On October 29, 2009, Cleveland police officers went to 12205 Imperial Avenue with a warrant to arrest the man who lived there for rape. He was not home. Inside they found the bodies of two women, Telacia Fortson and Diane Turner, and a freshly dug grave. By November 3 investigators had recovered eleven sets of remains: five buried in the backyard, four more bodies inside the house, and a skull. The man they were looking for, Anthony Edward Sowell, was a registered sex offender who had given the sheriff's office that address four years earlier. For two years the neighborhood had complained about the smell.
Every one of the eleven women was Black, and all of them had ties to Mount Pleasant, a working-class neighborhood on Cleveland's east side. Most were mothers. Almost all had struggled with drugs, usually crack cocaine. Several had been reported missing by their families, and several had not been reported at all. Afterward the city argued for years over why nobody had connected the disappearances, the stench and the man on Imperial Avenue.
Sowell was born on August 19, 1959, in East Cleveland, one of seven children of a single mother, Claudia Garrison; his father, Thomas Sowell, a house painter, left the family when Anthony was a toddler. Seven children of a sister who had died also lived in the house. His niece Leona Davis later described Garrison beating the children she was raising, once forcing Davis to strip in front of the others and whipping her with electrical cords until she bled, while Garrison's own children watched from nearby rooms. Sowell joined the Marine Corps, served in the United States and overseas, and was discharged honorably in 1985, the year he and his wife divorced. In 1987 he was convicted of domestic violence.
His first long prison term came from an attack on a woman who was three months pregnant. Accounts differ on the date and setting: some place it at his home in 1989, and a later WKYC account says he lured her from a motel on Euclid Avenue in 1990 by telling her that her boyfriend wanted to see her. She told police he bound her hands and feet with a tie and belt and gagged her with a rag. "He choked me real hard because my body started tingling," she said. "I thought I was going to die." Charged with kidnapping, rape and attempted rape, he pleaded guilty to attempted rape and served fifteen years. In prison he earned his GED, worked as a cook, electrician and yard crewman, and completed Alcoholics Anonymous and anger-management programs.
He came out in 2005 and moved into the house on Imperial Avenue, a four-bedroom house built in 1917 that his father and stepmother, Segrina Sowell, had owned since 1987, next door to Ray's Sausage, a meat business. He registered as a sex offender, required at first to check in with the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office once a year and, from 2008, every ninety days. He worked at a factory until 2007, then collected unemployment, and neighbors said he made a living selling scrap metal. For a time Lori Frazier, a niece of Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson, lived with him. She later said she had smelled the stench and been told it came from Sowell's stepmother, and after she moved out, that it came from the sausage shop. Neighbors complained to the city health department about the odor, and the blame settled on Ray's Sausage.
Prosecutors said he lured women to the house with the promise of alcohol or drugs, strangled them, and wrapped the bodies in garbage bags and plastic sheeting. Crystal Dozier, a mother of seven who had once lived on his block, was the first to disappear, in 2007; published accounts place her last sighting in May or October of that year. Her family said she had leaned on drugs after the death of one of her children. Her mother, Florence Bray, believed Sowell tore down the fliers the family put up. Bray lost a niece in the house as well: Amelda Hunter. Her remains were found beside the fence in his backyard.
Tishana Culver, who had earned a cosmetology degree and trained as a nursing assistant, lived a few blocks away and was last seen in June 2008. Her family, used to her drifting in and out of their lives, thought she might be in jail or living in Akron and never filed a report. Leshanda Long, twenty-five and the mother of three, disappeared that summer; only her skull was ever recovered. Michelle Mason, forty-five, of East 121st Street, went missing in October 2008. She lived with HIV, had worked with an AIDS outreach program, and had devoted herself to her children. Her missing-person file ran to thirty-four pages. Her mother, Adlean Atterberry, walked the east side putting up fliers and believed police had discounted her daughter because of her arrest record.
Tonia Carmichael, fifty-two, of Warrensville Heights, disappeared in the fall of 2008; her mother reported her missing on December 8. A forensic scientist later testified that she had been strangled with a telephone charger cord. Hers was the first body identified. The next four vanished in 2009. Kim Yvette Smith, forty-four, was the sole caretaker of her ailing father and was last seen in January. Nancy Cobbs, forty-three, lived three blocks from Sowell and knew him from the neighborhood; her family said she was devoted to her five grandchildren. Amelda "Amy" Hunter, forty-seven, a mother who loved reading and crossword puzzles, often had drinks at his house and was last seen in April. Telacia Fortson, thirty-one, a mother of three who went to church and liked arranging flowers, disappeared in June and was not reported missing until the bodies were found. Janice Webb, forty-nine, a grandmother, was last seen by her family in June, and they reported her missing in August. Diane Turner, thirty-eight, was the last, in September 2009. Published ages differ by a year for several of the women.
There had been a chance to stop him ten months before the bodies were found. On the evening of December 8, 2008, Gladys Wade, bleeding, ran to a police car near Kinsman Road and East 116th Street. At trial she testified that she had turned down Sowell's invitation to drink with him and was walking down Imperial Avenue when he grabbed her clothing, dragged her toward his house and choked her unconscious. She woke inside; he ordered her to undress and punched her, and when she clawed at his eyes he began strangling her, telling her, "you can scream all you want, you're going to die." She fought free. Officers arrested Sowell that evening, and a police report noted blood droplets on his walls and steps. Two days later he was released without charges. Why is still disputed. A police spokesman said Wade would not cooperate. Wade's later lawsuit alleged that the detective, Georgia Hussein, met with an assistant city prosecutor without presenting the evidence from the house or mentioning Sowell's record, and that the injuries were described as "no visible signs" although she had been taken to University Hospital. The Ohio Supreme Court's opinion says he was released because the arresting officer mislabeled the offense on the incident report. Five or six of the eleven women, depending on the account, disappeared after Wade's complaint.
On September 22, 2009, Cuyahoga County sheriff's deputies paid a surprise visit to confirm his address. Sowell answered their questions at the door, and they left. Latundra Billups later testified that he raped her twice that same day; she said he beat her and choked her with an extension cord until she passed out, and told jurors he looked surprised when she woke up. On October 20 a naked woman fell from an upper window of the house. She was Shawn Morris, who testified that Sowell had put her in a chokehold, forced her to undress, threatened to kill her and raped her twice. Billups went to the police, and her complaint produced the warrant served on October 29.
Sowell was arrested two days later, on October 31. The Cuyahoga County coroner identified all eleven women by early December. A grand jury returned an eighty-five-count indictment: two counts of aggravated murder with death specifications for each of the eleven women, and counts of attempted murder, rape, kidnapping, felonious assault, aggravated robbery, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence, including charges for the attacks on Wade, Billups and Morris. In April 2010 a separate ten-count indictment charged him with raping a thirty-four-year-old woman in his home. He first pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and later changed his plea to not guilty. His lawyers moved to suppress his hours-long statement to police, arguing that a psychotic disorder had kept him from waiving his rights knowingly; the court held a closed hearing in July 2010 and let the statement in.
Almost every prospective juror had heard about the case. The trial before Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Dick Ambrose opened in 2011. Wade, Billups and Morris all testified, as did Tanja Doss, a former girlfriend who described accepting his invitation to get high at the house in April 2009. The defense called no witnesses in the guilt phase. On July 22, 2011, the jury convicted Sowell on eighty-one counts, including all eleven aggravated murders; the judge had acquitted him of the felony-murder and kidnapping counts involving Leshanda Long. In the penalty phase the defense presented his childhood, his Marine service and his good record during the fifteen years in prison. Assistant Prosecutor Pinky Carr said the case "screamed death penalty," and her colleague Richard Bombik told the jury, "If this guy doesn't get the death penalty, nobody should." The jury recommended death on August 10, and Ambrose imposed it on August 12.
The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence on December 8, 2016, rejecting among other claims his challenges to the closed hearing and to parts of jury selection held out of public view. He was never executed. Sowell had worn a pacemaker since before his arrest, and on February 8, 2021, he died of a terminal illness at the Franklin Medical Center, the prison system's hospital in Columbus. He was sixty-one.
The city condemned the house and demolished it on December 6, 2011; crews took about two hours, and the debris was driven under police escort to a recycling plant in Garfield Heights and shredded so that no one could keep a piece of it. For years the lot sat empty, and in 2016 families complained that the city had let it become overgrown and littered. Western Reserve Land Conservancy and neighborhood partners acquired the lot and adjacent parcels, eight in all, and on November 6, 2021, the Garden of Eleven Angels opened where the house had stood, at Imperial Avenue and East 123rd Street. "I had two in this house that's gone and it hurts," Florence Bray said at the opening. "There's a special place in hell just for him."