By Chris Bartholomew
The house is squeezed between a sausage story and another house in an inner-city poor neighborhood of aging homes, some even boarded up and abandoned, in Cleveland, Ohio.
Eleven bodies, and a skull in a bucket in the basement of a three-story Ohio home, and neighbors who'd been complaining of a bad smell for at least two years. Women were attacked and escaped, but no one said a word for fear that the authorities wouldn't believe them because they had records of drug use. Ten of the victims have been identified through DNA.
Here is a man who targeted women who were on drugs, or had police records. One woman who was attacked actually said his eyes glowed red like a demon and she knew if she didn't fight hard to get away that he would kill her. One of the women who got away has a friend who is among the eight missing women the authorities are looking at as possible victims. Ten of the victims have been identified through DNA and dental records.
A SWAT team went to the home with an arrest and search warrant for the man on a separate rape charge. When they found that the man was not home, and because of the terrible smell coming from the house, they went in on the search warrant and found the first two bodies on the third floor of the building and then checked the basement. Most of the bodies were found inside the house, and one was buried outside in the garden.
Convicted of choking and raping a woman in 1989, the man was released from prison in June of 2005. Parole officers say he complied with all the rules of his parole, reporting regularly to a local sheriff's office for the past four years.
The victims were all in various stages of decomposition, and were all strangled, some still having the cords still wrapped around their throats. Two of the victims have been identified.
Police, who stood outside the house said the stench from inside was overwhelming. Rotting bodies were found in bedrooms, the living room, a crawl space, in the back yard buried in a shallow grave, and there was a grave found in the basement.
The neighbors who had been complaining for at least two years of the stench coming from the house, and the health department blamed the smell on a sausage factory not too far away, and backed up sewage at the plant. The smell got so bad that the owners of the brick building where workers made sausage and head cheese replaced their sewer line and grease traps. The smell never went away of course, because the stench was not coming from the building.
Now of course there is outrage because the neighbors say sometimes the stench was so bad it made their eyes water and that the health department should have been able to tell the difference between dead bodies and rotten meat. Apparently the killer lived among all those decomposing bodies for months, if not years, and he too smelled bad. One grocer said when he came into his store to buy beer the man smelled so bad he had to open all the doors. He asked the man why he smelled so bad and the man just shrugged and walked away with his purchase.
He lured the women to his home with the promise of alcohol or drugs.
Editor's note: this article was written in the days after the discovery at 12205 Imperial Avenue in late October 2009, which is why it refers throughout to “the man” and why the number identified changes from one paragraph to the next as the count rose. He was Anthony Sowell, arrested on October 31, 2009. He was convicted in July 2011 of eleven counts of aggravated murder and sentenced to death on August 12, 2011, and died in custody of terminal illness on February 8, 2021. The eleven women were Crystal Dozier, Tishana Culver, Leshanda Long, Michelle Mason, Tonia Carmichael, Nancy Cobbs, Amelda Hunter, Telacia Fortson, Janice Webb, Kim Yvette Smith and Diane Turner. The part of this article that has aged least is the part about the complaints: the smell was reported for two years and attributed to a sausage plant, and the women who escaped him did not go to the police because they expected not to be believed.