Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (5 page)

There are messages from my cousin Crystal and my friend MJ, asking about my birthday party. Their voices shatter me.

“That’s enough,” he says, pulling the phone away, though I know there must be messages from my mom. He gives, he takes.

May 7

I just brushed my teeth for the first time in three days.

4x
.

In my diary, I draw my heart with a dagger through it.

May 11

It’s Mother’s Day.

He brings me today’s
Plain Dealer
and shows me an article about my mom that says she is so upset and worried that she hasn’t eaten or slept since I disappeared.

“I don’t know if she’s out there being held, I don’t know if she’s out there laying on the side of the road somewhere,” my mom told the columnist, Regina Brett.

The article says that when my nieces see my picture on TV, they always ask when I’m coming home, and my mom tells them, “She’ll be home soon.”

My mom says she is keeping everything in my room exactly how I left it, and as I read that the tears are rolling down my face.

It turns him on to see how much it hurts me to read the article.

4x
.

May 13

5x
.

May 15

I’m on the news every day now. That’s a good thing. I know people are searching for me and I get to see my family on TV. Today the cops are saying they had dogs search DJ’s car, and they found a spot of blood and a knife in his trunk.

He’s watching the news with me, looking so proud, so happy. He loves that the police are focusing on the wrong guy.

May 16

He has been at his mother’s house for dinner and he brings me leftover rice and beans that she made. He seems to go to her place a lot, which seems weird to me because he’s always telling me how much he hates her. He calls her “whore” and “bitch” and says she beat him when he was little.

I don’t know whether to believe what he says about how his mother treated him, because he lies so much. But I’m grateful to get her homemade meals instead of another cold fast-food burger. I just wish she knew her son was feeding me her leftovers.

May 21

I haven’t gotten my period yet. I pray I’m not pregnant. What would I do? I can’t imagine going through that here.

I’ve been here for a month. I can’t sleep. I’m so lonely. I guess that girl is still in the other room, but I haven’t seen or heard her since that day I cleaned her room. I have no one to talk to but him.

I feel dead inside. I miss the smell of fresh air. I miss being able to get a drink when I’m thirsty. I miss the feeling of rain on my face. Everything I used to think was a pain really wasn’t. I even miss my mom hollering at me.

He hasn’t attacked me for two days in a row. That’s never happened before. Maybe things will get better.

May 30

I hear fireworks again. That means the Indians won another game tonight.

I see on the news that somebody donated money for a huge billboard with my picture on I-480, near West 130th Street. Thank God for whoever did that!

The Investigation: Searching for Amanda

Louwana knew her Mandy was never late. Never. So she and Beth were surprised she wasn’t home when they got there. They checked the shower; it was dry. She always took a shower after work. There was no sign of her uniform, either, so she hadn’t changed and left. They called her cell phone, but she didn’t pick up.

That was worrisome—she was never out of touch.

Louwana and Beth started making calls to Amanda’s friends to ask if anyone had seen her. Maybe she’d gone to see a friend after work? But no one knew anything, so they got into the car and began driving around the neighborhood. By now it was completely dark, and Louwana was becoming frantic, certain that something was wrong.

A little after nine she called 911. Police took the report but didn’t seem concerned. They told Louwana to keep looking for her, that the girl hadn’t been missing long and she’d surely come home soon.

By midnight, when there was still no sign of Amanda, Louwana called the police again, and this time two officers were dispatched and arrived in a patrol car just before one a.m. They took down Amanda’s description—five-foot-one, 120 pounds, long, dark blond hair—and told Louwana not to worry, that teenage girls ran away all the time and almost always came back in a day or two. Amanda was probably just with her boyfriend somewhere.

Louwana Miller had a short fuse, and when something ticked her off her temper could be volcanic. “Kids don’t run away in Burger King uniforms on their birthday and leave all their cash at home! Somebody must have taken her! Do something,” she told the police in a loud voice salted with profanity. She told them Amanda was a good kid who would never stay out this late without calling, had never run away before and had no reason to now.

The officers stood in the living room making notes, but Louwana and Beth felt they weren’t taking Amanda’s case seriously. They clearly thought she was yet another runaway whose mother was overreacting and wasting their time.

The two women stayed up all night, calling every one of Amanda’s friends they could think of and waiting for the phone to ring. In the morning they made flyers with her photo, a handwritten description of Amanda, and their home phone number. Louwana thought it was smarter to put her own number down rather than some police line, to make sure no tip was lost or ignored.

They drove around the neighborhood, taping the flyers on the door at Burger King, in the windows of shops in Westown Square, and on telephone poles.

Louwana’s phone kept ringing, and people told her they were sure they had seen Amanda at someone’s house, or in a store, or somewhere else. Louwana didn’t drive, so she got Beth or her sister Theresa to take her to investigate every tip.

When she called television stations and pleaded with them to cover Amanda’s disappearance, she was politely told that Amanda hadn’t officially been designated as a missing person yet, and they couldn’t run a story about every teenager who didn’t come home for a day or two.

“Isn’t anybody going to help us?” asked Louwana, who was getting angrier and angrier.

 • • • 

Louwana Miller grew up in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, just over the highway from Seymour Avenue. She was part Cherokee, and her mother wanted her to have a Native American name, which she hated because no one ever pronounced it properly. Instead of “Lou-WANNA,” people called her “Lou-Anna” or “Lou-Wanda” or Lou-something. And no one ever knew how to spell it.

Louwana left school by the seventh grade, and in 1976, when they were barely teenagers, she met Johnny Ray Berry, a skinny kid from rural Tennessee, with a wild side and a violent temper. He had moved to Cleveland with his family from a farm in Elizabethton, not far from NASCAR’s Bristol Motor Speedway.

Louwana got pregnant at sixteen and raised Beth with no help from Johnny Ray, who dropped out of school after the ninth grade and spent his nights drinking and partying. It was the same when Amanda arrived seven years later. By then Johnny Ray was working for Allied Van Lines, moving furniture. Louwana would make him coffee every morning, and as Amanda got older, he would sit and watch cartoons with her before he left for work.

There were good times during these years, but far more bad ones. Johnny Ray was in and out of jail, mainly for assaults and bar fights, and one of Amanda’s earliest memories is visiting him at the old Ohio state prison at Mansfield. He often beat Louwana, usually when they were both drunk, Louwana on a twelve-pack of Busch and Johnny Ray on whiskey. The police were often at the front door, called to stop the domestic violence.

When Louwana was young, she had Amanda’s thin face and high cheekbones. But by the time she was in her thirties, her face had become puffy and scarred from all the beatings, heavy drinking, and cigarettes. Because Johnny Ray drank most of his wages, she had to work one minimum-wage job after another, buying clothes at thrift shops and using layaway plans for Christmas gifts. While Johnny Ray celebrated Amanda’s thirteenth birthday by bringing her a joint and getting her high, Louwana tried hard to steer her girls clear of the path she had taken. She made sure they had regular checkups with the doctor and dentist, focused them on homework, kept the house spotless, and always put a home-cooked meal on the table.

When Amanda was thirteen, she picked up the extension on the home phone and discovered that her father was having an affair. She told her mother, who informed Johnny Ray that she had had enough, and two weeks later he moved to Tennessee with his new girlfriend.

Things became more peaceful when Johnny Ray left. Amanda and her mother loved to watch Lifetime and cop shows, and never missed
America’s Most Wanted
. But it wasn’t always easy between them. Amanda fought with her mother over the smallest things. Louwana would order her to turn down her music or go to bed, and Amanda would snap back and tell her to leave her alone. She called her mother stupid for having stayed with Johnny Ray for twenty-four years.

Determined not to repeat her mother’s mistakes, Amanda focused hard on school and did well. By the third grade she was enrolled in Major Works, a gifted and talented program in the Cleveland Public Schools, in which she earned mainly A’s and B’s.

By the eleventh grade, many of Amanda’s classmates had dropped out of John Marshall, a big, tough public high school near her house. Amanda eventually stopped going to classes too, sick of the drama and fights in the hallways. But she enrolled in a Cleveland Public Schools program that enabled students to study at home and send in work to be graded by teachers, paying $40 from each Burger King paycheck to cover it.

She earned a perfect 100 on her first test, in “Psychology for Life Today.”

Nine days later, she was kidnapped.

 • • • 

When he arrived for work that morning, Detective Rich Russell was just sitting down at his desk when his secretary told him, “Hey, Rich, a Louwana Miller called checking on the status of her daughter Amanda, who went missing yesterday.” Russell had been a police officer for sixteen years and he had handled hundreds of missing-child reports, and 99 percent of them turned out to be nothing—just kids spending the night with friends or off doing something they didn’t want their parents to know about.

But this mother had called again, so as Russell settled into his chair, he picked up the patrol officers’ notes about Amanda, which were on his desk in the routine report from the overnight shift. He looked to see if they had written “habitual” on the report, indicating that Amanda had run away before—but it wasn’t there. She was a first-timer. He also saw that it was her birthday, and that she had left a hundred dollars in cash at home. None of that felt like a typical runaway case.

Russell and his partner, Detective Laura Parker, drove over to check in with Louwana. She greeted them with a blast of cigarette smoke and four-letter words, cursing the police for not caring about her daughter. But she softened a bit when the detectives seemed more concerned than the cops the night before had been, and asked questions about Amanda’s friends, anybody she might be with, anybody who might have been angry enough to hurt her.

“DJ,” Louwana said immediately. She didn’t like Amanda’s sixteen-year-old boyfriend, who never bothered to come in and say hello when he picked her up. She told the detectives that he had a bad attitude, that he sold weed, and that she didn’t trust him.

Louwana had gone herself to DJ’s house on West 99th Street that morning and nearly banged his front door off its hinges. DJ kept the door chained and, speaking to her only through the crack, told her he had no idea where Amanda was.

After leaving Louwana, Russell and Parker paid their own visit to DJ, who told them his phone battery had died, so he had missed Amanda’s calls the night before. Though he seemed openly hostile to the cops, he let them check his bedroom. They found nothing, but the detectives agreed with Louwana that the kid seemed like trouble.

The police next interviewed Amanda’s coworkers at Burger King, who mentioned a guy named Axel, a Hispanic customer in his mid-thirties who had a crush on Amanda and frequented the drive-through all the time to see her.

Almost immediately, the police had two promising suspects: Amanda’s new boyfriend and a thirty-five-year-old guy who liked to hang around a sixteen-year-old girl.

 • • • 

On Thursday, three days after Amanda went missing, the police went to Axel’s apartment, but the building owner said he had gone on a bus trip to a casino out of town. In the meantime, police interviewing people in Amanda’s neighborhood got a lead from a man who had been waiting at an RTA city bus stop near Burger King on the day Amanda disappeared. He said he had seen her get into an old white car with two or three men. A heroin addict, he was a dubious witness, but for the time being he was the only person claiming to have seen Amanda after she left work.

“White car” got the cops’ attention. DJ drove a white car.

 • • • 

By Friday, as the “missing” posters multiplied along Lorain Avenue, the story hit the evening news, and tips started flowing in. Someone discovered a pair of sneakers in a Dumpster behind Westown Square. Somebody else found an apron they thought she might have worn at work. People reported sightings of Amanda at basketball courts, gas stations, convenience stores, and rest stops on the Ohio Turnpike.

Police looked into each tip, and none checked out.

They were nowhere.

 • • • 

Brian Heffernan, head of the First Division detective squad—Parker and Russell’s boss—decided it was time to make DJ’s life miserable.

Heffernan was the eldest of nine kids in an Irish-Catholic family, a soft-spoken tough guy. At six-foot-three, he was the 1978 Ohio state high school wrestling champion in the heavyweight division. As the father of three teenage daughters, Amanda’s case felt personal to him, and his cop radar was pointing him straight at Amanda’s smart-mouthed boyfriend.