In Cleveland’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood, people began complaining about a smell in 2006. For three years they blamed a sewer line, and then they blamed the sausage maker next door. The family that owned the business paid for new plumbing and a new grease trap, and neither fixed anything. A couple who had rented a floor of the house beside it moved out after a short time, leaving much of their furniture behind. When the reason for the smell came to light in October 2009, eleven women had died there.
Hindsight makes every odd detail look like a warning, and the records do not show that any single complaint, acted on at once, would have changed the outcome. They do show something more specific: complaints to a police box, a doctor’s repeated cautions, a mother’s report, a description given by a woman who survived. Courts, historians and reporters have set out what was said, to whom, and what became of it. Eight cases carry that kind of record.
The suspicion landed on the neighboring business. Its owner testified that he spent nearly 30,000 dollars replacing a grease trap; Associated Press reports put the spending on plumbing and sewer lines at about 20,000. In 2026 the family that still runs the company told Signal Cleveland that the city had ordered costly repairs that proved unnecessary, that sales fell, and that the episode cost them at least 400,000 dollars and about five years to recover.
The women’s families raised alarms of their own. Michelle Mason’s mother testified that in October 2008 she went to the police after two days without hearing from her daughter. The family put up fliers in the neighborhood, and the fliers kept disappearing; a store owner told her that Sowell had taken them down. Tonia Carmichael’s daughter said that when the family went to the police, they were told to go home. Two other women, Tishana Culver and Leshanda Long, were never reported missing to anyone. Culver’s family last saw her in June 2008; she had lived a few houses from Sowell.
Then there was December 2008. A woman reported to police that she had been assaulted at the house, according to CBS News; Sowell was arrested and released without charges. The families of six of the women later sued the city, and in 2018 Cleveland agreed to pay 1 million dollars, Ideastream reported. The deaths came to light on October 29, 2009, when officers went to the house with warrants after a woman reported a rape there in September.
A jury in Cuyahoga County convicted Sowell in July 2011 of the aggravated murder of eleven women, and of kidnapping, rape and attempted murder concerning three women who survived. He was sentenced to death, and the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed the convictions and sentences in December 2016. He died in custody on February 8, 2021. CBS News reported in March 2010 that the case was likely to bring changes, and News 5 Cleveland reported on the tenth anniversary in 2019 that promises of reform made after the case had not been kept.
The scale of what the police were not acting on is in the figures. The philosopher Theodor Lessing, who reported on the case, wrote that in 1923 alone almost 600 people were recorded as missing in Hanover, most of them boys and young men between 14 and 18. The city was crowded with young people with nowhere fixed to stay, which made each report easy to file as a runaway. Parents went to the police regardless. In at least one case Haarmann presented himself to a family as a criminal investigator.
An early visit had gone nowhere. In 1918 a detective went to Haarmann’s rooms in connection with a missing 17-year-old and left without him, and six more years passed before police acted.
The case unraveled in June 1924, and partly by chance. A 15-year-old boy and Haarmann became involved in a dispute at the station, and Haarmann reported the boy to the station police. The boy answered with a complaint of his own. Haarmann was arrested on June 22 and moved to the court prison the next day. What turned a complaint about one man into a murder inquiry was the testimony of ordinary witnesses. At police headquarters, the mother of Robert Witzel, who had come about her son, recognized the suit worn by another witness, a landlady, as his, with absolute certainty. The landlady had bought it from Haarmann. Confronted with that, Haarmann began to confess, first to Witzel’s death and then to others.
Some 200 witnesses gave evidence at the trial, many of them parents. The Schwurgericht in Hanover convicted him of 24 murders on December 19, 1924, acquitted him of three, and sentenced him to death; he was executed on April 15, 1925. Hans Grans, tried with him, was sentenced to death in 1924, had a retrial in 1926 and was given 12 years for aiding two murders.
Lessing attacked the police role, was barred from the courtroom, and was later driven from his university post. Seventy years afterward, the forensic psychiatrist Christine Pozsár, working from the shorthand transcripts, argued that the court’s expert had not been neutral and that doubts about Haarmann’s responsibility should have ruled out a death sentence, the Ärzte Zeitung reported in 2024. The state archive and the city of Hanover count his confessions differently, and the real total of victims was never settled.
Neighbors noticed a foul odor in the building, one of them told ZDF. The deaths stayed hidden in the building for months, and in Beuschel’s case for most of a year. He tried to cover the smell with scented blocks, according to Volksstimme, and Anna Franklin, reviewing the 2019 film for Film New Europe, wrote that the real Honka blamed the smell on a neighboring family. The Hamburg Police Museum now holds odor spray among the objects from the flat. Karl Pries, who recalled the case for ZDF in 2025, said that how the killings stayed hidden so long had never been fully explained.
The historian Frauke Steinhäuser, who researched the women’s lives for a brochure published by the association Garten der Frauen, told the taz in 2025 that only one of the four, Anna Beuschel, was reported to the police at all. Her husband made the report. For Gertraud Bräuer, no one reported anything. Frieda Roblick’s sisters had not seen her for about 20 years and about four years, and they declined to pay for a funeral. For Ruth Schult, the only official reaction to her absence was an order from the health authority to find her because she had missed an examination.
Firefighters entered Honka’s flat on July 17, 1975, to put out a fire in the building, and the deaths came to light that day. ZDFheute reported in 2025, drawing on Pries’s recollections, that police arrived and Honka came back while they were still there, indignant and asking what they were doing. Confronted with what was in the flat, he said, "Davon weiß ich nichts," I know nothing about that.
A Hamburg jury court tried him from November 12, 1976. On December 20 it convicted him of murder in one case and manslaughter in three, held that he had acted with diminished criminal responsibility, and sentenced him to 15 years combined with committal to a psychiatric hospital. The prosecution had asked for life imprisonment, web.de reported. In 2025 a travertine memorial stone with the women’s names and photographs was dedicated in Ohlsdorf Cemetery. Steinhäuser said she began the work because she could not accept that no one cared about the victims.
The case is remembered locally as the "House of Death." What the legal record adds is the sentence that followed. Judge Robert A. Latrone, trying Graham without a jury in the Court of Common Pleas over seven weeks, rejected the account in Graham’s statement that the deaths were accidents as "self-serving and wholly incredible." He convicted him of seven counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of abuse of corpse. For six of the women he imposed death sentences; for the first he imposed life. He then ordered every sentence to run consecutively, so that the death sentences could be carried out only if the life term were ever commuted. Graham’s lawyer, Joel Moldovsky, said as much to reporters.
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the death sentences on July 18, 1995, and vacated the order that made them wait. A Pennsylvania court threw out the death sentences in 2003, PhillyVoice reported. As of August 2017 he was reported to be serving a life sentence at SCI Coal Township. The exact date and grounds of the 2003 ruling have not been made public.
What the record shows is narrow. People nearby complained about a particular apartment, the complaints ended in an order to leave, and the deaths came to light when the landlord, with the tenant gone, called police.
The house belonged to a physician, Marcel Petiot, who had offered people trying to leave occupied France a passage to South America, then killed them and kept their money and belongings. He arrived while the police were there. Le Quotidien du Médecin says he first introduced himself as his own brother, then told the officers that the dead were Nazis. Salon, reviewing the American historian David King’s 2011 book, writes that he told the first patrolmen the house was a resistance outpost and the dead were "Germans and traitors," and that they let him leave. A Reuters report on King’s research says he spoke with a patrolman in a gathering crowd and rode away on a bicycle. He was not arrested until October 31, 1944, after seven months in hiding.
Petiot’s earlier history had also drawn attention, without result. Britannica records that a patient of his was murdered around 1930, and that another patient who had accused him of that killing also died in unexplained circumstances; Hérodote adds that in 1926 the house of a patient’s daughter, with whom he was said to be having an affair, was set on fire and that the young woman vanished. Later writers linked these events to him. He was never charged over any of them.
The trial began on March 18, 1946, and the Ministry of Justice later called it the great media trial of the Second World War. His lawyer, René Floriot, did not plead insanity; he challenged the weaknesses of the investigation and argued that the dead were collaborators killed "for France." Petiot himself said he had killed 63 people, all enemies of his country, and denied the murders he was convicted of. On April 4 the Seine Assize Court convicted him of the premeditated murder of 24 people, with theft, from 27 charged. He was executed on May 25, 1946. Some historians, as Salon reported, have questioned how the victims died; his conviction rests on the case presented in court.
Neighbors had complained for months. The police box serving the district told reporters after the arrests that since the previous August, people living near the home had reported that the babies were never bathed, even in summer, were left unclothed on the floor of an alcove where mosquitoes reached them, and cried all day. A woman who gave birth at the home complained to the patrolman responsible for the area; he reportedly said it was a terrible place and that she had been brave to go there at all. Women who saw how the infants were treated called Ishikawa the oni sanba, the demon midwife, and some left before they had recovered.
The staff also saw. More than ten midwives worked at the home over the years. A former worker told the Yomiuri Shimbun in January 1948 that Ishikawa set the portions herself, about half of what a normal infant would take, and the Asahi Shimbun reported that the midwives asked for more milk, were told to follow instructions, and all left within a month of starting. Several said the director seemed to be trying to kill the children.
A doctor signed the death certificates. Bunshun Online’s 2026 account says the couple obtained close to 60 false certificates. The doctor told the Asahi that by the time the children were brought to him they were beyond help and that he had warned the couple repeatedly, with no result. He was arrested on January 18 with an assistant midwife; what became of him afterward is not known.
Finally there was the ward office. For each death, the Shinjuku ward office issued tickets for two shō of sake for the funeral. According to Bunshun Online, the couple sold the milk, sugar and sake on the black market. On January 21 the Asahi Shimbun ran a long article asking whose crime it was, pointing to the staff who had left without reporting what they saw, the neighbors, the doctor, the local police and above all the ward office, whose officials had processed more than a hundred death reports and sake tickets without asking why. The Asahi called it bloodless office work.
A commentary in the Jiji Press bulletin on January 26 argued that an infant fed only on the official ration would die, because the ration was two 450-gram cans of milk a month when eight to ten were needed. On January 26 the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office indicted Ishikawa, her husband and the assistant midwife for murder.
On October 11, 1948, the Tokyo District Court held the couple responsible for five deaths caused by omission through malnutrition, sentencing Ishikawa to eight years; it held the evidence insufficient on 22 further deaths of the 27 the prosecution called clear. The Tokyo High Court cut the sentence to four years on April 28, 1952, and the Supreme Court upheld it. After the arrests, the Tokyo health bureau surveyed private maternity homes, and similar cases came to light at three more, according to the report of the House of Representatives. The estimates of total deaths at Kotobuki, never tried, range from 85 to more than 100.
The historian Sace Elder, who studied the police file, shows how much the building knew. Neighbors noticed a good deal. Grossmann came back late with women, and there was noise and a smell from his room. When one neighbor shouted at him to stop what was going on in the corridor, he answered through the closed door that the neighbor should be quiet. Another resident later told police that what they had heard were cries of pain, not cries for help. When people asked about the smell, he gave an explanation, and they accepted it. A married couple on his floor had drilled a hole in his door so they could watch him, and when wanted notices about murdered women in the district went up in early August 1921, Elder writes, they thought "instinctively" of him.
None of the women who dealt with him had gone to the police. Elder gives the reasons as shame and fear, and notes that police were seen by women in their position as persecutors rather than protectors. Grossmann turned this to advantage. He was a familiar figure at the local precinct, where he repeatedly reported the women he took in as housekeepers for theft. The police came to doubt his complaints, but one woman he had accused had the charges against her dropped only after his arrest, when she agreed to testify against him. Elder concludes that investigators later treated the women’s accounts as evidence of murder rather than of the violence done to the women themselves.
The numbers attached to him grew faster than the evidence. An undated police report in the file speaks of six deaths; police in 1921 hoped to attribute as many as 27; the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger reported in September 1921 firm evidence of at least 15 to 20; rumor said fifty. The Berlin police history page says that three could be attributed to him. Göllner, writing in the Tagesspiegel, reports that the trial opened on July 1, 1922, on three murders the prosecution considered provable, that 51 witnesses were called, and that Berlin’s newspapers were silent for part of it because of a printers' strike.
Some of the warnings came from survivors. On May 9, 1976, Marcella Claxton survived an assault in Leeds. She gave the police a description and a photofit that later proved accurate. She was ruled out as part of the series, the Press Association reported, because she was not among the women the inquiry’s theory had in mind. She was pregnant and lost the baby. Speaking after Sutcliffe’s death in November 2020, she said she still lived with her injuries. The assault on her was one of the seven attempted murders to which he pleaded guilty. On December 14, 1977, another woman in Leeds survived an assault. She gave a description later judged a "remarkable likeness" of Sutcliffe, but police dismissed her as unreliable, the Yorkshire Post reported in 2019. That, too, was one of the charged attempted murders.
Some came from experts. The inquiry’s attention was drawn toward Sunderland by letters and a tape sent from Sunderland. Voice experts and some detectives warned that the material was a hoax, the Press Association reported. Twelve days after the death of Barbara Leach in September 1979, the hoaxer himself telephoned the police to say that the letters and tape were not genuine; he gave nothing they could check, and the call was lost among many others. The survivors who had heard the man who assaulted them speak said he sounded like a local man. Sutcliffe was from Bradford. He later said of the Sunderland hunt: "While ever that was going on, I felt safe."
And one warning concerned how the police spoke. Officers described Jayne MacDonald, 16, as the first "innocent" victim. Wilma McCann’s son Richard, who was five when she died, said in 2020 that this implied his mother and the other women had not been innocent. "My mum was completely innocent and deserved to live," he said. Jayne’s own family were angered by the division of the dead into good and bad women, the Yorkshire Post reported. After Sutcliffe’s death the chief constable of West Yorkshire Police apologized for the language, tone and terminology used by officers at the time.
The Byford Report, written for the Home Office after his conviction, described an "unexplained lull" in his recorded activity between 1969, when he first came to police attention, and 1975. He was arrested in Sheffield on January 2, 1981, after a check on the number plates of his car. At the Central Criminal Court in London he was convicted on May 22, 1981 of 13 murders, after a jury rejected his claim of diminished responsibility, and given 20 concurrent life sentences. A whole life order followed in 2010. He died in custody on November 13, 2020.
In Tokyo, the press asked in January 1948 whose crime it was and named the ward office. In Philadelphia, neighbors' complaints ended in an eviction. In Hanover, the man the police should have been watching was working as their informer. In Berlin, the women who might have testified had every reason to avoid the precinct. What the courts, archives and reporters added, years later, was the record of what had been said and who had heard it.
• 1918: In Hanover, a detective visits Haarmann’s rooms in connection with a missing 17-year-old and leaves without him; Haarmann begins informing for the criminal police.
• 1919 to 1921: Berlin neighbors hear noise and notice a smell from Carl Grossmann’s room.
• August 21, 1921: Grossmann is arrested in Berlin after a neighbor reports screams; he dies by suicide in custody July 5, 1922.
• 1923: Almost 600 people are reported missing in Hanover, mostly boys and young men aged 14 to 18.
• June 22, 1924: Haarmann is arrested in Hanover after a boy’s complaint; a mother’s recognition of a suit leads to his confession.
• December 19, 1924: Haarmann is convicted of 24 murders; he is executed April 15, 1925.
• March 10 or 11, 1944: Neighbors of Petiot’s Paris house complain of smoke; the fire brigade enters.
• April 4, 1946: Petiot is convicted of 24 murders; he is executed May 25.
• January 12, 1948: Patrolmen in Shinjuku Ward question an undertaker about five infants' deaths at the Kotobuki home; Ishikawa is arrested January 15.
• October 11, 1948: The Tokyo District Court convicts the Ishikawas over five deaths; on appeal in 1952 her sentence is cut to four years.
• 1970 to 1975: Four women die in Hamburg; only one is reported to anyone.
• July 17, 1975: Firefighters entering Honka’s flat during a building fire bring the deaths to light.
• May 9, 1976: Marcella Claxton survives an assault in Leeds; her accurate description is set aside.
• December 20, 1976: Honka is convicted of one murder and three counts of manslaughter.
• December 14, 1977: Another survivor’s description of Sutcliffe is dismissed by police as unreliable.
• January 2, 1981: Sutcliffe is arrested in Sheffield; he is convicted May 22, 1981.
• August 1987: Graham’s neighbors complain of a smell; he is ordered out; the landlord calls police.
• May 3, 1988: Graham is sentenced by Judge Latrone; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rules on the order of sentences July 18, 1995.
• 2006: Cleveland neighbors begin complaining about a smell near Sowell’s house.
• October 2008: The family of Michelle Mason reports her disappearance; fliers are removed.
• December 2008: A woman reports an assault at Sowell’s house; he is arrested and released without charges.
• October 29, 2009: Cleveland police go to the house with warrants; the eleven deaths come to light.
• July 22, 2011: Sowell is convicted of 11 aggravated murders.
• 2018: Cleveland agrees to pay 1 million dollars to the families of six of Sowell’s victims.
• November 13, 2020: Sutcliffe dies in custody; West Yorkshire Police apologize for officers' language about the victims.
• February 8, 2021: Sowell dies in custody.