Ariel Castro (L) talks with his lawyer during a break in his trial on August 1, 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio/AFP
CHICAGO, Oct 11 – The sordid tale of Cleveland kidnapper and rapist Ariel Castro has taken another lurid turn, with officials saying dis death may have been caused by auto erotic asphyxiation and a coroner insisting it was suicide.
The coroner was the same one who did the autopsy on Castro, who died in September at age 53 a month after he was sentenced to life in prison plus 1,000 years for holding three women captive and treating them like sex slaves for a decade.
It was an abrupt ending to a sordid case that shocked the United States and the world with revelations of depravity and brutality carried out in an ordinary Cleveland home.
Details of his death, previously thought to be suicide, were released in a report with the results of an Ohio state prison internal investigation.
Castro was found hanging from a hinge in the window of his cell by a sheet wrapped around his neck with his pants and underwear pulled down to his ankles.
“The relevance of this finding is unclear,” the report concluded, adding that the details were “relayed to the Ohio State Highway Patrol for consideration of the possibility of auto-erotic asphyxiation.”
But late Thursday, Franklin County coroner Paula Gorniak said in a statement there was no sign that Castro had been sexually stimulated, CNN and other news outlets reported.
“I did the autopsy myself. I saw the ligature. I saw the pictures of the cell. It was a suicide,” CNN quoted the coroner as saying.
She said the fact that Castro’s pants and underwear were at his ankles is not enough to back up the idea of auto-erotic asphyxiation.
The garments may have simply fallen down while he was hanging, she wrote.
Gorniak said no one involved in the Ohio corrections report consulted her on its report on the possible cause of death and she was not pleased with this.
Castro had left no note and given no indication of suicidal tendencies, the corrections report noted, adding that “no other immediate observations about the scene led to conclusions about the motivation for the self-inflicted death.”
About The Author
