Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

by Amanda Berry

  Being alone is bad, but it is far worse when he comes in, and it always ends with me crying.

  Today he wants to talk and is acting like he hasn’t done anything wrong, like we are friends. I don’t say a word to him and just keep staring at the TV.

  January 2004: New Year

  January 1

  Amanda

  “You’re so pretty,” he says as he starts pawing me again.

  “Stand this way, stand that way, put your arms around me, you’re so beautiful,” blah, blah, blah. He has a whole little routine he makes me recite, about how much I love it, how much I want him. If I don’t say it, he’s rougher.

  It’s been almost nine months since he kidnapped me. He’s always touching me like he owns me. He talks about the different parts of my body and says they’re his, that they belong to him. He says we are “together.” How can he think that if he has to lock me up to keep me here?

  “You can’t just take my whole life away,” I tell him.

  “What life?” he says, laughing. “Working at Burger King? That’s not a life.”

  “What do you know about me? Nothing! You have no right to take my life away!”

  He keeps touching me, and I feel like cutting off his hands, or something else. I hope I don’t catch any diseases from him. I’m desperate to see a doctor when I get out of here.

  He’s raped me nine times in the past three days, but I’ve decided I’m not going to mark X’s in my diary anymore. I want him to be held accountable someday, but when I look back at these X’s, I remember every time all over again. It’s more than I can bear right now.

  January 9

  I keep thinking about the day I was taken. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d called in sick, or if I’d left work at the usual time, or if DJ had picked me up, or if I hadn’t gotten into the van.

  Could I actually have been able to avoid all this?

  He sits on my bed. I shift a little and move the chain around so it hurts less around my waist. I hate talking to him, but the loneliness is brutal. I have to talk to somebody.

  “When are you going to take me home?” I ask him. “I’ve been here long enough.”

  “You have to be patient,” he says. “Maybe after three years you might get to be free.”

  Three years! That’s forever. I can’t take this for three years. I’ll kill myself. I’m not going to believe him. I’m getting out of here sooner than that—I know it.

  I have all my belongings lined up. My clothes, my diary, my pictures and videos. That’s everything I have, and it all fits in a little box. If he said, “Okay, let’s go,” I could be ready in two minutes.

  January 26, 2004: Cops at the Door

  At around ten p.m. on Monday, January 26, 2004, two Cleveland police officers knocked on the front door of 2207 Seymour Avenue. They wanted to question the owner, Ariel Castro, because a mother had filed a complaint about how he had treated her four-year-old son on his school bus earlier that day.

  That morning, Castro had punched in at 6:40 and drove his usual route, picking up sixty kids and dropping them off at two elementary schools. When he was done he volunteered for an extra midday shift and was assigned to pick up two children and deliver them to a two-hour program for children with ADHD at Wade Park Elementary School.

  He picked up the children in a smaller bus and drove to Wade, where only one of them got off. The second, the four-year-old boy, was still on the bus when Castro drove to a Wendy’s restaurant for lunch. The boy later told police that when Castro realized he was on the bus, he ordered him, “Lay down, bitch.” It was a cold day, with heavy freezing rain and sleet, and the boy stayed in the bus alone while Castro went inside to eat.

  Castro then drove to a parking lot and read the newspaper, and then went to a school building. Finally, after more than two hours, the child was taken to Wade Park Elementary, where a teacher told Castro that he should just drive him home, as school was over. Castro dropped him with a babysitter at his house, and the boy’s mother called the police when she came home and heard her son’s account.

  When police did not find Castro at his home that evening, they got back in their patrol car and left, referring the case to detectives for follow-up.

  Amanda was chained in a bedroom on the second floor, but she never heard anyone knocking. Castro, as usual, had left the radio blaring in the hall.

  A month later, Castro was finally interviewed about the incident at the police station. He did not deny leaving the boy on the bus, but said it was an accident, an oversight. He said he only realized the boy was still there when he returned to the bus headquarters, and he insisted that he had never cursed at him.

  He said he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t followed standard procedure and checked the bus at the end of his route.

  “I was still mourning my father’s death, and I wasn’t quite right at that point in time,” he told police, noting that his father had died two weeks earlier. “I am very sorry for forgetting the student on the bus.”

  Police referred the case to prosecutors, who declined to seek criminal charges.

  The school system suspended Castro for sixty days without pay.

  Part Two

  Ariel Castro was born in the lush green hills of rural Puerto Rico, and his journey to Seymour Avenue began with his father, Pedro Castro, who arrived in Cleveland in the mid-1960s with big dreams and a chopped-off hand.

  The elder Castro, known as Nona, joined the post–World War II flood of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland. He came from Yauco, a town in the southwestern mountains, where coffee and bananas were plentiful but jobs and money were not. In the 1950s and ’60s, Cleveland’s steel mills, railroad yards, and manufacturing plants were drawing people from struggling Appalachian hamlets as well as eager immigrants from Ireland, Hungary, other European countries, and Puerto Rico.

  Nona followed his brothers to Cleveland, where the Castro family was establishing itself as a well-regarded clan of small businessmen in the city’s near west side, just across the Cuyahoga River from downtown. Nona’s older brother, Julio Cesar “Cesi” Castro, had opened the Caribe Grocery, a bodega that sold Caribbean food and became a social and political hub for the growing Puerto Rican community. His brother Edwin started Isla Music, which featured Latin music and quickly became a local landmark. Another brother ran a hardware store.

  Nona opened a used car lot on West 25th Street and was an unforgettable salesman, with a prosthetic left hand that he would put on and take off. He often told people that his hand had been mangled when someone accidentally slammed it in a car door. But the real story eventually made its way around Cleveland: He had lost the hand in Puerto Rico in a fight over a woman.

  • • •

  The man who had sliced off Castro’s hand at the wrist, and left him with scars on his back and head, was named Jose “Pepe” Rodriguez, a neighbor of Castro’s in La Parra, a tiny cluster of cinder-block houses on a narrow mountain road on the outskirts of Yauco.

  A half century later, relatives of both men, who have since died, aren’t certain of the exact cause of the machete fight, but they do remember that it had something to do with Nona’s complicated relations with women.

  Nona began his first family with Lillian Rodriguez in a one-story house on top of a hill in La Parra. Starting in 1958, they had three children in three years. The third, Ariel, was born on July 10, 1960.

  About a year later, when Lillian was pregnant with their fourth child, Nona left her and the children and took up with another woman, Gladys Torres, who lived farther down the country lane. Both women were pregnant with Nona’s children at the same time, in a village where just about everyone was related to one woman or the other.

  It was around then that Nona lost his hand.

  Monserrate Baez, Lillian’s sister-in-law, recalled the sight of Nona driving his Jeep up the steep road with one hand, t
hen stopping to fetch water from a communal well. He didn’t let anything stop him from going about his business.

  Aurea Rodriguez Torres, Pepe’s niece, said that Nona and Pepe eventually became friendly again, though there were plenty of bad feelings in the village about Nona’s having abandoned Lillian and their four kids.

  Nona, like so many other men who had been working on farms, soon left for higher wages on the mainland. In Cleveland he quickly earned enough money to send for Gladys, who now had two children with him.

  When Ariel was around four, Lillian also went north, moving to Reading, Pennsylvania, where some of her relatives had settled. She left Ariel and his siblings with her mother in Puerto Rico and got a job operating a sewing machine in a factory. She sent money and presents home and when Ariel was about six, she returned to Yauco, gathered her children, and brought them all to Reading.

  But during the year or two that Ariel was living with his grandmother, he said something horrible happened.

  • • •

  When he was about five years old, he said he was sexually abused by a boy, about nine or ten years old, who lived nearby. He said the abuse continued for about a year, but he never reported it to anyone.

  Castro would later give the same account to FBI agents and court-appointed psychiatrists examining him to determine if he was mentally competent to stand trial.

  “It’s known that people who are abused keep quiet, so I did,” he told the psychiatrists.

  Because the abuse is alleged to have taken place nearly fifty years ago, it is difficult to verify, but near the end of his life Castro talked about it frequently. Law enforcement officials believe Castro might have fabricated the story as a way to defend his own behavior, possibly in the hope that a judge would be more lenient with him.

  Castro also repeated the allegations in a four-page handwritten letter that police found in his kitchen on the day after his arrest. In that document, he identified his alleged abuser by his first name and the first names of his parents.

  In La Parra, relatives and friends recognized those names immediately. They said the alleged abuser, now about sixty, was a neighbor of Castro’s when they were boys and he still lived in the area. When contacted by phone in the summer of 2014, the man was at first cordial and friendly, but when he heard the name “Ariel Castro,” he became angry and hung up.

  • • •

  Castro was twelve, in the spring of 1973, when Lillian moved the family from Reading to Cleveland. She later told police that even though she and Nona had split up, she wanted the kids to be closer to their father.

  Castro had virtually no relationship with his father as a young boy, and he often described his relationship with his mother as terrible. In the letter found by police, he complained of being “abandoned by my father and later my mother.”

  “My mother was an abusive parent,” he wrote. “Her ways of discipline were very bad. For this made me grow hatred for her. There were times I wished she would die.”

  He told the court psychiatrists that his mother constantly hit him with “belts, sticks, and an open hand,” sometimes causing bruises. He said she was always “yelling negative things and cursing at us,” and “I would ask God for her to die.”

  But in one of the many contradictory statements he made, Castro also told the psychiatrists that his mother had done “a good job” raising him. In fact, as an adult, he spent a great deal of time with her. She lived only a few blocks from Seymour Avenue, and he would visit her often, helping her with chores and eating dinner with her. When police reviewed his cell phone records after his arrest, it included a long list of calls to her.

  Lillian Rodriguez, a small woman with white hair, visited him frequently when he was in jail awaiting sentencing. She has stayed largely out of the public eye since his death.

  • • •

  In Cleveland, Ariel Castro attended Lincoln Junior High, where, he later told law enforcement officials, he was suspended for “touching a girl’s breast.”

  When police interviewing him after his arrest asked him if he had ever sexually abused anyone other than his three captives, Castro said: “I had a girlfriend in junior high school. She would let me go under her shirt. I wanted to go farther, and she would say no. I tried to force her. I guess that was an early indication that I wanted to be in control.”

  During his years at Lincoln-West High School, he played bass guitar in the school band and worked part-time at a Pick n Pay grocery store on West 65th Street. He was a shy teenager with acne, the Puerto Rican kid who worked produce and didn’t have that much to do with his coworkers, many of whom were Irish American or Italian American. Sometimes, though, Castro would be seen in the parking lot with them, drinking beer and smoking dope after work.

  From a young age, he was openly prejudiced against African Americans and called them “niggers” or other slurs. When Castro was playing with a BB gun one day and shot a black kid from the neighborhood in the hand, nobody believed it was an accident.

  Castro stayed in school at a time when many others were dropping out, graduating in 1979. A year later, when he was twenty, he met the woman who would in many ways become his first prisoner.

  • • •

  Ariel Castro noticed immediately when a pretty, dark-haired girl moved in across the street from his house on Buhrer Avenue, a few blocks from Seymour.

  Grimilda Figueroa, a petite seventeen-year-old also from Yauco, hated her first name and told everyone to call her Nilda.

  Their courtship was quick. One summer evening not long after they met, Castro took her on a date, and they spent hours parked on the shores of Lake Erie. When they returned home very late, Nilda’s mother was furious that her daughter had spent all that time alone with a man. She told Castro that he was now responsible for Nilda: “Now you have to take her with you.”

  Nilda moved across the street to Castro’s house. They didn’t marry but considered themselves common-law spouses. After one miscarriage, their son, Ariel Anthony Castro, was born in 1981, when Nilda was just eighteen.

  At first Nilda’s younger sister Elida and the rest of her family thought Castro was fun, a talented bass guitar player who didn’t drink too much and smoked weed only now and then. He owned a car and took Nilda’s younger siblings on adventures. He got them a free McDonald’s cheeseburger by bringing his half-eaten one back to the counter and lying about finding a hair in it. He kept that burger, too, saying he might as well give it to his dog.

  But sometimes he also frightened the neighborhood kids, especially with an unnerving mannequin, a female torso with dark hair, that he had bought at a yard sale. He used to startle people by propping it up in the passenger seat of his car when he was driving around.

  Castro also quickly became possessive about Nilda, ordering her to wear long skirts and forbidding her from wearing V-necks or anything even slightly revealing. If she wanted to dress in something that he thought was too provocative, he threatened her, saying, “You better not.” Eventually he began buying all her clothes at thrift stores. He told her that her place was at home and hated when she went outside without him, even if just to go shopping.

  “I can’t believe this,” she told her sister Elida. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”

  Castro worked in a series of low-paying jobs, first as a machinist at Les-Ner Products Co., a company that made tips for car antennas, then at a plastics company and a used-car dealership. In the evenings he played in several bands.

  “Where were you?” Nilda asked him one night when he came home especially late. “Why do you always leave me here alone with the baby?”

  “Don’t worry about what I do. I do what I want,” he told her and then slapped her hard across the face.

  Not long afterward Elida came to visit her sister and was shocked to find Castro shoving her into a cardboard washing machine box, closing the flaps, and yelling: “You�
�re not getting out of here until I tell you to get out!”

  Elida, who was only twelve, was terrified and ran to get her mother from their apartment downstairs.

  “What is going on here?” the mother demanded.

  “Ah, nothing,” Castro said, letting Nilda out. “We were just playing.”

  Everyone was growing concerned about Castro’s increasingly violent behavior, but no one knew what to do. After their second child, Angie, arrived in 1983, and they were living on the top floor of a duplex on Riverside Avenue, he would lock the deadbolt from the outside and take the key so Nilda couldn’t leave, telling her he was just trying to keep her safe.

  “I feel like a prisoner,” Nilda told Elida.

  Even Elida could no longer freely visit, because she couldn’t get past the bolted door. Castro didn’t like Nilda visiting family or friends, or going anywhere, unless he accompanied her. One day in 1985, when Castro had left the door unlocked, Nilda walked to the grocery store. When she returned, she was climbing the steep, wooden stairs to the second-floor apartment, carrying full bags in her arms, and Castro leaped out and shoved his mannequin toward her.

  Nilda was so shocked that she fell backward down the stairs, smashing her skull when she landed at the bottom. She was rushed to the hospital and had emergency surgery. Nilda told her sister that Castro intentionally caused her fall because he was angry that she left the house alone.

  Nilda confided in Elida that she wanted to leave Castro, but didn’t see how she could. No one in her family had the means to support her and her children. Castro had threatened to harm her if she ever tried to take the kids away from him, and she wouldn’t leave them alone with him. She had no job, no income, and nowhere to go.

  The abusive behavior only became worse. Castro made wild accusations about Nilda having affairs. He hit her whenever she said or did something he didn’t like. One day, in a rage, he broke her arm and her ribs, and punched her so hard that he broke her teeth, sending her to the hospital and requiring dental surgery.