Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (14 page)

Anthony Sowell grabbed a bus back to the house on Imperial, where he cleaned up the mess left from the fracas with Gladys. It was almost Christmas. He went over to the store and got some beer.

You could be the next crackhead bitch dead in the street.

—ANTHONY SOWELL

“After my girl and me broke up, I just…[it was] traumatic, very traumatic,” Anthony Sowell said, a couple of years after Lori Frazier left him.

He was indeed having a hard time, going into dreamlike states where he would thrash around, violently, screaming, tearing at people, whoever was there in this blur. And when he would come out from this state, he would appear “just like everything is ok,” he said.

By then, at the start of 2009, the voices he claimed he had heard shortly after Lori left became louder.

“I couldn’t tell them no,” he said. “It’s like hate, punish, hot.”

Sowell was now living alone in the house. Segerna left for good in early 2009 as she began dialysis treatment. She moved in with her mother, Virginia Oliver, and Sowell would go visit her almost every week. The first floor
on Imperial was left in the same spotless condition she had always kept it.

Jermaine, Segerna’s nephew, continued to come by several times a week to check on the place, crash, and sometimes party.

Sowell mostly left the second floor alone. The main living room—like on the third floor, the room sat to the front of the house overlooking Imperial—had a lone blue upholstered chair and a grab bag of CDs, including titles by Ray Charles, Mariah Carey, and Jay-Z.

But the third floor was a disaster area.

Empty glasses and cups sat on tables and dressers in his room, where Sowell now spent much of his time. It was the same room he and Lori shared, on the east side of the house. There was a good-sized double window in it that opened onto a narrow alley between the house and Ray’s Sausage.

The mattress and box spring had fallen off the bed frame, and now the headboard leaned nonchalantly and unattached against the wall. He hung baseball caps on the two posts of the headboard, and he stacked his medications on the boom box that sat on the nightstand next to the bed. On a wooden five-drawer dresser, the kind grandmas everywhere seemed to hand down to kids, Sowell kept his TV, which was connected to a Game Boy. And next to that, he stacked stereo gear; from the bottom up, a solid state amplifier, a cassette deck, and a turntable.

Pornographic magazines, the kind that come wrapped in plastic at three for $6.99, with titles like
Tender
and
Barely Legal
, lay on coffee tables, while skin flicks jostled with Hollywood titles in makeshift DVD racks. His clothes were strewn in piles around the room, dirty sweatshirts and jeans with boots and sneakers haphazardly tossed about.

The kitchen, at the south end of the hall and opening onto the back stairway, was also a mess, with dirty dishes and take-out food containers joining empty beer bottles and cans on the narrow counter.

Where he’d once been orderly and neat, a trait he’d learned in the military, now Sowell’s third-floor apartment on Imperial was strewn with garbage and the detritus of a man falling apart.

An hour was like a day, a day like a month, as Donald Smith waited for his daughter Kim Y. Smith to return home. She had left his apartment on January 17, 2009, to go out for the night. Where was she, two days later?

The wheelchair-bound Donald was planning a party for Kim’s forty-fourth birthday on the next day, January 20. She wouldn’t miss that for the world, he thought.

Donald was a Marine Corps veteran who doted on Kim, who, by the start of 2009, was his de facto personal assistant as well as his loving daughter. She cooked and cleaned for him, making sure he had everything he needed in his apartment near the fashionable Shaker Square area of Cleveland. Kim was an angel to her father, a little less so to the rest of society, although she had tried to make good. She graduated from Warrensville Heights High
School and took some classes at the local community college, mostly art and dance.

But as she acquired a drug problem, Kim preferred to hang out in bad places. Her street name was Candy, and she was frequently seen in the Imperial area, walking around, looking for drugs, partying with friends. Six of her eleven county court cases were crack-related—possessing it or using it. The rest were for more advanced crimes, things like receiving stolen property and extortion.

Donald figured she had picked up a drug habit her last year of high school, where she ran with an older, faster crowd. He had lost touch with her in that time, but when he discovered her affliction, he moved to remedy it.

“I had taken her to several clinics in and out of Ohio,” Donald said. She was getting locked up in prison for her out-of-control drug problem, and Donald had hoped there would be some relief for her there, maybe some treatment or counseling.

“In some of the institutions she was in, she got drugs inside the institutions,” he said, flustered and saddened. His daughter was determined to be suicidal by the courts, and she was placed in mental-health-evaluation clinics. She took antidepressants. She committed more crimes. In 2004, she was again caught with drugs.

At the end of 2007, Kim got out of prison after serving a six-month sentence for drugs. She moved back in with her father, but it didn’t take long before she was taking off and not coming home for days.

But January 17, 2009, the last day he’d seen her, had
been a good day. Donald had handed his daughter $100 before she went shopping with her aunt. He loved her, and she knew it, he was sure. He’d encouraged her to get anything she wanted.

Kim scored some clothes, went to lunch. Later, she kissed her father before she headed out for the night.

After two days, Donald contacted her friends and put together a flyer with a picture of Kim. Being a man of relative means, Donald sweetened the pot with a $500 reward.

“On the street, $500 is like a million,” he said.

He never contacted the Cleveland Police Department. It just wasn’t always the first place people went for help when there was trouble in the bad areas of town.

How many times had Amelda Hunter been to Anthony Sowell’s house? She couldn’t even count. She’d see her friends around, and sometimes they’d all end up at Tone’s, drinking and smoking and carrying on.

The house at 12205 Imperial was a gathering place for the addicted, the disenfranchised, and the criminal. And Amelda had battled back and forth with that lifestyle. Yet she was also a mom of two kids and a life mate to Bobby Dancy. There was some hope at the end of a pretty rough forty-seven years. She had a decent home, a pleasant 1,100-square-foot, two-bed, one-bath number, in a decent neighborhood a few blocks east and a whole world away from Imperial. Her other home-away-from-home, though,
was a rancid room in a house on Imperial and, more and more frequently, Sowell’s place.

Amelda was born in 1962 in Chicago, the sixth of eight children, where she was brought up on the city’s crime-riddled South Side. She was impregnated by a teacher at her school when she was fourteen. That had jolted her family and spurred a move to her mother’s native Cleveland two years later, in 1978. But instead of helping, things just got worse from there. Most of the kids in the family, the ones left at home, got turned on to drugs, first relatively minor things like weed and drink, but when crack came along in the mid-1980s, they joined in with gusto.

Amelda was no exception. Her older sister Lynnette abetted in the delinquency of her younger sisters. She would take Amelda and some of the others to bars in the city’s sordid areas, exposing them to all kinds of the wrong things that would tempt a teenager.

“They were too young to be in those places, but as long as they didn’t tell my mother, we would go,” Lynnette said. “They grew up fast, messing with me.”

In fact, Amelda met Bobby Dancy in a Cleveland bar in 1981. He was a machine operator, a hard-drinking, blue-collar man who didn’t mess with drugs. She was still hooked on crack, although she was a smart user; he didn’t know for years that she was an addict.

She went for years without a serious drug case, in fact. After a fifteen-year stretch in which she had very little contact with the law, Amelda was busted in 2001 for possession of drugs, got some prison time, then went into
rehab. She was off paper, or out of the control of the state, in May 2004.

By March 2005, she was back in court for another drug-possession charge. She was released with time served, a couple of weeks.

She went home to Bobby’s house on Imperial, but even he knew that the area was getting too bad to stay there with Amelda, who would now sometimes be gone for weeks at a time without calling.

So in 2006, they left Imperial and moved a few blocks east.

Still, Amelda kept going back to the old neighborhood. And now she had a new pal, Anthony Sowell.

One evening in late 2007, Denise Hunter joined her sister for a night out. They walked a few blocks away to 12205, and Denise recalled walking in and seeing several women sitting around, talking. Someone offered the Hunter sisters something to drink.

Denise was creeped out, especially by the familiarity her sister had with this crew.

“I got the impression she had seen the ladies before,” Denise said. “It was like, ‘Come on in; have a seat.’”

Older sister Lynnette Hunter Taylor said when Amelda would disappear in 2007, more and more frequently she’d head for 12205.

“When she would leave and be gone for a little while, that’s whose house she was at,” Lynnette said. “The impression she gave me of Anthony Sowell was this was a nice man, that he was nice to her and did whatever he could for her. He was her buddy.”

The last time Amelda was seen, on April 18, 2009, her son, Bobbie, says, “She took off walking because she didn’t have a car. And she had a hurt left arm from something, so she was somewhat immobilized.”

When she didn’t come back by the evening, something wasn’t right, he says.

“We were supposed to go to my aunt’s, and it just didn’t seem at this time that she would pull this kind of thing, even though she had disappeared for weeks at a time before.”

He walked over to the Imperial area, knowing that his mom still crashed at Bobby Dancy’s old house on Imperial, which was now vacant.

He stopped at the take-out place across from Anthony Sowell’s place on 12205 Imperial, Bess Chicken and Pizza, and talked to Fawcett Bess, the owner.

“He said he had seen her over across the street,” Bobbie says. “But he didn’t know exactly when.”

Bobbie didn’t report her missing, though, instead embarking on his own search, like Donald Smith had for his daughter Kim. Bobbie was joined by Denise and the rest of the family, who put out posters everywhere in the neighborhood.

Nothing.

With the parade of drug-using women going in and out of 12205, it was hard to tell who was there and when. “All of those girls were around there, and they all came into my store,” says Sam Tayeh. They bought him out of Chore Boy, steel wool used as a filter when smoking crack, and lighters, sometimes a dozen at a time.

*   *   *

Tanja Doss, who had dated Anthony Sowell before he got together with Lori Frazier, had vowed to get her boyfriend back, and now was her chance. But like so many girls on the street in the Imperial area, she was dancing with an addiction much more heartily than she was pursuing romance.

In the spring of 2007, Tanja had returned to Cleveland from New York, where she was caring for her stroke-stricken mother. She lived in the area, scoring from the numerous area dealers. Back then, Sowell was taken; now, he was available.

Like almost everyone on the block, Tanja had several criminal convictions, and she had done six months in the Ohio Reformatory for Women for violating her probation sentence in a drug-possession case. She had various other infractions, from domestic violence to theft. She was another raspy voiced, fortysomething street girl in a neighborhood full of them.

Over the years—Tanja and Sowell had known each other since 2005, when Sowell was fresh out of prison.They would talk about their respective pasts, though he never copped to his rape charge, and Tanja never asked.

In fact, Sowell’s sexual-offender status was not common knowledge on the street. And despite his ebbing health and his emaciated state, Tone was still known as a good guy who could change out your water heater and rewire your electricity.

“I don’t know about you, but I never committed any
crime,” he told Tanja when they first got together in 2005. “I took a manslaughter rap for my brother.”

And that was the last they ever talked about his decade-and-a-half imprisonment. It was commonly believed among the folks that gathered at his house that the cops would stick a black man in jail and it often didn’t matter who’d done what.

Tanja ran into him in mid-April 2009 as he walked back from a store on 116th Street clutching a bag of beer; it was past 10
P.M.,
and the store on Imperial was closed. They were happy to see each other.

“Hey T, come on by some time,” Sowell said, calling her by the name he knew best. They exchanged cell-phone numbers.

“I had heard they broke up,” Tanja said, regarding Anthony and Lori. “And that’s all he ever talked about, and he said she was coming back, and he had clothes of hers, and he was going to get those to her.” Still, a few days after running into each other on the street, she came over and they slept together for the first time since 2005. It was familiar and easy. She didn’t get high, nor did he.

She said she’d noticed Sowell’s physical decline when she saw him around the neighborhood when she got back.

“He had started losing weight and not looking the same,” she said. “I assumed that he was smoking because of the weight loss, and he was thinner, and he wasn’t dressing like he used to. He was a good dresser in 2005, and now when I started seeing him, he was raggedy, not Tony to me.”

Again, he invited her over, this time with the promise
of drugs and beer. He was up front—he said he was getting paid so he’d take care of the party favors, and she could spend the night.