The investigation also found that prison guards failed to check on Castro every 30 minutes as required and then falsified their logs.
However, video surveillance cameras showed that guards performed the required check at 8:45 pm and again at 9:15 pm when he was found hanged in his cell.
Castro’s crimes committed when he imprisoned the women in a so called ‘house of horrors’ led to an outpouring of national pity for the three victims, Amanda Berry, now 27; Gina DeJesus, 23; and Michelle Knight, 32.
They were abducted separately between 2002 and 2004 at the ages of 14, 16, and 20 and held captive in a working class neighborhood of Cleveland.
His three victims escaped on May 6 when Berry managed to break open part of the front door and call out to a neighbor for help. She emerged from the dilapidated house with a young daughter who was fathered by Castro during her captivity.
More than 92 pounds (42 kilos) of chains were found in the filthy, darkened home where the women were kept in locked rooms with boarded-up windows.
The house was demolished a few days after Castro was sentenced.
Castro pleaded guilty on August 1 after prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty.
A tearful Michelle Knight said in emotional testimony before the court that death would have been “so much easier” for her tormenter.
“I spent 11 years in hell, and now your hell is just beginning,” Knight told Castro.
In a rambling quasi apology to his victims only Knight was present in the courtroom Castro claimed he had acted on impulse as a result of sexual addiction.
“I’m not a monster. I’m sick,” he said then, clad in an orange prison jumpsuit.
Despite having pleaded guilty to 977 charges related to his victims’ brutal ordeal including terminating Knight’s pregnancies by starving and beating her Castro insisted he was not a violent man and that “there was harmony in that home.”
About The Author
