Ohio abductions: False leads, dashed hopes and death by a broken heart

In the buildup to Christmas 2005, Amanda Berry’s mother bought presents as usual for her daughter. Louwana Miller had neither seen nor heard from Berry for over two years, but she remained hopeful that she would return to her in time to unwrap the gifts.

In fact, it would be seven more years before Berry and two other missing women, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, would reappear, in a house a few miles from where all three disappeared, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Tragically, the reappearances came too late for Miller, who died in March 2006, apparently of a broken heart.

The story begins on April 21st, 2003, the day before Berry’s 17th birthday. She called her sister to say that she was getting a ride home after putting in a shift at Burger King, around 10 minutes’ drive from where she lived.

It would be over 10 years before Charles Ramsey, a neighbour of the house where she was being held captive, would hear her screams and free her. In the intervening years, her family suffered the absence of their loved one, and the misery of hopes being dashed as leads proved fruitless.

The first came shortly after her disappearance, when a man using her daughter’s phone called and told her: “I have Amanda. She’s fine and will be coming home in a couple of days.” But that led to nothing.

As time passed and no news emerged, the case was featured on the TV programme American's Most Wanted. In November 2004, Miller, who worked tirelessly to highlight her daughter's case, appeared on The Montel Williams Show.

The experience was a painful one for Miller, who was told by a supposed psychic on the show: “She’s not alive, honey.” Those words, Miller’s friends said, profoundly affected her. Nevertheless, Miller continued her search, holding a vigil march the following year on Berry’s birthday, during which people sang happy birthday to the absent teenager.

But in December 2005, Miller was taken to hospital with pancreatitis and other ailments. She died three months later of heart failure, at 44. Dona Brady, a city councillor who said she spent many hours with Miller, said: "She literally died of a broken heart."

There was further trauma for Berry's surviving family last summer when a prison inmate, Robert Wolford, told the authorities they would find her remains in a city lot in Cleveland. He was taken to the location, which was dug up, but no body was found. Wolford was subsequently sentenced to four and a half years in jail after admitting he had made up the claim.

DeJesus went missing a year after Berry. Aged 14, she disappeared while walking home from Wilbur Wright middle school, about half a mile from where Perry went missing.

In the months after DeJesus went missing, her father, Felix, would go out every night after work to search for his daughter. He was frustrated, feeling that the authorities had given up on his daughter: no special alert was issued the day DeJesus failed to return home because no one witnessed her abduction. The lack of an alert angered Felix DeJesus, who said in 2006 he believed the public would listen even if such alerts became routine.

In 2006, there was, briefly, hope of a resolution to the case after a tipoff that DeJesus’s body was buried under the garage of a property belonging to a registered sex offender. The house owner and another man were arrested on suspicion of aggravated murder but a search failed to yield anything, and neither man was charged.

Knight’s case, too, was the story of a family continuing to cling on to hope and search for their missing loved one as they felt the authorities’ efforts tailing off. While the cases of Perry and DeJesus were high profile in Cleveland’s west side community, the disappearance of Knight, who was 18 at the time of her disappearance, on August 23rd, 2002, drew far less attention.

Speaking after she had been found, her grandmother, Deborah Knight, said that, based on advice from police and social workers, family members had concluded that Michelle, who was last seen at a cousin's house, had probably left of her own accord because she was angry that her son had been removed from her custody.

But Michelle Knight’s mother, Barbara, was unable to accept that she would disappear without a word to let her know that she was safe. She said she had continued to distribute flyers in Cleveland long after police stopped searching; and, even when she had moved from Cleveland - to Florida - she would often return to continue the search.

Knight said she had once thought she had seen her daughter walking with an older man, who appeared to be dragging her along when she dawdled, at a shopping plaza in Cleveland several years previously. But she called her daughter’s name and the woman did not turn around.

Understandably, given the years of dashed hopes, on Monday Barbara Knight was wary of believing her daughter had truly been found until she had concrete proof. But she was also looking ahead to the possibility of introducing her to another member of the family: the little sister Michelle Knight has never met.

Guardian Service