The Cleveland 50: Ariel Castro's Captives Escape

In 2015, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus recounted the years they’d lost to Ariel Castro’s cruelty in their book Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland. It's a tough read, a dark catalog of the crimes that earned Castro a prison sentence of life plus 1,000 years. But the memoir, written in part from the 1,200-page diary Berry kept in captivity, is also a narrative of perseverance.

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It includes anecdotes about Berry and DeJesus watching TV news segments about their disappearances. Since their miraculous escape, Berry has taken to the airwaves herself at WJW-TV8, where she reminds Cleveland not to forget the women locked in a house somewhere, waiting for others to look inside. 

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