Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (15 page)

Tanja’s best friend, Nancy Cobbs, was spending time at Sowell’s as well, although their relationship was more a function of necessity; Cobbs’s boyfriend was selling Sowell crack. Nancy turned forty-three on April 20, and she and Tanja scored some drugs and celebrated.

“I’m going to Tony’s tomorrow night,” Tanja told her. “You should come with me.”

It was a plan, but when the next afternoon arrived, Nancy decided to go to her boyfriend’s place instead. So Tanja called Sowell and told him she’d come over by herself. It was around four in the afternoon, a dismal, cold, rainy day, when she walked from her place on Forest over to Imperial. A cousin of hers was staying across the street from the Sowell house, and she spent a little time there, but around 8
P.M.,
she headed over to Sowell’s. It was, again, a welcome visit for her, because she truly liked him.

Sowell already had a few rocks and some beer ready to go, so they began that easy chatter that was made looser by the beer. The two had some beers and smoked a bit, watching the Cavs beat the Detroit Pistons in game 2 of the NBA play-offs.

“We started smoking, then looking at the game, cheering,” Tanja said. “After we watched the game, we started listening to music and talking about different things. He talked about how he was missing his girlfriend.”

The two were having a nice time. Tanja was remembering why she always liked to see him. It was warm with him.

Then he asked why she hadn’t called him the previous week, after they had been together.

Sowell had set up the dresser for his pipe, his wire, and his lighters.

As he asked her about her failure to call him, Sowell was standing with his back turned to Tanja, who was sitting on the side of the twin bed near the end.

He was clearing the pipe to smoke some more. She was looking away, toward the window while he was to her left and behind her.

Then he sprung.

Within seconds, Sowell had Tanja—his friend, his lover—by the throat and was pushing her up the mattress toward the disconnected headboard that leaned against the wall. At five feet four and 81 pounds, the diminished, intoxicated woman had no chance to even fight back.

Tears began to flow involuntarily as she gasped for breath and looked into Sowell’s enraged face, which had transformed almost instantly, like a science-fiction movie monster who could switch physical and emotional appearances at will. It was a haywire Jekyll-Hyde conversion.

“Bitch, you could be the next crackhead bitch dead in the street and nobody would give a fuck about you,” he roared into her face. The music continued to play, but the violence of his attack and the rapid cutoff of oxygen made it sound distant and surreal. His thumbs dug deeply into each side of her neck, closing off her jugular veins.

He had pushed her onto her back, her arms outstretched at the head of the mattress.

“If you want to live, knock three times on the floor,” he commanded her.

Tanja used the side of her left hand—
bam
,
bam
,
bam
—pounding the wooden floor. He pulled his hands away and stood up. Tanja sat up on the edge of the bed.

“Tony, why you trippin’ like that?” she asked peering up. Tears, now from her distraught emotional state as well as from the choking, were flowing down her cheeks.

He reached down and slapped her in the face, hard.

“Bitch, shut the fuck up and take off your clothes,” he said. His face was twisted into the mask of a madman.

She obeyed him, and as she did so, she felt her face swelling from the slaps.

“Move, Tony, let me go to the bathroom and see my face,” Tanja said. She was scared, but there was still the element of familiarity she felt with him. She had been abused by men before, even raped, so talking to her friend turned tormentor still seemed easy.

She took a left out the bedroom door and walked to the bathroom to check on her face. And when she returned to the bedroom, Sowell was sprawled, naked on his back, hands behind his head in repose.

“Tony, why you trippin’ like this?” she said again, beseeching him.

“I should make you suck my dick,” he said to her, his voice harsh and stern, like a drill sergeant.

Still standing, she leaned down and picked up her pants, hoping to get dressed and get away. She pondered her escape routes. The window behind her, although it
was three stories up, would land her on the empty driveway. It was painted shut and she would have to break through the glass.

“Bitch, who told you to put your clothes on?” he demanded.

She dropped her pants back to the floor and crawled timidly onto the bed, curling into a fetal position, being as small as she could.

“I was praying and I cried myself to sleep,” Tanja said. She was exhausted and terrified and scared straight. She had no idea what time it was.

When she awoke, it was 11
A.M.
and the skies were still a deep gray, and a cold wind blew the rain that was falling.

Sowell got up and looked at her like nothing had ever happened, as if the maniac that he had become was no longer home.

“You want a beer or something?” he asked.

“No, I just want a pop, if you got it,” Tanja answered, hoping, praying that it wouldn’t bring more abuse.

Tony was back, and whoever that was who took over eight hours ago was gone, as if he’d forgotten the whole thing.

Tanja had not. She’d fallen asleep scared and woke up scared. She had to get out before the whole thing started again. Her daughter Tashana had just had a baby. That was her out.

“I made up a story about her baby being sick and I had to go to the hospital,” she said. She placed a fake phone call to Tashana, not really dialing the phone. She said into the phone that she was on her way.

Tanja dressed and walked down the front stairway, with Sowell joining her.

“Let me know that she’s okay, call me,” he said as they parted at the sidewalk in front of the house. Tanja went right, and he went left. She wouldn’t see him again for a couple of years.

Tanja never told the police. She had seen plenty of crime and taken part in some. And besides, she thought, in the end he just slapped her and choked her. What would the police do for a spat between crackheads?

But she did tell Nancy Cobbs, her best friend.

“He went crazy and choked the shit outta me” is how Tanja described it to Nancy. The two had met in kindergarten and had shared plenty of secrets and gossip over their more than thirty-five-year friendship. Later, Tanja would also tell Janice Webb, another friend from around the neighborhood who knew Anthony Sowell. Both were surprised; certainly that wasn’t the guy they knew.

I’m sorry. I thought you were my daughter. She’s been missing for a while.

—ADLEAN ATTERBERRY

When the penal system turned him loose in 2005, the state authorities had determined that Anthony Sowell had a minimal possibility of reoffending.

There are mounds of paper amid mountains of studies on recidivism for sexual offenders. Some people believe that if there is even the remotest chance of again committing a deviant crime, why let them out at all?

Sowell was released under Megan’s Law, which merely required an annual reporting by Sowell to the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office, which he did. A deputy from the office stopped by the house periodically to verify that Sowell was still there.

He was not on parole or probation, but he was fully registered as a sex offender at his address. The system of registration is managed by the county sheriff’s office. Not the Cleveland Police Department, which investigated
Gladys Wade’s allegations. And just because Wade talked with the city police department’s sex crimes unit didn’t mean that they would confer with the sheriff’s office.

And Sowell was not creating big problems for the cops in his neighborhood in the early part of 2009, even though the sex crimes unit had obviously been aware of some street chatter; after all, a Cleveland Police Department detective mentioned it to Wade as she interviewed her.

Nancy Cobbs liked Anthony Sowell, even after hearing from her best friend, Tanja Doss, about the weird freak-out he had that April night. Maybe he was just too high.

Nancy had been staying with Audrey Williams, her twenty-two-year-old daughter, in public housing on Quincy Avenue, about three miles from Imperial. She’d been there for about six weeks, still trying to find out what she was going to do with herself.

Nancy had just turned forty-three years old, and she was again trying a comeback. She was born in Cleveland in 1966 and dropped out of high school after she got pregnant, at fifteen. Nancy married the father, William Hunt, who soon joined the military and left to serve his hitch. They had a son, William III, and divorced.

In the mid-1980s, Nancy made a couple moves that changed her life. First, she met Adam Williams at a nightclub. He was a good man, and they stuck together for almost a decade. They liked to party together, but when Nancy got pregnant with their daughter, Audrey, Adam
decided it was time to get serious about having a family. But Nancy couldn’t stop the party life, and when Adam left for Wichita, Kansas, to attend truck-driving school to learn a trade, Nancy decided to stay in her native Cleveland. The next year, 1995, Nancy was caught in a large bust for drug trafficking. It was a hard case; Nancy and five others were sent up, with Nancy getting a three- to fifteen-year sentence. The kids went to live with her mom, Louvenia.

She served two years, then got paroled in 1998.

When Nancy got out, she picked up right where she’d left off. Within eighteen months, she was popped again for possessing crack and was sent back to prison.

Her daughter, Audrey, would visit her at the prison, bitter over how things had turned out but still tied to her mom through a love that seemed to have no bounds. It was the drug habit she just didn’t get.

“I never approved of it, and we used to get into fights because I wanted to see her better herself,” Audrey said. “After my mother and father separated, she just would be in the streets.”

By 2008, Nancy was hanging out with this guy in the neighborhood whom everyone cheerfully called “Tone.”

Nancy, Tanja, Amelda—they all knew him. He would come by once in a while and sit on the porch at Nancy’s house, a few blocks from Imperial, and drink beer with them. Audrey didn’t care, of course. It was harmless, and Sowell seemed benign. She’d say hi to him when he was there.

So on April 24, 2009, when Nancy spent the day at
the house on Quincy before announcing that she had plans for the evening, it drew a weary sigh from the kids.

“She had just got her hair cut short,” Audrey remembered. “She told me she and her friend were going somewhere with Tanja Doss.”

Nancy left the house around 5
P.M.
Later that evening, Nancy called Audrey, mentioning that she was with someone and that everything was okay. But after Audrey hung up, something didn’t seem right. She just couldn’t figure out what it was. But Nancy didn’t come home that night. Calls to her cell phone went unanswered for the next few days. Then it became a week, and she missed a May 1 doctor’s appointment.

“They called to see if she was coming,” said Kyana, another of Nancy’s daughters, “and I called her phone and didn’t get anyone. That was my first sign. I started calling her friends and no one could find her. Mom would go away but never to a point where we couldn’t get in touch with her. Never like she went away and [we] couldn’t talk to her.”

Audrey Williams went to the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority Police Department to file a missing-persons report. She was directed to the Cleveland Police Department Fourth District station. But instead of filing a report, Audrey and the rest of the family and their friends, including Tanja Doss, went out on May 9, plastering the neighborhoods with flyers that read:

They talked a local TV station, WEWS, the ABC affiliate, into graciously running an item on its website.

The segment ended with a plea that anyone with any information on her disappearance contact the Cleveland Police Department Fourth District station, but nothing came of it.

Nancy Cobbs joined the growing number of women missing from the streets around Imperial.

The many missing-person posters that had been slapped up on any surface—telephone poles, store windows, and any of the many flat, blank spaces in the Imperial area—were being torn down.

Families and friends would traverse the area, even extending beyond the immediate eight to ten blocks around Imperial, with staple guns, glue, and tape, hoping that just one of the crudely designed flyers would yield a lead. Some simply wanted to know the morbid answer: alive or dead? Others were simply hoping a tipster would give a call and let them know that the missing was holed up somewhere and would be home eventually.