Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (13 page)

Gladys was a dedicated outlaw, repeatedly ignoring court summons and trial dates, then later getting picked up on open warrants. She was a hard-living, hard-fightin’ woman who had grown up on mean streets and stayed there.

Before getting into the crack lifestyle, though, Gladys had graduated from Shaw High School in East
Cleveland—the same high school Anthony Sowell had attended a decade before her—where she was in the marching band. She then went to Central State University and enrolled in the music-education program.

“I was two classes short of graduating when I dropped out,” Gladys says. “I ran out of money.”

She had dabbled with drugs during college, but after she dropped out of Central, Gladys moved to Dayton, Ohio, with a boyfriend, “And that’s when I got into drugs,” she says.

The boyfriend fell away. The drugs didn’t. She moved back to Cleveland and lived for a time with her mother, then her sister.

December 8, 2008, was a Monday, and Gladys was forty years old and two weeks out of the county jail after her latest encounter with the county’s court system. The charge stemmed back to a severe beating of a maintenance man at her apartment building in May, for which both she and her live-in boyfriend, Thomas Leander, were arrested and indicted.

Both ignored the court date. Gladys was arrested shortly thereafter, but Thomas was still free, not exactly hiding out but lying low at their apartment in East Cleveland.

On that cold and gray December day, Gladys visited her sister, Twyla, who lived near Kinsman on the city’s east side. She arrived in the afternoon and hung out for a while, just long enough for the two to get into a spat over some jeans Gladys had left there. She had other
clothes at her sister’s, and decided to take them with her to avoid any other problems. She stuffed them in a grocery bag and left the house around 5
P.M.

Gladys walked past the bus stop and kept moving toward the Imperial area, which was at the time a hotbed of drug activity. It was a thirty-minute walk, brisk in the thirty-five-degree air. She wanted a beer to take home, she said, and stopped at the market at the corner of 123rd and Imperial.

“I hadn’t been there in years,” Gladys said. She bought a twenty-four-ounce can of Labatt beer and a pack of cigarettes and stuck them in the bag with the clothes. It was dark out by now, and she headed west on Imperial toward 116th Street and the bus stop that would get her back to her place in East Cleveland.

As she crossed 123rd Street, Anthony Sowell walked up to her, astride, from the direction of the store. He was wearing a gray hoodie pulled up over his head and jeans and tennis shoes. There was a slight trace of snow on the ground, although a wintry slush was beginning to fall.

“Merry Christmas,” she said, a little startled by his sidling.

“Merry Christmas,” Sowell said. “Would you like to drink some beer tonight?”

Gladys didn’t break stride as she uttered, “No thank you. I have my own.”

Sowell fell back and watched.

Gladys walked on a bit more—ten seconds, perhaps—when she heard someone approaching, running.

Sowell pulled a powerful forearm across her throat, cutting off her air and rendering her unable to cry out. He pulled her quickly up the slight incline of the driveway as she twisted in his frenzied grip.

“I noticed the red house on the left, but I couldn’t cry out because I was being choked,” Gladys said. The house she was being taken into, she noticed, was the first house between the red house and Ray’s Sausage, “the factory,” as Gladys recalled it. A blue, older-model Chevrolet sedan blocked a clear path, but he hustled her past it and toward the side door, which led upstairs to his apartment.

Then everything went black. Sowell had choked her out with a strong-armed hold, and she was unconscious. He dragged her limp body up the stairs, through the small kitchenette, and down the narrow hallway to the sitting room at the front of the house. He turned on the lights to a small Christmas tree that sat in the corner at the front of the room.

Gladys awoke with a throbbing ache in her throat and a fast realization that she could die. She was in sheer terror. She screamed as loud as her injured vocal cords would allow. All it did was summon her attacker, Anthony Sowell. He ran into the room and, standing over her, punched her in the face several times with his fist.

“Bitch, take your clothes off,” he bellowed.

At five feet seven and 150 pounds and with a hardened temper, Gladys Wade fought back the best way she could. From her angle on the floor, she knew how to disable a guy; she grabbed his balls.

“I did that, and I tried to take his arm off,” she said.
“I was fighting back; he was fighting me. I ran to the stairs, and he’s running after me.”

The fight continued as she struggled to get to the stairs, any way she could. Gladys continued to call for help as best she was able.

“Bitch you can scream all you want, you’re fixin’ to die,” Sowell said.

Although he had dragged her up the side-door steps, she pushed her way to the top of the front steps, which led to a door leading outside at the front of the house.

They fell down the wooden steps, Sowell on top of her, keeping his hands around her throat as tightly as he could.

They tumbled onto the landing on the second floor, and as they battled, Gladys’s hand went through a glass plate in the top half of the door, severely lacerating her right thumb. Blood poured from the wound, and she kept pushing herself down the stairs as Sowell fought to drag her back up the stairs.

“Stop fighting!” he yelled, but she wouldn’t stop. He told her repeatedly that she was going to die, and she would grab hold of his crotch and squeeze every chance she got.

It was wearing him down, and moving her up the stairs was proving to be too difficult. They fell once more down the second flight of stairs, and he gave up. He was severely cut himself now, as Gladys’s nails had speared the skin around his eyes, and he had struck his head on a door frame, opening up a cut on the left side of his forehead.

She was free; she had escaped. Now she needed to get someone to make sure this guy would be locked up. The
whole episode had happened so fast, within thirty minutes. It was now 6
P.M.

The full panic Gladys Wade had in her was uncontrollable, so when she ran into Bess Chicken and Pizza, the restaurant across the street from the Sowell house, it is not inconceivable that her babbling made her sound like one more crazy person in a neighborhood full of them. There were three customers in there, waiting for their food. They looked at her with disinterest.

“She came into my store, and she was really bleeding badly,” says Fawcett Bess, who opened the place in 1990. He knew everyone in the area, but he had never seen Gladys before. And he was a little suspicious of her story.

“The blood was going all over the place, and she was crying. She was asking for someone to call the police. One of the customers told her there was a pay phone outside.”

But the phone had long been disabled. Pay phones and drug neighborhoods don’t mix.

Bess could make no sense of what Gladys was saying, but he told her she had to go outside, that blood and food can’t be together. He grabbed a towel to wrap around her hand and called police from his cell phone, but as she stood there, Anthony Sowell walked across the street. In his hands, he held her jacket and sweater.

“He’s telling [Bess] that ‘the bitch stole my watch and stole my money,’” Gladys said. “They were laughing and saying all kinds of derogatory things like ‘she was smoking crack and she robbed me.’ They called him ‘Tone.’”

She grabbed her jacket and began to run down 123rd Street and across a school yard to a house where her mother used to stay. She still knew the guys who lived there, and she used their phone to call her boyfriend.

It was a compromising situation for him; he had a warrant out for a serious felony. And if he did what he felt he should do—that is, administer some heavy street justice to Sowell—he would put himself at risk.

Gladys left the house and began to walk back toward the bus stop she had originally headed for before the nightmare. She was still bleeding, and her throat felt like broken glass. But she was still running and looking, fearing that Sowell was looking for her to finish the job.

“I still didn’t know if he was coming after me,” she said. “I just kept running and found some police.”

Cleveland Police Department officer Kevin Walker was assigned to Fourth District patrol that evening, working the second shift, 3:30
P.M.
to 1:30
A.M.
Walker was a twelve-year veteran of the department, a barrel-chested, bald-headed cop with a mustache, a central-casting law-enforcement guy who had spent all of his years in this high-crime district. Before coming to the department, he’d been a juvenile-detention officer for five years.

As Walker and his patrol partner, Angel Serra, sat at a stoplight on southbound 116th Street, they saw Gladys Wade, waving her arms. It was around 6:30
P.M.
She was bleeding badly from her hand, and Walker saw that she had a towel and napkins around the wound. It was a pretty bad cut, he thought. He called for an ambulance, and
between his assessment of her injury and his calling for help, Gladys told them her story.

“She said there was an attempted rape by a man that she knows, ‘Tone,’ or she said she knew of him,” Walker said. “She said she heard people from the neighborhood call him that.”

Gladys faithfully relayed information that checked out—a dark sedan in the driveway, signs of a struggle in the snow near the house, her blood on the walls and stairs. And she described Anthony Sowell—that he was wearing a gray hoodie, a black skullcap with white lettering on it, and jeans, and that he was real skinny and had a dark complexion, with spare facial hair. He should also have some scratches on his face, she said.

“If you go over there now, he should be there,” she told them. Then she added, “I kicked his butt.”

Another police unit arrived to stay with her, and Walker and Serra headed over to 12205 Imperial.

They arrived to a scene that had been faithfully rendered by Gladys. Car in driveway, dark sedan. Signs of a struggle in the disturbed snow outside the side door. Blood on the stairway and the walls of the stairwell. Broken glass on the second-floor landing. They called for backup, but before the car arrived, Sowell poked his head out of the third-floor apartment and looked at the officers on the landing. He hadn’t even changed his clothes.

“What’s going on?” he asked the officers, who by now had their weapons drawn. It was the reported scene of a crime, after all. They ordered him down the stairs, slowly.

Sowell was read his rights and cuffed. And, just as Gladys had said, he had some scratches on his face as well as two big cuts, including one that was coming up as a knot on his head.

Gladys was taken by ambulance to University Hospital, where she was treated by Renee Hotz, a sexual-assault nurse. Hotz clipped Gladys’s nails and swabbed her hands for DNA evidence. Gladys was joined at the hospital by Thomas Leander, who took her home.

The next day, Gladys met with Cleveland Police Detective Georgia Hussein, part of the department’s sex crimes unit. Hussein saw the injuries, no doubt; her hand required stitches and the police report noted that she had “several red scratches on her neck” when the cops first saw her. But there hadn’t been any sexual assault; as Gladys told Hussein, “He tried to kill me.”

“I’m not sure why I was talking to [Hussein],” Gladys said. Once she told her that there was no rape, Hussein “told me who [Sowell] was…she told me his record.”

Indeed, police routinely check the sex-offender registry when someone is accused of a sexual assault, as police first believed was the case here. An alleged rape case automatically goes to the sex crimes unit.

Gladys also told police, as an aside, that she’d had $11 in cash in the pocket of her jacket, which was held as evidence, and that Sowell had taken her can of beer and unopened pack of cigarettes.

Gladys was released after meeting with Hussein and came back the next day to the department headquarters
to sign a paper giving detectives access to her medical records from the night before and give a written statement.

At the city jail, investigators photographed Sowell’s injuries, and he was put in a cell. In addition to the scratches and gouges on his face and head, he had scrapes on his legs and shoulders. It had been one helluva fight.

Detectives fanned out in the small section of Imperial and quizzed witnesses. Fawcett Bess, the patrons of his restaurant, and a couple neighbors were all questioned.

The next day, December 10, 2008, Cleveland Police Department detectives met with Assistant City Prosecutor Lorrain Coyne. The consensus was that there was insufficient evidence of a crime to prosecute.

According to an investigative report police did not see any “visible signs” of Gladys Wade having been punched in the face.

Hours after that report was turned in, around 6
P.M.
, Sowell was let go on something called a “straight release.” It was a practice that had been in place for years in Cleveland, brought about because of crowding at the city jail. Straight release gave investigators twenty-four to forty-eight hours to assemble the needed facts to make a case and put the accused before the city’s municipal court for bond requirements and a preliminary hearing to move prosecution forward.

According to the notes of Cleveland prosecutor Victor Perez, the case was dropped in part because the “detective did not believe the victim was credible.”

Although straight release was a practical approach to the crowding problem, as well as an overburdened courts
system, it sometimes resulted in an investigation that was not as complete as it might be. Ideally, a case might stay on the radar even after a straight release and a more solid case was built for an indictment. But in practice, dangerous criminals were sometimes let go.

Gladys, who had been pressing the department for information, was dumbstruck. She had never heard of straight release.