I was laying on the sofa,” she told Judge Russo, “and I woke up to him feeling on me … touching my breasts. He had his hand in my shirt just feeling my breast area.”

  Then Kosko asked her to describe the next time the defendant had behaved inappropriately. Emily said she was in her room sleeping in bunk beds with her two sisters, Angie and Arlene.

  “And he was in our room,” she said, “and I woke up and he was touching my older sister. And when he turned around to look at me I just closed my eyes. He noticed that I was awake and just walked out of the room.”

  When the prosecutor asked her to describe the next incident of molestation, Emily looked lost.

  “I don’t … my mind is going blank,” she replied.

  “Your Honor,” said Colon’s defense attorney, Robert Ferreri, “I notice that the witness is unable to answer the question.”

  “So we’ll let her gather her thoughts,” said Judge Russo.

  “Was there ever another incident that happened … where you were touched by the defendant?” asked Kosko.

  “I know there was,” said Emily, “but I can’t remember anything.”

  Growing impatient, the prosecutor asked her to describe what had happened.

  “No,” Emily replied.

  “Why can’t you describe it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then Kosko had her read the two-page statement she had given to Detective Arthur King a year earlier, before asking her again about the third incident.