Just days after Cleveland abductor Ariel Castro committed suicide, footage from his FBI interrogation tapes emerged in which he explained two close calls that could have led to his capture.
The 52-year-old former school bus driver was sentenced to life imprisonment, plus 1,000 years with no chance of parole for kidnapping, beating and raping Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight for 10 years ago. Castro kidnapped the women between 2002 and 2004 and fathered a 6-year-old child with Berry. He also beat and starved Knight when she became pregnant, forcing her to miscarry five times. The women were freed on May 6 after a neighbor helped rescue them from Castro's home.
On Tuesday, he committed suicide in his jail cell after serving one month of his life sentence, reports Cleveland.com.
During the FBI interrogation, Castro detailed the two times he almost got caught including once when a girlfriend was suspicious that a TV was on in the room where he was holding one of three young women, NBC's Today reported.
"She says, 'what is that, you have a TV on up there?' My heart started beating and I was like, OK, she's probably catching on to something," Castro says.
In another incident, Castro says, he should have been spotted on surveillance tapes at the school where he abducted DeJesus.
Asked if that was a close call, Castro replies, "yeah."
He also tells FBI agents that he used Amanda Berry's cellphone to call her mother.
"I said something ... that I have her daughter and that she's OK," Castro tells the FBI interrogators.
He says he told Berry's mother that "She's (Amanda) my wife now, something like that, you know, probably not the exact words."
Then, he says, "I hung up. We didn't have a conversation."
He also describes what happened on the day Berry escaped and alerted neighbors, ending the ordeal for the three young women.
Castro says Berry's' daughter, whom he had fathered, was always asking him why he locked all the doors in the house. On the day he was captured, he says, he left a bedroom door open.
"I let my guard down," he tells the FBI agents.
Watch the footage below:
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