Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (2 page)
Read Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer Online
Authors: Steve Miller
Perhaps it is being such a slave to a compulsion that you know is wrong, that you just can’t stop. Like a Nolan Ryan fastball or a Johnny Ramone barre chord—you just do what you do because you have to. It’s why you live.
That’s Anthony Sowell. He killed because he felt he had to.
The day I first visited Cleveland for this story was February 17, 2011, the same day another Ohio man was executed by lethal injection for murder. Frank Spisak was a triple murderer who read Bible verses in German as he lay on the gurney awaiting the injection, the last to use sodium thiopental because of its scarcity. Ohio’s use of the death penalty was alive and well, and I wondered what Sowell was thinking as he heard the news of the execution. No doubt he was aware of the sentence being carried out.
Although Spisak’s fate was sealed by his hatred of blacks and other minorities, and Sowell’s homicidal hatred was misogynistic, both cases had elements of race. Sowell’s crimes were black-on-black, but it was also being held up as a case of police who didn’t care about black people. Of course, in a police department that’s 80 percent black, that was a harder allegation to prove—do black police care less about black victims? Or is the entire dynamic so convoluted that it’s impossible to dissect who cares less
or more? Or was the real issue less about race and more about class?
And there is the opportunity factor. Dahmer could pick up kids easily because he put himself in places where his victims were. Sowell walked the streets, seeming to troll for his victims, catching them waiting at bus stops or walking down the street. And he sure knew these weren’t people who would be missed. Serial killer Gary Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer, satiated himself and his need to control and kill by making sure his victims were hookers.
“I can kill a prostitute and have a lot less chance of getting caught because you don’t know them, they don’t know you,” he explained. “The police won’t look as hard as they would if it was a senator’s daughter or something, you know?”
Yes, unfortunately, we do know.
To clarify some of the reporting in this book, a quote attribution that reads “says” means that I, the author, did that interview. The attribution “said” means the quote or statement was derived from other sources, including news accounts, courtroom testimony or tapes, and letters.
As always, thanks for reading.
C
HAPTER
1
I’m too tired to kill you right now.
—ANTHONY SOWELL
When Melvette Sockwell left her mother’s home early on the evening of July 21, 1989, it was with a summer breeze at her back. Melvette was twenty-one years old, slight at five feet one, and pretty. She was also three months pregnant with her third child, and unwed. It was a hard road she was taking, but on that evening, her mind was free. She was finally feeling all right.
The term
finally
was relative for Melvette Sockwell, one of fourteen children born to Aretha Sockwell. Melvette’s father never married Aretha and was soon gone from the scene after his daughter was born in February 1968. But shortly after Melvette’s birth, Aretha married a military man, Richard Williams.
A Vietnam veteran and military lifer, Williams and the family settled in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. But once Williams
retired from his twenty years in the U.S. Army, Aretha decided it was time to get out of the South.
“We’re moving to Cleveland,” she announced to him and the kids one day in early 1971. And that was that. The family packed up and headed north.
“We crossed that bridge, the main bridge, into Cleveland and it was like going to the carnival with all those lights,” Melvette recalls. “It was lit up like a merry-go-round at the county fair.”
Melvette was happy growing up in Cleveland, and she loved Williams, her first true father figure.
“He taught me to ride a bike; he was the perfect daddy, even though he was my stepfather. He taught me about how he lived in Vietnam, about the war. Back then, when my dad was in the service, enlisting was the noble thing to do,” Melvette says. “I thought about it even when I was eighteen, even though the war was just over. But I didn’t do it. I was already in trouble, [though] thinking now, I should have.”
And Williams provided for the family. When they arrived in Cleveland, they lived in the bluff, an esteemed part of the old city that afforded a view and many roads straight down to Euclid Avenue, once known as “Millionaires Row” because of all the mansions that dotted the road. As Melvette remembers, “All the neighbors were white. It was a really good neighborhood, up on the bluff, and down the street we had a view overlooking the city.”
But the area, like so many in urban centers all over America, started going to seed as the more prosperous
families left for the suburbs—the so-called white-flight phenomenon—that gutted neighborhoods and left behind cheap housing and a criminal element that wasn’t policed nearly enough.
Melvette started out well enough, but she too was soon living the life of the streets. As a teenager with no one watching out for her, she fell into a lifestyle of drugs, drinking, and sex. She dropped out of high school at sixteen and had one child, then another; the familiar tragedy of the city became part of her being.
Soon enough, her mother split from Williams, though Melvette continued to live with her mother and several siblings in a large, pretty colonial house on Hilton Avenue, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms. The family had enough money to be comfortable.
“I was no angel,” Melvette says. “But no one can tell me I deserved what happened to me.”
On that July evening in 1989, it was balmy and moist, a dewy rain falling most of the day—the kind of pleasant night that made it worth suffering through the wicked midwestern winters. Melvette walked out of her house and got behind the wheel of her boyfriend’s Cadillac Eldorado, a ride she coveted. She had no driver’s license, not that that ever stopped her from driving. On this evening, her boyfriend had business and so he let her take the car, and she would meet him later.
She hit some spots in East Cleveland; she had been going to bars in the area since she was fifteen. “They never
carded; we all went there, me and my girlfriends,” she says.
After the evening ended, Melvette headed over to a motel not far from where her revelry had landed her, just two miles from her mom’s home. Her boyfriend was staying at the motel, using it as a base from which to deal drugs. It was around 6
A.M.
, July 22, when she arrived. The clubs stayed open all night if you knew the right people, and Melvette did. But as she pulled up, she noticed two suspicious cars in the parking lot. They looked familiar. They looked like cops.
“I didn’t want to get involved with that. I was already dating a drug dealer,” she says. “I got out of the car, it was just getting light, and I didn’t know what to do.”
She walked to a pay phone on Euclid, but it was out of order.
And as if by magic, Anthony Sowell walked up to her. It was out of the blue, almost genie-like.
“I thought later, he was probably there to buy drugs, but I didn’t know that,” Melvette says. The two talked. Sowell was a good talker. He was a month shy of thirty years old, an ex–U.S. Marine, in good shape, talked nice, and he calmed her down.
He said he could give her a ride home; his car was at his house, just a block over, on Page Avenue. By now it was 10
A.M.
, and the two walked together to the stucco house, still talking. Both were drug users, although neither was holding and agreed it was too hot at the motel to try to score. She would just go home, maybe. Or maybe
she would spend a little more time getting to know this Anthony Sowell.
Anthony Sowell was born in East Cleveland’s Meridia Huron Hospital on August 19, 1959, to Thomas Sowell Sr. and Claudia Garrison. They weren’t married, but it wasn’t an especially uncommon thing in the neighborhood at the time. Men wandered, and women took it and bore them children if they really liked the fellows. And women loved them some Thomas Sowell Sr.
The line on Thomas Sr. went like this: he was born October 10, 1922, in Cleveland, his parents having moved the family from Athens, Alabama, a few years before. In 1942, he married Virginia Ogletree, with whom he had four children: three sons, Thomas Jr., Allan, and William, and a daughter, Janice.
Virginia and Thomas Sr. divorced in 1952, but his legend was a weighty one; word was that he was a professional safecracker and a clever kiter of checks and other financial instruments. Which is how he found himself doing prison time during much of that decade of marriage.
“When I was very young, my grandparents took us to see my dad in prison in Columbus,” says Thomas Jr., who was born in 1945. “We pulled up to this big stone building and went through a big iron gate, and you could hear that big
clang
behind you. And there were these huge gun towers. And we went into a room with tables, and all the inmates came out to visit.”
As his brother Allan remembered, “My father was always incarcerated when I was young.”
Thomas Sr. was also a hard-drinking man, a “rolling stone, with a lotta women,” Allan said, while son Thomas Jr. says he was a “philanderer.” Along with Anthony Sowell, rumors of other children popped up.
And yet, Virginia would never bad-mouth her wayward, criminally inclined husband, Thomas Jr. says. Such was the charm of his father.
Thomas Sr. was in good health save for one thing; he had epilepsy, which ran in his family. He struggled with it most of his life, and he had seizures of varying severity for as long as everyone in the family could remember. The drinking didn’t help, of course. But he didn’t want to quit that, so he endured the seizures.
In 1958, Thomas Sr. married Velma Clemons, a union that ended when Velma died a few years later. And in 1972, Thomas Sowell married a quiet, gentle woman eighteen years his junior named Segerna Henderson.
“Thomas drank, and he would go out,” said Virginia Oliver, Segerna’s mother. “When men are single, you know how they are.” But Segerna “was young, and she calmed him down.”
The two lived around town a bit before settling into the family home at 12205 Imperial Avenue, a palatial, spacious place on Cleveland’s east side that Thomas had inherited from his father.
Thomas Sowell Sr. continued to move in and out of the prison system. In August 1977, he was charged with
carrying a concealed, loaded weapon, a serious offense for an ex-felon.
He pled guilty and received a sentence of one to four years. In February 1978, he again headed to the Correctional Medical and Reception Center in Columbus to await further prison designation; but by May, with the help of some good lawyering, he was released in an order from Judge Roy F. McMahon, who ordered that Thomas Sowell Sr. be “placed on probation for a term of three years on condition of good behavior, etc.”
With Thomas Sowell Sr.’s legal tussles, his fondness for drink, and the prison terms, for Anthony Sowell, there was never any real fathering. His dad asked Allan to hang out with him when Sowell was seven or eight years old, but Allan was already a man of twenty-four with career concerns.
“I took him to a softball game, a couple of baseball games,” Allan said. “My father asked me to spend some time with him because he wanted [Anthony] to know the family.”
On that summer morning in 1989—night was over, and it was now the next day—Anthony Sowell walked alongside Melvette Sockwell, who was a little buzzed and a little distressed over the fate of her drug-dealing boyfriend.
In January 1985, Sowell had been honorably discharged from the Marines after serving two four-year
hitches. He’d come home to East Cleveland, a wiry five feet eleven, 160 pounds of muscle, and moved back into the home he grew up in, on Page Avenue. His half sister Tressa Garrison lived in the house with their mother, Claudia, and many children from various fathers and with familial ties to varying generations. Some of the kids belonged to Tressa; others came from other relatives in the loosely knit Sowell-Garrison clan.
Sowell began working as a metal fitter at an auto parts shop on Euclid, a bus ride away. It was part of his release, gainful employment. But he always liked to work.
Nevertheless, the neighborhood was eroding as well as his sense of well-being. Nearly a quarter of East Cleveland lived below the poverty line, which was determined as a family of four with annual cash income of less than $10,989.
It was a place that Anthony Sowell had once thought of as his home, but it didn’t feel quite that way anymore. And whatever his demons were, the unsettled life he was living was feeding them.
Sowell and Melvette walked up the slight incline on Page Avenue to 1878, at the end of the block. The four-bedroom stucco home had been built in 1907 and featured a peaked roof; a small, stone porch with an overhang; and a stoop. A detached garage was too small for a car but instead held landscaping tools and old toys.
The house was remarkable in the neighborhood for its size—it sat on a 13,000-square-foot lot—and its imposing
height. Although it was listed as a two-story building, the attic, where Sowell lived, was a functional space, with a steep stairway and a triangular ceiling. At one time divided into two rooms, it was now one large space, the domain of Sowell, as he was the oldest member of the family living there. His bed took up much of the room, and a small window opened to the front, giving the space some air.
“That was a gorgeous house,” said neighbor Katie Tabb, who raised her children next door.
Sowell opened the side door to the home, and Melvette paused to look at a tree next to the garage, a bent, dead-looking thing that struck her ominously. “It was black; it had black bark. I looked at it and wondered why that was. I just thought it looked strange.”