Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (10 page)

He was able to find her in April 2007, and was pleased. “She was doing really good, had a boyfriend…who she was staying with and from my understanding was off drugs and doing very well.”

On Mother’s Day, Crystal called her mother to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. They shared a laugh about their lives.

Crystal also took a call that day from her daughter Antonia. They talked for a while and said good-bye.

Then Crystal was gone.

Anthony Dozier came home again later that month and went over to Crystal’s house on Mount Auburn, about a mile from Imperial, then headed over to the Fourth District police station.

The station, on Kinsman, not far from Imperial on the city’s southeast side, was the city’s busiest by far. It served the poorest people in Cleveland, and it had the most calls. There was a constant rotation of patrol units on the street at any given time, but there was also an office front where the public could come in to file complaints or reports.

“When I filed the police report, I went to the station and told them everything that happened…they sent a patrol car to the house where she was staying,” Anthony
said. “Then I had talked to someone she had known, an ex-girlfriend, who said there was a house on 130th…a known drug house or some guy who sold drugs to her.”

He told the police about the house, and they went up there and talked to folks at the address. When Anthony Dozier went back to the police, they told him he would get a report in three days.

The report never arrived.

In June 2007, the temperatures rose, and neighbors in the Imperial Avenue area again began to raise a furor over the stink. Calls began to come in to the office of Ward Two City Councilman Zachary Reed, who dispatched his own staff to survey the area, which lay in his jurisdiction.

“We received a phone call from a resident that said a foul odor came across the street and it smells like a dead person, not dead meat, not a dead animal. A dead person,” Reed said.

He called the city health department, which sent someone out to the area. It was then that the city asked Ray Cash Jr., the owner of Ray’s Sausage, to replace the grease traps in his building. He did. The smell continued. Visits from the city also continued for a while, men in white city cars wearing city badges. But nothing changed. The smell continued as the summer heat burnished itself into the air.

The same month, Sam Tayeh, the owner of Imperial Beverage, continued to smell the odor as well. His wife was working at the store, but the smell got too overpowering, and she refused to come back.

One morning in June 2007, Tayeh came to the store to find an employee, Jeff Beacon, waiting for him. Beacon was a fiftysomething local who had his share of hard luck, but who worked hard.

“Come out here and look at this,” he said, motioning to the Dumpster in the small area behind the store.

At first, Tayeh resisted. “I don’t care what’s out there; just get to work.”

“No, really, you need to see this,” Beacon insisted.

Together, they walked to the Dumpster and Sam peeked in. There, two packages, each about five feet long and wrapped in duct tape, took up a good portion of the container. Flies buzzed around the packages, and the smell was sickening.

“I went inside to think about this,” Tayeh says. “Then I thought that the girl who lived upstairs had a dog, a pretty big dog. So I went up there and asked if her dog was okay.”

Yes, the dog was fine.

The smell was stultifying and getting worse. The garbage pickup would come later in the day. Tayeh instructed Beacon to pour some bleach in the Dumpster. It helped. The Dumpster was emptied that afternoon. Problem solved, for now.

About the same time, Segerna Sowell’s nephew, Jermaine Henderson, came by Imperial. He would do odd jobs when Anthony Sowell couldn’t get to them, and in this case, some siding had come loose near the front of
the house. It was an easy job, he figured, looking at the flapping piece. He needed some kind of cement or adhering substance. It would be in the basement, which served as a catchall for home-improvement materials and tools, given the lack of space in the backyard for a shed.

Jermaine went to the side door, which provided the only access to the basement, and found it locked—no surprise, in a neighborhood where crime was an issue. Jermaine knocked on the door, which was solid wood at the bottom with a window on top. There were curtains on the window from the inside.

He got no response, and cupping his hands, he peered inside. Wedged between the door and stairs was a snow shovel.

“I knew he had to be in there,” Jermaine said. “And I could not get in there with it like that.”

He began to holler to get Sowell’s attention, now curious “and a little scared” at seeing the shovel and the blocked door. It had to be intentionally placed there to keep people out. Why would Sowell want to keep people out? What was he doing in there?

Finally, he gave up. The siding would have to wait.

After his heart attack, 2007 was a time of recovery for Sowell—and a time of indulgence for Lori Frazier. She would be gone for days, weeks. Sometimes she came back for a few days, then left again. She felt it was more and more taxing to spend time there.

On occasion, Sowell would get calls from her children, looking for their mother.

“Have you seen my mommy?” would come the voice, defeated and sad. “Is my mommy there?”

And when Lori would come back from wherever she had been, he had to ask her: “How do you think I feel when your kids call for two or three days straight and I don’t know where their mommy is?”

Sowell was now using drugs, too, although he and Lori didn’t use together all that often. She was as careful as she could be, knowing that the outstanding warrant for her arrest was for a drug-possession felony and realizing that the court would not be generous with her for skipping her court appearance.

In addition to collecting his unemployment checks, Sowell had found a new job with new hours. He was working as a scrapper, mining abandoned buildings for copper, empty cans, aluminum, and any other metals that could bring a buck from places like Ohio Metal Recycling or Cleveland Scrap.

He became a routine sight among the transient gaggle of raggedly dressed, beaten-down denizens of the area, shoving rusted grocery carts pilfered from foreclosed and shuttered homes and businesses.

“Everybody knew him,” said Kim Kemp, a local girl and also sometime scrapper. She also knew Sowell’s habits, down to his drug use. “He smoked. I guess he did what he did to get his hustle.”

By Thanksgiving 2007, things seemed to be well, though. Virginia Oliver came over to visit her daughter,
Segerna, and Anthony and Lori came down, and everyone watched TV for a while, talking and enjoying their time together.

“I didn’t know [Lori Frazier’s] name, but I knew who she was related to—the mayor,” Virginia said. “She seemed to be a nice girl. She told me her mom was sick.”

Virginia asked her if she had a job, and “that’s when we stopped talking.”

At the time, Virginia also smelled something, perhaps a dead animal. “I think we had an exterminator in,” Virginia said.

Between smoking crack and his scrapping routine, Sowell began to lose a lot of weight. His once-stout frame was gaunt, and his face was changing, becoming drawn. His hands were dirty, and he too smelled, a mixture of the same odor that permeated the neighborhood in the summer and mustiness, like old clothes.

And one night Lori came into the Imperial Beverage store with bruises on her neck.

“What happened to you? Are you all right?” Sam Tayeh asked, looking at the dark bruises on each side of her throat.

“I’m getting rid of that motherfucker,” Lori told him. “I’d call the police but I can’t because I have warrants.”

The year 2007 ended unceremoniously. But 2008 was the beginning of the end.

I cried the whole weekend.

—ANTHONY SOWELL

One day in early 2008, Lori Frazier came home to the house on Imperial and found a bloody mess.

There was blood on the walls, on the floor, and on the bed, although it looked like Sowell had done a noble job of trying to clean it up. It also looked like he had a hole in the side of his head.

“Someone tried to rob me,” Sowell told her, though he was evasive when Lori pressed him for details. But she had enough trouble. Her mother, Eleanor, was getting sicker and sicker with cancer, and Lori was starting to scale back her own drug use. She wasn’t carousing or hustling, and she wasn’t spending as much time at the house on Imperial.

Downstairs at the house, Segerna was getting sicker as well. Her kidneys were failing, and she was on the list for a kidney transplant. She was fortunate to be in a city so
well endowed with stellar medical help, thanks to the Cleveland Clinic, one of the premier health-care operations in the world.

It seemed every time Lori stopped by Imperial, there was something new going wrong with Sowell.

In late February, she came by, and Sowell’s neck was “torn up down to the white meat,” she recalled. He told her he had been attacked while in a vacant house, scrapping. He said he’d been deeply scratched during the fight. It wasn’t long after that Lori encountered Sowell just home from the hospital after getting stitches to close a wound to the right side of his throat, which he said had happened on his way back from nearby Woodland Hills Park. He was nonchalant about the attack, despite his injury.

“Who was this, who was attacking you?” Lori pressed. She was both worried for his safety and alarmed at his reluctance to tell her.

“I killed the motherfuckers,” Sowell told her. “You don’t gotta worry ’bout those motherfuckers; I killed ’em.”

The injuries were also hindering Sowell’s ability to look for work, which he was still doing, although with no success. He went to a place that had helped him before, Towards Employment, an employment agency that specialized in placement for ex-offenders. But whereas he’d been well received the first time, coming in with clothes pressed and a neat appearance, now Sowell looked beat up and unkempt.

“I saw him have a weight loss and not look as healthy as he initially did,” said Deborah Lucci, a placement agent at Towards Employment.

He claimed that he had been beaten up by his girlfriend. In his file, there was placed a note: “He has a stalker and she is related to the mayor.”

Sowell’s elusiveness with Lori about the injuries was compounded by some changes at the house. She still cared about the place, even though she wasn’t living there.

One day, she noticed the door to the front sitting room was closed, and she walked over and tried to open the door.

“What you doing, what you doing?” Sowell said, running down the hall. The door was locked. That door was never locked. The sitting room of the third floor overlooked Imperial and had a small window at the front, allowing some light in. Two bedrooms were located on each side of the hallway leading to the living room. The room Sowell and Lori used—now just Sowell—abutted the living room but had no door between the two rooms. It seemed as if he were hiding something in that front room. As it turned out, he was.

Lori thought it was “strange…all this stuff happening, windows broken, him all cut, seemed like every time I was seeing him he was all cut up.”

“Are you getting high still?” she turned and asked him one day. She had already seen the stem, a hollow chamber used to smoke crack, on his dresser.

“No,” he responded. And he asked her to leave.

*   *   *

On March 6, 2008, Lori Frazier’s warrant caught up with her, big-time. She was caught in a car with a crack pipe. It wasn’t a relapse, exactly, because she hadn’t really given it all up, try as she might. It was the beginning of the end, as they say.

Lori tried to give a fake name to the officer—Tharisa Frazier—but it was her time to go. She went back to the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, a place she knew well. In fact, Lori knew the judicial system incredibly well. She had been on probation, done community service, and escaped fines only because she was constantly declared indigent.

Now she was in the county lockup, and that was about it.

This is when Anthony Sowell made his move to prove his love.

It’s said that reaction is often more telling than action, and if so, Sowell’s reaction to Lori’s incarceration was indicative of some heart and soul. Yes, he was on drugs, and he was abusive, and he could be violent to Lori.

“Nobody in her family visited, nobody, but me,” Sowell said. “I was there three times a week sometimes and I wasn’t working. I would walk all the way from my house…to save a little money. I put it on her books,” he said, meaning that he credited the money he’d saved by walking to Lori’s prison account. “Sometimes I had money to go, but when I didn’t I didn’t miss no days.”

Lori got out on Wednesday, April 23, posting a $1,000 personal bond; no bondsman would take the risk on her. Sowell had come up with the money.

Despite Sowell’s generosity with the bond, Lori didn’t come back to Imperial. She moved to a small house in Twinsburg, twenty miles south, where some relatives of hers were renting. She was worn out with Sowell, although she would still occasionally come by the house on Imperial.

But she wasn’t able to keep things together, and they were moving fast now.

On May 28, 2008, she blew off her court date, and another warrant came her way. She was arrested again June 25.

This time, she made her court date. And this time, Sowell came down to the courthouse with her.

As he sat in the gallery, he watched the parade of people who had made a mess of their lives.

“I just met her lawyer that morning when I got there,” Sowell said. “They called her out a little…after that and she went in front of the judge. This lawyer and judge knew each other. It was going bad for her.”

But Lori’s attorney pulled it off. He told the judge that Lori’s boyfriend had come in. No one ran Anthony Sowell’s background; no one knew he was a sexual violator with fifteen years of penitentiary time behind him. On that day, he was the hero, the guy who cared.