Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (28 page)

This is how a huge bureaucracy handles a crisis; WPA Opinion Research is also known as a crisis-management operation. Elected officials and city workers failed to see the Sowell problem as a procedural problem; they saw it as a political inconvenience.

What wasn’t addressed was the court system that determined Gladys Wade’s accusation of assault in December 2008 was not credible while Sowell’s explanation was. The coroner’s office found that five women—Kim Yvette Smith, Nancy Cobbs, Amelda Hunter, Janice Webb, and Telacia Fortson—died after the Wade case.

It appears that the white-collar law-enforcement workers—prosecutors, judges who might sign warrants, and various paper pushers—are above the fray, while the street cops take the blame.

The state of Ohio has a long way to go in caring for its people, especially those who aren’t part of the government superstructure, where pensions and raises are freely handed out despite shoddy performance.

In reading up on the case and talking to people involved, it became apparent to me that there were even more attacks by Sowell that were not reported.

Other families never reported missing loved ones because they were so used to their being missing.

And some reportings are in dispute. Sam Tayeh, who owned the market on Imperial Avenue just feet from the Sowell home, contends families never came to his store with flyers for missing people. Some of the families swear they did. The cops also say that some of the relatives who claim to have reported their loved ones missing never did so. Who is to be believed?

Once the trial was over, I wrote my first letter to Sowell, asking to meet.

My letter began, “Here we are. I am your biographer, and I guess there’s not a lot either of us can do about it. I’m a crime writer…and you’re a convicted criminal. And I am writing your story. I’d like to talk with you, and getting on your visitation list is a good start. We can
talk for as much time as they give us, and I’d like to hear it all from you.”

It was a pretty straightforward missive, and I didn’t want to mislead him with any promises of “equal time” or “fairness.” Any report seeks to be fair, but a criminal’s idea of fairness is often vastly different than mine.

He responded within a month, asking me to establish an account with Global Tel Link. I did so, and pretty soon, I got a call. The recorded introduction told me I was getting a call from Ohio Correctional Services. I accepted and greeted Sowell.

I was in a car at the time, and he was on speaker. I pulled over to take notes.

Much of what we talked about on that occasion and two others are included in the main story. I confirmed some things and asked more about his jobs, his life growing up in East Cleveland, and his family.

My first goal was to establish some kind of rapport with him, talking sports and geography, since I knew he was pretty good with both. I was following the strategy of defense attorney Rufus Sims, who said Sowell wouldn’t communicate with him at first.

Sowell would smile at some of our talk—I could hear it through the phone. He would softly chuckle at a memory. I was again struck by his Southern accent, as out of place as an Irish brogue as far as I was concerned. Where did he get that? Regardless, he seemed to enjoy our chats; we were talking about pleasant things, which is how I wanted it.

My typed notes from one of our conversations:

More notes from another call, these scribbled on the back of a receipt from a repair shop, look like this:

But these prison calls have a fifteen-minute limit initially. And there’s not a lot of room for smoothing things in that short a time frame, then getting to the real questions about living in that house amid the bodies. About Lori and the blame he placed on her for his behavior. About his drug use, which was reported to be prolific. About any other attacks he may have committed.

In February 2012, Sowell sent me a visitor’s application for the Death Row Unit at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. I’m still waiting for it to be approved, even as this book goes to press. If I am, I’ll go and report my experience on my website.

I wrote the largest part of this book in a four-hundred-square-foot apartment in Houston, Texas. I was working during the day as an investigative reporter for Texas Watchdog, a news operation bent on transparency and responsibility in government. It was a job that had no end, as you can imagine.

But at night, I would read and reread my notes, pore over transcripts and documents, watch videos of the trial and news reports, check and recheck online court filings, and think about Anthony Sowell. Writing this stuff gets in your head, and sometimes, maybe after reading a particularly disturbing item related to the crime or watching some of the compelling trial testimony, I would take a break and sit on the little porch I had with a view of State Highway 59 and, beyond that, the planes landing at Hobby Airport.

Other times I would sit in silence, studying with the window open as the cars and sirens and planes made their own noise.

I read where the masters, like Steinbeck, and prolific word monsters, like Stephen King, talk of setting word goals for a day or session. Sometimes I would do that, usually around 4,000. Doing a crime book takes more time between sentences in that there are sources that are being tapped, and the facts get in the way of flow. The facts are always getting in the way of something in the eyes of a few. Some even say they get in the way of the story, but you and I know that the best stories are true.

I listened to a lot of music while writing this one, much more than the first two. The soundtrack was a wall of noise at times, German industrial bands like Einstürzende Neubauten or German metal like Rammstein. There was more: Boom Boom Satellites, DJ Shadow, Massive Attack, Test Dept. John Coltrane. One night I blasted through a just-released Tom Waits CD, and I was just paying enough attention to dislike it. It was when I was writing about Tanja Doss, whose hardened testimony gave me big respect for her. Doss’s attitude and straight-on, no-bullshit delivery made Waits inconsequential, and I realized—again—that truth always trumps fiction. It’s the real deal, something you can hold on to, unlike some sort of artsy phoniness that is supposed to translate into a story. Truth like Tanja’s hits you square in the middle of the face.

I was reviewing my notes at one point and noticed that a lot of the trouble for these people, the survivors, started when they were at a bus stop near 140th Avenue and Kinsman. It was there that Anthony Sowell used the ATM for Key Bank.

Bus stop. At any hour. Then I realized that women who were hooking could sit at a bus stop without being hassled by the cops. They could just say they were waiting for a bus. And if it were too late, they could say the time must have escaped them. It was perfect.

These are the things you realize when you sit in a room and think.

On November 12, 2011, I was writing about Shawn Morris, a woman who found herself face-to-face with death in Sowell’s house and realized that the only way she was going to survive was to jump out a window on the third floor. She cracked her skull, busted some ribs, and broke both hands. I found myself sad for her and angry at the whole book. It wasn’t cathartic to write this in any way.

Reading the transcripts over and over, it was hard to fathom Anthony Sowell killing all these women. Was he evil? Of course, the results were evil. But I really grappled with the idea that he was the devil.

As Larry Sells, the prosecutor in my second true-crime book,
Girl Wanted: The Chase for Sarah Pender
, said of some shady people who were murdered via shotgun at close range, “I don’t moralize cases. A lot of the cases I handled didn’t have innocent victims, quote unquote. But they didn’t deserve to be blown apart by a 12-gauge shotgun and stuffed in a Dumpster like trash. They were druggies and had their problems with the law, but they weren’t out killing people.”

This is how everyone should feel about the women Sowell killed. Every single one of them had terrible criminal records, some with violent crimes.

To society at large, these were nobody’s women. But to their families, these ladies were troubled yet beloved human beings.

We’ve got a long way to go.

Anthony Sowell arrives in court for a hearing shortly after his arrest in October 2009.

JOHN KUNTZ/
THE PLAIN DEALER
/LANDOV

The house at 12205 Imperial, where Sowell took the lives of eleven women.

CUYAHOGA COUNTY CORONER’S OFFICE