The woman who suffered the longest in Cleveland’s house of horrors was so mentally fragile, she panicked and hid when cops finally came to the door, she writes in a new book.
“There was a loud noise. Pound! Pound! Pound!” survivor Michelle Knight writes in “Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed.”
“This is a bad neighborhood, I thought. We must be getting robbed,” she recalls in her book, excerpted in People magazine.
It was May 6, 2013, and Amanda Berry had just escaped the house of monstrous sex fiend Ariel Castro and summoned help.
Salvation was at their door. But after 11 years spent mostly chained by her wrists and ankles in a completely darkened basement, Knight’s first instinct was to run away from her rescuers.
So she hissed at fellow prisoner Gina DeJesus, “Hide!”
“I ran over to the radiator and tried to crouch behind it. We heard heavy footsteps. ‘Police,’ a woman’s voice yelled. ‘I don’t know if it’s really the police,’ I whispered to Gina,” Knight wrote. When cops got inside and showed their badges, Knight finally realized the impossible had happened: They were rescued.
“My hands shook and my head felt like a whirlwind had gone through it. ‘Gina, can you believe it?’ I said, ‘We’re free!’ ” Knight penned.
Long before then, the three women had become resigned to their life of chains, threats and sexual assault and had etched out a sad, day-to-day normalcy, Knight reveals.
They celebrated birthdays and even gathered around a TV to watch sitcoms like “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Friends.”
“At least we were looking at the same things the rest of the world was looking at, even if we were locked up in a prison,” Knight wrote.
Most of her confinement was a blur of pain, fear, degradation and darkness. It wasn’t until Berry had a baby and that little girl had turned 2 in 2009 that Castro let all three women have more time — unchained — in the living room and kitchen.
Even if the chains were off, Castro was still in complete psychological control of his mentally beaten victims.
“ ‘I can trust you more now,’ he told us,” Knight wrote. “But he kept a gun on his hip most of the time. To be honest, he really didn’t have to. After years of being held in prison, the locks move from off of your wrist and your ankles and up to your brain.”
Now Knight is free as a butterfly and proudly displays a butterfly tattoo among the veritable canvas of images she’s inked on her arms and chest since the dramatic escape one year ago.
“When they did it, I told them not to be afraid to add pressure because I’m, like, numb to pain,” Knight said of tattoo artists in a follow-up interview with People magazine.
Her right wrist and has the image of a dragon. “This one is my protection dragon,” Knight said. “When it got to [my wrists], that hurt because that’s where the scars are from the chains.”
Knight’s right breast is inked with the picture of little boy wearing a baseball cap — in honor of her son.
The boy was just 2 when he was put up for adoption, following Knight’s 2002 kidnapping.
She describes the horror of rape and violence of her first day in captivity, Aug. 22, 2002. “I was in so much shock and fear that all I could do was lie there like I was dead. In a way, I think part of you has to die in order to get through a thing like that.”
As days turned into years, “I began to wonder if God had forgotten me, too,” the survivor penned.
The gutless fiend Castro — who committed suicide just a month into his 1,000-years prison sentence — took sick delight not only in his own three prisoners’ suffering, but in that of other tortured young captives.
Castro fantasized about taking murdered Colorado child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey and abducted Utah teen Elizabeth Smart.
“He told me, ‘I wish I had gotten to little JonBenet Ramsey first.’ Another time he made the same kind of comment about Elizabeth Smart, who was abducted just two months before I was,” Knight wrote. “ ‘I know — I’m a sick man,’ he said. ‘I hate how I am.’ ”
The odd and rare sign of self-awareness by Castro gave Knight fleeting moments of hope — that were quickly dashed.
“ ‘You are sick,’ I said. ‘But there’s help for people like you. Why don’t you let me go so you can get help?’ ” Knight wrote, recounting the fruitless negotiation.
“For a minute he seemed to be thinking about it. Then he frowned. ‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘You’re gonna have to stay with me for a while.’ I began to cry.”
On top of his kidnapping and rape atrocities, Castro was also a bigot, Knight writes, noting that he rarely missed a chance, when the TV was on, to vent his hatred of African-Americans.
To this day, Knight said, those rants still echo in her mind every time she spots an African-American on television.
“If I happen to see a black person on the screen, I let it stay on that channel for a long time — just for the hell of it!” Knight wrote. “It’s my little way of flipping off the dude.”