Missing in Cleveland: The True Story of the Seymour Avenue Abductions

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In Cleveland, Ohio, there's a house that doesn't exist anymore.

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The city demolished it in August of 2013 and shredded every single piece of it so that

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nothing could be kept or sold.

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For 11 years, that house stood at 2207 Seymour Avenue, completely ordinary from the outside.

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Neighbors walked past it.

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Police made visits to it.

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Three women were inside waiting for someone to notice.

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Cremont is one of those neighborhoods in Cleveland that has been quietly working class for over

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a hundred years.

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Church on Sunday, kids on bikes in the summer, everyone on the block knowing each other's

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names.

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On Seymour Avenue, there was a house that had been standing since 1890, a two-story building

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with nothing about it that would make you slow down as you drove past.

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Ariel Castro lived there, and most of his neighbors would have called him a decent guy.

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He played bass guitar in local salsa bands, and his bandmates described him as upbeat,

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always laughing, always joking around.

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He barbecued on his front porch and shared food with whoever happened to be nearby.

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For 22 years, he drove a school bus for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.

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In April of 2004, when a 14-year-old girl named Gina DeJesus disappeared from the neighborhood,

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Ariel Castro was at the community visuals, handing out flyers and consoling her grieving

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mother at neighborhood events.

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Gina was at his house.

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To understand how a decade of captivity becomes possible, you have to start with who Ariel

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Castro actually was.

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He was born in Puerto Rico in 1960 and came to Cleveland through Reading, Pennsylvania

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as a child.

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His early life was brutal in a specific and documented way.

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He was sexually abused, starting at age five by neighbor and then later an uncle.

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His mother paired physical beatings with consistent verbal degradation and researchers who studied

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his psychology described the pattern as systematic.

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A person who experiences complete powerlessness throughout his childhood very often spends adulthood

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searching for situations where they hold all the control, all the power.

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Castro found this.

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In junior high, he was suspended for sexually touching a female classmate, an incident that

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was documented, but received no meaningful follow-up.

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By adulthood, the need for domination had calcified into something that was going to find an outlet

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regardless.

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The outlet found its first target in a woman named Grimilde Figueroa, Castro's common

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law wife and the mother of his children.

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What happened to her inside that house before any of the abductions is a chapter of the

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story that rarely receives the weight that it deserves.

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He broke her nose twice, broke her ribs, and dislocated her shoulders.

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He threw her down a flight of stairs with enough force to fracture her skull, causing a

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blood clot in her brain that eventually became an inoperable tumor and contributed to

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her death in 2012.

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He was arrested for domestic violence in 1993 and a grand jury declined to indict.

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When Grimilde later tried to secure a restraining order, Castro staked out the courthouse and intimidated

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her and her children into staying away.

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Through a combination of neglect and procedural failure, the legal system had given him a working

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confirmation of something he had been testing all along, that he could do whatever he wanted

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inside that house and no one was going to stop him.

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On August 23, 2002, Michelle Knight was 21 years old and walking near Lorraine Avenue

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when Castro encountered her, a single mother in the middle of a painful custody battle

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for her young son, Joey.

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She was carrying more than her share that day.

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Castro offered her a ride and told her that he had a puppy that she could have and take

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to her little boy at home.

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She got in the car.

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Once inside the house on Seymour Avenue, she was taken upstairs and bound using extension

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cords, held in a stress position for three days without food or water.

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When Cleveland police eventually looked into her disappearance, they categorized her

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as a runaway, citing her troubled background and custody situation.

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Fifteen months after she disappeared, they removed her from the National Missing Person's

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Database entirely.

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Castro used that fact often as a psychological weapon, telling her that the world had decided

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that she is not worth finding.

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Amanda Berry disappeared on April 21, 2003, the day before her 17th birthday.

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She had finished her shift at Burger King and called her sister to say that she had a

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ride home.

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Her disappearance generated a much larger community response than Michelle's had, partly

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because of her age and partly because of a sustained media attention.

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During the first week of the search, Castro called Amanda's mother from Amanda's own cell

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phone and told her that her daughter was fine and would be home in a couple of days, then

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he hung up and went back inside.

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Her teen year old Gina DeJesus was on her way home from school on April 2, 2004, when

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Castro drove past her.

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That afternoon, she and Castro's daughter Arlene had called Arlene's mother for permission

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to make plans together and had been told no, so the girls parted ways.

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Castro came along shortly after, offering Gina a ride home.

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She was her best friend's father, someone she had known her whole life.

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She accepted, and that was the last time anyone outside that house saw her for nine years.

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The windows of the house were boarded up or covered with heavy plastic.

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The women were kept in upstairs bedrooms or the basement, frequently restrained with chains.

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Castro hid the padlock keys inside a Pringles can on the kitchen table.

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Meals arrived once a day, often fast food, sometimes spoiled fast food.

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She periodically left interior doors unlocked as deliberate tests, then punished anyone

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severely who tried to use that opening.

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Over the years of that cycle, the women developed what psychologists called "learned helplessness,"

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a state where even a genuine opportunity to escape registers in the mind as something

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to fear rather than something to act on.

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Open doors stopped looking like exits for them.

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The survivor accounts and court documents both make clear that the women chose consistently

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and deliberately to sustain each other.

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They built routines out of almost nothing, shared whatever resources appeared, and held

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each other together with a degree of intention and care that is genuinely difficult to describe

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from the outside, and even harder to fully comprehend.

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That intention is what kept them alive.

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On Christmas Day 2006, Amanda Berry gave birth to Castro's child inside that house.

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He had placed a plastic waiting pool on the mattress to protect it and forced Michelle

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Knight to serve as midwife, threatening her with death if the baby did not survive.

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When the baby arrived, not breathing, Michelle drew on her own experience as a mother and

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revived her.

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That child was named Jocelyn, and she became the shared center of gravity for everyone

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in the house who wasn't Ariel Castro.

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Castro occasionally took Jocelyn to the park and introduced her to neighbors as his girlfriend's

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daughter.

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Inside, the women cut holes in athletic socks to make her diapers and taped magazine pictures

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to the walls.

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The closest thing they had to a window onto a world she wasn't allowed to enter.

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They raised a child in their prison using every resource available to them, which was

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mostly each other and an absolute refusal to stop trying.

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On May 6, 2013, Castro left the house and forgot to lock the interior door.

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Amanda Berry had spent a decade learning which open doors were tests and which ones were

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real.

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This time, she listened to the particular quiet of an empty house and waited long enough

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to be certain.

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Then she went to the front door and started pounding and screaming.

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Her neighbor Charles Ramsey, inside his own home eating McDonald's, heard the screaming

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and yelling and came running.

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And he and her neighbor named Angel Cordero kicked through the bottom of the storm door.

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Amanda Berry and Jocelyn crawled out into daylight.

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Amanda called 911 from a neighbor's phone.

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She said, "Help me.

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I'm Amanda Berry.

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I've been kidnapped and I've been missing for 10 years.

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And I'm here.

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I'm free now."

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Police arrived within minutes and found Michelle Knight and Gina De Jesus in the upstairs

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bedrooms.

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Castro was arrested hours later, facing 937 counts.

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At his synancing, he told the courtroom that he was not a monster, that he had a sexual

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addiction, and that there had been many happy memories in that house.

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Michelle Knight faced him directly and told him that he had taken 11 years of her life

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and that she had taken it back.

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She told him his hell was just beginning.

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He received life without parole plus a thousand years.

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The house on Seymour Avenue was demolished in August 2013.

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Every piece shredded so that nothing could be sold or kept.

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On September 13, 2013, one month into his sentence, Castro was found dead in his cell.

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He hanged himself with a bed sheet.

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All three women chose to keep moving and reach outward while doing it.

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Amanda Berry hosts a daily segment on Cleveland's Fox 8 news, helping families find their own

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missing loved ones.

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Gina De Jesus co-founded a nonprofit for missing children and adults, and an adjuster that carries

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real weight, that organization is located on Seymour Avenue, on the same street where she

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was held.

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Michelle Knight, who now goes by Lily Rose Lee, has written two memoirs and dedicated her

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life to animal rescue and healing.

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They were hidden for a combined 30 years.

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They walked out, and then they got to work.

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Hey Charles, let me talk to you.

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I'm talking with Charles Ramsey, he's a neighbor.

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Walk me through again what happened this afternoon.

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You heard screaming.

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Her screaming.

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I meet my McDonald's.

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Come outside.

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I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of the house.

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So I go on the porch, and she says, help me get out.

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I've been in here a long time.

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So you know, I figured it's a domestic violence dispute.

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So I open the door and we can't get in that way because how the door is, it's so much

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that the body can't fit through only in your hand.

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So we click the bottom.

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And she comes out with a little girl and she says, call 911.

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My name was Amanda Berry.

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Did you know who that was when she said that?

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When she told me it didn't register until I got the call 911.

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And I'm like, I'm calling 911 for Amanda Berry.

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I thought this girl was dead.

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You know what I mean?

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And she got on the phone and she says, yes, this is me.

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And the detective, the detective Gregory Cook says, Charles, you know who you rescue?

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The girl Amanda told the police, I ain't just the only ones.

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It's some old girls up in that house.

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So they went up there, you know, 3040 deep.

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And when they came out, it was just astonishing because I thought they were going to come up

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with nothing.

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I figured, I mean, whoever she was, and like I said, my neighbor, you got some big testicles

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to pull this off, bro, because we see this dude every day.

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Barbecue with this dude.

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We eat ribs and whatnot.

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And listen to salsa music.

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You sound coming from?

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And you had no indication that they were dead and they got all the way.

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Bro, not a clue that that girl was in that house or anybody else was in there against their

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will because how he is is, he just comes out to his backyard, plays with the dogs, tinker

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with his cars and motorcycles, goes back in the house.

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So he's somebody you look and you look away because he's not doing nothing but the average

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stuff.

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You see what I'm saying?

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Nothing exciting about him.

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Well, until the day.

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What was your reaction on the girl's faces?

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I can't imagine to see the sunlight to be around.

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I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms.

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Something is wrong here.

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Yeah, give it away.

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Yeah, give it away.

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Yeah, give it away.

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Yeah, give it away.

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Yeah, give it away.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder.

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Bingeable True Crime Stories.

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Hello.

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I'm Joe, the host, and here's an email subject you're listening habits.

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Hi, Joe.

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When you're not working on your own show, do you still listen to other True Crime podcasts

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or do you try to take break from the genre when you can?

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I imagine that line between work and listening for fun could get blurry.

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And that email is from Hannah in Eugene, Oregon.

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And Hannah, you're right.

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It is a blurry line.

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But for the most part now, I don't really consume any type of True Crime podcast content.

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I have my hands full with doing my own that I don't really have time to just for fun

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z's listen to other podcasts like that.

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I do a lot of research, a lot of reading, and I watch a lot of documentaries for this podcast

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and also just because I want to.

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But podcast wise, I'm full up.

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Hope that answers your question and thank you again for the email.

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Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, yes, you listening right now, this

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is the first or second or maybe third time you've listened.

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And you are not yet subscribed, please do that.

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You can also go to 10minuteMurder.com.

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All kinds of things there, including a way to contact me.

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And if you really are into this podcast, you enjoy it, you're subscribed, you've been listening

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Please share it with your friends and your family, rate it five stars wherever that's possible.

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And that's going to do it.

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It's your episode for today.

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Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder.