The Lost Girls (16 page)

“Okay,” said Ferreri, “and against you as well?”

“She did not say that,” said Castro.

Then Ferreri showed him the restraining order against him, which had been marked as Exhibit F. Castro said he had not seen it yet, and only knew he had to appear at a Domestic Court hearing in ten days’ time.

“Did you have a conversation with Nilda,” asked Ferreri, “because your children were unavailable to testify against Fernando?”

“I had a short conversation with her,” he said. “She says, ‘Listen, I’m going to go downtown and file a restraining order … so you don’t get near the kids.’ I hung up the phone because I knew she wanted to argue.”

“Okay,” Ferreri continued, “did you ever have a conversation within the last week with your daughters, Emily or Arlene, threatening them if they did not come to testify against Fernando?”

“No,” replied Castro.

“Did you ever make offers of reward to them about testifying against Fernando?”

“No.”

“Did you tell Nilda that you would punish her and get even with her for testifying on Fernando’s behalf?”

“The answer is no,” replied Castro resolutely.

Ferreri then asked if he had ever threatened to “beat the shit” out of Nilda in front of Emily, so their daughter would see what would happen if she refused to testify.

“I never made that statement,” replied Castro angrily.

“Okay,” Ferreri continued. “Have you ever beaten Nilda?”

“Never,” snapped Castro. “No.”

“Have you ever struck Nilda in such a way that she was required to get medical attention?”

“No.”

“Did you ever hit Nilda in such a way that you knocked a tooth out of her head?”

“No.”

Ariel Castro then denied ever shattering Nilda’s ribs, dislocating her shoulders or breaking her nose several times.

“Did you ever hit her in the head with a hand weight,” asked Ferreri, “when she was eight months pregnant with one of your daughters?”

“No,” said Castro.

“Did you ever hit her with a piece of metal that resulted in her having a hemorrhage and a blood clot on her brain?”

“No.”

Castro also denied that his beatings had ever led to Nilda being hospitalized, saying he was not responsible for her brain tumor.

“Have you ever threatened to kill Nilda and the children?” asked Ferreri.

“No.”

“You’ve never done anything to Nilda, or to the children, to make them afraid of you?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m a good father to my children. I love my children.”

Then Ferreri questioned Castro about Emily’s recent drug overdose.

“Did you ever give your daughter Emily money so she could buy marijuana?” asked the defender.

“No,” replied Castro.

“Did you ever tell Emily what to tell the doctors when they were treating her for her drug overdose?”

“No.”

“Is it your testimony that you don’t know exactly what type of drug she ingested?”

“I don’t have the information to that.”

In redirect, Prosecutor Kosko asked Ariel Castro about driving to Fort Wayne the previous weekend to collect Emily.

“And would it be fair to say,” said the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, “that you and I were on the phone last Saturday and Sunday quite a bit, right?”

“That’s correct,” replied Castro.

“In fact,” continued Kosko, “at the risk of embarrassing myself, I begged you to go to Fort Wayne, right?”

“Yes,” replied Castro.

“You didn’t want to go, right?”

“If I had to send her a [Greyhound] ticket I would have done that, but I wanted to pick her up personally.”

“Now when we got here to court Monday, Arlene was missing, right?” asked Kosko.

“That’s correct.”

“You found Arlene Monday night?”

“Yes.”

“And those girls spent the night with you on Monday night, right?”

“Yes,” said Castro. “Well, Emily spent the night Monday, and then Tuesday, Arlene did.”

“Anyway, the night you got Arlene,” continued the prosecutor, “you were calling my house again, right?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“Oh, about the mother making threatening phone calls to me about the restraining order.”

Then Ferreri objected when the prosecutor asked what Nilda had told him in the phone calls. The judge then asked him to rephrase the question.

“All right,” said Kosko. “In any event, at some time this week you had both girls at your house?”

“That’s correct,” replied Castro.

“And [if] you had not gone to get Emily, and if you had not found Arlene, neither one would have been in court this week, would they?”

“That is correct. Yes.”

Then the prosecution rested its case.

That afternoon, the defense called Ariel Anthony Castro, Jr., as its first witness. The bearded twenty-three-year-old, who now closely resembled his father, told the court that he worked as an editor for the
Journal Gazette
in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

“Have you ever been around your father,” asked defender Robert Ferreri, “when he made any disparaging remarks about Fernando Colon?”

“Yes,” replied Castro, as prosecutor John Kosko objected and Judge Russo called a sidebar.

When they went back on the record, Judge Russo allowed Ferreri to continue.

“Did you ever hear your father make any statement relative to wishing … revenge against Fernando Colon?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“Tell the judge what those statements were, and the circumstances in which they arose.”

“Well, my parents broke up in the freshman year of high school for me,” said Castro. “And soon after that my mother got together with Fernando. For the first year or so, there were a couple of times [my father] told me, ‘Yeah, he’s gonna get his.’ He constantly tries to undermine him.”

Then Castro told the judge how his father had once collected him from school when he was thirteen and driven past his stepfather’s house, telling him his mother was “ho-ing” in there.

Then Ferreri asked if he believed his two sisters were being sexually molested by their stepfather.

“No,” he replied.

Ariel, Jr., said he had witnessed several verbal arguments between his father and stepfather, although he had never seen them get violent.

“Have you ever seen [your father] be physically violent with your mother?” asked Ferreri.

“Yes,” Ariel, Jr., replied. “Well, he used to beat her.”

“And you saw those things?”

“Yes.”

“And do you know the extent of the injuries sustained by your mother?”

“I know my mother was hospitalized more than once,” he replied. “I mean, some of the incidents were, you know, too young for me to remember now, but yeah.”

“It’s difficult to talk about?” asked Ferreri.

“Yes.”

Then, as the prosecution had no questions for Ariel Castro, Jr., he stepped down.

The final witness for the defense was Nilda Figueroa, who told the court how she had left 2207 Seymour Avenue because of Ariel Castro’s horrendous abuse. She outlined some of the terrible beatings she had suffered over the years. Once, she said, he had beaten her while she was pregnant, when she told him she was too tired to do the dishes.

“So he just punched me in the mouth,” Nilda told the judge, “and took my teeth out.”

When she was nine months pregnant with Emily, Castro had hit her hard in the stomach with an exercise weight.

Nilda told the court that she had been repeatedly hospitalized after his beatings, suffering two broken noses, broken ribs and dislocated shoulders. Once he had hit her on the head with a metal pipe; forty stiches were required to close up the wound.

“Did you receive a scar from that activity?” asked Ferreri.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Is it visible?”

“Yes.”

“Show the judge.”

Then Nilda walked over to Judge Russo and showed her the scar on her head.

She also recounted another savage beating.

“He came at me full force with his fist,” she said. “He punched me in the eye. There’s a lot of nerve damage.”

“And you told me,” said the defender, “that one of your eyes is round and the other eye is squinty, and both at different levels?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Nilda then told Judge Russo that she had undergone brain surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, because of all Ariel Castro’s beatings. She had suffered seizures, and doctors had diagnosed meningioma, or a brain tumor.

“Is your brain tumor operable?” asked Ferreri.

“No,” replied Nilda.

“Can they fix it?”

“No.”

“Do you know the term prognosis?” the defender asked.

“Yes … your outcome. How are you.”

“Your future?”

“Umm-umm.”

“And what is yours?” asked Ferreri.

“I have none,” replied Nilda. “I mean, there’s nothing they can do for the tumor. They tried. But they couldn’t do anything.”

“Would it be fair to say that the prognosis is, in medical terms, terminal?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Ferreri then asked if Ariel Castro had started buying Emily and Arlene lavish presents in the weeks leading up to their allegations against Fernando Colon. Nilda said that he had bought them each expensive cell phones, iPods, and clothes, and given them cash.

“He’s buying them,” she said.

Nilda also testified how Castro had threatened to kill her and the children, if she went before a grand jury and testified against him, when he faced charges of criminal domestic violence.

“I was scared,” she told Judge Russo. “I said that … nothing happened, just so he wouldn’t hurt me or the kids anymore.”

Then Ferreri asked if she believed Fernando Colon had ever sexually molested her daughters.

“No,” she replied.

“Why is that?” asked Ferreri.

“Because I know my daughters. My daughters tend to lie to me a lot.”

Finally, the defender asked Nilda about Ariel Castro’s unusual behavior when their daughters started having periods.

“When [Angie] started her period,” she said, “Mr. Castro, in front of me, [asked her], ‘Angie, are you sure you started your period, or did somebody stick their finger up your vagina?’”

“Did [Emily] have a similar situation with her first period?” Ferreri asked.

“Yes, he asked her the same question.”

“How about Arlene?”

“Yes, the same situation.”

“So, with every female child who experiences her first transition from little girl to woman, Ariel Castro says, ‘Did somebody finger you and that’s why you’re bleeding?’”

“Exactly,” replied Nilda.

“And these kids, Angie, Arlene, Emily, they never complained to you about any inappropriate touching from Fernando, did they?”

“Right. Never. They never did.”

In his cross-examination, Prosecutor John Kosko asked Nilda why Ariel Castro would want to frame Fernando Colon.

“Mr. Castro is, like, I’m his property,” she replied, “and he thinks I’ll come back with him. He thinks we’re going to be happy together again. That’s why he has never remarried. He’s sort of waiting for me.”

“And you think the girls all went along with this to help him out?” asked Kosko.

“Yes and no,” she replied. “The girls are probably mistaken about something that happened. That’s what I think.”

Then the prosecutor asked if she was trying to help the defendant be found not guilty.

“I’m trying to make sure the truth comes out,” she replied. “I mean, it’s obvious he’s not guilty.”

Then the defense rested without calling defendant Fernando Colon to the stand.

In Friday’s closing arguments, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor John Kosko, asked what possible motive Emily and Arlene Castro would have to lie on the stand.

“And the motive that’s been brought forward by the defense,” he told Judge Russo, “is that this is some sort of frame-up that’s orchestrated by the girls’ father, so that he could get rid of [Fernando Colon]. I don’t know if you saw Mr. Castro testify. What reason would he have to do this to this guy?”

The prosecutor said Fernando Colon’s defense relied solely on Nilda Figueroa’s testimony that her two daughters were lying, because she had not wanted to believe her fianc
é
had sexually molested them.

“Everything was directed at making Mr. Castro some kind of bad guy here,” said Kosko. “How is Mr. Castro a bad guy? He’s told this by his daughters. He does exactly what he’s supposed to do. He goes to the police station [and] has them make a report.”

The prosecutor told the judge it was “nonsense” that Castro had given his daughters expensive presents and money, just so he could move back with their mother.

“That’s the part that’s not credible,” he told Judge Russo. “And I’m going to ask you to make a finding of guilty in this case.”

Then Robert Ferreri stood up to address the judge.

“It’s difficult for me to sit here,” he began, “and listen to my colleague say that Mr. Castro’s being made to be a bad guy. The fact is, Mr. Castro is a bad guy.”

The defense attorney then called Ariel Castro’s sworn testimony “outrageous.”

“How do we know he was lying?” Ferreri asked. “His lips were moving. He said he had no idea why he would be brought into the court process. He never touched Nilda. He never threatened her. He never threatened the girls.”

Ferreri said Emily and Arlene Castro had not wanted to testify, and had only done so out of fear for their father.

“This case had a peculiar odor about it from the very beginning,” he told the judge.

Ferreri said there was no evidence they had even been molested by their stepfather, questioning why they had suddenly come forward with their story after so many years.

“What we do have in way of evidence,” he continued, “is that the dad was obsessed with their sexuality. Obsessed with Fernando. Asked them point blank, even to the point of being so bizarre and so intrusive and so violative of personal self-respect of saying, ‘Well, you have your period. Is it your period or did somebody put their finger in there?’

“Can you imagine your own father doing that? I can’t imagine mine. I mean, to me that [is] crude, unbelievable behavior on the part of Mr. Castro.”

Ferreri then described Ariel Castro’s family life at 2207 Seymour Avenue, prior to Nilda and her children moving out, as shocking.