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Cleveland Kidnapping Victim Says Captor’s Hell Is Just Starting Kidnapper in Cleveland Is Sentenced by Judge and Condemned by Victim
(about 5 hours later)
CLEVELAND — A former school bus driver who pleaded guilty to more than 900 counts, including aggravated murder, kidnapping and rape, after imprisoning three women in his west Cleveland house for a decade, gave a rambling justification for his crimes at his sentencing hearing Thursday, denying that he was depraved or violent and saying instead that there had been “a lot of harmony in that house.” CLEVELAND — Three months after her rescue from a quiet house where she had been held captive for a decade along with two other women, Michelle Knight, 31, confronted her abductor, Ariel Castro, 53, in a courtroom here on Thursday, offering an emotional last act to a traumatizing story.
Afterward, the man, Ariel Castro, 53, was sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 1,000 years by Judge Michael J. Russo of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. The punishment was the result of a plea deal between Mr. Castro and prosecutors that allowed Mr. Castro to avoid a possible death sentence. “I cried every night, I was so alone,” said Ms. Knight, who was 21 when Mr. Castro enticed her into his home in 2002 with the offer of a puppy for her young son. “Days never got shorter. Days turned into nights, nights turned into days. The years turned into eternity.”
Earlier testimony from law enforcement officers, one of the victims and other victims’ relatives painted a picture of Mr. Castro as terrifying and sadistic, a man who kidnapped the three women, repeatedly beating and raping them, and often keeping them chained to a pole in the basement of his house. Ms. Knight, who was held longer than the other women and was the only one who offered a statement at Mr. Castro’s sentencing, told him: “You took 11 years of my life away. I spent 11 years in hell. Now your hell is just beginning.”
The victim who spoke, Michelle Knight, read from a statement, her words punctuated by sobs, telling the court that while she might be able to eventually forgive Mr. Castro, she would always remember what he had done to her and the two other women. A tiny woman with auburn hair, Ms. Knight let tears run freely while speaking of how her bonds with the other kidnapped women, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, gave her a sliver of hope. “We said we would someday make it out alive, and we did,” Ms. Knight said.
“You took 11 years of my life away,” she said. “I spent 11 years of hell. Now your hell is just beginning.” Mr. Castro, an unemployed bus driver, looked on without expression. Judge Michael J. Russo of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court sentenced him to life in prison without possibility of parole, and 1,000 years. The punishment was the result of a plea deal between Mr. Castro and prosecutors that allowed him to avoid a possible death sentence.
She added, “I will not let you define me or affect who I am.” In a rambling statement of his own, Mr. Castro denied that he was violent or had ever raped or beaten Ms. Knight or the other women. “People are trying to portray me as a monster and I’m not a monster, I’m just sick,” he said.
Joshua Barr of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation testified that Mr. Castro had a gun in the home and 92 pounds of chains that were used to restrain the women. Prosecutors also offered photographs from the home showing an elaborate system of alarms on the doors and a motorcycle helmet that Mr. Castro forced the women to wear when he raped them. Mr. Castro also made the women play Russian roulette and threatened them with a gun. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty, told the court that experts had found no indication that Mr. Castro was mentally ill, adding that his effort to blame others, including the victims, was evidence of a lack of remorse that merited the maximum prison sentence.
Mr. Castro claimed that he had not forced himself on the women, two of whom were teenagers — ages 14 and 16 — when he abducted them. New details of how the women were abducted, imprisoned and managed to endure emerged in a sentencing memo, and at the four-hour hearing on Thursday, which was shown live by cable television, reflecting the worldwide attention the case has drawn.
“The sex that went on it the house, practically all of it was consensual,” he said. “There were times they would even ask me for sex.” All three victims were acquaintances of Mr. Castro’s children. He attended vigils on the anniversaries of the women’s disappearances, brought home a “missing” poster as a trophy and showed the women television coverage of their grieving families.
He insisted that he was neither evil nor violent, but that he had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse and became addicted to pornography. He kidnapped Ms. Knight when he overheard her asking for directions at a Family Dollar store and offered her a ride, which she said she accepted because she knew his daughter. Once inside his home on Seymour Avenue on Cleveland’s West Side, he tied her with an extension cord and dragged her to the basement, where he forced a motorcycle helmet over her head before raping her, said Detective Andy Harasimchuk of the Cleveland police’s sex crimes unit.
“I was driven by sex,” he told the court, saying that during some periods of his life he had spent several hours a day masturbating and watching pornography. Eight months later, in April 2003, Mr. Castro abducted Ms. Berry, then 16. He offered her a ride to his house with the promise of meeting his daughter, whom she knew. He chained her to a pole in the basement.
“These people are trying to paint me as a monster,” Mr. Castro said. “I’m not a monster. I’m sick.” Ms. DeJesus, his third victim, was 14 when Mr. Castro enticed her into his car in 2004 by asking for her help in finding his daughter, who was a friend of Ms. DeJesus’.
At times, Mr. Castro seemed not to understand what he had pleaded guilty to, saying at one point about the kidnapping charges that, “I simply kept them there without them being able to leave.” Sheriff’s deputies displayed a model of Mr. Castro’s home that from one angle looked as innocent as a doll house. But turned around, it was used to illustrate a chamber of horrors. Mr. Castro sealed windows with closet doors and heavy drapes. The women were locked in two rooms on the second floor, sometimes restrained by chains. Mr. Castro fed them a single meal a day and forced them to use plastic toilets in their rooms, according to the sentencing report.
He said at least twice that “there was harmony in that home.” He kept them “in a state of powerlessness,” prosecutors said, “through a program of prolonged physical, sexual and psychological violence.” As punishment he would confine them in the cold basement or the sweltering attic.
Mr. Castro also apologized to the victims several times and at one point began to cry, but he also appeared to taunt the Federal Bureau of Investigation by saying that agents had done a poor job investigating the disappearances because while law enforcement agents had interviewed one of his daughters, they had never spoken to him. “I feel the F.B.I. let these girls down,” he said. A psychiatrist, Dr. Frank Ochberg, testified that the women suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, “the kind of trauma that you don’t escape for years and sometimes for a lifetime.”
Ms. Knight showed no emotion as Mr. Castro denied that he had kidnapped or raped the women. Ms. DeJesus and Ms. Berry, who did not appear in court, were represented by family members who read statements on their behalf. Ms. Berry’s sister, Beth Serrano, asked for privacy so that the 6-year-old daughter Ms. Berry delivered in captivity, fathered by Mr. Castro, would not learn of the circumstances of her birth in the news media.
After Mr. Castro had stopped speaking, Judge Russo congratulated Ms. Knight on her restraint. “Amanda could not control a lot of things for a long time,” Ms. Serrano said. “Please let her control this.”
As the hearing started, Mr. Castro’s lawyers sought unsuccessfully to limit the details about the sexual assaults committed by Mr. Castro, saying a public airing of such information would be harmful to the three women, to a child born to one of the women during her captivity and to Mr. Castro. Craig Weintraub, one of Mr. Castro’s lawyers, said that his client had lived a “double life” for 10 years and had accepted responsibility for his crimes. Mr. Weintraub also said that Mr. Castro has a mental illness, although that condition had not interfered with Mr. Castro’s ability to understand the plea agreement he signed.
Craig Weintraub, one of Mr. Castro’s lawyers, said the court should not allow specifics related to “vicious sexual assaults” which would be"inappropriate to share with the world.” For years, Mr. Castro was able to present to friends and family an outward appearance of normalcy. He insisted that he was neither evil nor violent but that he had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse and had become addicted to pornography.
Mr. Weintraub said that Mr. Castro had lived a “double life” for 10 years and had accepted responsibility for his crimes. Mr. Weintraub also said that Mr. Castro suffered from mental illness, although that condition had not interfered with Mr. Castro’s ability to understand the plea agreement he signed. “Most of the sex that went on in the house, and probably all of it, was consensual,” he claimed.
Of the 937 charges to which Mr. Castro has pleaded guilty, two are murder charges related to Mr. Castro punching, kicking and stomping on the stomach of one of the women when she became pregnant after Mr. Castro had raped her, prosecutors said. Mr. Castro had also thrown her down stairs and withheld food from her during her pregnancies. Twice he said, “There was harmony in our home.”
Another of his victims, Amanda Berry, gave birth to a girl while in captivity, and DNA tests have shown that Mr. Castro is the child’s father, according to prosecutors. But Judge Russo offered a sharp rebuke: “I’m not sure there’s anyone in America who will agree with you.”
The women — Ms. Berry, Gina DeJesus and Ms. Knight — were kidnapped separately by Mr. Castro between 2002 and 2004. At the time they were kidnapped, Ms. Berry was 16, Ms. DeJesus was 14 and Ms. Knight was in her early 20s. They were freed in May after a neighbor heard cries for help from Mr. Castro’s house and Ms. Berry was able to first kick through, and then crawl out of a door of the house with her child. Ms. Knight, whose disappearance was not publicized because she was partly estranged from her family, said Mr. Castro tormented her by telling her no one cared she was missing. “After 11 years, I am finally being heard and it’s liberating,” she said.
Barbara Johnson of the Cleveland Police Department testified Thursday that when she arrived at the home the day of the rescue, the women were terrified. She told him she wanted him to endure a life sentence in prison rather than face the death penalty. “I will live on,” she said. “You will die a little every day.”
“All three of them were very pale — still kind of reluctant, not really sure what was happening,” Ms. Johnson told the judge. “Thin, pale, scared.”

Timothy Williams and Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting from New York.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Christine Hauser contributed reporting.