Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland by Amanda Berry Read Free Book Online

birthday, and that she had left a hundred dollars in cash at home. None of that felt like a typical runaway case.
    Russell and his partner, Detective Laura Parker, drove over to check in with Louwana. She greeted them with a blast of cigarette smoke and four-letter words, cursing the police for not caring about her daughter. But she softened a bit when the detectives seemed more concerned than the cops the night before had been, and asked questions about Amanda’s friends, anybody she might be with, anybody who might have been angry enough to hurt her.
    “DJ,” Louwana said immediately. She didn’t like Amanda’s sixteen-year-old boyfriend, who never bothered to come in and say hello when he picked her up. She told the detectives that he had a bad attitude, that he sold weed, and that she didn’t trust him.
    Louwana had gone herself to DJ’s house on West 99th Street that morning and nearly banged his front door off its hinges. DJ kept the door chained and, speaking to her only through the crack, told her he had no idea where Amanda was.
    After leaving Louwana, Russell and Parker paid their own visit to DJ, who told them his phone battery had died, so he had missed Amanda’s calls the night before. Though he seemed openly hostile to the cops, he let them check his bedroom. They found nothing, but the detectives agreed with Louwana that the kid seemed like trouble.
    The police next interviewed Amanda’s coworkers at Burger King, who mentioned a guy named Axel, a Hispanic customer in his mid-thirties who had a crush on Amanda and frequented the drive-through all the time to see her.
    Almost immediately, the police had two promising suspects: Amanda’s new boyfriend and a thirty-five-year-old guy who liked to hang around a sixteen-year-old girl.
     • • • 
    On Thursday, three days after Amanda went missing, the police went to Axel’s apartment, but the building owner said he had gone on a bus trip to a casino out of town. In the meantime, police interviewing people in Amanda’s neighborhood got a lead from a man who had been waiting at an RTA city bus stop near Burger King on the day Amanda disappeared. He said he had seen her get into an old white car with two or three men. A heroin addict, he was a dubious witness, but for the time being he was the only person claiming to have seen Amanda after she left work.
    “White car” got the cops’ attention. DJ drove a white car.
     • • • 
    By Friday, as the “missing” posters multiplied along Lorain Avenue, the story hit the evening news, and tips started flowing in. Someone discovered a pair of sneakers in a Dumpster behind Westown Square. Somebody else found an apron they thought she might have worn at work. People reported sightings of Amanda at basketball courts, gas stations, convenience stores, and rest stops on the Ohio Turnpike.
    Police looked into each tip, and none checked out.
    They were nowhere.
     • • • 
    Brian Heffernan, head of the First Division detective squad—Parker and Russell’s boss—decided it was time to make DJ’s life miserable.
    Heffernan was the eldest of nine kids in an Irish-Catholic family, a soft-spoken tough guy. At six-foot-three, he was the 1978 Ohio state high school wrestling champion in the heavyweight division. As the father of three teenage daughters, Amanda’s case felt personal to him, and his cop radar was pointing him straight at Amanda’s smart-mouthed boyfriend.
    DJ not only seemed to have a particular hatred of cops, but his story seemed inconsistent. He said he’d been with a friend fixing motorcycles on the evening Amanda disappeared and swore that she had called him at eleven that night. But when police had subpoenaed Amanda’s phone records, they revealed that her last calls to DJ were placed before eight. Was he remembering wrong, or was he lying?
    When Heffernan learned that DJ was driving without a valid license, he had patrol officers pull him over, tow his car, and get a warrant