Hope: A Memoir of Survival

by Amanda Berry

While investigators searched Castro’s house, other officers scoured the neighborhood to make certain they weren’t missing any accomplices or clues. Across the street and three doors down from Castro’s house, police arrested Elias Acevedo Sr., a convicted sex offender who had moved in with his mother but failed to register his new address with police. He was jailed for that offense, and while he was incarcerated police linked his DNA to an unsolved 1993 rape. The further they looked into that case, the more they also began to suspect Acevedo in the unsolved disappearance of Christina Adkins, who was eighteen and pregnant when she went missing in January 1995. Encouraged by the fact that Amanda, Gina, and Michelle had been found alive after so many years, FBI agent Andy Burke began reviewing cold cases. Burke noticed inconsistencies in police reports about Adkins’s disappearance—one witness seemed to have given police a false name and date of birth. After pulling the original files and reinterviewing people involved in the case, Burke discovered that that witness was Acevedo. Acevedo ultimately confessed to killing Adkins, as well as Pamela Pemberton, a thirty-year-old whose body was found in 1994. He then led police to an area off I-90 near downtown Cleveland and pointed to a manhole cover. When officers lifted it, Burke shined his flashlight twenty feet down into an old concrete storm sewer and saw Christina Adkins’s skull.