Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (6 page)

Perhaps more telling, he seemed to thrive in prison. “I liked the institutional life,” Sowell says, comparing his time in prison to his time in the Marines, though noting the difference between the military, where he went voluntarily, and prison, to which he was sentenced.

Written explicitly, baldly, on a parole department form for Anthony Sowell in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction file in 1996: “Continue to maximum expiration of sentence.” Also in the same file was the phrase “lack of significant programming,” meaning Sowell was not grasping the behavioral changes he
needed to embrace in order to make parole on the Sockwell charge. He was barely halfway through his time, and he hadn’t figured it out.

While he was in the prison system, Sowell was given a questionnaire to fill out, the kind of thing that prison shrinks administer to evaluate inmates upon release.

It was hardly encouraging.

In lockup, Sowell got along well with the other prisoners, but he had a telling quirk.

“[In prison] he wasn’t that bad of a guy. It wasn’t like he presented any kind of threat to anybody,” said an inmate who served with Sowell at Grafton Correctional Institution. “Sowell stood out because of the way he wanted you to pronounce his name. He wanted it pronounced
So Well
.” Most people typically pronounced it
Soul
.

But he didn’t get mad about someone getting it wrong and delivering it in the traditional, one-syllable fashion, unless the person was a female.

“Those lady [correctional officers] was pretty much who he went off on when they pronounced his name wrong. If it was one of us, he was like, ‘Man, it’s
So Well
.’”

After serving his whole sentence of fifteen years, on Monday, June 20, 2005, Sowell walked out of the Lorain Correctional Institution in Grafton, Ohio.

The release was a family affair; Tressa bundled a bunch of her ever-growing brood of kids into the family car and headed to pick up her half brother.

Ja’ovvoni Garrison, then fifteen, who was born to
Tressa the year his uncle went to prison, says, “We picked him up from prison—me, my grandma, my mom, some other of us, got in our maroon station wagon and went to Lorain. We stayed in [the] car, and my mom went to go get him and help him be released.”

The house on Page Avenue had been repossessed after the family failed to pay the mortgage, and they were all living in a rented house in an area known as the Slavic Village. The neighborhood had originally been settled by immigrants from Eastern Europe who had come to the United States to work in steel mills in the late 1800s.

“There were thirteen of us living in that one house,” Ja’ovvoni says. “There were nine of us kids; three boys [and] three girls would share a room; then the younger brother and sister would sleep with my mom.”

But despite the tight fit, when Sowell moved in, he got a room all to himself.

“Anthony was real quiet, and he was a really good cook. He was really into it; he was also into the idea that people respected him and that he didn’t get into too much trouble in prison,” Ja’ovvoni says of his uncle.

In one respect, having all the kids around provided Sowell some playmates; even though they were children and he was in his midforties. He loved the football video game
Madden NFL
, and would play solo or with the younger boys.

“And he was always the Browns—he loved the Browns, both in that game and in real life. Sowell loved sports.”

But the time with Tressa and her kids was short. Sowell moved out within a few months, heading about four
miles away to live with his stepmother, Segerna. It would be the last place he ever lived as a free man.

One of Sowell’s first mandates as a free man was to register as a sex offender. In his new neighborhood, he was one of twelve in a five-mile radius. He was humiliated, relatives say, and he feared that it would hinder his ability to find a job. He filed applications with a number of temporary-employment contract services, including Paragon Culinary Staffing, which filled food-service needs around town.

Despite his fears, however, Sowell quickly landed what many a sports fan like himself would consider a plum assignment: working as a prep cook in a kitchen at Jacobs Field, home of major-league baseball’s Cleveland Indians. The stadium sat on the southern edge of downtown, one subway ride and a ten-minute walk away from where he was then staying, with Tressa and her family, in Slavic Village. The stadium, with a half dozen kitchens and lounges serving food and three levels of suites, was a massive ode to pro sports indulgence.

For day games, Sowell would arrive at 6
A.M.
to cut, dice, and julienne the carrots, onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes for salads and deli trays. It wasn’t the actual cooking job he dreamed of, but for the time being, he figured it was a good way to get started in the work world. Despite his electrician training, Sowell harbored hopes of someday cooking in a fancy restaurant in Cleveland.

“Yeah, I was paid as a cook and it was good work,”
Sowell says. “I worked twelve hours a day, and for night games, I got there at nine or so. It’s the best job I ever had. They let me stay after and watch the games, but by the time that happened, I was tired and just wanted to go home.”

In August 2005, Sowell received a notice in the mail from the Cuyahoga County Court Psychiatric Clinic. As part of his sex-offender monitoring, he was required to undergo a sexual-predator evaluation.

On September 1, 2005, Sowell showed up an hour early to the county Justice Center, a little put out by the obligation. After all, he felt, he had served his complete sentence, he wasn’t on parole or probation, and he was working twelve-hour days at a good job, one with community standing. The Indians, like the football Browns and the basketball Cavaliers, were religion among many Clevelanders.

Straightaway, Sowell was told that there could be some negative impacts from the evaluation. It was a public record.

“I know, I know,” he said, his initial irritation dissipating. He had no choice, and over the course of the next hour and a half, Sowell talked, listened, and talked some more. In some cases, he told the truth. In others, he covered up.

He reported that his upbringing was in a single-parent home in an urban area, and he added that his home “was crowded.”

He told the analyst that he had a lot of friends while growing up but added that he was bullied and teased as well. He neglected to tell of the sexual abuse he both
witnessed and partook in. In fact, whether it was a case of covering up or of being completely oblivious, he told the analyst that his childhood was good.

The report also notes that Sowell claimed that “he was not exposed to violence in his home, school, or community” and that “he does not have a strong temper.”

In doing background work on Sowell, the analyst later wrote in a report that “Mr. Sowell’s grades [in high school] were average; he was never in special education classes nor did he receive tutoring or medicine for attention problems. His school attendance was generally good and he was never suspended or expelled.”

Sowell said he’d never been suspended from school or fired from a job, and he had never received any government assistance of any kind, for any reason.

Asked about the attack on Melvette Sockwell, he claimed to have known her for about eighteen months at the time of the incident, an assertion Melvette denies and was never verified by the state.

“He stated that he paid her money to engage in consensual sex,” according to the report. “He stated that he had used alcohol prior to the…offense but was not ‘falling down drunk.’ He indicated that he pled guilty to the charge because he was having difficulty mounting a ‘good defense.’”

His attorney in that case—the one who Sowell implied was ineffective—was James McDonnell, who, many years later, would run for Cuyahoga County prosecutor.

“All I can tell you is that I remember nothing about representing him,” McDonnell says now.

Sowell talked about his drinking and confided that he may well have a drinking problem although, because of his incarceration, he hadn’t been drunk in sixteen years, since he was thirty.

Questioned about sex, Sowell simply lied. He said he learned about sex through talking with his friends at school and sex-ed classes and that his first sexual experience came at age seventeen with his high school girlfriend, who would have been Twyla Austin.

He admitted that he bought hookers while he was in the Marines and hit the occasional strip joint. He said that like most men, he had checked out pornography, some hard-core, but never had any violent sexual fantasies. In fact, he came off as a guy who caught a bad break on the rape charge.

To the nameless analyst, who would file this report for public consumption as well as for judges and lawyers and law-enforcement agents who look to these professional assessments for guidance in determining a suspect’s possible guilt, Anthony Sowell seemed like a pretty okay guy. In the report, the analyst wrote that Sowell was “attentive throughout the interview. He demonstrated a full range of emotional expression. His speech was appropriate for rate, tone and volume. He was generally cooperative and polite. His thoughts were organized and logical. His responses were clear and understandable. He described his general mood as ‘good.’ The defendant’s hazard recognition skills and social judgment were good.” The analyst’s report went on to say, “It is my opinion that with reasonable professional certainty that Mr. Sowell does not
currently present with the following risk factors most significantly correlated with sexual offense recidivism.”

The factors that the analyst indicated included age (at forty-six, Anthony Sowell was statistically less a risk to reoffend), gender of victim (a male offender typically indicates a higher risk), and, notably, failure to complete treatment (in Sowell’s case, he had never
had
treatment; therefore, this factor was ignored—he could not be said to have “failed” to complete something he’s never even begun). Also considered were prior sexual offenses (of which Sowell had none) and deviant sexual preferences (which he denied).

Sowell was given a low probability rating to reoffend. Years later, when the report was revealed to have been flawed, the county refused to divulge who the analyst was. But as a result of that county employee’s poor judgment, Sowell was classified as a “sexually oriented offender” based on his attempted rape conviction, but not a “sexual predator,” which would have placed him under more scrutiny when a sex crime was reported in the area around him.

The system was not working.

The Sowell family home at 12205 Imperial is a majestic house, built in 1917, in the once-great neighborhood of Mount Pleasant. It is three stories of finely honed woodworking and ornate metal framing, wrapping around gorgeous built-in bookcases, knickknack cabinets, and kitchen cabinets. Over the number 12205 is a metal plate
embossed with the family name, Sowell, in red lettering on a black background. The 2,000 square feet is distributed evenly between the three floors, plenty of room for the four bedrooms and three full baths.

An unfinished basement, full of crawl spaces and little hidden alcoves, provides another 1,000 square feet for storage and whatever else one could fit around the massive furnace, which spreads its vents upward like a Medusa.

The home had been in the Sowell family for generations. John and Cleathor Sowell, Anthony’s paternal grandparents, had passed the house on to their son Thomas in 1995. The whole family would take a turn at some kind of handiwork at 12205. It always needed something, and it was a fine enough house that it deserved the attention.

Going all the way back to the 1950s, there were grapevines in the backyard in the summer, and John Sowell would make wine. In the winter, the basement was turned into a skating rink.

“When I was staying there, it was the best place in the world,” recalled Veosie Cox, who rented out the first floor of the house with her husband from John and Cleathor in 1954. “They were the owners of the house, the best people in the world.”

Through the 1960s, the Mount Pleasant neighborhood was as robust as any place in America, booming with local groceries, flower shops, beauty parlors, and restaurants both small and large. The businesses served residents who were mostly Italian and Polish.

By 2000, though, the neighborhood was a sad ruin of
those robust days four decades before. The median local income was $22,452, among the lowest in the state. One in three adult residents of the area received food stamps. Crime was routine, windows were barred, and the grocery stores had become poorly stocked bodegas selling plenty of King Cobra malt liquor, lottery tickets, and Kool cigarettes, while detergent and other household items were sometimes marked up 100 percent or more.

“There was lots of activity in the neighborhood, always,” said Lakeesha Pompey, who rented the second floor at 12205 Imperial with her husband and baby, beginning in 2003. But she was also seeing and hearing more fights, drug deals, and loud obscenities. There were gunshots in the middle of the night.