The Seymour Avenue Miracle: Inside the Ten-Year Captivity, Daring Escape, and Unbreakable Triumph of Cleveland’s Missing Women

If a kidnapped person is not found within 24 hours of their disappearance, their chances of survival are minimal. Georgina DeJesus, Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight all survived the first 24 hours of their kidnappings. But they were held captive by their kidnapper Ariel Castro for a whole decade. Ariel Castro was born in 1960 as the son of Petro Castro and Lillian Rodriguez. He grew up in Puerto Rico, but after his parents’ divorce, Castro and his three siblings moved to the USA with their mother Lillian. After a short stay in Pennsylvania, they moved again. This time to Ohio, where they had family connections and support. Over time, his parents had more children, until Castro had a total of 9 full siblings and half-siblings.

In Castro’s childhood, there seemed to be none of those red flags that are often seen in people who grow up to commit violent crimes. He successfully completed high school in 1979 and shortly afterwards his family moved again. For Castro, this move would change the course of his life. He quickly got to know Grimilda Figueroa, a teenage girl who lived on the other side of the street. Castro was immediately smitten with Grimilda, and the feeling was mutual. The two began a relationship which led to their decision to move out of their parents’ house and into their own house. The two-story, four-bedroom house on Seymour Avenue was like a new beginning for the couple, and Grimilda was looking forward to finally living with her boyfriend.

But as soon as they moved in together, Carlos’s behavior began to change. With her family away, Castro began to physically abuse Grimilda. He regularly beat her so violently that he broke her bones several times, resulting in fractures of her rib cage, nose, and arms. Once, he aggressively threw Grimilda down a flight of stairs, causing her to suffer a fractured skull. The worst injury, however, was not a fracture, but a blood clot that formed in Grimilda’s brain after these blows. The blood clot caused Grimilda to develop an inoperable brain tumor, which tragically led to her death a few years later. Castro was arrested in 1993 and charged with domestic violence for his treatment of Grimilda, but he never appeared before a grand jury.

Two years later, in 1996, Grimilda had finally had enough. At that time, the couple had four biological children together. Grimilda successfully strangled herself from custody of all her children and moved out of the house on Seymore Avenue for good. Grimilda required police protection during the move, which led to Castro’s arrest. No charges were brought against him here either, and Grimilda’s departure did not stop Castro from trying to control and abuse her, including the multiple kidnappings of her children. Despite his violent actions, arrests, and the kidnapping of his children, Castro had a steady job with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District as a school bus driver, where he was responsible for the well-being of young children on a daily basis.

His performance as a bus driver was not without its problems. In fact, he was frequently negligent, making unsafe driving maneuvers with children on board the bus, leaving children unattended on the bus while he ate lunch or went home for a nap, and even using the bus for trips to buy his own groceries. This continued until 2005, when Grimilda Castro filed charges because he had seriously injured her and kidnapped her children, which she now frequently referred to. Grimilda was relieved when the court agreed to grant her an injunction against Castro, but after only a few months the injunction was lifted.

Grimilda was routinely harassed by Castro for the rest of her life until she died in 2012 from the aforementioned brain tumor, which was caused by Castro’s abuse. In the same year, Castro’s job performance caught up with him. The endangerment of children, the use of the bus for non-professional purposes, and the regular unsupervised leaving of small children had accumulated, and he was officially dismissed for poor judgment. The loss of his job and the death of the mother of his children, who died from an injury he caused, were only the tip of the iceberg in Ariel Castro’s life. Despite the numerous arrests and restraining orders, his house was never searched, and Grimilda died without ever learning Castro’s dark secret.

While he stalked her, harassed her and kidnapped her children, he had not been living alone in the house they had once shared. Throughout this time, Castro had abused three kidnapped women whom he held captive in his house. He had kidnapped the first of them in 2002, six years after Grimilda had taken the children and left him. Michelle Knight was born in April 1981. At the age of only 21, Michelle had a child, Joey, who was in state care. On August 23, 2002, she had a court date for Joey’s custody case. After visiting her cousin that day, Michelle left her cousin’s apartment to go to court, but she did not appear.

Michelle’s case was barely investigated because the authorities did not suspect a crime. Investigators assumed that Michelle had run away due to her grief and anger over losing custody of Joey. Because no one was concerned about Michelle’s well-being, few tips came in from the public and the police devoted few resources to finding her. In fact, very few people knew that Michelle was even missing, and her name was deleted from the National Crime Information Center database less than 18 months after her disappearance.

Michelle had no idea that nobody was trying to find her. Trapped in Ariel Castro’s house, she had no way to escape. Her hands and feet were tightly bound, and she was chained to the top floor of the house on Seymoure Avenue for three days without being given anything to eat. When Castro tried to pull Michelle to her feet, he grabbed her bound hands or her neck to pull her up. Eight months after Michelle’s disappearance, she was miraculously still alive despite being abused by Castro. At this time, Castro decided to expand his house to accommodate a second prisoner and set out to find another woman he could kidnap.

He used the same method that had been so successful with Michelle. He offered a young woman a ride, took her to his house, tricked her into coming inside, then overpowered and tied her up. The girl who was to become Castro’s next victim was younger than Michelle. Amanda Berry was only 16 years old when she disappeared on April 21, 2003, just one day before she turned 17. Amanda worked at a Burger King restaurant and her shift that day didn’t end until late in the evening. At 8 p.m. she called her sister and told her that she would be getting a ride home from work. She never arrived home. Just like Michelle, Amanda was initially thought to be a runaway, although the phone call to her sister suggested that she wanted to come home directly after work.

However, a phone call Amanda’s mother received a week later prompted investigators to reconsider the events surrounding the teenage girl. The call came from Amanda’s mobile number, but when Amanda’s mother hurried to answer it, she heard an unknown, gruff male voice. The man said he had Amanda, she was doing well and would be coming home in a few days. The man hung up and gave no further information. Almost exactly one year after Amanda’s disappearance, Georgina DeJesus, called Gina, was on her way home from school. She was 14 years old, the same age as one of Castro’s daughters named Aline.

The two girls were good friends and had hoped to be able to spend the night at Gina’s house. However, Grimilda did not give Ailine permission to stay overnight, and so the disappointed girls went their separate ways in the afternoon. Gina was last seen near a phone booth at around 3 pm. There were no witnesses to Gina’s abduction, and despite her young age and the panic of her family, an amber alert was never triggered. Her father later said:

“The Amber Alert should apply to every missing child, whether they are a guide or a runaway. A child must be found. We need to change this law.”

Everyone who knew Gina knew that she had not run away and feared that a stranger had taken her from the street or persuaded her to get into a car. That was partly true, but the person who had kidnapped Gina was not a stranger to her. Ariel Castro knew Gina because she was friends with his daughter. When Castro stopped his car and offered Gina a ride home, Gina didn’t hesitate and got into the passenger seat. She knew and trusted Castro; she had met him several times before and never expected him to do anything other than take her straight home.

Her young age and the fact that she felt comfortable with Castro made it easy for him to control her. Gina’s disappearance bore some similarities to Amanda’s disappearance a year earlier, and both the authorities and the public quickly began to suspect that there might be a connection between the two cases. Amanda and Gina were featured in a segment of America’s Most Wanted, suggesting that the same person had kidnapped both girls. The suspicion that a repeat offender was at large finally brought movement to the cases, leading the victims’ families to hold public vigils and conduct search operations to find the missing girls.

Castro not only knew about the vigils and search parties, he even participated in several vigils and volunteered for the search parties. During this time, he tried to get closer to Gina’s family. Castro’s son Anthony, who was studying journalism, even asked to interview Gina’s mother for a newspaper article he was writing about the cases. Anthony had no suspicion that his own father was the perpetrator, nor did Gina’s family. They were simply grateful for Castro’s help in raising awareness about their daughter’s disappearance. Most of the details that the authorities and the public have learned about the time the three victims spent in captivity were discovered in the diaries that Castro allowed each of the women to keep.

Since there were hardly any other forms of entertainment and little hope of rescue as their time in captivity dragged on, they had nothing else to do but write about their experiences. Their days were marked by the abuse inflicted upon them by Castro, and later they were able to remember much of what had happened in detail. All three of Castro’s prisoners described how their captor repeatedly sexually abused them, often with violence and under threat of killing them. Between these abuse sessions, they were chained to a wall in his house or locked in a dark room where they waited for Castro to torture them again. They compared their experiences in Castro’s house with what they imagined a prisoner of war to be like.

Being treated like animals and constantly thinking about how they could free themselves. The three women survived the days, but their physical condition deteriorated steadily. They were only given one meal a day, were lucky enough to wash twice a week, and relieved themselves in plastic toilets that Castro often didn’t empty. However, the most dangerous abuse they were subjected to was Castro’s beatings. Just like with Grimilda, Castro would have fits of rage in which he beat his victims so violently that they broke their bones, so severely that Michelle Knight suffered multiple facial fractures and permanently lost her hearing in one ear. Later, she had to undergo reconstructive facial surgery to repair some of this damage.

Ariel Castro’s abuses are not limited to human victims. During Michelle’s captivity, Castro allowed her to keep a puppy as a pet. Michelle and the dog became friends, but during Castro’s attack on Michelle, the dog bit him to protect his owner. Castro didn’t hesitate to break the dog’s neck, and Michelle was not allowed to have another pet. Michelle received the worst beatings when Castro found out that he had accidentally impregnated her. Since he did not want her to continue the pregnancy, he stopped eating, repeatedly punched her in the stomach, threw her against walls, and hit her in the stomach with heavy dumbbells until she suffered a miscarriage.

Michelle became pregnant five times during her captivity, and each time Castro repeated the same procedure. This caused permanent damage that meant Michelle was unable to have her own biological children after her escape. Gina was able to escape this treatment because, although she was sexually abused by Castro, he never impregnated her. When Amanda Berry became pregnant, he wanted her to have the baby, and Amanda had no choice but to comply. It was Christmas Day 2006 when Ariel Castro entered the room where Michelle was locked up. He ordered Michelle to help Amanda with the birth and told her that he would not hesitate to murder Michelle if the baby died.

Castro had set up an inflatable swimming pool for Amanda’s birth, and Michelle did her best to help even though she had no experience or knowledge of the birthing process. The baby, who turned out to be a girl, briefly stopped breathing today, but Michelle managed to revive her. Castro treated Amanda’s daughter, named Joceline, with a kindness that his three adult prisoners had hardly ever experienced. As Joceline grew older, Castro began taking her on outings outside the house where her mother was being held captive, and even took the child with him to visit her mother. He did not deny that the child was his. Joceline referred to Castro’s mother as her grandmother and called Castro her father.

However, on several occasions he invented a story about how Joceline came to him, telling some people she was actually his granddaughter, while telling his other children Joceline was the daughter of his girlfriend with another man. Although Amanda feared for Joceline’s life and for how Castro would treat her when she got older, she did her best to care for her daughter. She taught Joceline to read and write as best she could and entertained her with the few means available to her. But Joceline offered Amanda something far more important than entertainment. All three prisoners were exhausted after years of torture, malnutrition and captivity, and the urge to protect Joceline gave Amanda the motivation she needed to leave Castro’s house forever.

One of the most devastating experiences during the three women’s captivity was knowing that help was only a few tenants away in the form of Castro’s neighbors. But no matter how hard they tried, he intercepted every attempt to communicate with the neighbors. Escape attempts were nothing new for the prisoner. Sometimes Castro would test a prisoner by leaving windows or doors of the house unlocked to see if she would try to escape. He pretended to leave the house, and when the women tried to fly, he held on tight and beat them to prevent their escape.

It was on May 6, 2013, when Amanda Berry noticed that Castro had left one of the doors of the house unlocked. She could not get outside because the inner door of the house led directly to a sturdy storm door which was locked with a bolt. Amanda considered breaking down the storm door to escape, but after Castro’s past tests, she believed he had deliberately left the door unlocked and would soon intercept her. While Amanda was considering what to do, she saw some of Castro’s neighbors through the window. She thought of her daughter, who was now six years old, and did the only thing she could think of: she screamed as loudly as she could.

One of the neighbors, Angel Cordero, heard her scream, but due to his poor English skills, he didn’t understand what she was saying. When Angel came to the front door, another neighbor, Charles Ramsey, joined her. The two men quickly kicked the storm door until it broke, leaving a hole at the bottom just big enough for Amanda to climb through. She picked Joceline up and crawled out of the hole until she stood outside Ariel Castro’s house for the first time in ten years. Amanda quickly told the two men that she had been held captive in Castro’s house for more than a decade, and they took her directly to another neighbor’s house where they tried to calm her down while they called the police.

In her 911 call, Amanda told the operator:

“Help me! I was kidnapped and have been missing for ten years. I am here, I am free now!”

The police officers who responded to the call had no idea what to expect when they entered the house on Seymour Avenue, but after what they had heard from Amanda, they knew they had to be prepared. With weapons drawn, they searched every room of the house until they reached the upstairs hallway. When they identified themselves as police officers, one of the bedroom doors opened and Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus approached them. Michelle jumped into the arms of one of the officers and repeatedly told him:

“They saved me, they saved me.”

After Michelle and Gina assured the three officers that there were no other prisoners in the house, all three women and Joceline were immediately taken to a medical center for examination. Both Amanda and Gina were treated and discharged the next day, but Michelle’s condition required four days in the hospital before she could be released. It later emerged that the police had only visited Castro’s house once after the kidnappings. However, the visit was unrelated to the missing women and Castro was not at home at the time. Several of Castro’s neighbors came forward and said they had called the 911 emergency number to report suspicious activity they had noticed at Castro’s house, but the police responded that they had no record of these calls.

When Castro was exposed as the perpetrator of the kidnappings, his family members were forced to reassess the events of the past decade and completely change their view of the man they knew as their father or brother. Anthony, who had interviewed Gina’s mother for a newspaper article, recalls a conversation he had with his father about Amanda Berry. Castro had asked his son if he thought the missing woman would ever be found, to which Anthony, surprised by the question, replied that he thought Amanda was most likely deceased. Castro’s response was:

“Do you really believe that?”

Anthony also told the police that there were some areas in his father’s house that he could never enter because they were always locked.

During a search of Castro’s house, the police found a farewell letter written by Ariel Castro. In it, he confessed to the kidnapping and demanded that, in the event of his capture, all his assets and money should be handed over to his three prisoners. This revealed something about Ariel Castro that would later be proven beyond doubt. Despite the severity of his crimes, he had no escape plan in case one of his prisoners escaped or he was convicted of the crimes. He even seemed to consider it inevitable that he would one day be caught. On the same day that Amanda escaped, the police arrested Ariel Castro and placed him under arrest. In his lengthy interrogations with the police, Castro described the three kidnappings in detail and insisted that each kidnapping was merely a crime of opportunity in which the victims were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Since Castro made an open confession, it could no longer be denied that he was the guilty party and the indictment process against him began. The ordeal his victims endured was summarized in three cases of rape and four cases of kidnapping. Charges that in Ohio resulted in a minimum sentence of 10 years with the possibility of life imprisonment. Investigators found it almost unbelievable that Castro had carried out both the kidnapping and the imprisonment of the three women alone, which led to two of his brothers being briefly taken into custody. The police quickly discovered that none of the brothers had known about the kidnappings and the charges were dropped. Castro’s first court hearing took place on May 9th.

The public prosecutor was merciless and intended to impose the death penalty on Ariel Castro for his crimes. The bond for Castro was set at 8 million US dollars. A cumulative fine of 2 million US dollars for each kidnapping charge brought against him. However, there were other charges pending against him, including an additional charge of kidnapping for each day the individual prisoners were held, additional charges of rape for each sexual assault he committed, grievous homicide for each intentionally caused miscarriage, and several charges of assault. In response to the pending lawsuits, the defense lawyers stated that Castro intended to plead not guilty if charged with rape and kidnapping.

On June 7, 2013, the Kuja HOGA County jury revealed Castro’s true indictment for the period between August 2002 and February 2007, which included more than 300 charges. The indictment included, among other things, two different charges of aggravated murder by causing an abortion. McGinty, the Kuja Hoga County District Attorney, stated that the investigation into Castro’s crimes was not yet complete and that the District Attorney’s office intended to present its future findings to the grand jury to supplement the case. He also stated that the District Attorney’s office was considering imposing the death penalty after the indictment was completed.

Castro did exactly what his defense attorneys had announced: he pleaded not guilty to all charges and addressed the allegations against his client. Weintraub did not deny that some of the charges against Castro, such as leading and sexual assault, were legally sound and debatable, but he hoped to spare Castro the death penalty or the additional charges of aggravated murder, which he described as unnecessary. Weintrop added that the defense was very sensitive to the emotional strain and impact a trial would have on the women, their families, and the community. It then became clear that Castro would indeed stand trial after being deemed sane at the beginning of July.

Shortly after Castro was found to be eligible for trial, the grand jury submitted the actual indictment, which covered the remainder of the three women’s captivity – that is, up to the day of their rescue. The amended indictment, filed on July 12, contained even more charges than the previous one. The total number of charges against Ariel Castro now amounted to 977. In addition to the approximately 500 charges of kidnapping and an equal number of rape allegations, Castro was also charged with multiple counts of endangering children, possession of criminal tools, grievous bodily harm, aggravated sexual assault, and aggravated murder. Five days later, Castro again pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Should Castro be convicted on all these charges, he would face the death penalty, which would be carried out by lethal injection. On July 26, Castro decided to accept a settlement offered to him. The agreement would allow him to avoid the death penalty and instead serve a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Castro pleaded guilty to 937 of the 977 charges, had the house on Seymour Avenue demolished, and waived his right to appeal his sentence or profit from the crime he committed. The verdict was irrevocable; Ariel Castro would not be executed, but in addition to the life sentences he faced, he would face 1000 years in prison.

Judge Michael Russo of the Kuja HOGA County common court looked directly at Castro and asked him sternly:

“You will not be released, is that clear?”

Castro replied:

“That’s clear to me, Your Honor.”

Before he tried to win the judge’s sympathy by pointing to his sexual problems and his pornography addiction. However, Russo interrupted Castro’s attempts and simply informed him that he could discuss these issues at his sentencing hearing in August. For Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, the news that their tormentor would never leave prison was a relief. The legal representatives of the three women reacted to the settlement with a public statement saying: They are satisfied with this solution to the case and look forward to this legal proceeding being brought to a final conclusion in the near future. After living for a decade under Aril Castro’s rule, all three victims were ready to move on with their lives and begin the slow process of healing from the torture.

At the sentencing hearing for Castro, which took place on August 1st, he spoke to the courtroom for almost 20 minutes. It appeared that he was once again trying to elicit some kind of sympathy from the court by saying that he was not a monster and insisting that he was in fact a good person. He explained to the court that he had never tortured his victims and insisted that most of the sexual encounters between him and his victims had been consensual. He partly blamed his crimes on his porn addiction, which he claimed to have had since childhood, but also placed some of the blame on his victims. Castro believed that the decision to get into a vehicle with a stranger made his victims complicit, as did the revelation that he had discovered they were no longer virgins while sexually abusing each of the women for the first time.

After blaming his victims for their own kidnapping and subsequent sexual assaults, Castro went on to blame the FBI itself for the fact that the woman was not rescued sooner. In a bizarre statement, Ariel Castro told the court:

“I hope you can forgive me in your heart, because we had a lot of harmony in this house.”

Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus did not speak before the judge but instead let family members speak for them. Their families told the court about the suffering the victims had experienced and the damage Ariel Castro had caused each of the women. Michelle Knight herself stepped onto the witness stand and looked at Castro as she spoke directly to him. She said:

“They took 11 years of my life, I spent 11 years in hell, now your hell is just beginning. I will overcome everything that has happened, but you will experience hell for eternity. I will go on living. You will die a little bit every day when you think about the eleven years of cruelty you have inflicted on us. I can forgive you, but I will never forget.”

Castro received the promised sentence: 1000 years in prison with further life sentences and without the possibility of parole at any time during his imprisonment. Castro not only had to hand over the house on Seymour Avenue and all his remaining assets to the government, but also received an additional fine of 100,000 US dollars. It seemed Michelle had been right when she told Castro that his hell was only just beginning. Just one month after the start of his prison sentence, Castro was found dead in his cell with a bedsheet hanging around his neck. The staff tried to revive him but were unable to bring him back. Castro was immediately taken to the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and officially pronounced dead on the evening of September 3rd.

The autopsy revealed that the cause of death was suicide by hanging, and his body was cremated shortly afterwards. At the time of Ariel Castro’s death, he was checked by staff every half hour, although he was never on suicide watch. In October 2013, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction proposed in a report that Castro’s actual cause of death was autoerotic asphyxiation, not suicide by hanging, and that prison staff reports about Castro in the hours before his death had been falsified. However, this theory was quickly dismissed, and the medical examiner maintained that the cause of death was suicide. On December 3rd, the expert’s report on Castro’s death was published. The report concluded that all the evidence found in Castro’s cell indicated that he was at risk of suicide and had decided to take his own life, including a shrine-like arrangement of family pictures and a Bible in his cell and the reality of spending the rest of his life in prison while being constantly subjected to harassment.

After the death of Ariel Castro, his three victims began to reorganize their lives. A bank account called the Cleveland County Fund was set up to help Amanda, Michelle, and Gina adjust to freedom, and more than one million dollars were raised. Shortly before Amanda was kidnapped by Castro, her grandfather had promised her that he would give her a vintage car, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo. Even when Amanda’s case seemed to have reached a dead end, her grandfather never gave up hope that she was still alive and he kept the Chevrolet in the garage when Amanda escaped from Castro’s house. As promised, he handed the car over to Amanda, and several local car repair shops offered to restore the vehicle free of charge. Amanda also hosted several missing persons programs on television in Cleveland to help families find missing relatives.

Gina began volunteering with the Amber Alert Committee, helping families of missing children. And both she and Amanda received an honorary high school diploma. Michelle Knight legally changed her name to avoid being recognized, but gave an interview to a magazine a year after the end of her ordeal. In the interview, she revealed that her son Joey had been adopted while she was missing, but that she only wanted to re-establish contact with him when he was grown up so that he wouldn’t have to witness the trauma of what she had gone through. Their plans for the future were simple: fall in love, get married, open a restaurant, and adopt children. She also revealed that she wanted to maintain contact with Gina and Amanda, but that she first needed to heal herself before doing so. On August 7, 2013, Michael Knight stood in front of the house on Seymour Avenue and handed out balloons to a group of onlookers. She explained to them that each of the yellow balloons represented a missing child. After the crowd had released the balloons into the sky, a crane began the first attack against the house. They stood there and watched as it was reduced to rubble.

And that concludes this very disturbing case, in my opinion. So where should I begin? For almost eleven years, Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus were prisoners of Ariel Castro, who abused them in the worst possible way. The liberation of the three young women is now almost ten years in the past, and they have largely tried to find their way back to a normal life. As I already roughly explained in the previous episode, over the years they became activists who helped find kidnapping victims, and Michelle’s book also deals with this, among other things. She addresses a fact that I personally find very shocking: as I told you in the previous episode, after Michelle’s disappearance, there was no real search for her, and her data was even deleted from the missing persons database. At the time, investigators strongly assumed that she had run away because she had lost custody of her son.

A year later, Amanda Berry and then Gina the Jesus became further victims of Ariel Castro. These two missing persons cases were addressed in the “Mysteries” section, but not a word was said about me. And this is exactly what Ariel Castro told her. He convinced her that there was no one in the world who had ever searched for her, and that is truly appalling. Michelle’s son was… At the time of her introduction, he was three years old. At the time of Michelle’s escape, the boy didn’t know who his biological mother was. His adoptive parents, however, were always in close contact with Michelle and sent me pictures and videos, and yes, regular updates about his growing up and generally his life. To what extent Michelle has contact with him now is unknown. I ‘ve searched, and yes, there are quite a few blog entries, but somehow nothing really concrete about her life.