Michelle Knight, Cleveland Survivor Says She's 'Numb to Pain' About Tattoos

Michelle Knight continues to ink her chest and arms with elaborate tattoos. They wrap around her arms like sleeves and they tell the story of her life. 

"This one is the love of music," she told PEOPLE in an exclusive interview last year, pointing to musical notes near her wrist. "I'm planning for it to go up [my arm] and it's going to have a lily. It's telling the story of my love of music and me changing my name." 

Knight, now 34, changed her name to Lillian Rose Lee. Lilies are her favorite flower, she says. 

Two years ago, Knight escaped from her captor, who kidnapped her near his Cleveland home and held them against their will for more than a decade. Castro chained them to walls, and raped and tortured them while he kept them hidden. 

Castro was sentenced to life plus 1,000 years in prison in 2013.

Earlier this week, Knight told about a tattoo, which includes five flowers on her left arm. "Every rose is for every abortion that I had in the house," she says. 

In Knight's best-selling book, Finding Me, she writes about her multiple pregnancies and how Castro starved and punched her in the stomach until she miscarried. 

For now, Knight lives on her own near Cleveland. She continues sharing her story through the tattoo art inked on her body, even if the memories are painful. 

She shows off her colorful "protection dragon" that covers her entire wrist. It cost $600 and it took six hours to do. There are visible scars from the chains that once kept her captive. 

"When I did this one, it was hard to get [the colored ink] on there, so I told them not to be afraid to add pressure because I'm numb to pain," she told PEOPLE. "And when it got to here, that was the only part that hurt because that's where the scars are." 

Gina DeJesus's Parents Speak Out, 'We Knew That She Was Still Alive'

Credit: Getty Images

Gina DeJesus is encouraging others to never give up hope on missing loved ones.

Cleveland Kidnapping Victims Tell Their Frightening Stories In Special ABC Interview

On Wednesday, Action News Jax reported that the young woman who was held captive in a suburban house in Cleveland for nine years before her rescue traveled all the way to Jacksonville, Florida in honor of a missing boy.

Mark Degner went missing in 2005 at the age of 12 where he and his friend Bryan Hayes disappeared near Paxon Middle School.

See PHOTOS Of Michelle Knight Spending Time With Actress Who Portrayed Her In Lifetime Film

DeJesus's parents spoke up about their daughter's disappearance where they knew they would see Gina again.

"We knew that she was still alive," Gina's mother, Nancy Ruiz, said. "We knew we had to fight. We knew we had to bring awareness. Parents don't ever give up."

"It's very hard, the not knowing of how your child's doing," Gina's father, Felix DeJesus, said. "How they're eating, how they're being taken care of. When are you going to find them? But never give up. Always have that hope."

Knowing her parents were staying strong in their search helped give Gina the hope that she would return home someday.

"Every time I'd see my parents on TV, it would give me even more hope to know one day I was going to come back home to them," Gina said.

The young woman was kidnapped by Ariel Castro where he abused her and two other women- Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry- for years before they found their freedom in 2013.
Credit enstarz

Ariel Castro, Ted Bundy and others in new book about Sexual Sadism

As for Ariel Castro's chapter: I draw attention to the fact that the man who kidnapped and impregnated Amanda Berry appeared to have a doting attachment to the child he conceived with the girl against her will. He didn't abuse the girl, and she referred to him as "daddy," happily. It's possible that he really loved this little girl -- and given the idea that he treated Amanda Berry better than the other two captives, it's possible that he had a sort of fantasy of being a family with her. Nonetheless, sexual sadists of this nature tend to also condition young victims -- and that's something I fear Castro was doing with little Jocelyn -- the six-year-old child he fathered with Amanda Berry.

Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus Sign Book Deal

Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus Sign Book Deal

Posted by Eric Sandy on Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 9:58 PM

• Berry

A shade under six months out from the May 6 rescue of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, two of the women have signed on to a book deal to tell their stories.

Berry and DeJesus will work with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mary Jordan to describe the years they spent living in Ariel Castro's home. Knight's role, if any, in the deal is unclear. There's no set release date for the book.

Here's attorney James R. Wooley of Jones Day, explaining the decision and taking a shot at both the local and national press corps:

Many have told, and continue to tell this story in ways that are both inaccurate and beyond the control of these young women. Our clients have a strong desire for privacy, but it is a reality that confronts them every day. Gina, Amanda and their families have decided to take control and are now interested in telling the story of what happened to them.”

Wooley adds that, their story will be “..above all else, about human dignity and human survival.

Is this Michelle Knight's Son?

Michele Knight poses for a photo with Gina DeJesus, family, and friends before the Cleveland Browns- Miami Dolphins game in Cleveland, Ohio.

The brave women smiled widely with their family at the Cleveland Browns football game against the Miami Dolphins Sunday afternoon. The crowds at FirstEnergy Stadium were abuzz for the kickoff of the 2013 NFL season, even if the hometown heroes went on to lose 23-10 to the Miami Dolphins. From the pictures, it looks as if Castro was far from their minds at the game, which is exactly what everyone — including Castro’s family — wishes for the young women he enslaved. I wonder is that Michelle Knight's son?

Ariel Castro: Sex Addict or Evil Genius

Ariel Castro, the man accused of holding three women captive for a decade, has agreed to life in a real prison plus 1,000 years, so he can avoid the death penalty.



Castro, who according to detailed secret chronicled diaries by all three women, attended church on Sunday before coming home to rape, beat and torture his victims, who were shackled to walls bound with duct tape or an extension cord and chained to a pole in the basement of Castro’s ram shackled house. At times he tortured them by subjecting them to the "cold of his basement" or the "heat of his attic."
At Castro’s sentencing hearing, his final court appearance, the diaries documenting their ordeal--- that had been kept secret from Castro [and the judge]--- are now introduced into evidence. Prosecutors, we are told, “relied on the diaries for many of the 977 criminal charges lodged against Castro.” Huh? “Relied on the diaries at the sentencing hearing?” A little unusual, I think you will agree.
According to a sentencing memorandum, “The entries speak of forced sexual conduct, of being locked in a dark room, of anticipating the next session of abuse, of the dreams of someday escaping and being reunited with family, of being chained to a wall and of being held like a prisoner of war.” Amanda Berry somehow found out her mother died during her captivity because her diary is addressed to “ her mother in heaven.”
Putting aside how she found out her mother died, how can you write and keep a diary secret, for ten years, when you were chained up and/or shackled, during which time you are being “viciously beaten, repeatedly raped, and “treated like an animal in a dark room, anticipating the next session of abuse?”


Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight

• Michele Knight, now 32, and the first of the three women to be kidnapped, was in a store asking for directions when Castro offered to give her a ride but then tricked her into coming to his house to pick out a puppy for her son, Joey, now living in foster care. In an ironic twist, Knight’s parents are the subject of a federal probe for cashing Michele’s Social Security checks while she was imprisoned all these years.

• Amanda Berry, a day before her 17th birthday, thought she was getting a ride home after her shift at a Burger King was over.

• Gina De Jesus, now 23, went home with him because he told her he needed help carrying a speaker to his car.

The three young girls disappeared and lived within blocks of one another in the same low-income neighborhood. They were kept locked up for 10 years in Castro’s house, also in the same neighborhood.
Castro’s son wrote a story about one of the girls and all of the girls were friends with one of Castro’s daughters by his first marriage. We aren’t told which one. One daughter, Emily, was convicted of slashing her 11-month-old daughter's throat and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The other, Annie Gregg, never wants to see him again.
Castro is a sex addicted evil genius who avoided authorities for the last decade and only likes to rape and beat women when they are wearing a motorcycle helmet.
The three women were confined in 1,436 square feet of this clapboard house with one bathroom for 10 years. Castro wired up the place with alarm clocks "in a makeshift manner" to create an alarm system to turn the house into a makeshift prison.




The women were kept in two rooms behind doors and curtains that could be secured from the outside with a lock, and a circular hole cut towards the bottom of the door so the women wouldn’t suffocate. The windows were boarded up with very heavy closet doors on the inside and plastic bags on the outside.
Anyone who came to visit, like the police, his two daughters, or his brothers, were kept in the kitchen. No one was able to detect the three women and a six-year-old girl, because Castro cleverly blocked visibility to the rest of the house with curtains that he explained, “were installed as an energy saving device.” Apparently, the curtains also served to sound proof the house because neither the brothers, the daughters, nor the police ever heard the screams for help from the three women behind the curtains.
His daughter Annie, who knew her "daddy" as a "friendly, caring, doting man,” visited him at the House of Horrors, during the ten years the three women were kidnapped, held captive, raped and beaten. She wants to know "how could you be so good to us, but (allegedly) take young women, little girls, someone else's babies, away from these families?”
My question for Annie is, “How could you” not know what was going on when you went visiting to his make-shift prison and didn’t think anything out of the ordinary was going on in her childhood torture chamber home? For example according to your CNN interview:

• He would take forever to come to the door," and “always had the house locked up tight.

• Once inside, visits were fun and cordial. Gregg, her husband and Castro "ate, looked at photos and listened to music," she said. "He appeared to be happy to see us and never rushed for us to leave." But at times, he would disappear from dinner and give no explanation for his absence.

• The music was usually turned up loud, but Gregg thought this to be fitting since Castro was a musician.

• Once she asked if she could go upstairs to see her childhood bedroom. Castro coaxed her out of the idea, telling her, "Oh, honey, there's so much junk up there. You don't want to go up there," she said.

• The basement was always locked.

Castro and Amanda a Match made in Hell
DNA tests confirmed that the six-year-old, born four years after her mother’s captivity, is Castro’s daughter. Castro, we are told, loves his little girl “dearly” and the child, we are also told, misses her father.

Here are current pictures of the three women.


According to doctors, they are all in surprising excellent physical and mental health, considering they were only allowed outside the house twice during their capture and fed McDonalds once a day for the last 10 years.
The horrific experience of being repeatedly raped “vaginally, orally and anally wearing motorcycle helmets” without access to the one bathroom in the house [each of them had a plastic toilet that was rarely emptied] finally came to an end when one of the next door neighbors, after 10 years, finally heard one of the women screaming and asking for help to get out of the clap trap house.
Amanda Berry, dressed in pajamas and sandals, was having trouble kicking a hole big enough in the front door [or front screen door] for her and her daughter to escape through to freedom.

An image of the door is below.


The neighbor, Ramsey Clark, who lived across the street, helped Amanda and her daughter kick a big enough hole in the door. She then borrowed his cell phone and called 911, “Hello it’s me, help me, I’m Amanda Berry! ” One has to wonder why it took 10 years for anyone to hear the three women screaming to get out of their hell or why it took them so long to finally kick in the front door. One has to also wonder why none of the women never picked up the phone in the house to dial 911. Yes, the Castro home at 2207 Sycamore Street had a landline.
Anyway, Amanda then tells the 911 operator that, “I need police … I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years and I’m here, I’m free now.” However, as implausible as it may seem, Amanda doesn’t go back in the house to tell Knight and De Jesus they can finally escape Castro’s makeshift prison. And even more beyond belief, is how effective Castro’s sound proof curtains were at separating the up from the downstairs of the 1,436 square feet House of Horrors.
The two women are upstairs, unbound, and don’t hear a thing until the police enter the house and make a lot noise walking upstairs. When Ms. Knight realizes it’s the police, she “literally launched herself” into an officer’s arms, and just kept repeating, ‘You saved us! You saved us!’”
Saved us?
Not according to Castro. After he was arrested, he declared his innocence of any criminal activity and tells the police he is not a violent person and objects to being painted as a monster because he is also a victim. Castro claimed he was “abused as a child and addicted to porn.” Now shackled himself, unshaven and wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, he accused the three women of lying about being raped and tortured. He tells the media that, "Most of the sex that went on in the house, and probably all of it, was consensual" [with or without the motorcycle helmet]. "As God is my witness, I never beat these women like they're trying to say that I did. I never tortured them," we all lived in “a lot of harmony."
He is even upset with the FBI for not thoroughly investigating the abductions. Huh?
Of course, we may never know the real truth behind this made for TV drama because when he agreed to spend 1,000 years in prison the women won’t have to testify under oath about their ten-year-ordeal.
When Castro wasn’t raping the three women, he was playing the bass guitar at clubs, churches and cultural celebrations or attending barbecues at the neighbors on holidays.
I am trying to decide which part of this story is more unbelievable:

That these three women, after being kept locked up by a bus driver and erstwhile musician in a ram shackled, 1,436 square foot, one-bathroom house built in 1890, would not have escaped or committed suicide after 10 weeks, let alone 10 years of beatings, rape [forced oral anal and vaginal sex] and torture is unmitigated nonsense. However, what is even more difficult to believe is that any of the three of them would have asked for, let alone agreed to, consensual sex [with or without a helmet] with an overweight loser who fed them McDonald's once a day for 10 years.

Is there any woman who could live through getting pregnant four times in 10 years, and each time aborted because she was either punched or kicked in the stomach, which caused her to fall down the stairs on her way to the kitchen to be starved or forced to eat rotten food?
The story might make a little more sense if the Castro brothers, who were arrested but later released, had been involved. Initially it was thought that all the Castro brothers forced the three women to have sex, resulting in up to five pregnancies and four abortions due to beating the women when they got pregnant, according to a report by Cleveland's WKYC-TV.
I don’t know what was really going on during the 10 years these three women were missing, but I am pretty sure there is a third story.
Then we have to reconcile Castro’s criminal record and his repeated encounters with the Cleveland Police, who never heard the three women screaming when they were being raped and tortured during the 10 years.
Neighbors claim they called the cops on Castro for stealing a chain link fence and suspicious activity for years, only to have police ignore them.
The Cleveland Police Department itself disputes the claims, saying its records indicate officers had visited the Seymour Avenue residence only twice before this week: Once, to respond to a street fight that Ariel Castro, the lead kidnapping suspect, had called in himself, and once again to investigate allegations, later proven false, that Castro had briefly abducted a little boy when he was still employed as a bus driver in 2004. The police went to the house to investigate but the women inside weren’t screaming for help so they left.
Ask yourself this simple question. You kidnapped three women and are keeping them locked up in your ram shackled house with paper thin walls. Would you actually call the police and complain about a street fight in front of your house?
Castro does have a record of assault. His ex-wife, Grimilda Figueroa, who died last year, accused Castro of assault in 1989, 1993 and again in 2005, three years after he allegedly abducted his first victim Michelle Knight. Castro was "a monster," according to Figueroa's family members who spoke to ABC News last week on the condition of anonymity. Figueroa's family members might just be a little prejudiced against their former son-in-law, when they tell reporters that Castro was arrested for "throwing his wife [their daughter] to the ground, hitting her about the head and face and kicking her body."
Castro was arrested, but it appears Figueroa dropped the charges against him because the fight with Figueroa was about her refusal to testify against her then boyfriend Fernando Colon. Colon was convicted in 2004 of raping Castro’s two young daughters.
There are some who believe the House of Horrors nightmare might not have ended if Castro hadn’t lost his job as a bus driver last year.
First, he got a 60-day suspension for making a U-turn in rush-hour with his bus packed with students; and later, the neighbors complained that he used the school bus for personal use when he parked the bus in front of his house to unload bags-full of McDonald's fast food.
The neighbors called the Police because they thought it was “unusual” that he needed so much food.
The Police showed up, but according to the record, they knocked on the door and when no one answered and/or they didn’t hear anyone screaming to be “freed” from captivity inside, they didn't enter the home.
There were other calls about the unusual goings-on in the Castro house. Like the time the neighbors called the police because they saw a naked women being led on a leash in the yard, or a baby banging on one of the house's windows as if it was trying to escape. According to neighbors, the police showed up, but when they knocked on the door and no one answered or screamed, “Let me out I am a sex slave,” they left.

Post-traumatic Stress
While the three victims appear to be physically and mentally healthy after their freedom from the House of Horrors, adjusting to normal life is going to be difficult. "It's going to be a long-term struggle," said psychologist Rona Fields, who has treated torture victims.
Fields and Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist who specializes in adaptation to stressful environments, expect the trio will experience post-traumatic stress, self-esteem problems and difficulty making decisions. They also may have trouble reconnecting with family members they haven't seen in years. "I would like to be able to say, 'Oh, they are going to be fine. My advice would be to let them get used to things gradually."
Amanda Berry didn’t heed their advice. Here she is making her first public appearance at a Music Festival.



And finally, there’s a dog story sure to make you tear up. Ariel Castro owned at least three dogs [we are not told if they were indoor or outdoors dogs] that are now impounded and living in an animal shelter. While Amanda, Gina and Michele begin to enjoy their freedom and heal from their horrific ordeal, the dogs that were imprisoned with them are suffering in judicial limbo on a special FBI hold. However, there is hope for one of the dogs. The Cleveland police officer, who wished to remain unnamed, revealed that "one of the dogs and one of the victims bonded during their captivity.”
If you can figure out how a woman who is beaten, raped and tortured when she isn’t shackled to the wall can form a bond with one of Castro’s dogs, let me know.

 

The Long History of Ariel Castro, Cleveland Kidnapper and Monster

Amanda Berry was screaming into the fresh air, trying to claw her way out of the confines of 2207 Seymour Avenue. It was May 6 and countless lives were about to be irrevocably altered.

Charles Ramsey heard her screaming for help. Charles Ramsey happened to be in the right place at the right time - a point of fate that strung together 10 years of mystery and pain and hope.

Cleveland police began making their way toward the otherwise quiet thoroughfare that shoots off of West 25th Street, just a stone’s throw from I-90. The wreck of a home stood tall in the late afternoon light, almost bracing for the grand reveal of all the secrets waiting within. Soon enough, two other women emerged from the home, and internationally breaking news began spreading a message of joy around the world. Three long-missing women had been found. Alive. Relatively healthy and coherent.

Ariel Castro, 52, and his brothers Pedro and Onil were arrested following the rescue of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. (May 8 Update: Ariel was charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape - all first-degree felonies. Pedro and Onil were not charged with anything.) Ariel owned the Seymour Avenue home where the women had been kept. Police sources paint a grim picture of chains, restraints, locked doors, and rape.

“Those guys were walking out of the house with 1,000-yard stares,” said one source.

The details surrounding who knew what in the neighborhood and within the Castro family remain murky at best. But the investigation is plowing on this week, thanks to bravery from unsuspecting corners.

For Amanda’s actions and Charles’s quick assistance, both are lauded as heroes in the community.

But it’s unclear whether their rescue needed to wait so long. Leads came and went during the past decade.

Israel Lugo, a neighbor, told MSNBC that he summoned cops in 2011 after “his sister spotted a woman with a baby in the home, banging on the window ‘like she wants to get out.’”

"The cops came,” he said. “They pounded on that man’s door around 15, 20 times, real hard. They looked in the driveway, they got back in the squad car and left."

“Every single lead was followed up no matter how small,” Cleveland police Deputy Chief Ed Tomba said during a press conference.

But lingering loose ends remain as law enforcement officials, family members, neighbors and investigators work to meld the disparate pieces of this puzzle.

***

Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, as sources put it, were close with the Castro family. Emily and Arlene Castro were similar in age to the girls, and they often hung out in the neighborhood.

“These kids all knew each other,” private investigator Chris Giannini says. During and after the girls’ disappearances, in 2004, he employed a man named Fernando Colon - Ariel Castro’s ex-wife’s husband - as a security site supervisor at a local shopping center and got to know the inner workings of the family fairly well.

Colon had fallen under the suspicions of the FBI during their investigation into DeJesus’s whereabouts. By way of marriage, he was somewhat close to the Castro family, and his step-daughters certainly ran in the same circles at the missing teenager. Colon was soon brought in for questioning regarding the disappearances.

But he was cleared following a polygraph test. The man in turn insisted that FBI agents look into Ariel Castro, a man who seemed to attract tumult and disorder throughout his adult life.

“They did not follow up on that,” Giannini says. The Cleveland Division of the FBI offered no comment on the matter when contacted by Scene.

It was 2004, still within the first year of DeJesus’s disappearance. She, along with Berry and Knight, were still regular fixtures in local conversation. Within the Castro family, however, turmoil was bubbling. As Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight grew up painfully inside Ariel Castro’s home, he was fighting to keep the eye of the law far away.

Emily and Arlene Castro, teenagers themselves, did not live with their father. Their mother, Grimilda Figueroa, had married Colon and brought her daughters to live with them over on West 110th Street. Allegations of sexual molestation against Colon soon threatened the stability of the household. Law enforcement once again zeroed in on Fernando Colon, all while Ariel Castro egged them onward. As his daughters continued to accuse Colon of touching them inappropriately - of penetrating them - Ariel Castro began visiting them more frequently and showering them uncharacteristically with gifts. They didn’t spend much time at Castro’s Seymour Avenue house, though. He ensured that much.

The Castro girls’ mother did not believe their mostly frantic allegations. Nor did their older brother, Ariel “Anthony” Castro. Nonetheless, Colon was indicted in late 2004 on 27 criminal charges, including kidnapping and gross sexual imposition, and later offered a light sentence that he couldn’t realistically appeal. Ariel Castro had testified against him in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. His wife and Castro’s son had testified on his behalf, hoping to clear Colon’s name in this increasing confusing tangle of allegations. Colon’s wife repeatedly told investigators that there was no credence to any of the charges.

This personal history is resurfacing following the arrest of Ariel and his brothers, mostly because it paints one of the few concrete images of life within the family. Ariel Castro had free range of the Seymour Avenue house — his son told the Daily Mail that his father kept the basement, garage, and attic locked and off-limits — and keeping his three kidnapped victims quietly within became a simple task.

***

"Words can't even explain," Tasheena Mitchell, Berry's cousin, told Scene as she gathered with hundreds of neighbors and family members outside MetroHealth Medical Center Monday night. She was nearly shaking at times.

"I feel blessed. I'm ecstatic,” she said, adding that there was never a day where she gave up hope on finding her cousin. "I think about her everyday."

A neighbor chimed in: "Prayers do come true. It's surreal."

The three women were released from the hospital in good condition Tuesday morning. Unconfirmed reports from family members at the scene, which police and doctors had not publicly commented on as of press time, noted that at least one and possibly as many as five babies were born during the women's captivity. A six-year-old child left the house with Berry as police arrived.

Speculation on the condition of the Seymour Avenue home abounded in the hours and days following the rescue. By any standards, the relative health and coherence of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight was a miraculous turn of events.

"This isn't the ending we usually get to these stories," Dr. Gerald Maloney, who works in the Emergency Room at MetroHealth, said.

Family members and friends spent the day and the night - every waking hour - rejoicing. It was the best of all possible family reunions, save for the void left by Berry’s mother’s death in 2006.

Louwana Miller, bereft of her daughter and any semblance of meaningful information about her disappearance, died of a broken heart, friends and family have said. She spoke with Scene in 2003, seven months after Berry disappeared. Already at that point, Miller openly feared, the city had given up on her.

"Me and her was very close," Miller said. "She always called when she was going someplace." She was last seen a day before her 17th birthday as she left for a shift at Burger King on West 110th and Lorain. Miller acknowledged that much of Cleveland bent over backward in the weeks following the disappearance, working to maintain awareness and follow up on any possible light. But news cycles demand change, and Miller was soon lamenting the loss of her daughter to few outside of her immediate social circle.

She offered stirring words in 2003, complete with the silver lining that truly never escaped her:

“One good thing is that they haven't found her body.”

Family members, of course, wished openly that Miller could be here now.

***

Ariel Castro spent much of the past decade working as a bus driver for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. According to police, his most notable interaction with the law occurred when he left a child on a bus in 2004, resulting in a call from Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services. “He was interviewed extensively,” Tomba said.

Castro would eventually be fired in November 2012 after leaving a child on his bus.

Public Safety Director Martin Flask said at the same press conference Tuesday morning that Children and Family Services were not able to make contact with Ariel after visiting his home. It’s unclear what developments really followed the report of a child being left on the bus, but no charges were ever brought about in that case.

Once again, Tomba’s words at the Tuesday morning press conference hang in the air: “Every single lead was followed up no matter how small,” he said. Unavoidable thoughts hearkening back to Anthony Sowell’s 2011 serial murder convictions hang in the air, as well. The rescue at the Seymour Avenue house will bear out a legacy on the backs of all involved, much like Cleveland’s other high-profile crimes.

Stories revolving around Castro’s work as a bus driver and his interactions with family members fill out characteristics about the man - elements of his personality that may have led to both the kidnapping and to his evasion from law enforcement.

In 1993 and 2005, Castro was accused of domestic violence from his one-time wife. The former charges were reduced to mere disorderly conduct, while the latter incident offered grisly imagery of a fractured marriage still capable of wreaking havoc. Castro broke his ex-wife’s nose and ribs, dislocated her shoulders, knocked out one of her teeth and battered her so hard that a blood clot formed on her brain, according to filings in court. In an interview with investigators after the fact, Castro denied ever being abusive toward her.

That filing effectively killed Castro’s chances at even partial custody of his children. Nevertheless, as sources familiar with the man report, his penchant for manipulation pulled Emily and Arlene back into his gravitational pull at times.

Several years after the gross sexual imposition conviction of Colon blew over, Emily Castro gave birth to a girl. It’s unclear who the father was - though speculation points to either a former boyfriend who now lives in Cleveland or, according to the private investigator, something much more untoward, evil, and incestuous.

Emily was living in Fort Wayne, Ind., where she attempted to murder her 11-month-old daughter by slashing her throat four times in 2007. She was later convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

“It is certainly a mystery as to how this happened or why this happened,” Allen Superior Court Judge John Surbeck told The Journal Gazette at the time.

It is indeed a mystery that may yet hold more clues as to who Ariel Castro has been all these years. Any answers that lay within may illuminate a gap in local law enforcement’s own investigations.

***

The Regional Fusion Center and the Cleveland Police Department currently maintain a list of 96 missing persons in the area. Some of them have been missing since the mid-2000s. One was last seen in 1995.

Each person carries with them a story, a life.

Women like Ashley Summers and Christina Adkins have garnered attention in the region, thanks to widespread reporting and an insistent base of family and friends that maintains the vigil.

Summers was last seen at her West 96th Street home, near Madison Avenue, in July 2007. The FBI has not come close to solving the mystery of Summers’ whereabouts, though various reports indicate the possibility that she has been held against her will and that foul play has not been an immediate suspicion in her case. The FBI had tied the investigation into Summers' disappearance into those of Berry and DeJesus as recently as 2009, though the department never explained why.

It took about 10 years for three of the most prominent names on the city’s list of missing persons to come off that roster and back into some semblance of normalcy. Ten years for three names.

***

WEWS posted an interview Monday night with Charles Ramsey, the neighbor who found Berry as she was running out of the house. In the hours following the rescue, that interview went about as viral as it could go, hitting all corners of the Internet and bestowing upon Ramsey a heroic bit of worldwide fandom. “I heard screaming…And I see this girl going nuts trying to get outside,” he said. “I go on the porch and she said, ‘Help me get out. I’ve been here a long time.’"

He had been working over a meal from a nearby McDonald’s just moments before - a fact that figured prominently in the Internet’s collective gushing. The fast food corporation reached out on Tuesday, writing: “Way to go Charles Ramsey- we'll be in touch.”

Ramsey stepped into local history Monday night, precisely as the names Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight re-entered local conversation with fervor and optimism.

All of their actions, which won out over the evil brewing on Seymour Avenue this past decade, are a testament to the power of will in this community and to the need for hope in the face of darkness. This matter of profound significance was not ushered in by way of police investigations or federal law enforcement insight. Three long-missing women are safe and out of harm’s way today solely due to the faith they fostered and the bravery they summoned.

Going forward, the weight of unanswered questions is countered only by the overwhelming joy resounding through Cleveland and the rest of the world.