What detectives found inside the home of the East Side killer.

By: James Renner

It was supposed to be the type of case that comes in spades through the Cleveland Police Sex Crimes Unit. A simple rape, if there is such a thing. A woman had escaped from the perp’s house after an alleged assault—the police had a warrant to search the home for her pink shirt. They see something like 200 of these cases a year. The detectives expected to be at the house an hour, two hours tops. They expected to arrest Anthony Sowell quietly and return him to jail to face the heat. The only reason they brought SWAT with them was because Sowell had a history of violence—he’d already served 15 years on a brutal rape from the 80’s. A precaution. Nothing more.

The first sign of something…strange…was when SWAT went into the house on Imperial Avenue and didn’t come out. When a member of SWAT finally returned to the detectives, all hope of a quick end to the case of Anthony Sowell dissolved like so much smoke about a steel mill. “There’s a couple bodies in there. Maybe another in the basement. And Sowell’s gone.”

Homicide trumps rape any day. A serial killer? That brings everyone in. A serial killer loose on the streets of a major metropolitan city? That turns your crime scene into ground zero for the national media—and with a mayor up for re-election, well, it was a perfect storm of fear. And it only got worse as the body count climbed.

This is the sort of depraved case that lingers with the crime fighters long after the last body is packed in a black bag and hauled away to the morgue, the sort of case that haunts you.

You can hear it in the voice of one of the men who stepped inside Sowell’s home that day.

“He was living with these bodies,” says the detective. “There were two upstairs, laying on the floor. They were so decomposed it was impossible for us to tell if they were male of female. The smell…the smell was something I’ll never forget. I took four showers that first night. It sticks to you. I can still smell it on my shoes.”

Then, they started to find bags.

In the corner in the bedroom upstairs was one such bag. Inside, detectives discovered a mass of biology, a soupy mixture that reminded them of decayed pumpkin. Was it one body or two? Impossible to tell.

Outside, they found soft soil, a sign that someone had turned over the Earth, there. A rescue dog was brought in, an animal trained to respond to the faintest smell of a buried human. Above that soft dirt, it registered a ‘hit’.

They started digging. After two scoops, the shovel smacked into something hard. A large rock. Under the rock was another bag. In the bag was a spongy mess. The house, the basement, the crawlspace, the yard…it was like a bad horror flick. “It was like that movie, House of 100 Corpses.” Everywhere they turned, another victim. Sowell had almost run out of space to hide them.

“The best way to describe the feeling you get inside that house is, like, imagine you’re a knight in some fairytale. There’s a dragon living nearby that is responsible for killing 1000 people in your village. And one day you find his cave. And the dragon’s not there. And you’re inside the secret home of this most dangerous monster. And all you can think at the time is, ‘I hope he doesn’t come back and find me in his lair’.”

Sowell, likely to go down as the most prolific killer in Cleveland history since the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run terrified the town during the last Depression, defies understanding. The only analogies that work come from our nightmares.

“I’ve met dangerous men. And I’m always up for a fight. Man, sometimes I just want to throw down, you know? I’m not scared of the men I go after. But this one puzzles me. I was scared in that house. This man is like the Devil on Earth. In a cupboard in his kitchen there was a can of baked beans. I just bought these same baked beans last week. He eats my beans. In some ways, we were alike. But what makes a man do this? What was different about this man? It was creepy that everything in the house was so nondescript. It wasn’t like he was making a suit out of their bodies. They were just laying about.”

Wherever Sowell was, they figured he couldn’t be far. He had no vehicle. But he was a scrapper, a master of raiding vacant properties and stripping copper piping and aluminum siding to sell for cash. This neighborhood on the East Side is infected by foreclosed properties and the serial killer knew just where to hide.

Talk among the detectives was that Sowell would be found, but too late. Most assumed that he would kill himself before police caught up with him, now that he knew his secret had been discovered. “Personally, I thought the man was too narcissist to off himself. I thought he was just sitting around somewhere, maybe smoking a little last bit of crack, waiting for us to find him.”

He was right. On Saturday, Sowell was spotted taking a stroll down Kinsman, not far from the crime scene. Now the task of identifying his victims is the focus of the investigation. But it’s not going to be easy. Sowell preyed on the poor, on adults, in a section of town where people go missing every day.

“The number of missing people in this fucking city would stagger you. Would boggle your mind. Remember, an adult is not really missing just because they didn’t come home. They’re not breaking the law if they disappear, so no one is looking for them. They could be wrapped around a crack pipe somewhere, after all. Or, they could be floating in Lake Erie.”

“There was a girl. There was this one girl. Lived on Edgewater. This was back when Free Times was still around. She had an ad in the back of the paper. She was a call girl for rich men in town. Businessmen. One night, she gets a call from an Arab man. She went out with him. He beat the living shit out of her. She didn’t want to press charges because she didn’t want what she does for a living to get out. Two weeks later, she gets a call from another Arab man. She decides to meet up with him. And she’s never seen again. We know she’s dead. Someone got rid of a threat. Her body is out there somewhere. But we can’t prove it.

“There’s so many, man. So many.”

And Sowell’s case may be an especially bitter pill to swallow for the city of Cleveland. It speaks of race relations, a sore reminder of the disparity between white and black that still exists in the coverage of crime by local media.

Because, the bottom line is simple, isn’t it?

If six white women had disappeared, wouldn’t we have known about it before their bodies were discovered in some killer’s lair?