Cleveland man convicted of keeping women captive gets life without parole
Posted Aug 1, 2013 12:05 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
CLEVELAND – The Ohio man convicted of holding three women captive in his Cleveland house over a decade and raping them repeatedly has been sentenced to life without parole.
Ariel Castro, 53, was being given his sentence Thursday. He had pleaded guilty to 937 counts including aggravated murder, kidnapping, rape and assault.
He got the life term for the most serious count and was getting additional time for the hundreds of other counts.
A plea deal struck last week spared him from a possible death sentence for beating and starving a pregnant victim until she miscarried.
The women disappeared separately between 2002 and 2004, when they were 14, 16 and 20 years old.
They escaped to freedom May 6 when one of them, Amanda Berry, broke out part of the door to Castro’s house and yelled to neighbours for help.
The women described horrific conditions in the home, which Castro turned into a jury-rigged prison.
At his sentencing hearing, Thursday, Castro apologized to his victims but also claims most of the sex was consensual.
Castro said he isn’t a monster. He said he’s sick and addicted to pornography. He says he didn’t even plan the first kidnapping.
He said he knows what he did was wrong, but that he’s not a violent person and that his captives asked for sex and weren’t tortured.
