Facing off against the sick fiend who held her captive for nearly a dozen years, Michelle Knight told a rapt Ohio courtroom yesterday about her nightmare of captivity.
"I spent 11 years in hell," said Knight, 32, the first of three women former bus driver Ariel Castro abducted, raped and tortured for more than a decade.
"Your hell is just beginning. You will face hell for an eternity. You will die a little every day . . . You deserve to spend life in prison."
The emotional appeal came as new gruesome details were revealed about the victims' horrifying decade of captivity.
'I spent 11 years in hell. Your hell is just beginning. You will face hell for an eternity.' —Michelle Knight to Ariel Castro (above), who was sentenced for the kidnap, rape and torture of Knight and two other women
'I spent 11 years in hell. Your hell is just beginning. You will face hell for an eternity.' —Michelle Knight (above) to Ariel Castro, who was sentenced for the kidnap, rape and torture of Knight and two other women
AP
TORTURE CHAMBER: Some of the 100 feet of chain Ariel Castro used to imprison three women for years in his Cleveland house of horrors.
Prosecutors said that Castro used 100-feet of heavy chain to hold Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus in his basement for long periods of time, and denied them food or fresh air.
The women used portable toilets in their bedrooms, windows were boarded shut and doorknobs were replaced with locks.
One captive was chained to a pole in the basement with a motorcycle helmet strapped to her head, prosecutors said. When she tried to escape, a vacuum cleaner cord was wrapped around her neck.
Knight — during a sentencing hearing for Castro, in which he received life in prison without parole, plus another 1,000 years — recalled the anguish she endured while she was separated from her son, who was 2 when she was snatched off the street at age 21, lured with the promise of a puppy for her little boy.
Knight held her tongue as her creepy captor pleaded for understanding and unlikely forgiveness.
"I'm just sick," the lowlife kidnapper told Judge Michael Russo. "I have an addiction."
Then Castro, 53, who pleaded guilty to abducting the women, who were beaten and raped for a decade while trapped in his home, had the nerve to tell the judge, his victims and their astonished families that life in the house of horrors was nothing out of the ordinary.
"You guys know all the harmony that went on in that home," Castro said. "I was a good person. I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me."
The three escaped May 6 after Berry kicked out the bottom of a screen door and ran to safety.
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