Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (19 page)

“We will turn every stone until we find him,” U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott vowed, with law-enforcement bravado.

Police and coroners ended their search of 12205 Imperial Thursday night with two confirmed bodies and were
still waiting on the results of tests for what would turn out to be the remains of Janice Webb. The crew would be back the next day.

People in the neighborhood were nervous. Random gunshots, murders among drug dealers, and fights over petty arguments were one thing. But a serial killer? That was something else entirely.

“Everybody in this neighborhood is on edge,” one local told the
Plain Dealer
. “We want to know what’s in the grave. Is this guy a serial killer?”

The scene on Imperial played out hour after hour—newspaper reporters and broadcasters walking the narrow streets of a classic American ghetto, clutching notepads and microphones, desperately trying to interview family members, who were holding vigils and passing out missing-person flyers.

And when Kyana Hunt, Nancy Cobbs’s daughter, broke down on camera in the middle of a rather callous television interview—“What if it is her? What if it isn’t?”—the camera stayed right on her as she cried and went down on one knee in the street.

After regaining her composure, Kyana said, “All I can say is, if it’s not her, tell her I love her and want her to come home.”

Police had not yet begun to announce a roll call of the dead.

Friday morning, October 30, 2009, the teams converged again on 12205, and the body count grew. The remains
under the turned earth in the basement were determined to belong to Janice Webb. She was found with a green leather belt around her neck, and her wrists were bound with two intertwined white shoelaces, tied so tightly they had to be cut off.

Also in the basement, police discovered a red plastic bucket across the dirt floor from Webb’s remains. From the top, it looked like it was filled with newspaper. But wrapped inside the newspaper was the head of LeShanda Long. The bucket had small bite marks around the top rim, evidence of a hungry animal seeking a meal.

Her body would never be found.

The backyard was a killing field. A backhoe was brought in, and blue plastic tarps were erected around the fence line to keep out busybodies with cameras. At one spot, there was a plastic bag sticking out of the dirt, as if someone had just been too tired to complete the burial.

Dogs were turned loose to sniff for cadavers, and the unearthing brought about the eye-watering smell that had been plaguing the neighborhood off and on for years. From that point on, everyone, from officers on security duty to the forensics team, wore masks.

That Friday, the teams found five more bodies in the backyard, women who would later be identified:

Crystal Dozier was found with a slim piece of cloth wrapped around her neck, her wrists and ankles bound with wire.

Tonia Carmichael was also discovered in a shallow backyard grave, an electrical cord around her neck.

Amelda Hunter was back there as well, the strap from a purse cinched about her throat.

Michelle Mason was partially covered in the backyard dirt by blankets and plastic garbage bags. Like Crystal, she had been strangled with a cloth.

Kim Y. Smith, who hadn’t even been officially reported missing, was the last of the bodies found in the backyard. She was naked from the waist down, wrapped in black and clear plastic bags, her ankles and wrists tied with strips of cloth.

None of the bodies in the backyard had been buried deeper than twenty-four inches. All were killed by some form of strangulation, be it from a ligature or by hand.

Upstairs, Tishana Culver’s body was found in a dirt-filled crawl space in the front sitting room, the same room where SWAT team member Richard Butler had found Telacia Fortson, Nancy Cobbs, and Diane Turner.

Tishana’s neck bone was fractured, and her wrists were bound with a knotted rope. She was fully clad in a brown dress, brown pants, shirt, and socks.

And Kyana Hunt’s nightmare came true: her mother, Nancy Cobbs, was soon determined to be the fourth body in the front sitting room. She had been strangled, then enclosed in five layers of black plastic bags and wrapped in a comforter. A thirty-six-inch shoelace and a twelve-inch-long white tube sock were wrapped around her neck. Her wrists were bound with another shoelace.

Bottle caps, crack pipes, a condom, cigarette butts, earring posts, and carpet shreds were all found stuffed into bags with and around the victims.

Although the bodies would not be identified immediately, a call went out for those with missing persons to supply DNA in hopes of determining who was being discovered. Inez Fortson brought her six-year-old grandson in to give a DNA sample for Telacia Fortson. There was a growing swell of sorrow among those with missing loved ones, a flush of tragic possibility.

“She had never been gone like this before…When I heard about it, I just figured she was there,” said Janice Webb’s son, Lamarr Webb.

Likewise, Denise Hunter, Amelda’s sister, said, “When I seen the house, I knew she was there.”

The crime was already becoming one of the biggest serial killings in recent memory. There were eleven bodies found at 12205 Imperial: Tishana Culver, Nancy Cobbs, Telacia Fortson, and Diane Turner in the third-floor sitting room; Crystal Dozier, Tonia Carmichael, Amelda Hunter, Michelle Mason, and Kim Smith in the backyard; and Janice Webb and LeShanda Long in the basement.

Double-digit murders were a tragic benchmark, but most couldn’t recall anything like it. Local historians dug in and found the eighty-year-old case of the so-called Torso Murderer, who had savaged an area in Cleveland called Kingsbury Run between 1934 and 1938. The slayer, so named because some victims had been found with their torsos shorn in half, had taken at least a dozen lives. The crimes were never solved.

And now, even as the victim tally grew, police couldn’t find their suspect.

The next day, Saturday, was Halloween. The cops were getting nervous as they pulled more bodies from the yard. A Halloween night with a serial killer on the loose? The possibilities made the whole city queasy.

Anthony Sowell spent Thursday and Friday nights in an abandoned house on Martin Luther King Drive, a one- and-one-half-mile walk from his home on Imperial. He had walked over there right from Tressa’s. It was a familiar place, one he had scavenged some metal from before. He was carrying a backpack with some warmer clothes, as a cold front had moved through. He slept in a beige spring jacket over a leather zip-up jacket. And he would tell investigators that he drank himself to sleep.

Sowell knew he was a wanted man. But he was also a crack addict, and the booze wouldn’t be enough for long. He had to get out eventually to cop again.

On Saturday morning he made his move. He emerged from the house.

For Joe Veal, October 31, 2009, was a great day. Halloween was an occasion to have some fun, and he headed out that morning with a skull mask, his costume for the year. He put it on and decided to take a celebratory drive.

Around noon, Veal was driving down 102nd Street near Mount Auburn, and he did a double take when he saw Anthony Sowell on the street.

“That looks like the guy the police are looking for,”
he thought to himself. Forgetting his mask, Veal stared at Sowell.

Sowell stared back at the man in the skull mask, their glances frozen on each other.

Shaken, Veal headed straight for the Fourth District police station, on Kinsman, about a half-mile away.

In the parking lot, he saw two officers.

“I think I know where the dude ya’ll are looking for is at,” he said, pulling up his mask. The officers could tell he was serious.

A call to a patrol car just around the corner informed them that the suspect was in the area.

Indeed, the guy the patrolman saw did look a lot like the fellow whose face had been all over TV for the last forty-eight hours. Walking down Mount Auburn, he had a backpack and seemed just like any other citizen. Veal’s eye was sharp. For that, he would eventually receive the $12,000 reward from police for assisting in the capture of Sowell.

Cleveland police officer Charles Locke walked up to Sowell and told him to put his hands up and to get on the ground. Sowell gave no resistance, but he looked up from the pavement.

“You got me already. You got me last night,” Sowell claimed to Locke, meaning he had been stopped and questioned the previous evening.

Locke disregarded the comment and searched the backpack. In it he found a box cutter, an empty wallet, and a piece of carpet.

“What’s your name?” Locke asked him. Sowell told
him his name was Anthony Williams. But Locke wasn’t going to let him go until he was sure.

He cuffed him, put him in the patrol car, and called headquarters.

Sergeant Ronald Ross and three other detectives arrived at the scene.

“Is this the suspect?” Ross asked Locke, approaching the car and looking in the backseat.

“We don’t have a picture of him,” Locke said.

Ross walked back to his car and pulled the APB with Sowell’s picture. He looked at Sowell and at the picture, and pulled him out of the backseat.

“You’re definitely too close to call on this one,” Locke said, referring to the close likeness between the recent photo on the APB and the man standing in front of him.

“I’m not the guy you’re looking for,” Sowell said again. “The police had me last night and they let me go.”

“I have a machine at my office; it’s a handheld fingerprint machine,” Ross said. “I’m going to check you real quick on it, and if you’re not the guy we’re looking for, we’ll take you wherever you need to go and send you on your way.”

It took minutes to fetch the machine, and as Ross began to put the machine on Sowell’s finger, he broke down and said, “I’m Anthony.”

Detective Luther Roddy, who was watching, asked, “Anthony who?”

“I’m the guy you’re looking for; I’m Anthony Sowell.”

At that, Sowell broke into a sweat and dropped to his
knees. The bewildered officers looked at each other, first puzzled, then joyous.

Wow—we just got him
, Ross thought to himself.

The officers helped Sowell to his feet and radioed in. The serial-killer suspect from Imperial was in custody.

Sowell was still sweating and muttered, “I just want to die.”

Ross put him in the back of his car for the ride downtown. Sowell seemed to collect himself. The two began having a conversation. He seemed glad it was over, Ross later said.

“Is everything we found in the house all of it?” Ross asked, referring to the bodies.

“I think so,” Sowell said.

“What about outside?” Ross said.

“Oh, those,” Sowell said.

“Anthony, you a smoker?”

“Yes.”

“You want some coffee and a cigarette? I have menthols.” Lieutenant Michael Baumiller lit him a Maverick cigarette, since Sowell’s left hand was cuffed to the shiny chrome arm of a gray plastic chair. Soon the cuff would be unlocked, but for now it stayed. Sowell sat in the corner of the small interview room on the fourth floor of the Justice Center complex in downtown Cleveland, daylight coming through the half-closed shades.

The room was a converted office, not the formal setting seen on TV cop shows. It had a couple of file cabinets,
a computer and a printer on a desk, some chairs on rollers, and a tile floor. On the videotape of his police interview, it looked as if Sowell had stopped by the office of a bureaucrat in some faceless corporate building, not a police interrogation room.

Lieutenant Baumiller, of the sex crimes unit for the Cleveland Police Department, was a rangy everyman with a thick midwestern accent. He was considered a star detective, and the Sowell case played perfectly into his expertise on sexual predators. It was already circulating that there was a sexual element to the crime scene—there almost always was in serial-killer cases—and Baumiller wanted a piece of the action.

He was there because although there were bodies found, the warrant served was for the sexual assault on Billups. That would soon change, but for now, Baumiller and his colleagues were in charge.

Baumiller showed up with a baseball cap and a blue short-sleeved shirt with “POLICE” blared across it in yellow letters.

Two officers brought Sowell, wearing a skull cap and heavy jacket, into the interrogation room, and they waited as he peeled off his outerwear, leaving him in brown jeans, a white half-sleeved jersey, and white high-top running shoes with blue piping.

Along with Baumiller, Sergeant Joseph Rini and Detective Richard Durst sat in the room, talking animatedly with Sowell. They first asked Sowell about Latundra Billups, how he knew her, what might have happened on September 22 that year.

“Well let me ask you, this allegation was made in September and the girl says that you and her went into the house and had some beer and you started messing around and she wanted to stop and then you kind of forced her from there,” Durst said. He was avoiding the bigger issue of the bodies, focusing on something relatively lesser.

“That’s a lie,” Sowell said quickly, softly. “La La. That’s who you’re talking about.”

He explained he knew Latundra—La La—through his old girlfriend.

“Who is your old girlfriend?” Durst asked.

“I’m not going to get her involved,” Sowell said with finality. “She ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

They briefly talked about the rape allegation, and Sowell moved his head animatedly when he talked about it, denying, smoking, fidgeting.

“He was getting agitated,” says one of the group of officers watching the questioning on a closed-circuit screen in another room. “He was high and coming down and getting agitated, and now he was thirty-six or forty-eight hours without drugs.”

At one point he began to rock back and forth slightly in his chair, both feet on the floor, looking downward as he answered Durst’s gentle probing while the other two officers looked on, occasionally tossing in a “Really?” or an “Okay.”

The questioning was smooth, asking about his family, about Segerna, his whereabouts for the past couple of days.