Ariel Castro told Michelle Knight that she wasn’t his first victim. He had captured a girl before her, but said, “I’m not going to tell you if she made it out alive.”
That was just one of many horrifying details from Knight’s interview with TV personality Dr. Phil, the first part of which aired Tuesday night. Knight was one of three women held captive by Castro for years in a Cleveland house before escaping this year.
Knight said that when she became pregnant for the first time, Castro beat her in the stomach with a barbell to force a miscarriage.
“Then when I did miscarry, he blamed me,” Knight said. “He said I hated him, that I killed his kid. Then he punched me in the face, saying that it was all my fault.”
When Knight first met Amanda Berry, Castro’s second victim, “she actually had clothes, which was odd to me because I didn’t have any.” Knight said she covered her own body with a blanket because she was embarrassed.
“At the time she came into my room, my room was full of garbage, like knee-high,” Knight said. “Old pizza, spoiled sandwiches on the floor, because he wouldn’t take it out. He would leave it there. There were flies flying around the room.”
At the holidays, Castro would taunt Knight about not being able to spend Christmas with her son. He kept her chained up in a freezing bedroom with no clothes. “He would look at me and be like, ‘Well, you don’t need clothes to say warm. You’re not here for that purpose. You’re only here for one thing.”
Castro pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year, but was found dead in his cell a month into his sentence. Investigators believe he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation, a masturbation technique that involves oxygen deprivation.
[Dr. Phil]