The prevailing story is that Amanda spied the door was left unlocked when their depraved captor, who died hanging in his prison cell months later, went out.
But in this gripping exclusive excerpt from a new book, Captive, author Allan Hall recalls those heart-stopping last moments to reveal it was Amanda's 7-year-old daughter with Castro, Jocelyn, who was the real hero.
She was the one who emboldened the terrified girls to swallow their fears and the first one to tell them that their time was now or never.
For the inmates at 2207 Seymour Avenue, the day of 6 May 2013 had begun in the same depressing manner as all the other days of their imprisonment. They had coffee delivered to their cells. They averted their eyes when Castro came in to check on them.
But on this day, the doors to the bedrooms were not locked. If the birth of Jocelyn saved the women on so many levels – spiritually, emotionally, psychologically – it was her interaction with their jailer that was to rescue them all on a day that started like every other one they had endured.
For days, weeks – he couldn’t exactly remember – the little girl, the one person in that house he treated with the dignity she deserved, had begged him to ‘stop locking all the doors in the house’.
One newspaper summed it up in a report after it was all over: ‘He treated the girls like animals but he idolized his daughter.’ This simple human emotion of love was to be his downfall. He did what his precious little princess wanted.
He also kept the chains off their legs on this, the day of days. And in pleasing her, he condemned himself to discovery and, ultimately, death. ‘I know I let my guard down,’ he would later tell police in an interrogation room, in what was something of an understatement. And so they heard his fourteen footfalls on the stairs on the way up and on the way down.
They heard the sounds of him shuffling about in the living room and kitchen, the Spanish- language radio station playing, a few vague noises of cars passing and children shouting in the street outside. Their collective hearing had become acute during the years of captivity – honed, as it was, to detect when their tormentor might be approaching or leaving.It came around to lunchtime, the time when he departed. They heard the locks shift and then the silence fell. Later, he returned and, in the early evening, readied himself to depart once more for their junk- food dinners. But there was a change.
It was the absence of a single sound that alerted the women to the fact that something different, potentially life changing, had occurred. They heard the shutting of the inside door leading to the porch . . . but not its locking.
They did not hear the mechanism which slid the mortise levers into place. The house was silent. But they remained frozen, too petrified to move. Even though they knew they had only a few seconds to make a decision, they were too scared to do anything.
Too often they had ventured out of their cells when Castro left the house to see if there was a way out. Sometimes he lay in wait for them and would beat them mercilessly, tie them up and starve them for days afterwards in retribution.
Other times he told them the doors were booby- trapped and they would die if they attempted to escape. Yet this was the time, and this was the place, for action. And it came through the bravery of Jocelyn.
Favorite child: Daughter Jocelyn was the only one Castro treated like a human
While Castro doted on her, took her out and swore her to secrecy about her life in the house, the little girl had matured beyond her years and the vain, self- obsessed and self-aggrandizing bully that was her father failed to notice it.
She instinctively knew that the life she led with Amanda and the ‘other ladies’ was not on the level – and neither was the man who kept them there. She ate his ice cream, she kept his secrets about the others in the house. But she knew right from wrong because her mother had taught it to her when she wasn’t being raped or starved or beaten by the man who held their fate in his calloused hands.
It was Jocelyn, according to investigators, who had descended the stairs shortly before Castro left the house, who had chatted to him and noticed that the front door leading to the porch screen door had not been locked.
It was she who returned to the frightened sisterhood upstairs to say, ‘The front door’s open and he’s gone away. He’s gone to Grandma’s,’ which was where he went to collect his brother. This lost female group, a sorority forged in adversity whose shared suffering had kept them alive and given them hope, nourishing them in their darkest moments, screamed out for salvation.
It fell on Amanda Berry to make the dramatic bid for freedom because the others were simply too cowed to move. This was the ultimate roll of the dice, the last chance to get away from the filth, degradation, pain and humiliation that their captor had heaped upon them.
Amanda made the journey down the stairs with Jocelyn and, with the hopes and prayers of her fellow inmates of 2207 Seymour Avenue, she hesitantly crept towards the unlocked door. As a police officer close to the case remarked, ‘Castro probably wishes he had never fathered that child in some ways.
'It gave Amanda a reason to live and a reason to hope. She would have been as zombified as the others, were it not for her daughter. Castro thought he was master of everything but not even his cunning could factor in simple human bonds like that between a mother and a daughter. He was a monster – and a fool.'
Amanda slowly crooked her head round and saw the chink of light from where the door had sprung open. Their tormentor had indeed failed to secure it. She shouted up the stairs, ‘It’s open! It’s open! I’m going for it!’
She raced for the open door, pushed on the locked iron door outside that prevented her from stepping out on to the deck and yelled for all she was worth. Above everything, above her concern for the other women and for herself, she did it for Jocelyn.
She had seen the marked increase in the volatile behavior of Castro in the months since he had lost his job. She sensed a seismic shift in the master’s moods. She feared for her daughter, for the mind games he played with her. The fear she had for Jocelyn’s future in this toxic house suddenly overcame the fear that Castro had inculcated in them all.
This was a moment of enormous courage,’ said former FBI hostage negotiator Clint Van Zandt. ‘What she and the others suffered, it was like being prisoners of war. You have to make up your mind to survive, and you draw strength from the people around you – you draw strength from their ability to survive. If she can survive, I can survive. They probably drew some strength from each other.
Berry beat the odds. On that day when Castro left to go to McDonald’s, she realized that her captor had forgotten to lock the front door and seized the moment. I think that Amanda’s maternal instinct may have made the difference. I think part of it was something concerning her child.
'She had more than herself to think of. It’s difficult to comprehend the paralyzing fear Berry had to overcome in order to escape – a fear all three of Castro’s victims likely endured. It was an act of amazing fortitude after so many years of being beaten down.
‘When police arrived the other two didn’t run, and there is a reason for that. They were likely conditioned not to escape. There are psychological chains and restraints that are so much stronger than any steel chain or handcuff. I think they gave up the idea of escape because they had to consider the price they would pay if they didn’t succeed.
Extracted from CAPTIVE: One House, Three Women and Ten years in Hell by Allan Hall, published by Penguin
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