The Lost Girls (21 page)

In March 2012, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed an executive order creating the Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force, in response to the growing epidemic of missing persons in the state. Governor Kasich charged it with eradicating the sex-slave trade in Ohio, which enslaves approximately one thousand Ohioans annually.

“It’s almost too horrific to imagine,” said the governor, “but the fact is that human trafficking is real and is happening across Ohio. It’s a modern day slave trade and we need your help to stop it.”

A couple of weeks later, at a vigil to commemorate the eighth anniversary of Gina DeJesus’s disappearance, Nancy Ruiz announced that she believed her daughter, who would now be twenty-two, had been snatched by human traffickers.

“I always said it from the beginning,” she told a TV reporter. “She was sold to the highest bidder.”

After all the publicity surrounding Governor Kasich’s new executive order, more than forty people turned out for Gina’s vigil, including several FBI investigators who had been working on her case for years. Also in attendance was Ariel Castro, who handed out fliers and led the chants of “Stop human trafficking!” and “We want Gina!”

“He led the prayer at the vigils,” said his neighbor Lupe Collins. “He was the first one there to tell everybody to hold hands.”

The FBI and Cleveland police said they were still actively looking for Gina.

“We are following every lead that possibly comes our way,” FBI Agent Vickie Anderson told WKYC-TV. “We continue to work this case with the Cleveland police and any … tip regarding Gina we follow it through, whether it’s in our state or out of state.”

Nancy Ruiz said that she felt renewed hope after Jaycee Dugard was found, and was certain Gina was still alive.

“I think if she would have passed on,” said Nancy, “I would have felt it. I would be feeling empty, lonely, but I’m not.”

Three weeks later, Nancy Ruiz held hands with Beth Serrano at a vigil to commemorate the ninth anniversary of Amanda Berry’s disappearance.

“Today is Amanda Berry. Nine years!” said Ruiz. “I’ve suffered eight, they suffer nine. And it should be enough!”

A tearful Beth Serrano told a TV reporter how time had stood still for her since Amanda, who would be twenty-six the next day, had gone.

“There’s days where it feels like it’s so fresh,” she sobbed; “because there’s no new leads, it feels like day one. But it feels like so long because … I just miss her so much.”

Then as the television cameras rolled, the crowd began marching the half mile to Amanda’s house, chanting her name.

“We want her to know we’re never going to stop looking for her,” said Amanda’s friend Victoria Dickens. “Where’s Amanda at right now? She’s not at peace. Her family’s not at peace. And we just want her to come home. It’s been way too long.”

And just three miles away, Amanda Berry was watching the coverage of her vigil with Ariel Castro, who had brought in a birthday cake to celebrate.

Four days later, on Wednesday, April 25, Nilda Figueroa died of brain cancer at the age of forty-eight. And her relatives had no doubts as to who was responsible.

“All my family blames [Ariel] for my sister’s death,” said Elida Carabello. “He put her six feet under.”

In the weeks before she succumbed to the brain cancer, Nilda was partially paralyzed, and couldn’t even stand without falling down. Her tragic life was commemorated in a brief obituary in the Cleveland
Plain Dealer.

GRIMILDA FIGUEROA

(July 30, 1963–April 25, 2012)

GRIMILDA FIGUEROA, 48, loving mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, aunt. She also leaves behind many other relatives and friends.

The following Sunday, a viewing was held for friends and family at the Walter Martens & Sons Funeral Home, followed by a wake. Ariel Castro and one of his brothers turned up, to the horror of Nilda’s family, and proceeded to drink heavily and make jokes.

Castro also attended her funeral on Monday at the Interment Riverside Cemetery.

“I saw him,” said Elida, “at my sister’s funeral. He’s disgusting to me. The way he treated my sister.”

At her funeral, Nilda’s favorite song, “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion, was played at the graveside, and Ariel, Jr., wrote a moving epitaph in the funeral home’s guestbook.

“Dear Mom,” it read, “You are gone too soon. But your suffering is over.”

Soon afterward, a gregarious African American named Charles Ramsey moved to Seymour Avenue, two doors away from Ariel Castro. The two soon became friends and the forty-three-year-old dishwasher would often see Castro going in and out of the house. At night they would hang out together.

But Castro could also be abrasive with other Seymour Avenue neighbors, whom he did not approve of. Storm Pusztay, who lived a few houses away, said he was having a cookout on his porch in late April, when his dog started growling.

“Then I look up and it’s Ariel,” recalled Pusztay. “He looked down on me and I said, ‘Can I help you?’ He goes, ‘You can’t have that fire there like that, man.’”

Then Pusztay realized that his neighbor had been spying on him from his roof before coming down to confront him.

“The creepiness,” said Pusztay. “I don’t know how long he was up there watching me.”

At the end of June, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason received a letter from Robert Wolford, an inmate at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility serving a twenty-six-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter and felonious assault. Wolford, twenty-five, claimed he had murdered Amanda Berry with another man, and buried her remains.

After checking out the tip, Mason got a search warrant and ordered digging to start on a vacant lot at West Thirtieth Street and Wade Avenue.

“I had a good feeling,” he told reporters before the digging began. “Thought it was the real deal.”

On Wednesday, July 18, Cuyahoga County sheriff’s deputies drove Wolford to the site. Then, in shackles and handcuffs, the orange-jumpsuited prisoner walked around the lot for several hours, pointing out specific spots of interest.

At seven the next morning, several dozen FBI agents and Cleveland police officers arrived with shovels and dirt sifters, to begin digging up a sixty-by-eight-foot area. A cadaver dog and a backhoe arrived a few hours later.

At around 6:00
P.M.
the digging stopped for the day with nothing being found.

“That’s a waste of money,” Pedro Castro told a Fox-8 news reporter, as he walked by.

During the day, Amanda Berry’s worried family gathered at Beth Serrano’s house to await the outcome.

“I don’t want her to be gone,” said Amanda’s aunt Theresa Miller, “but we do want closure.”

On Friday morning, the digging continued with a bigger backhoe, as a crowd gathered on Wade Avenue to watch. Daniel Marti was there and ran into his old friend Ariel Castro.

“Castro was around there helping the cops put that crime ribbon around,” said Marti. “And he was saying, ‘They’re not going to find Amanda there.’”

At around 2:30
P.M.
, police finally called off the search, without any trace of Amanda Berry being found.

Cleveland Police First District Commander Thomas McCartney voiced his frustration.

“We had our hopes up,” he told reporters. “Everyone had their hopes up, but the other side of the coin is, we still hope for the family. Maybe somewhere a girl is still alive.”

After the search was called off, Beth Serrano handed reporters waiting outside her house a handwritten statement.

I want to say thank you to the FBI and the police for their help and support. I’m happy they didn’t find my sister there, because my faith and hope is that she’s coming home. This time is emotional for me and it’s hard for me to keep speaking of this at the moment, but I want to say thank you to everyone. It’s been 9 long years and I’m just wishing someone would say something and bring my sister home.

Thank you

Beth Serrano.

In January 2013, Robert Wolford was sentenced to an additional four and a half years in prison, after admitting making up the entire story, just to get out of state prison for a couple of days. The total cost of the two-day dig was $150,000.

That long hot summer of 2012, Michelle and Gina started getting bitten by bedbugs. Ariel Castro had originally found their filthy mattress in an alley, and over the years it had become heavily stained with semen and blood. When Gina first woke up itching and covered in tiny red dots, they had thought it was chickenpox. Then, Michelle saw a bedbug crawling on the mattress and realized what was going on. Castro’s first reaction when Michelle showed him a bug was to close the door to Amanda and Jocelyn’s bedroom, so they would not get infested too.

He then brought in a plastic sheet and placed it over the mattress, which did nothing to stop the bedbugs, which were now attacking Michelle. The two women spent the sweltering summer locked in the pink bedroom, sweating on the plastic sheet and being eaten alive by bedbugs.

In September, Michelle became pregnant for the fifth time since she had been taken. And soon afterward, Castro took Jocelyn to a carnival, returning with hot dogs smothered in mustard. Michelle was highly allergic to mustard, and as a little girl her mother had rushed her to the emergency room after she ate some deviled eggs. Doctors had warned that mustard could kill her.

Castro was well aware of this, as Michelle would never eat McDonald’s burgers, if he hadn’t asked them to hold the mustard. When she refused the hot dog, because of the mustard, he threw it on her mattress, took out his gun and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t eat it.

So she wiped off some of the mustard with her T-shirt and ate the hot dog. Immediately her face swelled up and she couldn’t breathe. Castro told her to get over it, as he walked out of the bedroom, locking the door behind him.

That night Michelle writhed on the bed in agony and thought she was going to die. Her entire body turned bright red and her tongue and throat went numb. Several days later, Castro brought in a bottle of cough syrup for her to take. And for the next four days and nights Michelle was in such terrible pain, she couldn’t even move off the mattress.

“I told Gina, ‘Just kill me,’” she recalled. “‘Just put the pillow over my head and kill me. Let me go.’”

But Gina refused, saying that she must stay alive for her son, Joey. All through her sickness, Gina nursed her night and day, urging her to stay strong and fight.

At 9:30
A.M.
on Thursday, September 20, Ariel Castro parked his school bus 978 outside Scranton School and went home. School principal Troy Beadling became concerned when he noticed the yellow bus parked outside his school, as it was blocking the emergency lane used by the fire department. After making repeated appeals to the driver on the school’s public address system, as well as checking all the restrooms, he went inside the bus, which was empty. Then he called the Ridge Road Bus Depot to report the abandoned bus.

Four hours after leaving it abandoned, Ariel Castro returned and drove it away for his afternoon route.

He was ordered to appear at a disciplinary hearing on October 4. Now facing termination for his fourth serious offense, Castro handwrote a rambling, almost incoherent letter of explanation, which he presented at the hearing.

I went to Scranton School after McKinley 9:30 A.M. to get a schedule of pre-school kids days off. Teachers were not available. I left my bus parked in front of the school and walked home two blocks away.

I returned a while later got on bus and went to 49
th
punched clock to do P.M. Route Lincoln West. My midday was canceled for that day is reason for leaving bus there. Bus was secured and off.

I went home to rest. I’ve been helping Depot with many routes that needed coverage. I felt tired that day, Scranton is my school; so I didn’t think anything wrong with parking there. I do apologize.

Thanks Kindly, A. Castro.

In an official memo, Castro’s boss, Cleveland Metropolitan School District Transportation Director Ann Carlson, said that his excuse of not realizing his route had been cancelled was unacceptable.

“Notice was made over the radio,” she wrote, “and posted within the depot several days before September 20th. He did not notify the depot nor dispatch that he was leaving the unit unattended. This is Mr. Castro’s fourth demonstration of lack of judgment. I am recommending his termination.”

On November 6, Ariel Castro was officially fired by the Cleveland Metropolitan School District after nearly twenty-two years of service.

Later, Ariel Castro would claim he had deliberately gotten himself terminated, as he could no longer handle the pressures of a full-time job and his demanding home life.

“I started slacking off,” he explained, “trying to get fired because I knew it was just too much. This job is too stressful and coming home to my situation. And I just couldn’t juggle both of them.”

After losing his job, Ariel Castro sunk into a depression and became even more violent. He stopped rising early for his morning route, and his hostages soon noticed that he no longer wore his bus driver’s uniform.

Finally Amanda asked him if he had lost his job, and Castro admitted he’d been fired.

“Now he was at home all the time,” said Michelle, “he assaulted me at all hours of the day and night.”

He also started taking Jocelyn out with him more, shopping and on trips to the bank.

One morning his brother Pedro saw him at McDonald’s eating breakfast with the pretty little girl, and asked who she was. Castro replied that she was the daughter of a girlfriend. When Pedro asked where her mother was, he replied she was grocery shopping.

“So I left it at that,” said Pedro, “because he’s with this little girl and they’re going to have breakfast.”

Three weeks later, Pedro saw his brother’s red truck parked outside Burger King and went inside to see him.

“Again he’s with this little girl,” said Pedro Castro, “and then I questioned him, ‘Where’s the mother?’ ‘Oh, she had to do something.’ So I just let it go. I believed it.”