Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (20 page)

“I’m in and out,” Sowell said. “I’m mostly, I spend
most of my time over at a friend of mine’s house or with my family. Because my mom’s in the hospital last week we was all—I remember I spent one night at the hospital, I stayed all night Tuesday. Went Monday night, it was Tuesday morning.”

He told them the last woman he was seeing was Shawn Morris, giving them her maiden name of Shawn Smith. No one mentioned the incident of the previous week, when Shawn had “fallen” out of the third-floor window.

Either no one was connecting the dots, or possibly they didn’t want to upset Sowell, who was starting to flow with answers to their questions. They knew they had the heavyweight inquisition coming up and wanted him primed.

Then they came back to his recent whereabouts.

“So where you been the last couple of days?” Baumiller asked, easily, testing the waters.

“I was at—I stayed in the house, the house they say they seen me coming out of,” Sowell said, referring to the abandoned house. Actually, Veal had seen him walking down the street, but the police had told him otherwise in a bluff.

“Which house is that?” Baumiller said.

“It’s like on Martin Luther King Drive. It’s a few blocks down from there.”

“Is it vacant?” Rini asked.

“Yeah.”

“How come you didn’t go home?” Baumiller said.

“To my sister’s?”

“No, to your house.”

“Because I knew you all was looking for me,” Sowell said.

“You knew that they were looking for you,” Rini said, repeating. “What did you think they were looking for you for? What was going through your head there?”

“I don’t know,” Sowell said. It was coming to a point here, and he seemed to know it. “They just told me they was looking—somebody said, actually somebody from the area told me.”

Baumiller broke the free-flowing banter.

“Hey Tone, this is really, really important. I think you have been pretty honest with us so far, you know what I mean, and probably in the next block of time, 15, 20 minutes, might be the most important 15 minutes of your life. What we’re looking for you is to be honest with us some more.”

Anthony Sowell didn’t move.

“Okay,” he said.

“I think you know what I’m talking about,” Baumiller said. “Let’s just get this over with and talk about what’s going on in your home, okay? Now you know we have been to your home.”

Sowell stammered. “Okay. What, what?”

“Okay,” Baumiller said, his voice getting even-toned and tight. “Upstairs on the third floor where you stay we saw—we found some folks up there. Now, hey, I know it’s tough. You know you’re running with some people that are kind of fringe folks. It’s real important, you’re honest with us, you know why you’re down here. So what happened up there on that third floor?”

Sowell paused and looked down. He clutched a cup of black coffee in his right hand.

“I just hate what they did to me,” he said, low, almost inaudibly. “I’m a nice guy. I feed them and they steal and treat you like shit. Forget about you. I cook hot dogs, French fries, anybody who want to play across the street and play, play down here, play down the street, the rest of the people just come by.”

“What pissed you off?” Baumiller asked. “What did these people do to make you angry? Because you know, we are all human beings, we all know that anger. What did these people do to piss Tony Sowell off?”

“My head,” Sowell responded. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

The convivial conversation of the first thirty minutes was over. Sowell told of losing control of his temper after he and his girlfriend, whom he still refused to name, broke it off.

“What was your head telling you to do, Tony?” Baumiller asked.

“It’s like I was supposed to rape those girls and shit,” he said. “People don’t give a fuck about nothing, nobody. Even when you help them. I was just—I just—I don’t know what happened but I know it had something to do with my last girlfriend.”

He went through the story of Lori and her crack habit, of visiting her in jail, of attending her court hearing, and talking with the judge on her behalf.

He stopped just short of admitting that he’d murdered the women. It was what he left implied by the “and shit”
at the end of the “supposed to rape those girls” part. That was murder.

“I know everybody going to make me out to be evil, but I’m one of the best,” he asserted.

When the police started asking for names, he refused.

“I don’t know their names,” he claimed, even though he had met some of these women many times.

“I need some time,” he said.

The officers offered cigarettes, water, anything to keep him on track.

But he went back to talking about Lori, though not by name, how she’d broken his heart, how he’d cried over the loss of her.

“I love her,” he said, staring into space.

Baumiller tried to steer him back to discussing the bodies, but Sowell kept turning the conversation back to his breakup with the still-unnamed Lori.

“That’s when I started hearing things,” Sowell said. “I mean it was just, I just had like a breakdown or something.” He said that the voices told him that “you know what you’re supposed to do.”

The officers looked at him in a long pause.

“And what, when they said, ‘you know what you’re supposed to do,’ what did that mean?” Rini asked.

Sowell’s head twitched back and forth as he sat silently. He dipped his chin, looking downward.

“Try, Tony,” Rini urged. “Would you try to tell the voices no?”

Sowell cocked his head to the side, still downcast.

“You couldn’t keep ’em back, huh?” Rini said.

Sowell began muttering, almost under his breath, as the officers watched. He was melting down. Then he said, “My mother to this day never told me she loved me. Ever loved me. It’s the hardest part.”

He raised his head, took a sip of his coffee.

Then he was back, and the officers again urged him to tell them what happened in that house.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember. It’s like two of me or something. I just don’t know. That part is missing.”

He shook his head, seeming to pretend he didn’t understand anything, almost willing it all to go away. Sowell claimed he’d go into a dream state in which he went under, then would wake up and find everything clean and normal.

“Well, like the people that are dead, there was probably blood on the floor,” Durst prodded, trying to get Sowell to drop the act.

“Not when I came to,” Sowell replied.

Durst moved on to nailing down the number of victims. By that time, six had been found, with the expectation there would be more.

“Can you guess?” he asked Sowell.

“No.”

“If you had to throw a number out, what would you say, like ten?”

“Ten,” Sowell repeated leadenly.

“Twenty?” Durst pushed.

“No.”

“Not that many?”

“No.”

And on it went, settling between ten and fifteen bodies, although Sowell never came out and admitted to having killed anyone.

Eventually, Sergeant Rini, Detective Durst, and Lieutenant Baumiller turned Sowell over to two detectives from the homicide unit, Melvin Smith and Lem Griffin. But there was little change in Sowell’s demeanor. He refused to acknowledge that he had killed anyone. The detectives tried the circuitous route, talking about his military service and his pacemaker. They had his handcuff removed, hoping to loosen him up, then moved the topic back to the house. They talked about his leaving the house on Imperial the last time, how he’d left on Tuesday without taking his cigarettes, a full pack.

“I had another pack with me,” Sowell explained. “I think my ID and everything. My credit cards.”

“Everybody knows that we were there and everybody knows what we were there for,” Smith said.

“They are just doing their job,” Sowell chimed in.

The detectives were pressing to get these bodies identified as quickly as possible. More and more people were coming forward, asking, demanding to be told the identities of those found. The word swept the streets of the Imperial neighborhood as fast as any crack epidemic.

Although the police were asking for those with loved ones who had been missing and were part of the neighborhood to provide DNA samples, their job would be made much easier if Sowell would start naming names. They knew he knew.

“That’s a good thing that you can do is try to identify,” Smith said.

“Like I told him, I don’t—I don’t even remember meeting them, names or anything…I just black out.”

But finally, Sowell made one break, nothing significant, but mentioned that the last time something went wrong and he blacked out, he’d had an episode.

“I don’t know,” Sowell prefaced his statement. “A month. Maybe longer than that. September.”

Interrogations are like any other interview, provided the subject is willing to engage, as Sowell was. The longer the session goes, the more likely it is to bear fruit.

So Smith and Griffin settled in for some hard work.

“Got you a burger and fries and a drink coming,” Griffin told him after stepping out for a while. Smith and Sowell had been talking family and kids.

“You know he’s got four grandkids?” Smith said to Griffin.

“Really?” Griffin said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. “They call you poppa or grandpa?” he asked Sowell.

It flipped the switch for Sowell.

“Uncle,” Sowell said quickly, brightly.

“You love that don’t you?” Griffin smiled back.

“No, it’s ok, but I, everybody calls me that,” Sowell said. “And my sister used to get on them for that, said, ‘that’s not your uncle that’s your granddad.’ But I said that’s ok.”

But before the food arrived, the questions began to get more focused and immediate.

Griffin leaned in, smoke from his cigarette drifting upward.

“Yeah, let’s make some things right,” he said. “It’s important. Me, you, and my partner…can we go back to our conversation about the bodies in the house?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything specifically that you can remember about the bodies?”

Sowell again went blank.

Next, Griffin read Sowell his rights. Just in case Sowell decided to say something.

Next, Smith tried his hand at cajoling: names, places, dates.

Sowell shook him off.

“This is not going to be pleasant,” Griffin said. “It’s not pleasant for us and I’m sure it’s not pleasant for you. But we know that you concealed some of the bodies, you know that I’m right.”

Sowell looked away from Griffin, toward Smith. But said nothing.

Griffin pushed ahead. Again he leaned in.

“Tell me what she might look like. A conversation, her tone of voice, long hair, short hair, black female, white female, Asian—”

“Black female,” Sowell said, barely audible.

Smith picked it up there.

“Let me ask you, what about age,” he said. “Older female, younger girl…?”

Sowell was tilted in his chair toward Smith, as if he were more receptive to his questions.

“Older,” Sowell said, nodding slightly. “20s, 30s.”

And with that, the two detectives were rolling.

Without ever confessing to anything, Sowell acknowledged that he met women walking in the neighborhood, “going to the store, maybe sitting on my porch.”

“Can we honestly say, between the three of us, that the bodies that we found in the house were from people that you met in that area?” Smith asked.

“I didn’t go far,” Sowell said, not answering the question directly. “Let’s say the Mount Pleasant area, Kinsman to Buckeye. Not far past 116th.”

“And we can honestly say that all of these bodies that were in your house were females,” Smith said, declaring more than asking.

“Yes,” Sowell said.

It went on for hours more. But they had what they wanted, at least partially: acknowledgment.

Two days later, on Monday, November 2, Detectives Smith and Griffin pulled Sowell from his jail cell and had him delivered to the same room. Sowell had a blue zippered jail outfit on, and he sat down in the same chair. Only this time, although they didn’t handcuff him to the chair, instead of friendly conversation, the exchange was rancorous.

“You understand what you’re here for,” Smith said, his voice no longer the measured timbre of someone asking a favor. “You know where you are.”

He wanted answers. He wanted names. Griffin held photos of missing women in his hands, and he sat to Sowell’s right in a chair just feet from him, passing the
black-and-white photos to him. Sowell grabbed them, looked at them.

“No,” he said. “No. No. No,” one after another, and handed them back to Griffin. “I actually don’t remember, it’s more complicated than you think,” Sowell yelled, looking at one photo.

“Explain it to me then,” Smith bellowed.

Sowell rose from his chair. “I don’t want to explain it,” he said, moving toward the door.

Smith, who was sitting in his path, gently put his hands out and pushed Sowell back toward the chair in the corner. Sowell gave them nothing more. But he’d already given them enough.

It was enough, in fact, that John Parker, his court-appointed lawyer, would ask a judge that the interviews be excluded from evidence. He was denied. It was January, two months after the arrest of Sowell.

“We feel his Miranda rights were violated,” Parker told a reporter as the state began to assemble its case against Sowell. “He was interviewed by police at great length. I have seen videotape of the interrogations and I have asked that it be excluded.”

It was clear that Sowell was Mirandized shortly after the tape began on October 31. But Parker was wisely throwing everything he could in the way of the state’s case, much as a man fleeing his pursuers would push obstacles in their path.

Sowell’s arrest also set off a flurry of national and international crime checks, tracing the dates he spent time in various locations during his military travels.

Law enforcement in Parris Island, South Carolina; Cherry Point, North Carolina; Camp Pendleton, California; and Okinawa, Japan, looked for cold cases.

In Coronado, California, near Camp Pendleton, after seeing his face on television, a woman claimed Sowell had raped her. Cops in Coronado said they couldn’t confirm her allegation because records from that far back had been tossed.