Prologue
On Sundays the bells would peal out, God's ringtone to a material world. They implored those still faithful to attend service, while attempting to convince others that salvation was only feet away for the taking. The chimes echoed in every wooden house on Seymour Avenue in the American city of Cleveland. Only the locals had another, more ironic and half-joking name for the street they lived on – 'See More' Avenue, they called it. See more drugs, see more violence, see more hookers, see more despair, see more trouble. Seymour Avenue was a place on life support a decade ago, and the patient has not made significant progress since. The sound of the bells from the Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church on its corner struck chords of hope in an area of chronic social decay and, in one particular house, gave small comfort that God had not forgotten the people who dwelled within its walls.
Perhaps.
House number 2207 Seymour Avenue looked like it might have once featured in an Edward Hopper painting on a lonely prairie. A little worn, a little run-down, but essentially benign. White clapboard walls, wooden front porch, the American eagle symbol of liberty nailed above the deck and a small, tattered Puerto Rican flag hanging limply from a metal holder on one of the wooden beams. The kind of place where good old boys sip whiskey and smoke cigars on long hot nights. It did not look like a house of horrors, the Gothic monstrosity of Hitchcock's Psycho, or the creepy Overlook Hotel of The Shining fame. Not even the dark plastic sheeting nailed across the interior windows gave it any particular air of menace. Rather, it seemed as if it had been put there by dilatory painters who had never got around to completing the renovations.
The house was, like the criminal who inhabited it, essentially anonymous. But horrifying crimes took place here. Women stolen from the streets nearby vanished into its maw, there to become the personal sex slaves of the misfit Ariel Castro who, like the house, masked his crimes in plain sight. Women who heard the tolling of the bells but were out of the reach of God's love and protection.
For ten terrible years three unrelated victims – Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus – were degraded, dehumanized and despoiled by a predator with uncontrollable sexual urges who claimed them for his own. Despite neighbours, despite cries for help, despite noises heard by those invited across the threshold by the gatekeeper himself, these young women were lost to an increasingly disconnected world, a world marching to the inexorable drumbeat of 24/7 communications, rolling news, Twitter and Facebook that left no one to wonder what was going on inside 2207 Seymour Avenue.
The women suffered as much from the atomization of society as from the diseased mind of their perverted jailer. A society that, while aware of titanic wars being fought abroad, of drugs destroying their youth, of both adults and children preferring to dwell in a cyber universe of computer games rather than in the real one, looked away from its neighbours as trust evaporated along with feelings of community obligations. The fear of getting involved in something that didn't concern strangers had become entrenched on the street where Castro lived.
Before the three women vanished, Castro had honed his uniquely evil talents on his common-law wife. She inhabited the house of horrors before them, suffered like them, was beaten and humiliated like them in his realm of misery and terror. And, like them, there was no one to step in to save her. Not police, not neighbours, not even her own family. Castro, one of the world's little men, foisted upon Grimilda Figueroa the control he could not exercise upon his own demons. He told her what to eat, who she could befriend, when she could leave the house, when to speak and when to stay silent. He once demanded that she get into a cardboard box and only come out when he said so. He was the lord and master of a fiefdom of pain and misery and, within its narrow borders, he beat her constantly.
She died in 2012, her family insisting it was from the injuries inflicted upon her during Castro's rages. Medical records show she sustained two broken noses, shattered ribs and a blood clot on the brain. She lost a tooth and was permanently hunched from two dislocated shoulders after one particularly horrific frenzy of violence after which she was left dangling in the chains that he would later use on his kidnapped trio.
The first kidnap victim, then 21-year-old Michelle, was abducted in 2002, followed by then sixteen-year-old Amanda in 2003. Gina was taken in 2004, when she was just fourteen years old. After their dramatic return to the world in May 2013, the girls described a terrifying life where they were controlled both by physical and emotional violence. Though they were not bound when police arrived to take them from the house, they said that in the first few years of their captivity they were often tied with chains that hung from the ceiling of the cellar, from a post in the floor of their rooms, or from heaters on the walls. He raped them repeatedly, and when one of them fell pregnant he punched her time after time in the stomach to induce miscarriages. Only Amanda bore a child who lived – the now six-year-old Jocelyn who, like the others, must climb an Everest of suffering in a bid to reach a worthwhile, endurable life after all the pain.
In the past I have chronicled other monsters of a similar hue, notably the pathetic loner Wolfgang Priklopil, who stole schoolgirl Natascha Kampusch in a desperate bid to make her love him, and Josef Fritzl, who is probably closer to Castro in his modus operandi and his urges. Fritzl earned himself an infamous place in criminal history when he sealed his own daughter up in a DIY dungeon he carved out beneath the family home in Amstetten, Austria, to turn her into his own personal sex toy. Three thousand rapes, twenty-four years and seven children later – six of whom survived – Fritzl was finally brought to justice in a case that stunned the world. No one thought that anything more depraved could ever be visited upon defenceless young women.
And then came along Ariel Castro. In this book all aspects of the horrors endured by the Cleveland captives are explored, while the key figure, Castro, remains centre stage. The world wants to know what made his dark heart beat. What formed him? What motivated him? What petty fortunes of life forced his soul to morph into the twisted, terrible thing it became? From infancy to adulthood, from bus driver by day to rapist and ruler of his home by night, the twisted psyche of Castro is laid bare.
Ultimately, there was a happy ending of sorts. His victims survived. They will heal. They will, it is hoped, find love and happiness in a world they thought had forsaken them. They, not Castro, are the victors.
And how did they come upon their freedom? It was thanks to the little girl, fathered by Castro, who listened to the stories of God's greatness that her mother whispered to her in the darkness. She alone found the courage to save them all.
