Michelle Knight

Michelle Knight was twenty-one when Ariel Castro took her from a Cleveland street in August 2002, and she was held in his house for eleven years, longer than either of the two women taken after her. Almost nobody looked for her. She had lost custody of her son shortly before, the police treated her as an adult who had walked away, and her name stayed off the news that later carried Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus. The three got out on 6 May 2013 when Berry shouted through a door to a neighbour. Castro was given life without parole and died in prison a month later. Finding Me, written with Michelle Burford and published by Weinstein Books in 2014, is Knight's account of those years and of the violence in the childhood that preceded them, and it refuses the recovery ending. She has since taken the name Lily Rose Lee and married.