Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (40 page)

Nancy Ruiz shared her gratitude for the safe return of her daughter at a press conference. Felix DeJesus is at far right.

News of the girls’ escape made headlines around the world, and people from all over the United States sent letters and gifts to celebrate their freedom.

Less than an hour after the girls’ escape, Ariel Castro was arrested. He ultimately pled guilty to 937 criminal counts and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole plus 1,000 years. One month into his sentence, Castro committed suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell.

Police searching the Seymour Avenue house the day after the escape found a four-page handwritten note dated April 4, 2004—two days after Gina’s abduction. In it, Castro called himself a “sexual predator” and traced his behavior to being sexually abused as a boy in Puerto Rico. The note was part confession, part suicide note, and part rambling fatherly advice to his children.

On May 6, 2014, Amanda and Gina, along with Beth Serrano, Nancy Ruiz, and Felix DeJesus, met with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden at the White House.

Gina and Amanda

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After Ariel Castro was arrested, Nancy Ruiz and Angie Gregg both remembered the phone call and couldn’t believe that it was just a coincidence.

To Angie, it had sounded so desperate and real that she still hears it in her head, and she can’t dismiss the possibility that it might have been her father accidentally dialing her while he held Amanda and Gina captive.

Nancy wondered if there had been some mistake in the trace of the call, and it was actually from Castro’s cell phone. In early 2015, the FBI played the tape for Gina, who said the sound quality of the recording was so poor that she couldn’t tell whose voice it was.

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Emily Castro and her boyfriend had a daughter in 2006. They were then living together in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but he moved out and left the baby with Emily, who was nineteen. The day after he left, Emily took the baby into her garage and slashed her neck four times with a knife. Her mother, Grimilda Figueroa, who was in the house at the time, discovered what was happening, ran out into the street with the bleeding infant, and flagged down a driver, who called 911. The infant survived. When police found Emily covered in blood and mud, she told them she had tried to kill herself by cutting her own neck and wrists with the same knife she had used on the baby, then tried to drown herself in a nearby creek. In June 2010 she was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to thirty years in prison, with five suspended. She appealed later that year, arguing that the court mistakenly ruled her competent to stand trial. Her appeal was denied.

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Robert Wolford, who was serving twenty-six years for murder at a southern Ohio prison, sent a handwritten note to Cuyahoga County prosecutor William Mason in Cleveland on July 19, 2012, claiming that he had killed Amanda and buried her body:

I am writing this letter because I have a confession to make that has been eating me up for the past nine years. I killed this girl her name is Amanda Berry. Me and her were seeing each other at the time. She had a boyfriend. She told me that she was going to tell her boyfriend that she has been cheating on him with me. So I waited for her to get off work then I killed her. . . . It’s eating me up. I want her family to have the chance to rest. So I will tell you where I put her. I dug a hole on Clark and put her there.

Wolford was fifteen at the time Amanda went missing, so they were roughly the same age. Wolford was in prison for murdering a man in a drug deal at the same place where he said he buried Amanda. Of most interest to the FBI was the fact that the spot he identified fell within the area in which Amanda’s cell
phone had last been used.

Tim Kolonick and two other FBI agents drove to the prison in Lucasville to pick up Wolford, who was tearful and repeatedly said on the four-hour ride back to Cleveland that he was sorry he had killed Amanda. He told them he and Amanda had been dating for about six months, and that he killed her because she threatened to tell her boyfriend, DJ Diaz, about their relationship, and he didn’t want trouble. So, he claimed, he had poured gasoline into Amanda’s mouth until she died, then stuffed her body into garbage bags and buried her.

When after two days the digging turned up nothing but chicken bones, Wolford admitted he had fabricated the story. The police and FBI never figured out why, but ultimately they concluded that Wolford might simply have wanted a chance to get out of prison for a few days.

In January 2013, a judge added four and a half years to his sentence.

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Cleveland police officials reprimanded the dispatcher who handled Amanda’s 911 call. He was cited for not staying on the line until police arrived. His supervisor also noted that he “could have demonstrated more empathy and could have been more compassionate in [his] dealing with Ms. Berry.”

Neighbors have offered differing views of the escape and who deserves credit for helping Amanda. The first man who stepped up onto the porch, Angel Cordero, who was visiting Altagracia Tejeda, said he kicked the door open for Amanda. The second man on the porch, Charles Ramsey, Castro’s next door neighbor, said he was the one who kicked in the door. Ramsey’s account is more widely known because he became an instant global celebrity for several colorful television interviews he gave. (Cordero does not speak English.) Amanda said Ramsey helped her by giving her the idea to kick out the door’s bottom panel and calling 911 for her. But her memory is that she kicked the door out and freed herself. The FBI, which had offered a reward of up to $25,000 in the case, decided not to give out the full amount, but did give some money to both Ramsey and Cordero.

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This account of Castro’s last days was drawn largely from reports by prison officials, the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the Franklin County coroner, and consultants Lindsay M. Hayes and Fred Cohen, corrections experts hired by the state to look into a spate of ten suicides in Ohio prisons in 2013, including Castro’s.

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Three sentences in the first official review of Castro’s death, conducted by prison officials, launched waves of speculation:

“His pants and underwear were pulled down to his ankles. The relevance of this finding is unclear. These facts, however, were relayed to the Ohio State Highway Patrol for consideration of the possibility of auto-erotic asphyxiation.”

A far more exhaustive report, issued three months later by the Highway Patrol, rejected that possibility, concluding: “Other than the fact that Inmate Castro was discovered with his pants down there was no other evidence to support he was engaged in auto-erotic asphyxiation.”

Officials said his beltless pants were too big, his underwear was in the laundry, and when he hung himself his pants fell to the floor.

A third report, by Hayes and Cohen, nationally recognized specialists in jail suicide, also found no evidence to support anything but a finding of suicide:

“The issue of clothing worn at the time of death only serves as a distraction to other facts in this high profile case. All the available evidence, including, but not limited to, the condition of the inmate’s cell when he was found hanging (e.g., careful placement of family pictures and Bible), as well as the increasing tone of frustration and annoyance voiced in his journal entries, and the reality of spending the remainder of his natural life in prison subjected to harassment from others, points to suicide.”

“In conclusion,” Hayes and Cohen wrote, “based upon the fact that this inmate was going to remain in prison for the rest of his natural life under the probability of continued perceived harassment and threats to his safety, his death was not predictable on September 3, 2013, but his suicide was not surprising and perhaps inevitable.”

Cohen interviewed four inmates who had cells near Castro’s, who told him prison guards regularly harassed him. One said Castro asked a guard about his meal, saying, “What am I eating?” The guard allegedly responded, “You’re eating shit,” “You’re a piece of shit,” or “It’s dog food.” The inmates also claimed that when Castro asked about recreation, he was told by the officers, “You don’t deserve it. Never gave them girls recreation.” Cohen and Hayes were unable to confirm those accounts, and prison officials deny that Castro was ever mistreated.