Details emerge of Ohio girls’ time in captivity

Onil Castro, Ariel Castro and Pedro J. Castro. Picture: submitted

• Video: Charles Ramsay, neighbour of suspected kidnappers and first person to see Amanda Berry after her escape tells of the dramatic moments after her escape (WEWS TV/YouTube/ABC)

Authorities confirmed that no human remains were recovered from the Cleveland house, which had held Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, following a thorough search by officers.

McGrath said the women had been allowed outside “very rarely” during their captivity. “They were released out in the backyard once in a while,” he said.

McGrath said the women were in good physical condition, “considering the circumstances.”

The three suspects were expected to be charged by the end of the day, McGrath said.

Amanda Berry, left, and Georgina DeJesus both who went missing as teenagers. Picture: Getty

One suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, was arrested almost immediately after the women escaped on Monday. Brothers Pedro Castro, 54, and Onil Castro, 50, were taken into custody a short time later.

Twenty-seven-year-old Ms Berry, who disappeared in 2003 aged 16, escaped with the help of a neighbour who heard her screaming while her alleged captor was out of the house.

On Tuesday, she and two other women – Gina DeJesus, 27, and Michelle Knight, 32 – who were held captive with her in the seemingly ordinary house in urban Cleveland, Ohio – were back in the arms of their loved ones, in an extraordinary ending to an abduction case that few had believed would ever end happily.

“Help me. I’m Amanda Berry. I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years and I’m . . . I’m here! I’m free now,” she wept down the phone line to an emergency despatcher on Monday night, after a neighbour helped her to break out of the home that had been her prison for more than a decade.

A police officer walks past the family home of Georgina DeJesus

Questions

Amid the jubilation, however, questions were being asked as to how no-one – including police, who had conducted high-profile hunts for Ms Berry and Ms DeJesus following their separate disappearances as teenagers – had failed to spot anything amiss.

Police had twice visited the property, but for unrelated reasons – the last time in 2004, when Castro was questioned for having left a child on his bus while he went for a lunch break. He was questioned but the incident was considered an accident and he was never charged.

In 1993, he was accused of domestic violence, but the case was later dropped in exchange for him pleading guilty to disorderly conduct. Details of that case were sketchy last night.

Amanda Berry is reunited with her sister

In the end, it was Ms Berry, 27, – who apparently bore her captor a daughter during her time as a prisoner in his home – who executed an escape plan.

Tragically, her mother Louwana Miller died in 2006 of what relatives say was a “broken heart”, after a psychic who she hired to help her find her missing daughter told her that the child was dead. She had spent the previous three years looking for her daughter, whose disappearance took a toll as her health steadily deteriorated, family and friends said.

Charles Ramsey, who lives next door to Castro, described hearing screams and then seeing a women’s arm waving from the lower part of the front door.

“I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of the house. So I go on the porch and she says ‘help me get out, I’ve been in here a long time.’

“So I figure it’s a domestic violence dispute . . . We kicked out the bottom (of the door) and she comes out with a little girl and she says ‘call 911, I’m Amanda Berry,’” he explained.

“When she told me, I didn’t register until I got to calling 911 and I’m on the phone for Amanda Berry and I say ‘wait, I thought this girl was dead.’ That girl Amanda told police ‘I ain’t just the only one. There’s some more girls up there in that house.’”

Police had received regular tips about the whereabouts of Ms Berry and of Ms DeJesus.

Ms Berry was last seen making her way home from a local Burger King branch in 2003, while Ms DeJesus disappeared a year later during her walk home from school.

All those tips appeared to have been false leads – some of them having even led police to dig up the gardens of two properties where they had been wrongly led to believe the women’s bodies may have been buried.

Little was known publicly yesterday about Ms Knight, whose disappearance in 2003 appeared to have been written off by police at the time as a case of a runaway.

She was never formerly listed as a “missing person” despite the efforts of her mother Barbara, who posted fliers around Cleveland hunting for her daughter for years after her disappearance.

Ordinary

“So much has happened in these ten years. She has a younger sister she has not met…I missed her so much,” said Mrs Knight yesterday.

To those who knew Ariel Castro, he was a seemingly ‘ordinary guy’ who played in a jazz band, gave local children rides up and down the street on his motorbike on Saturday mornings, and often stopped by neighbours’ homes to share in a barbecue or a chat. Some had even visited his home, never suspecting that somewhere inside were three women being held against their will.

“I had no idea…I thought he was a nice guy. He was loving to all the kids in the neighbourhood, he was loving to me since I was five years old,” said Juan Perez, who lives two doors away. “It always seemed like no one lived there. I always thought he just lived somewhere else and came by from time to time to check it.”

Mark Klaas is a leading child safety advocate and head of the Klaas Kids Foundation, set up in memory of his 12-year-old daughter Polly, who was abducted during a sleepover party at her California home in 1993 and later found murdered.

He said yesterday: “You start out when your child is initially missing thinking it will be resolved within just a few hours. That extends to a weekend, a week, a month, and then it just sometimes extends on to eternity and as time goes on your hope diminishes to the point where finally maybe you’ve got just a thread of hope.”

In the case of Ms Berry’s mother, he said, “maybe her thread broke.”

“This guy appears to have descended out of hell on three separate occasions and snatched these girls and found a way to restrain them for more than a decade,” said Mr Klass. “The sun’s going to shine a little brighter on the USA today because of Amanda’s actions.”

Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former FBI profiler, said yesterday that in her experience, Castro is likely to fit the category of a “sexual sadist…a very unusual individual motivated by keeping their victims for days, weeks, months and years. The definition is that they are sexually aroused by the infliction of physical and emotional pain,” she said.

“It doesn’t mean that he’s crazy. I want people to understand it’s a sexual deviancy, a very, very dangerous sexual  deviancy. Someone that has this disorder would certainly be able to commit these crimes by himself. I think once you get inside that home there’s going to be a lot of customisation – hidden rooms, hidden doorways.”

A sign outside the home of DeJesus’ parents yesterday read “Welcome home Gina”. Her aunt Sandra Ruiz said: “Those girls, those women are so strong. What we’ve done in ten years is nothing compared to what those women have done in ten years to survive.”

Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson said the investigation into their abductions had only just begun and there were several key unanswered questions.

He asked: “Why were they taken, who took them and how did they remain undetected for so long?”

Ed Tumba, Cleveland’s deputy chief of police, said yesterday: The real hero here is Amanda. She’s the one that got this rolling. Without her, we wouldn’t be here today.”

Stephen Anthony, the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge, added: “This is the ultimate definition of survival and perseverance. Our prayers have been answered. The nightmare is over.”

‘Miracles do happen’ – the kidnap victims who survive

The unravelling of the Cleveland abductions has echoes of other missing persons cases that have ended in similarly extraordinary circumstances – among them, that of Jaycee Dugard, who was held captive for 18 years.

She was 11 years old when she disappeared while walking from her California home to a bus stop in 1991 and was widely feared to be dead until a sharp-eyed policewoman triggered the process that led to her safe recovery in 2009.

Ms Dugard, below, gave birth to two daughters by her captor, convicted sex offender Phillip Garrido, whose crimes were discovered only after arousing suspicions during a visit to a police bureau on the University of California campus.

With him were his two daughters by Ms Dugard, whose nervous demeanour alerted a police officer. Further inquiries led to the discovery of Ms Dugard, who had been held in a shed-like structure by Garrido, 56, and his wife Nancy, 54. He was sentenced to 431 years in prison, and his wife to 36 years.

Ms Dugard said of the Cleveland case yesterday: “These individuals need the opportunity to heal and connect back into the world. This isn’t who they are, it’s only what happened to them. The human spirit is incredibly resilient. We should never give up hope.”

Elizabeth Smart, 14, was abducted from the bedroom of her home in Utah in 2002 and found nine months later as a captive of a mentally disturbed “street preacher” and his wife. Now aged 25, Ms Smart, right, is married to Matthew Gilmour, from Aberdeen, and runs the Elizabeth Smart Foundation to assist other families missing loved ones.

“I’m just so overjoyed, so happy to hear another happy ending,” she said yesterday. “Miracles do happen.”

Seven-year-old Steven Stayner was kidnapped in 1972 while walking home from school in Merced, California. After Stayner escaped captivity in 1980, Kenneth Eugene Parnell was convicted of kidnapping him and a second boy, five-year-old Timmy White, and sentenced to seven years in prison. Stayner died in a motorcycle accident in 1989 aged 24.

In October 2002, Shawn Hornbeck – then aged 11 – was kidnapped while riding his bike to a friend’s house in Washington County, Missouri. In January 2007, authorities found Hornbeck and another kidnapped boy, Ben Ownby, in the suburban St Louis apartment of Michael Devlin. Ownby, 13, had been abducted four days earlier. Devlin was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and abusing the boys.