Ohio kidnap victim: You face hell for eternity

For 13,226 days Michelle Knight's life belonged to Ariel Castro.

Every day was his day as he raped, tortured and imprisoned Knight and two other young women in the Cleveland home he had converted into a dungeon.

But yesterday was her day as the 32-year-old mother faced her former captor in an Ohio courtroom and told him: "I will overcome all that's happened but you will face hell for eternity."

Knight's brief read statement was the climax of a day of evidence perhaps unparalleled in recent American legal history.

A spellbound court watched as a woman who had spent 11 years in chains and had her unborn baby beaten to death inside her declared the beginning of her new life.

"From this moment on I will not let you define me or affect who I am. I will live on, you will die a little every day," she told Castro as she faced him for the first time since being rescued in May.

"Writing this statement gave me the strength to be a stronger woman and know that there's more good than evil," she said, describing how she would spend Christmas this year with the son who was just 2 when she was kidnapped but is now a teenager. "After 11 years, I am finally being heard and it is liberating."

Castro, a 53-year-old former bus driver, blinked and sometimes closed his eyes as he listened to his victim find the voice he had stolen from her for more than a decade.

With his small frame draped in an orange jumpsuit, scraggly beard and little spectacles, it was at times hard to believe that he could be responsible for the almost unending litany of 937 crimes described by state prosecutors.

But when he eventually rose to his feet to deliver a statement that was as rambling as Knight's was clarion clear, the court was reminded of the monster within the little man.

Describing himself as "a happy person inside", Castro led his listeners through a bewildering 16-minute public confession, casting himself as a victim of his own sexual addictions and making the astonishing claim that he lived in "harmony" with his victims.

"I am not a monster, I am a normal person, I am just sick," he told the court, saying he would "practise the art of masturbation" for three hours a day. I just want to apologise to everyone who was touched by these events," he said. "But I do also want to let you know that there was harmony in that home."

As evidence he pointed to a video of Amanda Berry, 27, who he kidnapped when she was 16 and forced her to give birth in a paddling pool, appearing at a rap concert last month.

"That right there in itself proves that that girl did not go through no torture," he said.

Jocelyn, the child that Berry bore after being raped by Castro, is now 6 years old and said to be adjusting well to her first experience of life outside the house.

"She's a miracle child," Castro said, and suddenly broke down into tears as he described how she began suffering toothaches, making him fear he was "letting her die".

But there were no tears for the child that he murdered inside Knight's womb.

In a 13-page sentencing memorandum, largely drawn on diaries kept by the three victims throughout their captivity, prosecutors described how Castro tried to abort the baby by putting Knight on a diet of only tea and forcing her to perform gruelling exercises each day.

That did not work and so "the defendant punched and kicked her in the stomach, jumped on her stomach, and starved her for days to terminate the pregnancy", prosecutors said.

He went on to keep the placenta in the refrigerator "as a memento". The death of the unborn child comprised only a small section of the prosecution's description of Castro's "disgusting and inhuman conduct".

The court was shown the first images of the grim prison he constructed inside 2207 Seymour Ave as prosecutors described the elaborate lengths Castro went to conceal his crimes.

At first glance the two rooms in which the women were kept seemed the unremarkable bedrooms of young women, with Disney posters tacked to the pink walls and stuffed animals lined up on the bed.

Yet a closer look showed part of the 30m of rusted iron chains that Castro used to imprison them and the heavy wooden boards with which he blocked the windows. The women were fed just once a day and rarely given access to the bathroom, instead having to relieve themselves in plastic buckets that were "emptied infrequently", prosecutors said.

Other evidence shown included a scrawled letter written by Castro on April 2, 2004 - two days after he had abducted his third victim, 14-year-old Gina DeJesus - in which he admitted: "I am a sexual predator". DeJesus' cousin, Sylvia Colon, addressed the court on her behalf and told Castro in his native Spanish: "God have mercy on your soul."

On the rare occasions that he brought them out of the house, Castro would disguise the women in motorcycle helmets and wigs.

In 2005, he kept the three women locked in a car in his garage to keep them hidden from a house guest.

At other times, he stuffed dirty socks in their mouths to prevent them from screaming.

Anna Faraglia, prosecuting, told Judge Michael Russo: "This is a court of law, it is not one of mercy" as she argued that Castro deserved "eternity" in prison. His eventual sentence - life imprisonment without parole plus 1000 years - fell only slightly short of that desire.

"A person can only die in prison once," Russo said in the Cleveland courtroom. "There is no place in this city, there is no place in this country, there is no place in this world for those who enslave others."

To the end, Castro denied the evil characterisation of himself.

Before he finally hobbled out of the courtroom in shackles, he told his spectators: "I know what I did is wrong but I'm not a violent person. I simply kept them there without them being able to leave."

He added: "Thank you everyone. Thank you victims. Please find it in your hearts to forgive me."

Long after those words of Castro, the lawyers or the judge are forgotten, Americans may still remember Knight standing upright in the court to speak for herself for the first time. "We said we would some day make it out alive and we did," she said.