“The house was always locked,’ he said. ‘There were places we could never go. There were locks on the basement. Locks on the attic. Locks on the garage.’

In an interview with MailOnline, his son Anthony Castro, 31, who last visited his father’s house two weeks ago, has said how shocked he was to hear of is father’s alleged crimes.

“The only thing I can express is a tremendous level of shock,” he said. “To those girls, it’s beyond comprehension what happened to them. It’s just a nightmare. I just feel so horrible for them. Unspeakably horrible.”

Photographs from 2001 have been published which show a grinning Castro, standing in front of the locked door to the basement. By that point, one of his alleged victims, Michele Knight, had already been missing for a year.

“If it’s true that he took her captive and forced her into having sex with him and having his child and keeping her hidden and keeping them from sunlight, he really took those girls’ lives,” said Anthony Castro.

It has emerged that kidnapper’s daughter Arlene Castro had been the last person to see one of the kidnapped three, Gina DeJesus before she went missing for nearly a decade, and they were close schoolfriends.

She told America’s Most Wanted in 2005 that she had walked home from school with the then 14-year-old DeJesus and had wanted to go to DeJesus’s house.

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