Cleveland kidnap saga: Life after the house of horrors

FOR three women held captive, the triumph of escape after a decade in hell is haunted by unimaginable horror.

"Do you want a ride?''

After words to that effect, three young women separately got into Ariel Castro's car and were driven to a decade of rape, torture, bashings, childbirth, alleged forced abortions and unimaginable humiliation in one man's private harem hell.

It is easy to picture how Castro, 52, persuaded one of victims, Georgina DeJesus, into his car. She was his own daughter's best friend at school.

Read: Castro the father of victim's child

Ever since Amanda Berry broke free on Monday afternoon from a nondescript house at 2207 Seymour Avenue, in Cleveland, Ohio, the story of supreme brutality and three women's remarkable survival has lit up news sites and newspapers across the world. 

Amanda Berry

The tale is also, for those people whose loved ones are still missing and who keep a candlelight burning, an exceptionally cruel one, because it offers a flicker of hope where none may be warranted.

These women - and a daughter born in captivity - survived, even though beyond the walls of their suburban prison at 2207 Seymour Avenue, hope for them was mostly gone. It seems like a good news story, and it is. 

But the triumph of their escape is underwritten by pain. As a neighbour, Chuck Ramsey, is celebrated for bringing the women's ordeal to an end, it has emerged another man, Angel Cordero, aged 32, played the key role in facilitating Berry's escape and closing down Castro's torture chamber, which from the street was just another suburban weatherboard house flying an American flag on the porch.

Cordero told CNN he was visiting two women across the street when their attention was drawn to screaming coming from inside the house.

This image provided by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's office shows the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center booking photo of Ariel Castro, 52, after he was ordered to be held on $8 million bail Thursday, May 9, 2013, in Cleveland. Castro, a former school bus driver, is accused of imprisoning three young women and beating them repeatedly over a decade in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Cuyahoga County)

Michele Knight: The forgotten abductee

Berry, 27, who was ripped off the streets in 2003, when she was aged 16, had spotted a rare opportunity. The front door was unlocked.

The shambolic Castro, who has been charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape (which is only the start of it, as prosecutors explore the possibility of the death penalty for the murder of unborn children) was fastidious in keeping the doors of his home bolted shut and the windows sealed tight.

But on this afternoon, as Castro drove to McDonald's, only the chain-locked front screen door stood between Berry and freedom. Cordero asked the terrified woman behind the screen if the house was burning.

Berry told him she'd been held prisoner for 10 years. "I tried to open the door, but I couldn't, so I gave it a few kicks,'' Cordero told CNN's Piers Morgan.

"She succeeded in escaping through the bottom of the door, and once she had escaped, she remembered the girl [her daughter] and returned into the house, picked up the girl and left.

"And when she left with the little girl, she said, 'Let's get out of here because, if this guy comes, he's going to kill us. If he finds me here, he's going to kill me and he's going to kill you."

The first girl to be abducted, Michele Knight, was 22 at the time. It was 2002. She would not emerge for 11 years when, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a police officer crawled under the bent screen door, climbed the stairs and saw a pair of eyes "peeking through a slightly opened bedroom door''.

Abduction

Knight, now 32, reportedly leaped into the arms of a policeman, saying, "You saved me", over and over. Knight had been having family troubles at the time of her disappearance and never attracted the attention of Berry and the third woman, Gina DeJesus.

DeJesus, now aged 23, went missing at the age of 14, in 2004. She, like Berry, is now back home in the care of her family. She has told police she was raped by Castro but never became pregnant.

Knight, who remains being treated for trauma in hospital, has reportedly told authorities she became pregnant to Castro at least five times, but was either starved or punched in the stomach to force her to miscarry.

Knight's anguish is likely to be especially acute. Before she was kidnapped, her family relations were strained. Her own small son was removed from her by child welfare and she was believed to have some mental health issues.

An undated picture taken of Michele Knight before she was held in a house in Cleveland against her will with Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry. Picture: Fox News 8

But none of the girls were forgotten: Knight's mother, who has since moved away would sometimes return to the area and put up missing posters; the DeJesus family held annual prayer vigils for Gina; and Berry's mother, Louwana Miller, reportedly hounded local media and police to keep Amanda's name alive, until Louwana died in 2006.

Tragically, a psychic told Louwana in 2004 that Amanda was dead. The three women are yet to speak publicly and are likely to be put through lengthy debriefings by mental health experts, in between police interviews and reconnecting with their families.

But a scattered picture is emerging. It appears the three women were initially kept bound by chains in a basement before being permitted to live, separately, and behind bolted doors, in upstairs rooms.

At times they were permitted to walk in the backyard in disguises as Castro maintained total control over the women's every action.

Castro, a former bus driver and local bass player, appears to have won the women's fear by keeping them separate and possibly playing one against the other. It is noticeable that in Berry's 911 call on Monday afternoon - "I've been missing for 10 years - I'm here, I'm free now" - she did not mention the other two captives.

Six years ago, Knight was forced to assist delivering Berry's daughter, Jocelyn, in an inflatable swimming pool, and told by Castro she would be killed if the baby died. Knight has told investigators she needed to resuscitate the baby after it stopped breathing.  

The three women were never more than six kilometres from the locations where they were picked up all those years ago. The question of how Castro was able to keep his prisoners a secret is baffling, given that two of his brothers, Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50, appeared to be regular visitors.

Castro was arrested at the local McDonald's after a string of 911 calls went out from Berry and the neighbours. He was with his brother Pedro, who assumed police were looking for Onil over an unrelated warrant.

Both were arrested but have since been released, with police apparently believing neither had any knowledge of Ariel's activity.

Castro, one of nine children, was investigated but apparently not charged over the 2005 bashing of his ex-wife, Grimilda Figueroa, who accused him of breaking her nose and knocking out a tooth. There are close links between the Castro and DeJesus families, who both have their origins in Puerto Rico.

Ariel Castro's daughter Arlene was Gina DeJesus's best friend, and was the last person to see her after school on the day she disappeared in 2004.

"I'm absolutely so, so sorry," a stricken Arlene told Good Morning America, as she tried to comprehend her father's actions. "I really want to see you Gina and I want you to meet my kids. I'm so sorry for everything."

And Ariel Castro's son, Anthony, as a journalism student in 2004 wrote for a local paper on the pain DeJesus's disappearance had caused the local community. This week, he told the Plain Dealer: "I can express nothing but shame for our family that it involved any one of us."

The mother of Michele Knight, Barbara, told Today she thought her daughter was "probably angry at the world, because she thought she would never be found".

Amanda Berry and Georgina DeJesus were both welcomed home like prisoners of war, with balloons and teddy bears.

 "We are so happy to have Amanda and her daughter home," said Georgina's sister, Beth.

Now the question is turning to the whereabouts of Ashley Summers, who went missing from the same area in July 2007, at the age of 14.

Summers reportedly packed her clothes and left home of her own free will, calling her mother a month later to say she was OK.

The DeJesus family said on Wednesday that Summers was "our other family member" and asked people to rally to find her.

Castro's motives, other than grotesque opportunism, are unknown. As Castro shuffled in chains, assistant prosecutor Brian Murphy told the court, which set an $8m bond: "The situation has turned. Castro is the captive in captivity."