Anthony Edward Sowell was born in East Cleveland on August 19, 1959. He served in the Marines, and in 1990 was convicted of the attempted rape of a pregnant woman and served fifteen years. He was released in 2005 and registered as a sex offender, living at 12205 Imperial Avenue in the Mount Pleasant district of Cleveland.
Between 2007 and 2009 he killed eleven women. All were Black, most were poor, and most had struggled with crack addiction. He offered them alcohol or drugs, strangled them, and left the bodies in the house, in the stairwell, in shallow graves in the yard, and in the crawl space. The Cleveland press called him the Cleveland Strangler.
The eleven were Crystal Dozier, thirty-eight; Tishana Culver, thirty-one; Leshanda Long, twenty-five; Michelle Mason, forty-five; Tonia Carmichael, fifty-three; Nancy Cobbs, forty-three; Amelda Hunter, forty-seven; Telacia Fortson, thirty-one; Janice Webb, forty-nine; Kim Yvette Smith, forty-four; and Diane Turner.
The smell was reported for two years. It was blamed on the sausage factory next door, which spent money on new equipment because of it.
Families reported the women missing and were told, in several documented cases, that grown women who used drugs were entitled to disappear. In December 2008 a woman escaped from the house and reported a rape, and no charge followed. In September 2009 another woman jumped from a second-floor window. That report produced the warrant.
Police went to the house on October 29, 2009 and found two bodies immediately. They kept digging for a week. Sowell was arrested two days later.
He was convicted in July 2011 of eleven aggravated murders and sentenced to death on August 12. He died of terminal illness in custody on February 8, 2021.
A city commission afterwards examined how eleven women could vanish from one neighbourhood without a serious investigation. Every element needed to find him was already in the hands of the authorities: a registered sex offender at a known address, two years of complaints about the smell coming from that address, eleven missing-person reports, and a rape allegation from a woman who had got out of the house alive. The commission's answer was about who the women were.