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I see no one else has started a thread on it after a couple of days so I guess I'll venture one. In Cleveland, Ohio, three girls in their teens to early 20s went missing over time a decade ago, seemingly unrelated cases. This week, they all turned up alive, held prisoner all this time in a house in a residential neighborhood. Their names are Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. Their kidnapper's name is Ariel Castro, a Cleveland bus driver in his 50s.
Let's not mince words here, this is gruesome and nasty and makes a person's skin crawl. These three women have been held as captives and sex slaves and God knows what else for ten years in a house surrounded by other houses and other people. Amanda Berry suddenly made a 911 call on a neighbor's phone after somehow managing to escape to the front door when Castro wasn't home and kicking out the screen and screaming her lungs out until someone heard and responded. The exact details have yet to be released as to how it went down, but I get the impression it was like- after ten years of this life, he one day somehow forgot to click one of the padlocks into place.
The women are free now, Castro is in custody and he is going to go down in flames, hard. He has two brothers who were briefly suspects also but now It's been announced there are no charges against them. His family swears they had no idea. FOR TEN YEARS?!!! The womens' families are of course overjoyed to be reunited with their loved ones they had assumed were dead. And there is also a six-year-old child, daughter of Amanda Berry apparently. And talk of other babies who died. It couldn't be any more sad.
It's also reported that there were times over the years when neighbors did call police when they observed suspicious things about the house, but the police response was always insufficient or non-existent. Amazing, just absolutely amazing and unbelievable that this could happen in a place surrounded by hundreds of people. For Casebook purposes, it puts me in mind of Whitechapel and how many people must have seen things and heard things and never said anything, or had their reports ignored. Jack the Ripper, the Torso killer (who must have had a private dwelling where he did his work), and by the way that's IF Jack and Torso weren't the same person, which is a theory I hold as possible. This is an extreme example of how much depravity can go on in broad daylight with people all around and go this long before it comes to light. It makes a person wonder- with the number of missing people, how many more settings are there with something like this going on?
Absolutely horrifying.
Let's not mince words here, this is gruesome and nasty and makes a person's skin crawl. These three women have been held as captives and sex slaves and God knows what else for ten years in a house surrounded by other houses and other people. Amanda Berry suddenly made a 911 call on a neighbor's phone after somehow managing to escape to the front door when Castro wasn't home and kicking out the screen and screaming her lungs out until someone heard and responded. The exact details have yet to be released as to how it went down, but I get the impression it was like- after ten years of this life, he one day somehow forgot to click one of the padlocks into place.
The women are free now, Castro is in custody and he is going to go down in flames, hard. He has two brothers who were briefly suspects also but now It's been announced there are no charges against them. His family swears they had no idea. FOR TEN YEARS?!!! The womens' families are of course overjoyed to be reunited with their loved ones they had assumed were dead. And there is also a six-year-old child, daughter of Amanda Berry apparently. And talk of other babies who died. It couldn't be any more sad.
It's also reported that there were times over the years when neighbors did call police when they observed suspicious things about the house, but the police response was always insufficient or non-existent. Amazing, just absolutely amazing and unbelievable that this could happen in a place surrounded by hundreds of people. For Casebook purposes, it puts me in mind of Whitechapel and how many people must have seen things and heard things and never said anything, or had their reports ignored. Jack the Ripper, the Torso killer (who must have had a private dwelling where he did his work), and by the way that's IF Jack and Torso weren't the same person, which is a theory I hold as possible. This is an extreme example of how much depravity can go on in broad daylight with people all around and go this long before it comes to light. It makes a person wonder- with the number of missing people, how many more settings are there with something like this going on?
Absolutely horrifying.
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