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

to search it. They had a cadaver dog sniff it, but it found no traces. They sprayed it with Luminol, a chemical that makes blood show up under black light, and discovered bloodstains in the trunk. But lab results revealed that it was chicken blood that had probably leaked from a bag of groceries.
    They also found a receipt showing that DJ had washed his car the day after Amanda went missing. The car wash was near a big park with large wooded areas, so officers searched it with dogs. When nothing turned up, they got a court order to attach a tracking device to DJ’s car to follow his movements and persuaded a friend of his to wear a hidden microphone.
    “What do you think happened to your girlfriend?” the friend asked, with police listening.
    “I don’t know what happened to her, and I don’t care,” DJ said, launching into a profanity-laced tirade about the police.
    DJ infuriated the frustrated cops, who finally brought him into the station and gave him a lie detector test, which he passed.
    They had absolutely nothing on him.
     • • • 
    On Monday night, Louwana and Beth were at home, crying as they watched a report about Amanda’s disappearance on the eleven o’clock news.
    Beth was growing worried about her mother. Louwana had never been a sound sleeper, but she had barely slept at all since Amanda had gone missing a week earlier. And while she had always been a heavy drinker, she was now drinking alarming amounts of beer.
    Louwana taped a poster of Amanda over the living room fireplace, in the same place she used to hang her daughter’s Christmas stocking, and put a pink butterfly on it as a symbol of freedom and hope. “We miss you, Mandy. We love you,” she wrote on the poster. Every day, she kissed the photo good morning and good night.
    Within minutes of Amanda’s face appearing on the news, the phone rang. As Louwana rushed to answer it, Beth was picking up the extension in the dining room.
    “I have Mandy,” said a man’s voice on the other end. “She wants to be here because we’re married. But I’ll have her back home in a couple of weeks.”
    “Please bring her home!” Louwana pleaded. “Drop her off at a store. Drop her at the corner. Anywhere! We don’t care who you are, we just want Mandy home!”
    The line went dead.
    Louwana gasped and sat down. She and Beth were struck that he had called her “Mandy,” because only family and her closest friends called her that. They thought he sounded like an older white man.
    A minute later, the phone rang again.
    “Don’t worry,” the same voice now said. “She’s okay and she’ll be home.”
    Louwana and Beth both begged: “Please bring her home!”
    Without another word, he hung up.
    They reported the calls to police, and a trace confirmed they had come from Amanda’s phone. Louwana and Beth had new hope that Amanda was safe, but police viewed the calls as evidence proving only that Amanda had been abducted—not that she was still alive.
     • • • 
    When Axel returned from his weekend at the casino, police searched his apartment, checked his phone records, and brought him in for a lie detector test, which was inconclusive. Though Axel had been coming to the Burger King regularly for months, after Amanda went missing her coworkers never saw him again.
     • • • 
    Several callers told police they had seen Amanda working as a prostitute along Cleveland’s infamous Broadway Avenue corridor, near Fleet Avenue. Parker and Russell showed Amanda’s photo to some of the regulars there who said a blonde, who looked like her and called herself Amanda, had recently started walking their strip. So the two detectives began a stakeout, watching from their car and waiting for the young woman to appear. On the night of April 30, nine days after Amanda went missing, Parker was on her cell phone checking in with Louwana when the blond woman they were waiting for walked into view.
    “I’ll have to call you back,” Parker told