Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (39 page)

In her bedroom, Amanda put a colorful cloth over the two doors that Castro nailed up to cover the windows behind the bed.

Castro often slept in the first-floor dining room, which he turned into a bedroom filled with his clothes and the junk he collected.

Castro used heavy chains to restrain the girls, first around their waists and then around their ankles.

The kitchen of 2207 Seymour, where Castro enforced strict housekeeping rules for each of his captives.

One day in May 2012, when Nancy Ruiz was handing out “missing” flyers of Gina, Castro asked for one. An hour later he gave it to Gina, who decorated with hearts and glitter and the foods that she craved.

Amanda gave birth to a daughter, Jocelyn, on Christmas Day 2006, and took extraordinary steps to give her child as normal a life as possible, including turning their bedroom into a classroom and creating a play area in an empty
upstairs bedroom
.

Amanda decorated the walls of her room with posters, Jocelyn’s artwork, and worksheets from their home-schooling classes.

Amanda and Jocelyn had a dresser, closet, a clothesline to hang laundry, and a small refrigerator with a picture of Amanda’s late mother.

For years Amanda kept a diary charting Castro’s abuse of her and vowing to be strong enough to survive the experience. Her diary was written in small notebooks that Castro gave her but she also wrote hundreds of entries on any scrap of paper she could find. In this entry from January 2009 she records Castro’s telling her that he had just seen her sister, Beth Serrano, at a local store.

On May 6, 2013, after realizing that Castro had left the house and forgotten to lock her bedroom door for the first time in ten years, Amanda kicked her way through the front storm door of the Seymour house and used a neighbor’s phone to call 911.

That evening Amanda was reunited with her sister Beth at the hospital where the freed girls were taken. This photo was taken moments after Beth met Jocelyn for the first time.