The Lost Girls (30 page)

Besides Wooley, attorneys Kathy Joseph, Heather Kimmel, and Henry Hilow, were also representing the survivors on a pro bono basis.

A few hours later, at a secret location outside Cleveland, Pedro and Onil Castro gave an exclusive interview to CNN reporter Martin Savidge. They were now well groomed and wearing smart shirts and ties, looking nothing like their grungy, unshaven mug shots taken almost a week earlier.

“You all went to your mom’s for dinner?” asked Savidge at the beginning of the seventeen-minute interview.

“Yeah,” replied Onil, “we went to Mom’s for dinner.”

Onil said the first sign of trouble came when police pulled over his brother Ariel’s sports car in the McDonald’s parking lot.

“I’m wondering why he’s pulling [in],” said Onil, “we just ate.”

When Onil asked if he needed the bathroom, Ariel replied that the police were right behind them and he didn’t know why. Within seconds two officers were standing on either side of the car, asking for Ariel’s ID. Then Onil had reached for his own ID, and one of them went for his weapon.

“And I said, ‘I haven’t done anything, what’s going on here?’” said Onil. “He says, ‘All I can tell you is that you are in for some serious allegations.’”

Soon afterward, police had arrested Pedro, who was passed out at his mother’s house.

“I was sleeping,” he told Savidge, “and I don’t remember the police in my room. And I was thinking because I had an open container … they were taking me in because of that.”

The Castro brothers had spent the next two days in jail, without knowing why they had been arrested. Pedro had finally asked a prison officer to find out.

“So she comes back [with] a piece of paper written down whatever I was in for,” said Pedro. “I didn’t have my reading glasses. I looked and said, ‘Oh, open containers?’ She said, ‘No, read it again.’ And I said, ‘Oh, kidnapping. What’s this kidnapping?’”

In jail they were kept in separate cells, but Pedro and Onil did see Ariel as he was escorted past their cells by guards to use the toilet.

Pedro said that Ariel had only said the word “peace” to him, while Onil said he had told him he loved him, but they were never going to see each other again.

They said they only discovered what Ariel had done after investigators told them the three missing women had been found in his house. Onil described that moment as “heart-dropping,” saying he could not believe it.

“You had been to the house?” asked Savidge.

“Yes,” replied Pedro.

“How often?”

“I didn’t go to his house very much,” said Pedro, “but when I did he wouldn’t let me in past the kitchen. I would sit down … in the kitchen because he had alcohol. He would take me in the kitchen, give me a shot.”

Pedro said when he had once asked Ariel why he had blocked off his house with heavy curtains, he said it was to keep the kitchen warm and save on his gas bill. Pedro said the radio or the television would always be turned up high, so it was impossible to hear anything else.

“Did you in any way know, help, assist your brother in the horrible things he’s accused of doing?” asked Savidge.

“Absolutely not,” replied Onil. “No idea that this horrific crime was going on.”

“No,” Pedro agreed.

“You know [there are] people who say you had to know?” observed Savidge.

“For those people out there, I’m going to tell you something,” said Pedro angrily. “I had nothing to do with this and I don’t know how my brother got away with it for so many years.”

“He fooled you?” asked Savidge.

“He fooled me,” Pedro agreed, “because I used to go there … to work on cars, clean the yard, help him out and stuff. But I never went beyond the kitchen.”

Then Savidge asked how they felt about Ariel, now they knew what he had done.

“A monster,” Onil replied. “I hope he rots in that jail. I want him to suffer to the last extent. I don’t care if we even feed him, for what he has done to my life and my family’s.”

“I feel the same way,” said Pedro.

“To the both of you now,” asked Savidge, “he no longer exists?”

“Yeah,” replied Onil. “The monster’s a goner. I’m glad that he left the door unlocked. Maybe he did it on purpose … and wanted to get caught. Maybe [his] time was up. But if he did it that way he shouldn’t have went to Mamma’s house and picked me up and put me in a car, if he knows that was going to happen.”

Finally, Savidge asked the brothers what they would have done, if they had known Ariel had three kidnapped women and a child under his roof.

“I would call the cops because that ain’t right,” said Pedro. “If I knew I would have reported it, brother or no brother.”

Gina DeJesus celebrated Mother’s Day with her family for the first time in nine years. After having her hair done in a local beauty salon, Gina came home to her favorite home-cooked meal of corn beef empanadas and potato balls (ground beef and potatoes rolled into balls and fried).

“It was the best Mother’s Day I could ever have,” said a beaming Nancy Ruiz. “I still feel it is a dream.”

Felix was so delighted to have his family together again, he was already planning the next celebration.

“We want to have a block party and close the streets down,” he told a reporter. “That’s the best Mother’s Day present any mother can have.”

As part of her healing process, Gina had now adopted Lola, one of the three dogs living at 2207 Seymour Avenue. Gina had bonded with the small terrier mix while she was a prisoner and wanted to keep her.

After the escape, Ariel Castro’s dogs, a Chihuahua named Dina, a shih tzu called Drake, and Lola, had been housed by an animal rescue group. Now Lola would move in with Gina, while the two other dogs would be put up for adoption.

Amanda Berry celebrated Mother’s Day with her visiting family from Elizabethton, who had decided to stay an extra day in Cleveland. But it was a bittersweet occasion without her late mother there.

Troy Berry said he had really bonded with his new great-granddaughter, Jocelyn.

“She jumped on my lap and said, ‘Papaw, give me a hug,’” he told a TV reporter. “She’s so smart. [Amanda] said she taught her a lot at home when [Castro] wasn’t around.”

Berry said the family took photographs of the reunion but were told by the FBI not to have them developed until after the trial.

On Monday morning, Amanda visited her mother’s grave. It was a moving occasion as Amanda was finally reunited with her beloved mother, who had died seven years earlier of what many believed to have been a broken heart.

“[Amanda] went to the cemetery this morning,” her uncle Curtis Berry told the New York
Daily News
.

He also revealed that Amanda was now considering moving to Elizabethton, Tennessee, with Jocelyn, to get away from Cleveland.

“She has more kin here than anywhere else,” he said. “This is her home.”

As Amanda Berry visited her mother’s grave, private investigator Chris Giannini interviewed Emily Castro at the Rockville Correctional Facility in Rockville, Indiana, where she was serving twenty-five years for attempting to kill her infant daughter. Giannini, who audio-recorded the interview, was seeking evidence to appeal Fernando Colon’s 2005 conviction for sexually molesting Emily and her younger sister, Arlene.

He first asked Emily what she now thought of her father.

“He’s a monster,” she replied, “and then actually seeing the guy that hugged us and smiled with us and took us to eat and cared about us supposedly, is the guy who’s in handcuffs.”

A tearful Emily, now twenty-five, said she now felt her father had used her in the kidnappings of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, both of whom she knew from school. Giannani asked if she was aware that Gina and Amanda were saying that she was in the car just before they were abducted.

“It hurts so bad,” said Emily. “I’m just saying that, that I feel used. I feel like I’m nothing to him, do you know what I mean? I feel nothing anymore.”

Emily said it bothered her that her father hunted for victims in the streets around Wilbur Wright Middle School, which she and her sisters attended.

“He would come to his own kids’ neighborhood,” she told Giannini. “He didn’t consider anything about us being his kids. He didn’t consider that he’s not only [kidnapping children] but he’s hurting us.”

During the interview, Emily said her father was often violent when she was growing up and savagely beat her late mother. Once she had jumped on her father’s back, and tried to stab him with a pencil, when he attacked her mother after her brain surgery.

She said that her father had never abused her or her sisters and was overprotective, insisting they always wear shorts under their skirts, T-shirts over their bathing suits and even shower with their underwear on.

She said she rarely visited 2207 Seymour Avenue after her parents broke up, and when she did, was never allowed past the kitchen.

“I’m thinking of the dates, to where he would actually have [the girls],” said Emily. “The upstairs was blocked off with a big bass speaker.”

She had last spoken to her father three days before he was arrested, and now felt betrayed by him as she and her sisters had all known Amanda and Gina.

“I’ve seen Gina a couple of times,” she said, “and then it couldn’t be coincidence. And so I had to bury my dad as being a good person completely.”

Finally, when Giannini asked if she had been coerced by her father to testify that Fernando Colon had sexually abused her, she refused to change her story.

“She’s standing by her father,” said Giannini, “so you get this conflict in her head of, ‘My dad’s a bad man but my dad told me to say these things.’”

On Tuesday at noon, Cleveland police removed the barriers outside 2207 Seymour Avenue, allowing pedestrians and drivers their first glimpse of the “horror house.” Seymour Avenue would become a ghoulish sight-seeing destination, and from now on, to the annoyance of neighbors, hundreds of people would arrive daily to stare at it and pose for photographs outside.

“I just came to see it with my own eyes,” said Stan Miller, who lived on the other side of Cleveland, “but the next time I come, I’ll probably bring my cell phone, take a picture.”

Armed police still guarded the house around the clock to prevent curiosity seekers coming in, as it was still a crime scene.

“It’s like a movie … over there,” said neighbor Arivar Santiago. “A lot of people are going to come from other states to take a picture of the house.”

Late Tuesday afternoon, Ariel Castro met with his new criminal attorneys, Craig Weintraub and Jaye Schlachet for the first time. The two prominent Cleveland lawyers, with more than sixty years’ legal experience between them, had been contacted by Castro’s uncle Cesi two days after his arrest.

“Both my partner and I have had high-profile cases in our careers,” said Weintraub, “and when the call came in we both had to decide the advantages and disadvantages of getting involved in this … extremely high profile case. And we had to talk to our families, because we knew that there’s the potential to be scorned as the attorney for someone … accused of committing such heinous crimes.”

Since his transfer to Cuyahoga County Jail, Castro’s behavior had become increasingly bizarre. He spent most of his time lying on his mat, either sleeping or staring at the empty bunk overhead. Occasionally he would walk around his tiny cell naked, even though he had complained it was too cold. Several times he was seen by guards drinking Kool-Aid and staring at himself in the mirror.

As he was still on suicide watch, every ten minutes a guard looked through his cell door window, to make sure he was okay. He did not have a radio or television in the cell or access to newspapers or magazines.

On Sunday morning, Castro had refused to take a shower, complaining of a headache. Later, he had attempted to floss his teeth using the loose strings from his mat. A sergeant had reprimanded him, before trimming the mat to stop him from doing it again.

During Tuesday’s three-hour meeting with his two attorneys, Castro insisted on being naked. And whenever tough questions came up, he would order Weintraub to turn off the air conditioner. From the beginning he appeared to enjoy toying with his two defenders.

As he had already confessed to detectives without a lawyer present, the main issue for the defense was whether Castro would face the death penalty, as fetus murder is classed as aggravated homicide under Ohio law.

“The majority of the charges were indefensible,” Weintraub said later. “We knew he would spend the rest of his life in prison, so it would just be keeping him off death row.”

When Weintraub and Schlachet left Cuyahoga County Jail, they were besieged by media representatives with interview requests for Ariel Castro.

“There were television producers from the major networks waiting for us,” said Weintraub. “We spoke to them and took their business cards, and said maybe we’ll be in touch.”

The next morning, the two attorneys told a TV reporter that their client would plead not guilty to all the charges if a grand jury indicted him. Weintraub said Ariel Castro had been “demonized” by the world’s press before anyone knew the whole story.

“The initial portrayal by the media has been one of a ‘monster,’” said Weintraub, “and that’s not the impression I got when I talked to him for three hours.”

Asked how the three women ended up in 2207 Seymour Avenue, Weintraub was evasive.

“That fact will be disclosed as the case progresses,” he said. “I am aware of how he came into contact with them.”

Jaye Schlachet vowed that he and his partner would mount the “best defense” possible.

“I know the media wants to jump to conclusions,” he said, “and all the people in the community want to say terrible things about the person who’s accused. We’re not even at the beginning of the process. If this was a marathon race, we’re not even at the starting line yet.”

Weintraub also said that Castro loved his daughter Jocelyn, and was determined to remain in her life.

“I can tell you that Mr. Castro is extremely committed to the well-being and positive future for his daughter, who he loves dearly,” said Weintraub. “And if people find that to be a disconnect from what he’s alleged to have done, then the people will just have to deal with it.”