Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (10 page)

How long will he leave me here? It feels like hours and I’m getting more and more scared as time passes. I’m crying so hard that it hurts, and my stomach aches because of the chain.

Now he’s back, this time carrying a McDonald’s bag.

“You must be hungry by now,” he says. “You gotta eat.”

I’m starving, so I can’t help it. I eat the cheeseburger and fries in seconds.

“We’re going upstairs—don’t try anything.”

He unlocks me, but it’s hard to stand up since I’ve been sitting on the floor since yesterday. My legs wobble as I walk upstairs in front of him. When we get to the top, I ask if I can use the bathroom.

“Hurry up,” he says, standing right beside the toilet until I’m done.

Then he takes me to the dining room, where he has a twin bed pushed up against the wall. On top of the bed is a box made out of wood lattice fencing, the kind you see around gardens, with blankets draped over the whole thing. It looks like a fort that a kid would build to play in.

He makes me stand at the edge of the bed and wraps a chain around my ankle, attaching the other end to the bed frame.

“Get in,” he orders.

So I crawl into his weird box, and he follows me. There’s barely enough space for both of us. I’m having trouble breathing, I’m so scared. His hands are all over me, and he grabs my breasts as I close my eyes and pray. Then he just falls asleep.

I lie there wide-awake. The police must be looking for me. I know my parents have called them by now.

Somebody has to find me.

April 2004: Searching for Gina

Nancy Ruiz was expecting Gina home by about three thirty at the latest.

She would have been home sooner if she had taken the RTA bus, but knowing Gina, Nancy figured that she had probably walked. Factoring in time to chat with friends and a stop at the corner store for Funyuns and a Pepsi, she usually walked in the door between three and three thirty.

Nancy was planning to take Gina to the Parmatown Mall for their monthly mother-daughter shopping trip. Because Nancy didn’t drive, they usually caught the bus near their house and made an evening of it. When Gina didn’t show up by four, Nancy walked to the corner store on Clark Avenue and asked if anybody had seen her.

She returned home and started calling her daughter’s friends. Nobody knew anything. Now Nancy was scared. She raced down to the corner again, and when there was still no sign of Gina at five thirty, she called 911.

A police car came immediately, and Nancy gave the officer a photo of Gina.

“Oh, your daughter is at that age,” the officer said. “She’s probably with her boyfriend.”

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Nancy told him. “She’s fourteen. I’m telling you, she would call me. Something happened to her.”

Nancy asked the police to issue an Amber Alert, but the officer explained that they couldn’t do that unless they were certain there had been an abduction, and they had at least some description of an abductor or a vehicle.

“Don’t worry, she’ll show up,” the officer assured her before leaving.

Nancy did not feel reassured and ran outside to meet Felix when he returned home a few minutes later.

“Gina is missing!” she shouted. “She never made it home from school!”

Felix immediately drove off to check around the school and drive the route she would have taken home. Nancy continued to call Gina’s friends while Gina’s older brother, Ricky, went looking for her in his own car.

By seven thirty Gina’s family was in a full-blown panic. They began searching the neighborhood on foot, walking along the railroad tracks, through vacant lots, and around the area’s factories. Nancy stayed by the phone in case Gina called.

Nobody slept that night as the search continued. In alleys behind bars, several people, clearly drunk, came out at closing time and asked what they were doing. When they heard a young girl was missing, they pitched in and started picking through Dumpsters.

 • • • 

On Saturday afternoon Cleveland police lieutenant Marge Laskowski arrived at 2:30 for her shift. She was the shift supervisor that day, so the missing-persons report on Gina was referred to her for follow-up and she drove to Gina’s house.

Laskowski, an eighteen-year veteran police officer, spent an hour with Nancy, sitting on Gina’s bed, listening to the tearful, distraught mother describe their tight-knit family. Laskowski had responded to scores of missing-children reports, and most of them turned out to be nothing. But something about this one felt different, and she believed Nancy when she said that Gina would never run away.

Back at the station she told a detective, “This is bad. I think this one is real.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Lieutenant,” he replied. “I guarantee you, she’ll be home before midnight.”

Laskowski was annoyed. She suspected that the detective’s response would have been different had Gina lived in a wealthy suburb, but because she came from a poor urban neighborhood, he assumed she was just another runaway shacked up with her boyfriend.

She passed her concerns directly to District Commander Gary Gingell, who immediately assigned detectives to work the case.

 • • • 

When news of Gina’s abduction reached Brian Heffernan late Saturday night, it hit him like a punch to the gut:
Oh, my God, it happened again.

He immediately called Tim Kolonick at the FBI, with whom he had been investigating Amanda Berry’s disappearance for the past year, beginning and ending every workday by going over the case. Heffernan wanted all the manpower he could muster on this new one, and on Sunday morning he and Kolonick went to interview Nancy and Felix. On the way there, Kolonick called FBI agent Phil Torsney, who was at home packing his car for the long drive to Quantico, Virginia, for firearms training. Torsney drove over to join them, his car fully loaded for the trip, thinking the case would be resolved quickly and he would be on his way.

Torsney, who had been an FBI agent for more than twenty years, specialized in finding people. In 2011 he would make news around the world for his pivotal role in locating and arresting James “Whitey” Bulger, the infamous Boston mobster who had been a fugitive for sixteen years.

Torsney was a wiry, old-school agent who enjoyed strapping on his body armor and kicking in bad guys’ doors. Patient and methodical, he made ten peanut butter sandwiches every Sunday, putting two in his car for Monday and freezing the rest, removing two each morning the rest of the week so he didn’t have to leave a stakeout to eat. He, too, had been working the Amanda Berry case, and had spent hours sitting in his car at Westown Square, watching, hoping that something would catch his eye—someone out of place, someone stalking young girls, anything unusual.

Torsney got a bad feeling when he heard the details of Gina’s case. It was too soon to conclude that Amanda and Gina had been abducted by the same man, but there were too many similarities to ignore, and something dangerous was clearly happening in this part of Cleveland.

By noon, Gina’s house was swarming with media interviewing Nancy, Felix, and the police. Gina’s vanishing made the news within forty-eight hours, and reporters were raising the possibility that the two cases were related.

Using dogs and flashlights, police officers and FBI agents combed through the neighborhood, tracing Gina’s two-mile walk home, picking their way through abandoned houses and empty factories. They interviewed Arlene Castro, the last person to see Gina, and her mother, Grimilda Figueroa—Ariel Castro’s ex.

 • • • 

On Monday morning, several students at Wilbur Wright Middle School told police they had seen a suspicious white two-door car, driven by a Hispanic male, with a distinctive sticker on its back window: an image of a rainbow and a wolf. Police put out an alert for a vehicle of that description and began searching the Internet to try to identify the sticker, but could find nothing. They questioned every person who appeared on tapes recovered from a surveillance camera in the school’s office, but a camera at the school’s main door had been out of order that day. Had the camera been working, it would have recorded Ariel Castro entering the building. As school was letting out, Castro had walked in the school’s front door, looking for Arlene, and asked a security guard, a man he had grown up with, if he had seen his daughter. Nothing about the exchange had seemed unusual to the security guard, and because Castro worked for the school system, he didn’t think to mention the incident to the police.

Police also photographed a blue jacket, black pants, white hoodie, and blue-and-white sneakers that matched the outfit Gina had been wearing and put them on a “missing” flyer that they posted around the neighborhood.

On Monday evening, as Felix was helping post flyers along Lorain Avenue, a man walked out of an apartment near where Gina had disappeared and asked what he was doing. When Felix explained, the man said, “I’ll be looking out for your daughter.”

Felix thought there was something a little odd about him.

On Tuesday, police officers with a bloodhound searched the area around the pay phone on Lorain Avenue where Gina had last been seen. The dog picked up Gina’s scent and followed it, but the trail went cold around the corner of 104th Street, near McKenna’s Irish Pub—almost the exact spot where the man had asked Felix about Gina the night before.

That didn’t seem like a coincidence to Felix and his brother, Fernando. Without informing the police, they and some friends forced their way into the man’s apartment, roughing him up and demanding to know if he had had anything to do with Gina’s disappearance. He hadn’t, and Brian Heffernan soon got an angry call from the building’s owner, complaining that a door had been broken down. Heffernan explained that Felix was a distraught father looking for his missing daughter, and the man eventually calmed down and did not press charges, but Felix did have to pay him $900 in restitution, a huge sum for the family.

April 2004: Early Days

Gina

After I spent a few freezing days on the concrete in the basement, he finally gave me an old twin mattress to sit on and a thin, pink blanket to pull around me, but I’m still cold.

Days and days are passing, all the same.

He leaves me alone in the basement until he comes to take me to sleep with him in the strange covered bed upstairs. He gropes me, then falls asleep for the entire night.

The chains are digging into me, my whole body aches, and I’m always hungry.

I used to think time moved slowly in social studies class, but it’s nothing like how it drags by now. I sit and wait, jittery, for the next horrible thing to happen. I hate how he strokes my hair, how he wants me to sit on the couch with him and watch TV. It’s like he thinks we are friends. I’m terrified of him.

I see myself on the news! There’s a story about how the police are looking for me and another girl, Amanda Berry, who disappeared a year before me, near where I did. I’ve never heard of her, but I have never watched the news before now.

I see my mom and dad on TV, and all I can think of is them. I imagine my dad running down the stairs, ripping open these chains, picking me up, and carrying me home. I picture myself hugging my mom and never letting her go.

It makes me feel better to see that so many people are trying to find me, but I bet they have no idea where I am.

Lots of people know him, but no one gets how messed up he is. He goes to work every day, talks to his kids, acts normal—he even played in the high school band with my mom. Will anyone ever figure out that he is the perv who took me?

I start thinking about when he used to wave to me from his bus.

“Were you following me all those times?” I ask him.

“Yeah, I was,” he says. “You turned me on. I liked your cleavage. I liked it when you wore a black V-neck shirt and a jeans skirt. That was my favorite.”

I wonder if at the Christmas concert, when he was talking to my parents, he was already planning to kidnap me.

 • • • 

He takes me upstairs for dinner: Tonight it’s doughnuts, the grocery-store kind in a white box with a mix of powdered sugar, cinnamon, and chocolate. He gives me so little food that when he does, I’ll eat anything.

I have been asking him to let me write a letter to my family so I can tell them I’m alive, and one night in the kitchen he hands me a pen and piece of notebook paper. “Don’t say where you are, or who you’re with,” he warns. “But you can say you’re okay and you’ll be home soon.”

I don’t really think he will give my letter to them, but I want to believe he will, so I start writing.

Dear Everybody,

How are you? I am okay. I love you.

Mom and Dad, I love you. Don’t give up hope. I am not dead.

I want to come home now. People from my school who like me, and people who don’t like me, were on TV participating in my vigil. I want to say thank you to them.

Tell Chrissy not to go skating without me.

When I go home I want my family and friends over and we can cry together and have fun.

I tell my brother, Ricky, that he is funny sometimes, and that I miss him, and I tell my sister, Mayra, that I love her. And then I write:
P.S. I want mom to know I cut my hair.

My hair had grown all the way down my back, and I used to like it that way. But I just chopped it off with the little kiddie scissors I use to cut pictures out of newspapers, because it makes me crazy how he keeps touching it. I hope he hates it short, and that he’ll now leave me alone. I put my ponytail in a plastic bag, and I’m going to give it to my mom when I get out.

Before I give the letter to him, I draw hearts at the top of the page and write in the margins, “Miss you a lot,” and on the envelope, “I love you” five times. I imagine them getting the letter and realizing I’m alive.

He takes me into the dining room and chains me up to the weird bed. When he leaves, I try for the millionth time to break free.

I keep staring at the padlock and then have an idea. I grab a pencil near the bed and push the tip of it into the lock. Maybe I can pick it. I fiddle with it, like they do on TV, but the pencil snaps, and the tip gets stuck in the keyhole. I lean back and start crying.