Volume 21 · Chapter 12
The Cleveland Monster
Ariel Castro
Victims: Michelle Knight · Amanda Berry · Gina DeJesus
Case at a glance
- When
- August 2002 to May 6, 2013
- Where
- Seymour Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio
- Perpetrator
- Ariel Castro
- Victims
- Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus
- Outcome
- Pleaded guilty in July 2013 to 937 counts and was sentenced on August 1, 2013, to life without parole plus 1,000 years; he died by suicide in his cell on September 3, 2013
The case
Ariel Castro drove a school bus in Cleveland and lived on Seymour Avenue on the city’s west side. In August 2002 he offered Michelle Knight a ride; she was twenty-one and on her way to a custody hearing. In April 2003 he picked up Amanda Berry, sixteen, outside the Burger King where she worked, a day before her birthday. In April 2004 he took fourteen-year-old Gina DeJesus, a friend of his own daughter.
He kept all three in the boarded-up house for years, locked in upstairs rooms and often chained. Amanda gave birth to a daughter there on Christmas Day 2006. Castro turned up at vigils for the missing girls and spoke with their families. On May 6, 2013, while he was out, Amanda worked the front door open far enough to call to a neighbor, Charles Ramsey, who helped her and her six-year-old daughter get out. Police freed Michelle and Gina minutes later.
Castro pleaded guilty on July 26, 2013, to 937 counts, among them kidnapping, rape and aggravated murder. He was sentenced on August 1, 2013, to life without parole plus one thousand years. The house was torn down on August 7. On September 3, 2013, he was found hanged in his prison cell.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 21 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 21 on AmazonCase photographs
6 photos
Where it happened
Why this case
“Three women were held for a decade inside a normal-looking house on a street where people knew each other. I wrote this chapter around the neighbors, not around Castro, because what Amanda Berry did on that porch was the whole case. Everything the police accomplished that day started with her getting a door open.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
