Kidnapped For A Decade Our World

Do you need police, fire or ambulance?

For more than decade, there was dark secret hidden away

In a quiet suburb, three girls were imprisoned,

Ariel Castro, a school bus driver, had kidnapped all three girls.

The girls were abducted on this street between 2002 and 2004.

Gina DeJesus, Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight.

This is Lorraine Avenue in Cleveland and this road connects

Michelle was taken from here at 1.06pm on Lorraine.

Gina was taken one block that way, Amanda was taken three blocks

But something else connects the girls.

In 2013, a decade on, miraculously, they escaped.

And now, Amanda and Gina have decided they are finally ready

I had gotten off work early that day and I worked at Burger King.

She was at work and I had called a friend for a ride and he didn't

And as I was walking there was a van and it was in a driveway that I had

And I looked up and saw a man and a girl in the van.

The girl looked like someone that I had worked with so I smiled

A couple of minutes later, the van pulls up and he says,

I was walking home from school with his daughter, Arlene Castro.

And she used the pay phone to call her mum to ask

if she could come to my house and her mum said no,

she went her other way and I went the other way.

He asked me if I had seen his daughter and I said yes

and he was, like, can you help me find her?

And he didn't turn around and went to go into his house.

He noticed that and he was talking about how his son had used

And that I knew a couple of his kids.

And then, of course, when you get to the house,

you immediately know that he is not going to let you out?

Amanda was just 16 when she was kidnapped.

Once locked inside Castro's house, she discovered his first victim,

This is Seymour Avenue, less than four miles

Ariel Castro moved here in 1992 and he was well-known the area.

He imprisoned the three girls here for more than ten years.

They were chained up for much of the time,

raped over and over again, half starved, sometimes beaten

2207 Seymour Avenue has been razed to the ground now.

One less physical reminder of the girls' decade in hell.

Amanda, you had demonstrated extraordinary foresight

Within the first week, I was just sitting in a dark room

watching a small black and white TV and he asked me,

is there anything that we needed from the store?

And I said, yes, a colouring book would be nice and a journal.

The code, you were being raped repeatedly, sometimes up to five

But what you did, you would just put 3X, 4X, 5X.

I knew eventually, if we were ever freed, my mom would read this

and I wanted my family to kind of know what I went through and how

horrible it was and I also wanted him...

I wanted everything to be accounted for.

Was it also a way of writing about the rapes but not writing

Gina, he also raped you hundreds of times, you were just 14.

What happened when you decided to take matters into your own hands

How did you have the courage to do that?

I don't know, I think he just kept shaking me and was annoying me.

And what happened when you smacked him?

He smacked me back and then he sent me upstairs.

My chain went through her wall to my wall.

Her room and my room were connected so it went straight through the wall

and I was divided from my ankle to Michelle's ankle.

It must have been terrible to have the chains on all the time.

But also, when he was abusing you, physically, he had you sometimes

There was only a couple of times that happened with me and,

I remember crying and telling him no.

I think the more we cried and showed him our pain and sorrow,

To don't cry, don't show him your pain, don't show him you are mad.

One of the cruellest things, I think, early on that he did

was he talked to you about the fact that he had been on his motorcycle

and he had seen your mum handing out flyers about your disappearance?

And he had gone up and taken a flyer from her and asked if there was any

information about you, which was so cruel.

Because my mom was handing out the flyers and it was the only thing

And did you think that you would be able to keep the flyer to the day

Gina's parents, Nancy and Felix, never gave up the search

Any ideas that came up, if anybody approached us,

we took advantage because we knew we had to keep her alive.

We knew we had to keep her out there so people would not forget.

And to let everybody know that she was still missing.

You got a chance to see your families on television.

That must have been both heartbreaking but it would also

That was the only way they knew how they looked,

To know that they were still fighting for you.

I felt like a piece of my heart was missing because it was just me

and my mom and my sister and my two children and my husband

When she came up missing, I lost a piece of me.

We were so close, she is my best friend.

I kept going because I would never give up hope on my sister.

If I didn't know anything about her, there was nothing bad in my heart.

So all I could do was keep hope and keep going.

And for you, Gina, you have this big, fun family and you were able

to see them on television, to see your mum.

But something else came on the television as well.

You didn't watch it but you watched the Royal wedding?

It was like the biggest thing on all the news channels and I loved

watching the news, to know what was going on in the world.

You have to wake up at 6am and it was going to be on this

channel so I actually set my clock and got up at 6am.

And the veil being held in place by the Queen's halo tiara.

Which has been loaned to her specially for this day.

To me, that just something that was, I don't know, it was happiness.

They are getting married, to see what her dress looked like.

To see all the people there, it was just beautiful.

I still one day want to get married and have a family.

I think it could have been a little fancier.

The Christmas of 2005 was particularly difficult for you.

He went out to his family for dinner and that day,

I think I am right in saying, you saw that your mother was ill?

It came on the news that she was in the hospital

When I heard that, I just couldn't stop crying.

And then, eventually, of course, she passed away.

And, again, it was from television and not him that you found that out?

I had gotten up early that day because he had to take me to my room

and chain me upstairs and I had turned on the news and it was maybe

5.30am in the morning and it was breaking news that my mom

What do you think he would have actually done to you if you had

What do you think might have happened?

I think he would have buried us in the back,

It's a beautiful spring day in the neighbourhood where

all these three young women were raised in Cleveland, Ohio.

And it is extraordinary to think that they hardly ever,

in ten years, saw the sunshine because they were kept in rooms,

they were locked and barred and the windows covered up.

One of the things that I found extraordinary was,

going to Seymour Avenue, I expected this huge place,

But it was a small place and what I couldn't understand

was why none of the neighbours had even noticed him bringing food

into the house or even his family coming to the house?

What happened to you when family came to the house?

Well, he would put all of us into Gina and Michelle's room.

And he would lock the door and tell us, be quiet, don't move.

And, of course, the temptation would be to scream but

And we just knew how he could flip like that.

Halfway into the girls' ordeal, something would happen

which would change the experience of everyone inside.

I had realised that I hadn't got my period and that was that the first

But you knew that he didn't want a baby in the house?

Because if the baby cries or the neighbours hear a baby

or someone comes to the house, what do you do with the baby?

But then came the time when you went into labour?

I really didn't know I was going into labour,

I just had labour pains all day but I had no idea what it was.

Eventually I had to use the bathroom and I heard something pop.

He was like, I think you water broke.

He was like, I think your water broke.

So he takes me upstairs into my bedroom and he brings out

And that's where I had to lay until I had the baby so I wouldn't

So he had gotten Michelle to come in and help me deliver the baby.

And he sat in a rocking chair and read a book on how

The pain was horrible and I didn't know what to do.

When Jocelyn was born, did it reinforce all of your survival

instincts, the three of you, that you had a baby in the house?

How did it make it a difference to have Jocelyn in the house?

It was like, thank God that she was all right.

Because it could have been otherwise?

The time did come for her to go to school and you made the school?

We would wake up in the morning and we would have breakfast

I tried to make it as real as possible.

So we would lock the door and we would walk to school,

across streets, and I would tell her, stop at green lights and look

both ways when it's a red light and we would finally get to school

and I would set her down I would tell her, OK,

When Jocelyn was three, Amanda told Castro she needed fresh air.

He took her to this park at the end of the street.

Astonishingly, no one noticed him with a small child.

He always put on a show outside of the house.

That was why nobody ever thought anything.

He was just this cool guy on a motorcycle or this guy that

They never would think of him as this monster.

When he started taking out Jocelyn more and more

and he took her to church and took her to a fair and so forth,

was it hard for you because you saw that he actually loved her?

Did that bring feelings of conflict in you?

Because I hated him, of course I hated him for everything

And then I would see him with her and he loved her so much.

And I just, I started to care for him.

But then I would get angry at myself and I would get so mad and say why?

Then, of course, finally the day came.

So Jocelyn goes to go downstairs because she was allowed to go

downstairs when she wanted, if he had the door open, usually.

So she goes downstairs and she was, I guess, looking for him.

She comes upstairs and she says, Mommy, Daddy's blue car is not here.

Go look in the garage, look around the house,

So she goes downstairs again, she looks around, she looks for him

again and she comes back upstairs and says, no,

I think that means that he is not here.

Because I had the TV so loud, but I heard her coming up

And I just sat there and everything and kept watching TV.

I don't see anything so I finally told Jocelyn,

OK, Mommy is going to go downstairs for a minute.

And when Mommy yells for you, just run down the stairs as fast

She started to get a little nervous and she was asking me why.

So I get my tennis shoes on and I go downstairs.

And I still don't see anything, I don't hear anything.

And my heart is pounding out of my chest but then I try to open

the door, the screen door, and there is like a lock on there,

And I notice as I looked at it that you had to have a key to unlock it

So I am pushing it and thinking, it is going to break easy,

At that point I am, like, yelling and screaming and I am,

like, it was just about that much room that I could fit my arm

through so I have my arm waving and going crazy.

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

So we kicked the bottom and she comes out with a little girl

Do you need police, fire or ambulance?

I have been missing for ten years and I am free now.

I just sat there and I didn't hear her screaming.

I just heard when the cops started to break in the house and stuff.

I'm not thinking of the cops, really.

And she is going to be in big trouble.

We have got a female and she has a young child with her.

We also have a Michelle Knight in the house.

They put me in the back of the car when they went into the house

and got Gina and Michelle and they walked us all

So that was the first time that we were together

And me and her were sitting next to each other and she looks at me

You actually do have an incredibly bright future now.

What do you want to do more than anything?

Some day I want to be able to help other people.

That maybe don't have a voice or are scared or are going

through something and they don't know what to do.

I definitely want to help people one day.

When you engaged a lawyer and he asked you if you wanted

anything, you just said you wanted two things.

A tombstone, a headstone for my Mom because she hadn't had one.

And a birth certificate for my daughter.

And what about you, Gina, what is your dream?

I want to help people like me and change a lot of people.

Gina, having not quite believed that you were going to get out,

I still couldn't believe that I was out.

I don't think it hit me until I got to the hospital.

And you were out and in the normal world?

Hello. It does look more drive for the next couple of days