Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (6 page)

DJ not only seemed to have a particular hatred of cops, but his story seemed inconsistent. He said he’d been with a friend fixing motorcycles on the evening Amanda disappeared and swore that she had called him at eleven that night. But when police had subpoenaed Amanda’s phone records, they revealed that her last calls to DJ were placed before eight. Was he remembering wrong, or was he lying?

When Heffernan learned that DJ was driving without a valid license, he had patrol officers pull him over, tow his car, and get a warrant to search it. They had a cadaver dog sniff it, but it found no traces. They sprayed it with Luminol, a chemical that makes blood show up under black light, and discovered bloodstains in the trunk. But lab results revealed that it was chicken blood that had probably leaked from a bag of groceries.

They also found a receipt showing that DJ had washed his car the day after Amanda went missing. The car wash was near a big park with large wooded areas, so officers searched it with dogs. When nothing turned up, they got a court order to attach a tracking device to DJ’s car to follow his movements and persuaded a friend of his to wear a hidden microphone.

“What do you think happened to your girlfriend?” the friend asked, with police listening.

“I don’t know what happened to her, and I don’t care,” DJ said, launching into a profanity-laced tirade about the police.

DJ infuriated the frustrated cops, who finally brought him into the station and gave him a lie detector test, which he passed.

They had absolutely nothing on him.

 • • • 

On Monday night, Louwana and Beth were at home, crying as they watched a report about Amanda’s disappearance on the eleven o’clock news.

Beth was growing worried about her mother. Louwana had never been a sound sleeper, but she had barely slept at all since Amanda had gone missing a week earlier. And while she had always been a heavy drinker, she was now drinking alarming amounts of beer.

Louwana taped a poster of Amanda over the living room fireplace, in the same place she used to hang her daughter’s Christmas stocking, and put a pink butterfly on it as a symbol of freedom and hope. “We miss you, Mandy. We love you,” she wrote on the poster. Every day, she kissed the photo good morning and good night.

Within minutes of Amanda’s face appearing on the news, the phone rang. As Louwana rushed to answer it, Beth was picking up the extension in the dining room.

“I have Mandy,” said a man’s voice on the other end. “She wants to be here because we’re married. But I’ll have her back home in a couple of weeks.”

“Please bring her home!” Louwana pleaded. “Drop her off at a store. Drop her at the corner. Anywhere! We don’t care who you are, we just want Mandy home!”

The line went dead.

Louwana gasped and sat down. She and Beth were struck that he had called her “Mandy,” because only family and her closest friends called her that. They thought he sounded like an older white man.

A minute later, the phone rang again.

“Don’t worry,” the same voice now said. “She’s okay and she’ll be home.”

Louwana and Beth both begged: “Please bring her home!”

Without another word, he hung up.

They reported the calls to police, and a trace confirmed they had come from Amanda’s phone. Louwana and Beth had new hope that Amanda was safe, but police viewed the calls as evidence proving only that Amanda had been abducted—not that she was still alive.

 • • • 

When Axel returned from his weekend at the casino, police searched his apartment, checked his phone records, and brought him in for a lie detector test, which was inconclusive. Though Axel had been coming to the Burger King regularly for months, after Amanda went missing her coworkers never saw him again.

 • • • 

Several callers told police they had seen Amanda working as a prostitute along Cleveland’s infamous Broadway Avenue corridor, near Fleet Avenue. Parker and Russell showed Amanda’s photo to some of the regulars there who said a blonde, who looked like her and called herself Amanda, had recently started walking their strip. So the two detectives began a stakeout, watching from their car and waiting for the young woman to appear. On the night of April 30, nine days after Amanda went missing, Parker was on her cell phone checking in with Louwana when the blond woman they were waiting for walked into view.

“I’ll have to call you back,” Parker told Louwana, and then called out to the young woman, “Girl, get your ass in the car.”

But Parker quickly realized it was not Amanda. She had the worn-down look of someone much older.

“You look so much like Amanda Berry,” Parker told her.

“Yeah, I know. That’s what people keep saying to me,” the woman said.

Parker called Louwana back and told her they were still looking.

 • • • 

When Heffernan heard that the young blond woman in the red-light district they had been tracking for days wasn’t Amanda, he decided to bring in the FBI. It had been ten days since Amanda had disappeared, all leads were exhausted, and the police needed help. Police receive huge numbers of missing-children reports, most of which involve children who intentionally ran away or went somewhere without telling their parents. Police only call in the FBI when they suspect a child has been kidnapped. Heffernan called his friend Tim Kolonick in the FBI’s big Cleveland field office on the shores of Lake Erie.

Kolonick had wanted to be a federal agent since the day in elementary school that he saw Secret Service agents guarding Rosalynn Carter on a visit to the west side of Cleveland. Tall, trim, and athletic, he rose quickly from Cleveland police officer to U.S. Secret Service agent to the FBI, where he worked on the violent crime task force.

As they drove up to Amanda’s house, Heffernan and Kolonick saw yellow ribbons tied to the chain-link fence, and they found Louwana waiting for them in a white-hot rage. She demanded to know why they weren’t working harder and why nobody had found her daughter.

She took them to Amanda’s bedroom, where Kolonick marveled at the twenty-five pairs of jeans Amanda had hung neatly in her closet and the rows of perfectly lined-up shoes. Louwana went through the details yet again—the untouched money, the birthday plans, the strange call from a man who said Amanda was now his wife.

From everything Kolonick could see, he felt certain Amanda hadn’t run away. He also knew that the longer she was missing, the less likely she would be found alive.

 • • • 

The FBI hoped the kidnapper’s first mistake would be to turn on Amanda’s phone again. It was 2003 and bureau engineers in Quantico, Virginia, had developed new cell phone–tracking equipment that could pinpoint a particular phone’s location, as long as it was switched on, and so on May 8 an FBI engineer arrived at Cleveland Hopkins Airport with several large suitcases containing a mobile computer lab. Seventeen days had passed since Amanda’s disappearance, and ten days since Louwana had received the call from her daughter’s cell phone.

Amanda’s phone records showed that her phone had been turned on repeatedly on the night she went missing and during the next day. Someone had been calling her voice mail and listening to the messages.

FBI agents determined that Amanda’s phone had been somewhere near two cell towers on the west side of Cleveland when the call to Louwana was made. The caller might have been driving, because the signal seemed to bounce from one cell tower to the other. The towers were on either side of I-90, and they covered a radius of about forty square blocks. For all the bureau knew, the caller could have been racing along the highway when he made the call and he—and Amanda—could be in California by now.

Hoping they were still in the area, Kolonick packed into a grungy gray van with the Quantico engineer and several other FBI agents and looked for a place to park somewhere between the two cell towers. They pulled into the parking lot of the Family Dollar discount store at Clark Avenue and West 30th Street, where their banged-up vehicle was inconspicuous, and turned on their gear: a device consisting of a computer screen, keyboard, and antenna. If Amanda’s phone was turned on for even a minute, they could pounce, along with an FBI SWAT team waiting in two Chevy Suburbans parked nearby.

Although Kolonick and his team didn’t know it, they were parked only about a thousand feet from the house where Amanda was being held, and could have walked there in a matter of minutes. The FBI had never heard of Michelle Knight, and they didn’t know that she was also being held in the same house. Nine months earlier, Castro had abducted her from the exact same Family Dollar lot where the FBI van was now parked.

The FBI agents continued their stakeout for eight days, changing shifts every twelve hours, but Amanda’s phone never went on. They knew she had left her phone charger at home and reluctantly concluded that by now the battery had died and there was little chance of it being used again.

On May 16 they drove the engineer and his gear back to the airport.

 • • • 

Samantha Farnsley looked remarkably like Amanda: same age, same height, same build, even the same piercing over her left eye.

Everyone noticed the uncanny likeness. On city buses she would hear people whispering: “Is that Amanda Berry?” An FBI agent spotted her one day in a thrift shop and followed her around the aisles, then tailed her into the parking lot. When she confronted him, he asked her if she was Amanda Berry, and when she said she was not, he still demanded to see her ID. Police stopped her eight or nine times in the months after Amanda went missing, and the situation became so bad that the FBI finally gave her a letter to carry certifying that she was not Amanda.

Samantha ultimately left Cleveland, but not until after a sad encounter with Louwana. When police booked Samantha on a truancy charge one day, they asked Louwana to come to the station and take a look. When she arrived and saw the back of the girl’s head and her long blond ponytail, she gasped. But then Samantha turned around and Louwana’s face fell.

“No,” she said. “That’s not my child.”

June 2003: First Summer

June 3

Amanda

I haven’t eaten in two days. I guess he just forgot about me yesterday. I’m feeling weak.

I’m not sure why he won’t spend much money on food for me, but he will buy me cigarettes and weed. Getting high dulls the pain of being here. If it weren’t for the weed, I would have killed myself by now. Maybe he knows that, and that’s why he gets it for me.

Before I was in here, pretty much everyone I knew smoked weed. It was just what teenagers in my neighborhood did. I liked to sit in my room, listen to music, and smoke a bowl once in a while. Now I’m smoking a lot and it takes me to a different place for a little while. But he doesn’t give me anything for free.

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When he finally gives me a Mr. Hero sandwich, I keep the napkin. It’s very thin but has lots of white space where I can write. I’m keeping McDonald’s and Wendy’s bags too, because I can tear them open and write on the inside. The only paper I have is my diary, but that’s filling up. So I keep every scrap of paper I can find in case I run out.

Writing things down makes me feel closer to my family.

“Are you still going to take me home at the end of June?” I ask him. “You said you would.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe next year.”

“You told me you were taking me home!” I tell him, crying. “I need to see my family!”

He complains that I’m always talking about my family like I’m the only one who is missing someone. “Soldiers don’t see their families for years at a time,” he says, “and they don’t cry like babies about it.”

I just saw a TV news story about a female soldier from Cleveland who is in Iraq and who won’t be coming home before Christmas. I think about her on the other side of the world from her family and know it must be hard for her. But I also know she will make it.

Life is giving me a test. I have to pass. God wouldn’t give me anything I can’t handle. I can do this.

June 10

This morning Channel 19 has a story about a sixteen-year-old girl from Massachusetts, Molly Bish, who has been missing for three years. They found her body in the woods. I’m so sad and sorry for her and her family. What agony. I’m worried my mom is watching this too, scared that’s how they’re going to find me.

And now there’s another story about five women, as young as fourteen, who were sex slaves for fifteen years. Why do so many men hurt women?

June 17

He hates the feeling of air blowing on him, so when he sleeps in my room he turns off my fan. Without it I feel like I’m suffocating. Even when he sleeps downstairs or stays out all night, he sometimes turns off my fan, though he knows I want it. He keeps it just out of my reach so he can control it.

He’s back from work.

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“Can you please turn the fan on?” I ask him.

“In a little while,” he says.

“Why not? It’s too hot.”

“In a little while.”

He’s like a prison guard who loves taunting, punishing, and taking away privileges. I make loud groaning noises to annoy him until he finally gets up and turns on the fan.

He smacks my arm hard. “Don’t be a baby!” he yells at me.

He is on me again. I don’t want him to see me crying because I hate giving him the satisfaction of knowing he hurts me. But I can’t help it, and my tears spill.

“You have been acting really strange lately, and you’d better stop,” he says when he’s done. “Stop crying so much. It’s only going to make you look old. You’re prettier when you laugh.”

June 23

I saw Ricki Lake’s show about sexual assault victims putting their lives back together. I hope when I get out of here that I am not scared of every man for the rest of my life. But I’m afraid I will be. I don’t want to be paranoid. I want my life back the way it was. Can I bounce back from this? I’m fighting back thoughts of killing myself.

At some point this has to end, doesn’t it? If I thought I was going to never get out of here before I died, what would be the point of even getting up in the morning? I have to believe that one day I will walk out that door, free, and it’s going to be like coming back from the dead.