Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (4 page)

“Everyone who knows Anthony knows that he is a good cook, a good plumber, and good at everything else,” said Virginia Oliver, his stepgrandmother.

His mother, Claudia Garrison, was a tough lady, born in Illinois, who had four children—Anthony, Tressa, Patricia, and Owen. No man would step forward to serve as a father to any of them, and Claudia filled the roles of both parents. From the start, she did the best she could, living with little resources, moving around the city, dodging bill collectors, and pulling what little financial help
she could get from a system that had made way for the urban poor. Food stamps and other social services were a booming industry in America’s cities, almost tailor-made for the misfortune of the Sowell clan.

Claudia and her mother, Irene Justice, dragged Sowell and his half sister Tressa Garrison from house to house, hopping about the lower-income streets of Cleveland, from East 88th Street to East Boulevard and from Central Avenue to Parkgate Avenue. The radius never spread more than four or five miles, a confining circle of wavering hope for something to get better.

Sowell’s childhood was a murky and confusing time. He went to a number of schools, with poor results. It was inner-city bedlam during a tumultuous era for urban America, and Sowell was living the life of a bedraggled child. With a working mother, he would come home from kindergarten with a key on a chain around his neck and be alone for hours.

At the same time, Claudia’s daughter Patricia was having a difficult time with her life. Patricia had been born to a fifteen-year-old Claudia and an eighteen-year-old packinghouse worker who disappeared quickly after her birth.

Patricia was sickly, with almost debilitating asthma. Yet by the time she was eighteen years old, she had five children (she ultimately had seven, three boys and four girls). But, as with her mother, Claudia, no man stuck around to do more than father any of them.

“My mom was sick all the time,” says Leona Davis,
one of Patricia’s daughters. “She was told not to have children, but she did anyway. She loved children.”

The families merged into a caravan of illegitimate children in a household run by three generations of women: Irene, Claudia, and Patricia.

“When I first met Anthony, he was a nice kid; he was sweet,” Leona recalls. “He was my age; we talked, like kids do.”

In this maelstrom of nieces, nephews, grandmothers, sisters, and brothers, there was a lurid undercurrent that would permeate the family for years. There was mental illness, epilepsy, and birth defects in the family tree.

And there was abuse, something that would influence Sowell’s own perverted tendencies forever.

One day, when he was around seven years old, Sowell noticed that his older nephew was forcing his niece to do something she didn’t want to. At his age, he didn’t know what it was, and it was only later that he understood.

“He took her in her closet and—he was like having lots of—there was a lot [of] sexual activity going on there,” Anthony Sowell said. “This was happening at my sister’s house. And he basically, being the oldest, he was like directing everybody [to do] what you don’t really want to do, but I remember how he [took her] into the closet.”

And the nephew didn’t stop with his little sister; Sowell claimed that the older nephew was also molesting him, although he could never prove it.

“I don’t remember what it was exactly but he was [pissed] when I bit him,” Sowell said. “I got tired of him
messing with my thing. I never did that before, but I bit him…on his arm somewhere, probably right above his wrist.”

In August 1969, Patricia died at the age of twenty-seven of chronic bronchitis due to asthma. The kids moved into the house on East Boulevard in the eastern part of the city, and things continued to be nasty.

The house was jammed, seven of Sowell’s nieces and nephews plus his half sister Tressa, with everyone sleeping two to a room. No one even knew how exactly they were related to Claudia; Leona never knew Claudia was her grandmother. Such was the blur of adults in her world.

And Claudia was not very fond of her grandchildren.

“She liked my sister Monica, because she had lighter-colored skin,” Leona remembers. “But with the rest of us, Claudia would say, ‘that black so-and-so.’”

The house on East Boulevard is where the beatings began. Claudia, says Leona, hit them with everything, from belts to coat hangers. Irene had a cane that she smacked them with. Everyone had chores, and everyone was expected to execute those chores with timely precision. All of the kids were beaten, including Sowell.

The gaggle of kids and adults moved to the house on Page Avenue in 1970. It was a big house, and everyone had his or her own room. Tressa, just four years old, slept in Claudia’s room. Sowell and Patricia’s son Robin took the beautifully finished attic, which was divided into two rooms at that time. Such was the hierarchy; the boys got the best.

“The house was beautiful,” Leona recalls. “We had to
keep it clean; we all still had our chores. We all really had fun there when we first moved.”

While living on Page Avenue, Claudia would go to work every day at a dry cleaner, and Irene would clean houses when she could get the work.

“But really, they took us kids because of the extra welfare they could get for us,” Leona says.

The yard was big enough for everyone to play in, and while Claudia and Irene were at work, the kids played baseball or football all day. The yard was that big. There was also a cherry tree that they all climbed. The place was a playground.

Outside of their childhood mirth, it was an isolated world they lived in, though. No one was allowed to have friends over. Birthdays were not celebrated. There was no candy or junk food allowed for the kids, although Claudia kept her own stash. If anyone stole some, there was real trouble.

And the beatings continued in such a way that “it was psycho,” said Ramona, Leona’s twin sister.

“It’s like a war,” echoed Sowell. “There’s just constant yelling and screaming…. All day, they were yelling at the kids, they was always going off. There’s a lot of war in here.”

When a perceived infraction took place—and it seemed to happen almost every other day—Claudia would have the accused strip off all of his or her clothes; then she would tie the child to the banister at the foot of the stairs and beat him or her with an extension cord or something else that gave a whiplike wound. It was sadistic and ritualistic.

“Claudia would call us down at 2
A.M.
and find a dirty dish; there would be a whipping for whoever she felt was responsible,” Leona says.

Worse, the others would gather and watch each other get beat.

“Both my grandmother and mother would do the beating,” Sowell said. “Whupped and beaten.” One night as he slept, Sowell said, his mother came into his room and started whipping him with an extension cord.

As the girls got older and more developed, Sowell and Robin watched more closely. Owen, also known as Junior, or Uncle Junior, was much older but was also drawn in by the blossoming bodies of the girls.

Sowell devised a way to satiate his interest in the girls: He would steal his mother’s soda or food, then blame one of the girls, just so she might be forced to undress. And his focus was increasingly on Leona.

By the time he was in junior high, Anthony Sowell would usually walk the few short blocks each day to W. H. Kirk Junior High by himself. Built in 1930, it was a fine old school, regal and stately, a redbrick three-story building set back from busy Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland. It had a white-stone-framed front entrance, and inside, the halls were wide, and the classroom doors were solid oak. To get there, Sowell walked down Page and hung a right on Euclid, past Salon D’Le Hairstylist and the Wick Lincoln car dealership and up the slight hill on which the school sat.

He was a shy and skinny boy, “quiet and never one to start a conversation,” said Cavana Faithwalker, who attended Kirk with Sowell. “If you said, ‘Hi,’ he would say, ‘Hi.’ If you asked a question, he would answer it. He was friendly, sort of, in that he would smile whenever I looked in his direction.”

Sowell loved school despite not being a stellar student; he got Fs in English and Bs in physical education. But he was excited about learning and loved the classroom experience. He didn’t miss much school either; records show he made it to class thirty-nine of forty days his last term in sixth grade.

Sowell tried his hand at the golf team as well as swimming and diving, but he was unexceptional. He also played chess with his science teacher, Cary Seidman.

“I was really good after a while,” he says.

He was also told to choose a musical instrument to play for a performance in sixth grade. Sowell selected the cello. At a concert for teachers and parents, he played a solo of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

“I love music,” Sowell said.

When he moved on to Shaw High School, he made almost the same walk every day as to Kirk. Shaw, with twelve hundred students, was also big in the tradition of old schoolhouses, a gallant solid building with long concrete sidewalks leading up to the front doors. Its colors were red and black, and its most famous alumnus was football player Tom Matte, who went on to play for the Baltimore Colts.

Sowell was no athlete, although he’d often play basketball on the city courts at nearby Forest Hill Park.

In fact, high school didn’t really give him much fun. His reticent demeanor caused him problems.

His classmates ribbed him all the time about anything, particularly his awkwardness around girls.

“I remember one time on the basketball courts a group of people teasing him about girls, being a virgin, and things in general,” Faithwalker said. “He tried to talk the ‘bitches-and-ho’s’ kind of talk, but it really wasn’t part of him. A cat threw the ball to him. Anthony was so mad. He caught the ball in his stomach. He took the ball and whipped it at the guy. The guy could eat Anthony for breakfast, and would have, except another guy stepped in.”

Sowell acknowledged he was picked on but blamed it on his superior upbringing, claiming that the teasing was “because I was quiet and you know all to myself sometimes…I just wasn’t used to really associating with a lot of other kids from slums.”

To some in the outside world, Sowell’s childhood appeared fine. He certainly didn’t present himself as any kind of predator, that’s for sure.

“He was the kindest child you wanted to deal with,” said Katie Tabb, a neighbor on Page. “He was always very respectable.”

But academic life didn’t do much for him, and he quit Shaw in the fall of 1976. Add to that the fact he had no wheels, which was a certain path to datelessness.

“He was a walker, you know?” said Chip Fleshman, a high school classmate. “To have a car as a high-school kid
was a big deal.” Sowell the teenager was no ladies’ man, either. “I never knew him to have a girlfriend.”

But Sowell did meet his first real girlfriend shortly after he stopped attending Shaw. Twyla Austin was a petite and pretty girl three years his junior. She lived on “The Hill,” an upscale part of East Cleveland, relatively speaking, that shared a border with the much more illustrious Cleveland Heights.

Twyla had moved to the Cleveland area from Atlantic City, New Jersey, with her mother and siblings when she was eight, in 1969. She and Sowell met when she was walking down Terrace Road, heading home from Shaw High School. Sowell was coming from the school himself, having picked up some papers he needed to complete his failure to graduate.

“And he said, ‘Hi,’ and that was it—we started hanging out,” Twyla says. Sowell was interesting, she thought. He was boxing in the Police Athletic League at the time, and he still loved to play chess.

Their times together were sweet.

“We would go to the den, which was where Irene’s room was, and watch TV,” Twyla recalls. “Claudia was never there at that time; she was working two jobs—one at Republic Steel, a mill, and the other at a laundry. And there were lots of kids around, but it was a nice place. Everyone was happy most of the time.”

The house was a “mini mansion,” she says. It had two kitchens and an intercom.

She spent lots of time there and recalls one day looking out the doors that led to the back porch.

“They were French doors,” she says. “And there were curtains on the doors, and I saw this toy kind of hanging from those curtains. But it wasn’t a toy; it was a possum. I ran and got Tony, and he just put it in a basket and let it go outside. He was real gentle with it, too.”

Sowell and Twyla went to movies, taking the city bus. He always had money, somehow, but she doesn’t recall what kind of job he had. He was quiet, and theirs was a peaceful, unspoken communication.

“He wasn’t always showing what he knew or thought,” she says. “But he was a good guy. Good to me.”

Sowell also never told her about his formative sexuality, which took place on Page Avenue beginning in 1972, when he was thirteen and his favorite niece, Leona, was twelve.

“It all changed with Anthony, Robin, and Junior all of a sudden,” Leona says. The almost ritualistic beatings continued, with everyone watching the humiliation of their de facto siblings. Leona watched, too.

“Anthony went quickly from being very nice to me, when we first started living all together, to being always mean to me,” Leona says. “He started being mean to me as soon as he started sexually assaulting me.”

One day in 1972, Sowell ordered Leona to go upstairs, to his room. And after the first time she went, and he raped her, the fight was on. Almost daily, he would tell her to go upstairs. She would refuse. Once, he blackened her eye. And so it went, over and over, for years, she says.
Ramona was assaulted by Robin and Owen. So was their younger sister, Renee. It was a madhouse.

“It was happening almost every day,” Leona says.

And they were terrified to tell anyone. Claudia was still beating them, one day hitting Leona in the head with a high-heeled shoe.

Pretty soon, though, the girls began to run away, preferring to escape than face the wrath of Claudia, who didn’t believe anything they said anyway.