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

0:00 In Cleveland, Ohio, there's a house that doesn't exist anymore. The city demolished it in August of 2013 and shredded every single piece of it so that nothing could be kept or sold. For 11 years, that house stood at 2207 Seymour Avenue, completely ordinary from the outside. Neighbors walked past it. Police made visits to it. Three women were inside waiting for someone to notice.

0:53 Cremont is one of those neighborhoods in Cleveland that has been quietly working class for over a hundred years. Church on Sunday, kids on bikes in the summer, everyone on the block knowing each other's names. On Seymour Avenue, there was a house that had been standing since 1890, a two-story building with nothing about it that would make you slow down as you drove past. Ariel Castro lived there, and most of his neighbors would have called him a decent guy. He played bass guitar in local salsa bands, and his bandmates described him as upbeat, always laughing, always joking around. He barbecued on his front porch and shared food with whoever happened to be nearby. For 22 years, he drove a school bus for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.

1:39 In April of 2004, when a 14-year-old girl named Gina DeJesus disappeared from the neighborhood, Ariel Castro was at the community visuals, handing out flyers and consoling her grieving mother at neighborhood events. Gina was at his house. To understand how a decade of captivity becomes possible, you have to start with who Ariel Castro actually was. He was born in Puerto Rico in 1960 and came to Cleveland through Reading, Pennsylvania as a child. His early life was brutal in a specific and documented way. He was sexually abused, starting at age five by neighbor and then later an uncle.

2:19 His mother paired physical beatings with consistent verbal degradation and researchers who studied his psychology described the pattern as systematic. A person who experiences complete powerlessness throughout his childhood very often spends adulthood searching for situations where they hold all the control, all the power. Castro found this. In junior high, he was suspended for sexually touching a female classmate, an incident that was documented, but received no meaningful follow-up. By adulthood, the need for domination had calcified into something that was going to find an outlet regardless. The outlet found its first target in a woman named Grimilde Figueroa, Castro's common law wife and the mother of his children.

3:06 What happened to her inside that house before any of the abductions is a chapter of the story that rarely receives the weight that it deserves. He broke her nose twice, broke her ribs, and dislocated her shoulders. He threw her down a flight of stairs with enough force to fracture her skull, causing a blood clot in her brain that eventually became an inoperable tumor and contributed to her death in 2012. He was arrested for domestic violence in 1993 and a grand jury declined to indict. When Grimilde later tried to secure a restraining order, Castro staked out the courthouse and intimidated her and her children into staying away. Through a combination of neglect and procedural failure, the legal system had given him a working confirmation of something he had been testing all along, that he could do whatever he wanted inside that house and no one was going to stop him.

3:57 On August 23, 2002, Michelle Knight was 21 years old and walking near Lorraine Avenue when Castro encountered her, a single mother in the middle of a painful custody battle for her young son, Joey. She was carrying more than her share that day. Castro offered her a ride and told her that he had a puppy that she could have and take to her little boy at home. She got in the car. Once inside the house on Seymour Avenue, she was taken upstairs and bound using extension cords, held in a stress position for three days without food or water. When Cleveland police eventually looked into her disappearance, they categorized her as a runaway, citing her troubled background and custody situation.

4:41 Fifteen months after she disappeared, they removed her from the National Missing Person's Database entirely. Castro used that fact often as a psychological weapon, telling her that the world had decided that she is not worth finding. Amanda Berry disappeared on April 21, 2003, the day before her 17th birthday. She had finished her shift at Burger King and called her sister to say that she had a ride home. Her disappearance generated a much larger community response than Michelle's had, partly because of her age and partly because of a sustained media attention. During the first week of the search, Castro called Amanda's mother from Amanda's own cell phone and told her that her daughter was fine and would be home in a couple of days, then he hung up and went back inside.

5:29 Her teen year old Gina DeJesus was on her way home from school on April 2, 2004, when Castro drove past her. That afternoon, she and Castro's daughter Arlene had called Arlene's mother for permission to make plans together and had been told no, so the girls parted ways. Castro came along shortly after, offering Gina a ride home. She was her best friend's father, someone she had known her whole life. She accepted, and that was the last time anyone outside that house saw her for nine years. The windows of the house were boarded up or covered with heavy plastic. The women were kept in upstairs bedrooms or the basement, frequently restrained with chains.

6:11 Castro hid the padlock keys inside a Pringles can on the kitchen table. Meals arrived once a day, often fast food, sometimes spoiled fast food. She periodically left interior doors unlocked as deliberate tests, then punished anyone severely who tried to use that opening. Over the years of that cycle, the women developed what psychologists called "learned helplessness," a state where even a genuine opportunity to escape registers in the mind as something to fear rather than something to act on. Open doors stopped looking like exits for them. The survivor accounts and court documents both make clear that the women chose consistently and deliberately to sustain each other.

6:56 They built routines out of almost nothing, shared whatever resources appeared, and held each other together with a degree of intention and care that is genuinely difficult to describe from the outside, and even harder to fully comprehend. That intention is what kept them alive. On Christmas Day 2006, Amanda Berry gave birth to Castro's child inside that house. He had placed a plastic waiting pool on the mattress to protect it and forced Michelle Knight to serve as midwife, threatening her with death if the baby did not survive. When the baby arrived, not breathing, Michelle drew on her own experience as a mother and revived her.

7:37 That child was named Jocelyn, and she became the shared center of gravity for everyone in the house who wasn't Ariel Castro. Castro occasionally took Jocelyn to the park and introduced her to neighbors as his girlfriend's daughter. Inside, the women cut holes in athletic socks to make her diapers and taped magazine pictures to the walls. The closest thing they had to a window onto a world she wasn't allowed to enter. They raised a child in their prison using every resource available to them, which was mostly each other and an absolute refusal to stop trying. On May 6, 2013, Castro left the house and forgot to lock the interior door.

8:18 Amanda Berry had spent a decade learning which open doors were tests and which ones were real. This time, she listened to the particular quiet of an empty house and waited long enough to be certain. Then she went to the front door and started pounding and screaming. Her neighbor Charles Ramsey, inside his own home eating McDonald's, heard the screaming and yelling and came running. And he and her neighbor named Angel Cordero kicked through the bottom of the storm door. Amanda Berry and Jocelyn crawled out into daylight. Amanda called 911 from a neighbor's phone. She said, "Help me. I'm Amanda Berry. I've been kidnapped and I've been missing for 10 years. And I'm here. I'm free now."

8:59 Police arrived within minutes and found Michelle Knight and Gina De Jesus in the upstairs bedrooms. Castro was arrested hours later, facing 937 counts. At his synancing, he told the courtroom that he was not a monster, that he had a sexual addiction, and that there had been many happy memories in that house. Michelle Knight faced him directly and told him that he had taken 11 years of her life and that she had taken it back. She told him his hell was just beginning. He received life without parole plus a thousand years. The house on Seymour Avenue was demolished in August 2013. Every piece shredded so that nothing could be sold or kept.

9:41 On September 13, 2013, one month into his sentence, Castro was found dead in his cell. He hanged himself with a bed sheet. All three women chose to keep moving and reach outward while doing it. Amanda Berry hosts a daily segment on Cleveland's Fox 8 news, helping families find their own missing loved ones. Gina De Jesus co-founded a nonprofit for missing children and adults, and an adjuster that carries real weight, that organization is located on Seymour Avenue, on the same street where she was held. Michelle Knight, who now goes by Lily Rose Lee, has written two memoirs and dedicated her life to animal rescue and healing.

10:21 They were hidden for a combined 30 years. They walked out, and then they got to work. Hey Charles, let me talk to you. I'm talking with Charles Ramsey, he's a neighbor. Walk me through again what happened this afternoon. You heard screaming. Her screaming. I meet my McDonald's. Come outside. I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of the house. So I go on the porch, and she says, help me get out. I've been in here a long time. So you know, I figured it's a domestic violence dispute. So I open the door and we can't get in that way because how the door is, it's so much that the body can't fit through only in your hand. So we click the bottom.

11:02 And she comes out with a little girl and she says, call 911. My name was Amanda Berry. Did you know who that was when she said that? When she told me it didn't register until I got the call 911. And I'm like, I'm calling 911 for Amanda Berry. I thought this girl was dead. You know what I mean? And she got on the phone and she says, yes, this is me. And the detective, the detective Gregory Cook says, Charles, you know who you rescue? The girl Amanda told the police, I ain't just the only ones. It's some old girls up in that house. So they went up there, you know, 3040 deep. And when they came out, it was just astonishing because I thought they were going to come up with nothing. I figured, I mean, whoever she was, and like I said, my neighbor, you got some big testicles to pull this off, bro, because we see this dude every day.

11:50 Barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and whatnot. And listen to salsa music. You sound coming from? And you had no indication that they were dead and they got all the way. Bro, not a clue that that girl was in that house or anybody else was in there against their will because how he is is, he just comes out to his backyard, plays with the dogs, tinker with his cars and motorcycles, goes back in the house. So he's somebody you look and you look away because he's not doing nothing but the average stuff. You see what I'm saying? Nothing exciting about him. Well, until the day. What was your reaction on the girl's faces? I can't imagine to see the sunlight to be around. I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms. Something is wrong here.

12:31 Yeah, give it away. Yeah, give it away. Yeah, give it away. Yeah, give it away. Yeah, give it away. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder. Bingeable True Crime Stories. Hello. I'm Joe, the host, and here's an email subject you're listening habits. Hi, Joe. When you're not working on your own show, do you still listen to other True Crime podcasts or do you try to take break from the genre when you can? I imagine that line between work and listening for fun could get blurry. And that email is from Hannah in Eugene, Oregon. And Hannah, you're right. It is a blurry line. But for the most part now, I don't really consume any type of True Crime podcast content.

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