Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (12 page)

“Whenever she put that red lipstick on, I knew what it meant,” Carl Johnson said. “Unless I tied her down, there was no way I could stop her. I hated to watch the person I love hop in and out of cars.”

They rarely stayed in the same places for long, moving around from rented rooms and apartments to the spare rooms of relatives.

She had three more kids with Carl.

In 2006, she caught the domestic-violence charge after punching Carl and attempting to stab him after he tried to keep her from going out on the streets. This time, she was sent to prison.

When Tishana walked out on the work-release program, she tried to come home to the place on Imperial, but her mom and sister, who lived there with Tishana’s children, didn’t want the kids to see the train wreck their mother had become. It was tough love to the nth degree.

The last time Tishana Culver was seen was by the authorities when she checked out for the day on Wednesday, May 21, 2008.

In October 2008, yet another woman around the Imperial area fell off the face of the earth, and this time, it was easy to track: forty-four-year-old Michelle Mason just quit using the $1,000 of social-services money that was direct-deposited into her account at the start of every month.

She left her mother’s house, the same one she’d
grown up in, on October 8 around 10
A.M.
and headed to take the bus back to her apartment, about three miles away.

Her apartment was a portion of a rooming house, actually, but she was happy to have anything. Her life had been hard, and she was fragile.

To start with, Michelle was five feet seven yet weighed all of 85 pounds, a stick figure of a woman. She was bipolar, HIV positive, and took a small pharmacy’s worth of pills in order to function. She’d survived being shot and left for dead in a garage, after which she had crawled to a nearby market—the incident happened about one-half mile from the family home—and got help. She now had a glass right eye.

Yes, life had been a long, hard ride for Michelle.

She’d left home for New York in 1979, when she was sixteen, then came back five years and two children later. She also came home carrying the AIDS virus, which she’d contracted through sharing a needle with fellow heroin addicts.

Her criminal record in the Cleveland area was a full one—seven of her nine county cases were drug related—as well as a breaking and entering and a soliciting after a positive HIV test.

But in 2001, she’d turned it around. At least that’s what most everyone thought. Michelle had been sentenced to attend three meetings of drug and alcohol counseling a week, and she’d stayed with it, even going to outpatient drug treatment at Marymount Hospital, near her mom’s house.

“She was standing up and giving talks at the AA meetings,” says her son, Shannon Liccardo. She was trying.

But then there were backslides.

Michelle was popped twice in 2003 for soliciting, and about three months before she disappeared in October 2008, she had been arrested for disorderly conduct. She was fined $80 for that arrest, which she never paid. She didn’t have time to, because she was gone.

The family managed to get an item in the local newspaper on December 1, 2008, announcing a rally for Michelle. It noted that she suffered from a bipolar condition and had not been heard from since October 8. The 107-word blurb noted that Michelle disappeared after meeting a sexual predator who had been in prison for 18 years. The gathering was held at East 116th Street and Buckeye, a mile from the Sowell house on Imperial.

Few people showed up, disheartening everyone involved.

The family knew that the guy Michelle had recently been hanging out with was a sex offender, and they thought it would be common sense to search the man’s place, her son, Shannon Liccardo says. But family members were told there were “jurisdictional issues” regarding such a search, and there was no evidence he had anything to do with Michelle’s disappearance.

“They talked about rights that he had, as well,” Shannon says. “But if I raped someone, my rights should be limited. But the police didn’t see it that way.”

But as family and friends distributed flyers, Shannon had another way to track his mother. On the first weekday
of every month, his mother would get up early because that was the day her social-services check would hit her bank account. The first thing she would do is take care of her phone bill and get some groceries.

On November 3, the money was untouched. Same on December 1. That’s when he knew that something was definitely wrong.

“We were praying that she was doing drugs,” Shannon says. “You can fix that.”

After the January 2, 2009, check was not tapped, he called social services and asked that they put a hold on the checks. The family had no idea what had happened to Michelle Mason.

Around the same time Michelle Mason went missing, Lori Frazier got a job at Charley’s Grilled Subs in the Tower City Center, in downtown Cleveland. Getting a job was a requirement of her probation. She also submitted to drug testing and visited with a counselor. Lori made all her appointments. The odd man out was Anthony Sowell, who was not cleaning up his act.

In fact, he was getting worse, both physically and emotionally.

“His face changed,” his sister Tressa Garrison said. “He would be up all night, then some more all day.”

And the smell, man, the smell.

It was starting to come through the vents at Sam Tayeh’s store, across the street. He was dumping Clorox, Pine-Sol, whatever he could, around access points to the
store. And the same smell was coming off Sowell when he came into the store.

“He gave me a headache from the smell,” Tayeh says. “It was overpowering.”

He also noticed that Sowell’s movements were changing, from slow and calm to furtive and abrupt.

“I would see him walk down the street, and he was very paranoid. He would walk and keep looking behind him. Mentally, he wasn’t the same character.”

And Sowell’s buying habits, well, they changed, too. In addition to his normal purchases—the forty-ounce bottles of King Cobra malt liquor, Newport cigarettes, and lighters (four or five at a time), the typical crack user supply—now he wanted electrical extension cords and plastic bags.

“Not the regular plastic garbage bags,” Tayeh says. “He asked for the heavy-duty bags. He bought five boxes at one time—$3.89 a box.”

Tayeh thought it was for yard work, since he’d seen Sowell puttering around in the yard as the warm weather faded. He had cleaned up the backyard, in fact. Small as it was, there was some decent grassy area there when the garbage was picked up. Just open ground, enough to plant something. Or bury it.

Bitch you can scream all you want, you’re fixin’ to die.

—ANTHONY SOWELL

In Warrensville, Ohio, Tonia Carmichael was still trying to pick up the pieces of the wreck she had made of her life. At forty-nine, she was a crack addict who had lost it all. Of course, to have lost it, you have to have had it, and relatively speaking, she had. At least for a while.

At the age of thirty-five, she had been a medical secretary and the owner of a three-bedroom brick home where she had been bringing up her three children as a single mother. But when she discovered drugs, things went south, fast. She quickly lost the house and the job. The kids went to live with her mother, Barbara Carmichael.

Not that Tonia’s life had been entirely innocent until then. Tonia had always had troubles. She had her first daughter, Markiesha, when she was sixteen. Her second daughter, Donnita, was born two years later, in 1977, and son, Jonathan, was born in 1985. She never stuck with the
fathers. Tonia had a string of criminal charges, starting in 1978 with grand theft, then a concealed weapons violation in 1982. In 1987, she was again charged with theft. Then she calmed down, got the house, the job. And she was an upstanding citizen, her mom, Barbara, said. She had some money, too; in 1996, Tonia joined some pals and hit the Las Vegas parties for the Mike Tyson–Evander Holyfield heavyweight title fight.

And at home, she was trying to keep her neighborhood safe.

“She was known for chasing drug dealers away,” Barbara said.

But somehow along the line, Tonia began using the drugs instead of pushing them away. Once she lost everything, Tonia moved in with her kids and mom. The television and the car disappeared. She sold them for drug money. Her son’s stereo went missing. One time, Tonia even tried to sell a camera to her daughter Donnita. Donnita refused.

In 2005, Tonia got popped on a drug charge and was sentenced to six months in the Ohio Reformatory for Women, in Marysville. It didn’t do anything to deter her.

When she got out, she’d disappear for weeks, unexplained. When she came back, she’d sleep it off for a few days, then maybe get some temporary clerical work. Tonia still presented well, looked pretty good, and could do the job. But once she drew that first check, she’d be gone again. Sometimes she would turn her cell phone off, just so the people who loved her couldn’t call and beg her to come back.

And Tonia’s lifestyle was tinged with a bit of a death wish.

The way she was living, the five-feet-tall, 110-pound Tonia knew that her habits were putting her in danger. “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” she told her mother one day.

On the morning of November 10, 2008, Tonia asked her mother for $20 to buy antifreeze for her boyfriend’s truck, a blue Chevy S-10 pickup, which she was borrowing. Barbara knew better. Since her daughter’s relapse, she had been nickled and dimed by flimsy excuse after flimsy excuse. She remembered the car theft a few years back. But she couldn’t refuse her daughter that day. She gave her the $20, and she watched Tonia drive away.

It was the last time she ever saw her. That night Barbara and the kids—now adults—went out in the cold autumn darkness and searched the area. Nothing.

“I called her for two days and nights, and I couldn’t get her,” Barbara said.

After the requisite forty-eight hours, Barbara and Markiesha walked into the Warrensville Heights Police Department to file a missing-persons report, but their report was met with indifference.

“She’ll show up after she finishes smoking crack,” Barbara said a desk sergeant told her.

The department, in a court document, said that Barbara and Markiesha, “purporting to be members” of Tonia Carmichael’s family, “appeared at the Warrensville Heights Police Department inquiring about making a
missing person’s report and did not submit a report at that time.”

As they continued to search the area for Tonia, they were told by some people in the neighborhood that she’d been seen around Imperial, about six miles away

Now Barbara went to the Fourth District station, which covers the Imperial area, to file a report. This time, she said, she was told that since Tonia wasn’t a resident of the city of Cleveland, the office would not take a report. Cleveland police deny this.

A couple days later, Barbara found the pickup truck Tonia had been driving parked near the corner of 118th Street and Kinsman, about a ten-minute walk from the Sowell house on Imperial.

Barbara, sure that this evidence would prompt some help, went back to the Fourth District station and was again refused, but this time she was advised to file the report with the Warrensville Heights Police Department, and they would get the information there.

This time, Warrensville Heights took the report. Flyers were made and distributed. But like LeShanda Long, Tonia Carmichael had vanished.

Anthony Sowell was battling demons. He was losing Lori, and it hit him as hard as anything ever had.

“It’s bad,” he said later of that time beginning in 2008. “All the things I done, it’s bad.”

As his relationship with Lori Frazier moved to an end, he began to do anything he could to be part of her life.
Just before her arrest in early 2008, he went out with her on a night of drug cruising.

“I used to go out and hang with her. I just said ‘what is so fascinating about this lifestyle?’ I did it about three times, she would take me out where she hangs, abandoned buildings, trick houses…I spent the night in one where people hang out and get high but they—she make sure people there look after me.”

“He’s not a street dude,” Lori told some of the people at the drug house. The houses were considered “safe” by users and sellers, hookers, and other small-time criminals in the Imperial area. Sowell did not typically frequent those places; he scored mostly from the locals on his block, and that was enough for him. Lori, though, had been in the street drug scene for years and knew the players.

“One dude was humongous, but he looked after me all night,” Sowell said. “He wouldn’t let…nothing happen. I just hung out with her and that morning I said I will be ready to go home.”

When the time to get out came, Sowell turned to Lori.

“I don’t see how you do it,” he said.

Now, in the wake of their romance, Lori’s visits were few. She still had more bags of clothes lying about, in spare rooms and in the basement, but she was too busy to deal with them. She was continuing to walk the straight line, trying to be a mother, trying to stay straight, visiting her community supervising officer, and working as many hours as she could at the restaurant downtown.

On Imperial, Sowell was keeping that front room on
the third floor locked down. And there seemed to be more jewelry and clothing about the house, more than was normal for a man who lived alone. He would have female guests in, but the collection of underwear, leggings, blouses, and shoes was growing.

There were leatherette coats with faux lamb’s-wool collars, yellow thong underwear, underwear with purple psychedelic circles on it, Barbie underwear with pink lace at the top, chiffon panties—and all in different sizes. Sowell did little to hide the garments. He was a player now. This is what happened; his girls would leave things sometimes.

Gladys Wade would do anything for crack.

She started using at the age of twenty-four, in 1992, and stuck with it through the proverbial thick and thin. Crack was her faithful ally, for it stayed with her through her legal battles, a violence-spackled trail with charges of felonious assault and taking stolen property. She had been evicted, sued, and homeless at various times since that first taste of crack.