Ohio women were tied and chained

CLEVELAND: As authorities prepared to file charges against three brothers suspected of keeping three young women captive for nearly a decade, police yesterday said they found chains and ropes used to bind the victims inside the Cleveland house where they were held.
Some details about the women’s ordeal began to emerge as euphoria over their rescue on Monday evening gave way to questions of how their imprisonment inside a house on a residential street in Cleveland, Ohio went undetected for so long.
Several neighbors said they had called police to report suspicious activity at the house in a dilapidated neighborhood on Cleveland’s West Side, where Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Berry’s 6-year-old daughter escaped from their captors.
But police denied those calls from neighbors were made. “We have no record of those calls coming in over the last ten years,” Cleveland Police Chief Michael McGrath said yesterday on NBC’s “Today” show.
McGrath said he was confident police did not miss opportunities to find the missing women. “Absolutely, there’s no question about it,” he said.
FBI agents were searching through the house where the women were believed held since vanishing between 2002 and 2004 from the same neighborhood, he said.
“We have confirmation that they were bound, and there (were) chains and ropes in the home,” he said.
The women had been allowed outside “very rarely” during their captivity, he said. “They were released out in the backyard once in a while.”
McGrath said the women were in good physical condition, “considering the circumstances.”
The three suspects were expected to be charged by the end of the day, McGrath said. He said the suspects were being interviewed and “Yes, they are talking.”
One suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, who was fired from his school bus driving job in November for “lack of judgment,” was arrested almost immediately after the women escaped on Monday. Brothers Pedro Castro, 54, and Onil Castro, 50, were taken into custody a short time later.
The women’s imprisonment came to a dramatic end after a neighbor, drawn by the sound of screams, broke through the door to rescue Berry, whose 2003 disappearance as a teenager was widely publicized in the local media. He helped her place an emergency call to authorities.