Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (11 page)

Judge Nancy McDonnell called on Sowell to come forward, and he testified on Lori’s behalf.

“I got up there in front of the judge and told her that
[Lori] got people,” Sowell said. “I told her I love her, I’m always there for her and she got people who care…

“I was getting ready to cry. But that turned the tide for her. The judge put her on probation, strict probation.”

It was August 2008.

Lori was battling demons that got louder and louder. She was confused by the different Sowell, the one who loved her, then appeared with horrible cuts and was in her face, angry at her with shaking rage.

She was fighting the relentless tug of intoxication. She missed her mom. She loved her kids.

It was no wonder the court sent her for mental-health counseling after her hearing. She had been diagnosed with depression in 1998 after her father’s death, then received outpatient mental-health care in 2002, then was hospitalized for mental disorders that same year. She said she heard voices that told her to hurt herself.

Now Lori was found to have a depressive disorder and given a prescription for Paxil. She took it for a while, but “it made me jittery,” she said.

She went back to Imperial with Sowell for a few nights. The court had given her a list of phone numbers to call if she felt suicidal at any point, and Sowell kept the list for her. At one point, she did call, with Sowell overseeing it.

“They asked her did you feel like you’re going to kill yourself or hurt someone,” Sowell said. When she said yes, she hung up rather than wait for a response. The emergency hotline called back immediately, and Sowell held them off.

“No, she’s just pissed off; she’s not serious about hurting herself,” he explained. Lori left in the morning, and the hotline called back. The worker wanted to know if Lori had gone back into a place where she could get some help. Sowell had no answer.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s not here.”

In fact, she was leaving him for good, she again claimed.

She had heard that despite his protestations of love for her, Sowell was messing around with other girls.

“When she got out of jail, she didn’t wanna go back at all with him; she didn’t like Tone anymore,” says Latundra Billups, one of Lori’s close friends who had spent hours getting high with the couple over the past year.

This part of the end of the relationship was a drawn-out event with plenty of acrimony and name-calling and accusations. And the accusations were rough.

“One day they had this big argument, I was over there, and she was calling him a rapist,” Latundra says. “The next day they were back together.”

But shortly after that, Lori moved out for good, leaving some of her clothes behind.

It was a Friday in August 2008 when she left for good. The on-again, off-again relationship had simply fallen apart over the past year. Sowell’s behavior—the furtiveness and his increasing agitation—had taken its emotional toll. It was a big deal for Sowell, who would later say the break brought out feelings of anger that he couldn’t control.

“I cried the whole weekend” after she left, Sowell said.

Lori left the neighborhood and refused to answer anyone’s calls for three days. On the third day, Sowell went by Latundra’s apartment with three garbage bags. He said they were Lori’s clothes and asked that she give them to Lori when she next saw her.

“A couple days later, Lori came over to pick up the bags,” Billups says. “She told me that her clothes were in there. And they were cut into little pieces.”

Segerna Sowell, who had been staying with her mother for months, got a kidney transplant in August. She would never return to Imperial to stay. She left her first floor in its typically immaculate condition. She had decorated it in a beige and white color scheme. The large sofa and matching love seat were beige, and the room featured a round, light brown rug; beautiful wooden-framed mirrors; tchotchkes sitting on built-in shelves; and on one wall, a painting of Thomas Sowell, her late husband.

The kitchen, too, displayed Segerna’s simple tastes, with a small, round glass-top table in the middle and a wood-paneled cabinet, a white electric stove, and a brown Frigidaire.

Scattered throughout the dwelling were framed photos of family members, including Sowell.

In the coming days, weeks, and months, Jermaine Henderson, Segerna’s nephew, would come by sometimes, checking on the house and, once in a while, partying a little bit.

Twelve years younger than Sowell, Jermaine also had a long criminal record, spending time in state prison on various charges including witness intimidation, kidnapping, aggravated burglary, and receiving stolen property. On the street, they called him “J,” but he handed cops all kinds of names, like Jezel Michaels or Edward Stevenson.

We were praying that she was doing drugs— you can fix that.

—SHANNON LICCARDO

While things had coalesced to end Sowell’s relationship with Lori, the neighborhood was enduring a wave of disappearances.

On February 12, 2008, LeShanda Long called her father, Jim Allen, on his cell phone.

“Do you know what day it is?” she asked him.

“No, it seems like there’s something, but I can’t remember,” Jim said. And LeShanda giggled. She had once been a little girl, after all, and sometimes it seemed all she wanted to do was to curl up and return to that world of innocence.

“It’s your birthday,” LeShanda said.

It was a game father and daughter had long played. Jim Allen was a corrections officer for Cuyahoga County, and although his daughter had seen more trouble in her
twenty-four years than he cared to acknowledge, he loved her like any solid parent would. She was his baby.

Still, when LeShanda disappeared, in May 2008, there was no one who really paid attention. She had been hanging out with a boyfriend, a ne’er-do-well named Reggie. But LeShanda would split on him sometimes and be gone for weeks. And her dad—well, it would be months between calls or visits.

LeShanda was born in Cleveland to Jewell Long, who was plagued by her own drug addiction and criminal behavior. Her raps included criminal trespass and drug possession. Jim Allen lived with the kids and his grandmother, trying the best he could. Jewell’s sister Caroline Long was also in the picture.

“[LeShanda] was controlling and she had all these boys around, brothers and relatives, she would always try to get to do what she wanted,” Jim said. “They would sit on her and hold her down.” And when she didn’t get her way, she cried, and they dubbed her Crybaby Gangster.

But in 1990, a social worker paid a visit to the house on Folsom, about five miles from downtown, and found six kids between the ages of one and thirteen, including LeShanda, home alone. Records show that Jim’s grandmother had asked the county several times to find the children a home because she could not give them the care they needed.

But it took the visit to make that happen. LeShanda and the rest of the kids were headed for foster care, but their aunt Caroline rescued them, taking all six kids into
her home to join her own two sons. She worked at a gas station to help pay the bills.

“That is what you are supposed to do for family,” she said. “In my heart, it wouldn’t have been right if they all were separated.”

Caroline moved them around, first to the Cleveland suburbs and then to the smaller village of Kokomo, Indiana, where she got a job at a nursing home, and the kids got a new start. But that’s when LeShanda started acting up.

“It got to a point to where she would stay out and not let me know where she was,” Caroline said. “She kept saying she wanted to be with her mother and father. So one day, I told her if her daddy wanted her back, she could go back home.”

So back to Cleveland LeShanda went, along with her ever-growing shadow of rebellion and defiance.

“I was always part of her life,” Jim said. “But I couldn’t be there always.”

At one point, LeShanda lived with Jim and his new wife. But she kept running away. Her father reported her missing numerous times, and she would always be found, in trouble. At thirteen years old, LeShanda already had her first child, one of three she would have by the time she reached seventeen. She was picked up for theft and for taking her children away from relatives, who’d been given custody after LeShanda was declared unfit.

Starting at age fifteen, she was in and out of juvenile jail and psychiatric care. She spent six months attending
drug and alcohol counseling classes at Applegate, a national drug-treatment chain.

“It was like AA,” Jim said. “You come in and talk and discuss and have questions and answers.”

But nothing worked. At sixteen, LeShanda found herself once more locked up in juvenile detention in Cleveland. In October 2000, she wrote the first in a series of letters to Cuyahoga County Juvenile Judge John W. Gallagher.

She asked to be moved to one of several esteemed homes or schools for troubled kids: Summit Academy, in Herman, Pennsylvania; Marycrest, in Independence, Ohio; Parmadale Institute, in Parma, Ohio; or Day Break, an anger-management treatment center with a location in Cleveland.

“Sir, I am sixteen and I have two daughters,” she wrote. “I can honestly say at the rate I’m going I’ll be dead before I’m eighteen.”

LeShanda said she was not asking to go home but simply for help in finding a place that could give her in-patient care that would stick.

“I’ve been to Scioto four times and not once has it helped me,” she said. Scioto Juvenile Correctional Facility, located just north of Columbus and operated by the state’s Department of Youth Services, is a hard-core lockup for young people in deep trouble. LeShanda fit the bill. She was pregnant with her third child.

So back to Scioto it was.

She took group-therapy sessions, had victim’s-awareness counseling, took a computer class, and learned welding.
She was preparing to take her GED and applied to take the SAT exam.

She again wrote the judge in January 2001 asking for an early release so she could attend the local community college for a couple years before transferring to Spellman College or Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia.

Among her goals upon release, she said, were to “be a good mother and role model to my children.”

LeShanda got out but failed miserably to meet these goals over the next few years. She was arrested repeatedly, with charges including hitchhiking and disorderly conduct, and her father was sure she was using drugs.

“Yes, she was probably was on drugs,” Jim said. He had been to places she lived and “seen her and seen the way she acted. You know your child, you know when something’s not right. Her swagger, her tone, her different mind-set. It alters a person.”

Jim and other relatives had custody of LeShanda’s kids. She would disappear for a few months and then reappear. She was erratic and living a hard street life.

In 2007, LeShanda was twenty-three and had an apartment near Imperial and 123rd Street, spitting distance from the Sowell house. She was living there off and on with a boyfriend. Reggie was the only name Jim knew him by. LeShanda was distant, lost.

In late February 2008, the hospital called Jim Allen to report that LeShanda had been beaten up and was being treated for her injuries. He went to get her.

“It’s time for you to come out of the streets,” he told his daughter. Although LeShanda’s temper made her a
force to be reckoned with on the street, she was only four feet seven and 100 pounds, a slight girl. He was afraid for her now.

She came home to live with him once more, and Jim began to understand that his daughter was going to have to live on the system. She just didn’t have the strength to make it with a regular job.

“I was going to show her step-by-step how to get adequate housing and get on welfare and relief to help herself somehow,” he said. He took her to the Social Security office to get a Social Security card.

“At first, she was receptive,” he said. “Then, the lightbulb went off.”

After she left his house one May afternoon and headed back toward her place on Imperial, he never saw her again. It was as if she disappeared into the sidewalk cracks.

On any given day, it seemed, a cop could pluck a denizen out of the Imperial Avenue neighborhood, run him or her for warrants, and get a hit.

On May 21, 2008, Tishana Culver became one of those many when she walked out on her work-release program. She was serving time on a domestic-violence conviction in 2006, having first put in some state prison time before a jammed system set her into a looser program. On June 20, a warrant was issued, and a judge charged her with upper-level escape, a second-degree felony.

Her last known address was 12317 Imperial. But no
one really cared to look too hard. She would turn up somehow.

Tishana was born in 1978 to unwed high school sweethearts who split up before her first birthday. Her mom, Yvonne Williams, moved in with her own mother and took Tishana with her. Her dad, Sam Culver Jr., got into serious criminal trouble, spending more time in and out of courtrooms and jails than with his daughter. In 2001, he was sentenced to ten years for aggravated robbery as a repeat offender.

By junior high, Tishana was prone to fights with her peers. She had the first of her six children during her sophomore year at John Adams High School and never stuck with the father. She graduated, however, and started working in cosmetology. Tishana did her best to take care of her growing brood of children.

In the mid-1990s, Tishana met a young man named Marcus Johnson. Friends said they planned to get married, but in 1998, he was found with a bullet in his head in the city’s Gordon Park, on the Lake Erie waterfront. He had killed himself.

It’s apparent, looking at police records, that Tishana plunged into problems almost immediately after Marcus’s suicide, racking up criminal charges for drugs, weapons, and prostitution.

By 2000, she was twenty-two, had three children, no husband, and an escalating drug habit.

That year, she hooked up with Carl Johnson (no relation to Marcus), who became a significant presence in her life.

They were both deep into drugs. He worked at a bowling alley; she worked the streets.