According to absolutely everybody (but I heard it first from Justin): Ariel Castro has done the world a favor and offed himself in his prison cell.
I cannot think of anyone in the world more friendless, and less mourned, than him. Is there anyone out there, with the possible exception of his own mother, who’s going to be sorry he did it? I’m just happy that my parents’ and siblings’ hard-earned tax dollars don’t have to go towards feeding him anymore.
The only other thing I have to say is directed at the idiot on Slate who said, “They should have saved him, or at least caught him with these staggered rounds. It takes more than 30 minutes to die from hanging, sometimes hours (unless he successfully snapped his neck or crushed the esophageal tube).”
Uh, no. It does NOT typically take more than half an hour to die from hanging; I’d wager it usually takes half that time or less. I wrote about one judicial execution where the prisoner was pronounced dead after a minute and a half; for judicial hangings, the average time is around twelve minutes, whether the person’s neck breaks or not.
The Charley Project Blog 
Sorry that this is unrelated, but I emailed you a while ago about Bonnie K Ledford, to see if she would be taken down as remains have been identified as hers – did it get through to you?
Yeah, I just kind of…forgot about it. I’ll resolve her next update.
Agnes,
Do you have a link to Bonnie Ledford? I know the Maine State Police found human remains years ago they felt were hers but could not find a family member to do a DNA match. Did they finally find a relitive or did something else happen?
I don’t have any personal connection, but I did a bit of digging around and I thought I found the details of her half-siblings. I contacted Maine State Police about this, who thanked me but let me know that the remains in question had already been identified as hers and she is no longer being sought as missing, I think that’s why they took her off the Maine State Police missing list some months ago. For whatever reason though, they haven’t publicised this at all. The detective didn’t really go into further detail, but I’m assuming that they did find a family member for DNA eventually.
Thanks Agnes,
The most likely reason for the lack of publicity is because Bonnie’s case is now a murder investigation. Investigators have a suspect. Now they are building a case and they don’t want the suspect to know they have identified her.
That’s the case with a 15-year-old Jane Doe teen identified several years ago in Arizona. The fact she was identified was never in the press, no obituary was ever published, and no memorial from her friends was ever held at the request of the police. I wrote about her and her killer after she was identified and was asked to pull my posts off the net. She was found on what would have been her 16th birthday by the way. On Charley the only thing Meaghan posted was the fact she had been identified.
The Phoenix police know who murdered her; he is serving time in a different state for killing another young woman and will be up for parole in 2014. They suspect he is a serial killer with seven or more victims. However he does not know they have identified her and everything he told them about her was a lie. Authorities want to keep it that way until they are ready to make a arrest and I think they are hoping to go for the death penalty.
Well, an amateur hanging ina jail cell probably wouldn’t be as quick as a judicial hanging b/c there’s no big drop and no weights, etc. But you can still die pretty fast after the blood flow to your brain is cut off.
He had nothing and nobody. All he’d had were those four girls. He was such a loser he had to kidnap people to be with him. Then they got away from him and that was it, nobody left, nothing to do, no power over anybody. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
As someone commented in one of the articles I read, he subjected those poor girls to years of captivity but didn’t have the cajones to withstand more than a few months of captivity himself.
This was my thought when I first heard the news. The women were strong enough to survive their incarceration and the pathetic Castro couldn’t endure what he himself had inflicted on them. Good riddance.
that is pretty much what I have read from so many people. He couldn’t live in confinement. But he wasn’t raped, starved, beaten, threatened or chained. AND he was not a TEEN ager. SICK …how does evil live in this world?? b/c they don’t look evil. ANYway, his death won’t change what happened to those girls but at least they don’t have to breath the same air he did any more. Rot in hell
From what I remember, even his own mother couldn’t stand him. Though there are a few family members claiming “grieving” and I’m sure will sell their story for a few bucks. Me, personally? Who cares. Glad, glad, glad. I just hope he fades into obscurity instead of infamy now. Coward in life, coward in death.
I thought the same thing, Meaghan. He made those girls prisoners for years but he couldn’t take 30 days in prison. I find that odd and proves how much stronger they are than he could ever be. Guess he crumbled under having no one – not even his own son would speak to him.
I hate to say that I feel good about the death of another person, but I’m not feeling bad about it.
I guess the unfortunate aspect is that he had the final say regarding his fate, instead of being forced to rot in solitary for decades.
This way though he doesn’t get to sit in solitary and enjoy the memories of the things he did. I would rather have him dead by his own hand than be able to sit and take sick pleasure in his own thoughts.