Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (16 page)

“We put posters…in the surrounding area, and the next day, when we’d ride by, they were all gone,” Adlean Atterberry, the mother of the missing Michelle Mason, said.

One day in late spring 2009, Adlean had been driving through the Imperial area. Her daughter, Michelle Mason, never left her mind even though she had been gone since October. As she waited at a stoplight, she looked over to her right and spotted a woman who, at a glance, looked like Michelle. She pulled her car to the
curb and rolled down the window for a closer look. But it wasn’t Michelle.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were my daughter. She’s been missing for a while,” she told the woman. And she drove on. Hope springs eternal, always.

Employees at Imperial Beverage told her that whenever Sowell came in, the posters would be gone when he left. “Flyers were gone from some of the areas…they were gone, too,” she said.

“My family did the same thing,” Florence Bray, Crystal Dozier’s mom, added. “We put posters on the east side and west side.”

They would be torn down as soon as they were put up.

On the first Wednesday in June 2009, Telacia Fortson walked into her mom’s kitchen, her arms loaded down by five bags full of groceries, including some chicken, which she fried up as soon as everything else was put away.

Then she cleaned the place, up and down, top to bottom. It was always a clean house anyway, a place full of chimes and plants and an aura of gentle nature. A white picket fence encased a small yard that was graced by a porcelain angel surrounded by porcelain doves. It was a house kissed with love in a neighborhood that had fallen down over the years. The neat, two-story house stood like a beacon to better years, as if by just existing it could summon a better day.

Telacia loved Inez Fortson, the woman who had
adopted her when she was nine years old. Inez was a divorced woman living alone when she adopted Telacia, who had been in the Cuyahoga County’s foster-care system for four years. Her birth mother was a drug addict, and her daddy was a drunk. Neither was fit to care for a child. But Telacia hadn’t always been a model daughter to Inez.

Now thirty-one, she had been in trouble since she was a juvenile, starting with smoking pot at the age of fourteen and graduating to cocaine at twenty. As a teenager, she’d run away from Inez and her world of beauty, instead seeking what she considered freedom, which served as a convenient mask for delinquency.

She would often run to a former foster mother, Lucille Groomster, who lived four miles away.

“She would always run to my grandmother,” said Ebony Groomster, thirty-six, Lucille’s granddaughter. “My grandmother never closed the door on her, no matter what the repercussions were.”

In fact, despite the cushy life Inez provided, Telacia had bounced around town as a teenager, staying with other friends as well as Lucile Groomster.

Inez would try to exert some discipline, but it didn’t work, and she didn’t have the will for a fight.

Inevitably, at seventeen years old, Telacia ended up at Bellefaire JCB, a residential facility for wayward youth. The place offered help for drug problems, behavior issues, mental-health troubles. It was a catchall for juveniles. And Telacia wasn’t having any of the help, getting in fights and damaging property. In 1997, having completed high
school classes, she was evicted from Bellefaire in a complaint filed by the facility in June.

She hit the streets for a life of crime and drugs. She was sent by the court for mental-health treatment. She had suicide attempts behind her. She had anger issues. She was popped for drug possession a couple of times; then, in 2003, while under court supervision, she tested positive for cocaine while she was pregnant with her first child. She didn’t know who the father was. The child was delivered, and the county took custody of the child.

“Mother has engaged in acts of domestic violence; child at risk,” a social worker’s report stated. “Mother has attempted suicide on four occasions.”

Telacia also washed out of three drug-treatment programs and was living on the streets or with a boyfriend, Terrance Minor, who had a rap sheet longer than hers, with several violent offenses.

“Does not have a permanent home,” the social worker duly noted, adding, “Lacks the parenting skills to care for the child. Has only visited sporadically.”

By 2006, Telacia had two kids—neither of whom she had custody of—and was pregnant by Minor. She was twenty-eight and checked into Laura’s Home, a shelter for women run by the City Mission. She sang in the shelter’s choir, took some job training, and headed back into the world in early 2007. She failed and came back a few months later. Telacia cried as she told staffers at the home about her situation. She told one that if she were to go back out to the streets, she was sure she would end up dead.

“I know I can get some peace here,” she told the shelter staffers. Yet Telacia walked away the next day.

In 2008 came the theft rap and the prison time. While locked up, she sent a friend a letter about how she let Inez Fortson down.

“I feel like an outcast in her family. But as I continued to pray to the Lord, it has gotten a little better each day, knowing that it is only one more day closer to me being a productive citizen and a good mom to my children.”

She got out, became reacquainted with Inez, and hit the streets again, only this time she had a Bible in one hand and a crack pipe in the other.

Terrance Minor had custody of two of her three children when she got out, and she stayed at his house frequently. He had gone relatively straight: no felonies since 2001.

Telacia went into Imperial Beverage with a friend from a local church; her new life was based on faith, she told people. She bought a soda instead of a beer.

But when she disappeared, it was after another visit to the store. That time, she’d bought four lighters.

A while passed before Inez became worried. She thought her daughter was on the straight and narrow, so where was she?

She called the East Cleveland Police Department, which sent a car to her house to take a report. The officers provided her with a list of morgues, hospitals, and other police departments and law-enforcement agencies around the city. She called them diligently, but no one had a thing on Telacia. She and her lighters had disappeared.

*   *   *

Janice Webb could have been voted most likely to go missing.

At forty-eight years old, she would frequently walk the streets of the Imperial neighborhood, looking to score some crack. And when she did, she made no secret of it—she would buy a dozen lighters at a time at Imperial Beverage, and throw in a box of Chore Boy, the steel wool that worked so nicely as a filter in crack paraphernalia.

Other than some traffic stops and fines, Janice had managed to avoid serious trouble with the law since 2003, when she had been busted for possession of crack along with some friends.

But Janice was a model defendant in the case. She was bonded out after her arrest in July of that year, and she showed up for every court appearance, unlike most of her peers. And she caught a break, at first probation, drug treatment, frequent drug testing, and mandatory sobriety for a year.

She walked out of court a week before Christmas, but within two months, in February 2004, she tested positive for cocaine and was back before the judge. House detention, the judge said this time. Another break.

But by April, Janice was gone, no longer reporting to the required Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or the probation-officer appointments. It would be another year before she was stopped on a traffic violation and found to be driving without a license—it had been revoked as part of her original sentence—and returned to court.

This time she served thirty days in the county jail, then was cut loose.

By May 2005, Janice was back to the streets and more drugs.

Janice Webb had come close to making it before she fell in love with crack.

She’d graduated from John Hay High School in 1979, and after graduating, she went to work as a waitress at Corky & Lenny’s deli, not far from the house where she grew up. It was a respectable place for employment, a local institution that had been around for more than fifty years.

She had a child, a little boy, shortly after graduating high school and did not stick with the father. In 1982, she was busted with stolen property, but prosecutors dropped the charges.

The next year, she met and fell in love with Michael Harrell, whom she married in 1984. The two set about having a life and bringing up her son. Michael was a courier, and they would sometimes travel together around the Midwest. He loved the road. He took her to Los Angeles in 1985 to visit some of his family, making the drive across the country an adventure.

It became even more of an adventure when he found that his own family members had turned Janice on to crack. Michael sent her son back to stay with her relatives in Cleveland, and she developed a habit. By the time the couple returned, both were using.

“See, I cared about her so much that in order for me
to keep her home, I had to buy drugs to be with her,” Michael said. “Neither one of us did drugs when we first got married.”

In 1986, the couple was busted for theft. Both were declared indigent by the court, and both got a one-year suspended sentence. Janice complied with the terms of her probation, but Michael skipped his probation reporting and ended up back in the slammer.

By then, drugs had estranged the couple, and they divorced.

Janice’s life spun out of control. She was arrested numerous times, mostly for drugs and once for carrying a concealed weapon.

She wanted to quit the drugs, but just couldn’t. The neighborhood, which by the mid-1990s was an open-air drug market, made it too tempting to resist.

“She tried to get off the drugs and tried to fight it,” said her sister, Audrey Webb. “But it was hard for her.”

Audrey would know; she herself was busted fourteen times between 1985 and 2007 for hard-core crimes, including robbery.

When Janice was short on cash, which was frequently, since she didn’t work, she would hit up her ex-husband, Michael.

“She would always come around when she knew I got a check,” he said. He last handed her some cash in February 2009, then never saw her again.

Until June 3, 2009, Audrey would hear from her sister every day, usually by phone, just to check in. Then the calls stopped cold. Audrey filed a missing-persons report
a month later. Her missing-person flyers joined the growing number of papers that seemed now to be littering the neighborhood one day and gone the next.

But no one, including law enforcement, seemed to take notice of the proliferation of missing people, all of the same demographic: black women, on the dole, drug abusers, with police records. And all were seen at some point scouring the area around Imperial to feed their habits.

On July 2, 2009, a warrant was issued for Diane Turner, who had failed to show up for a probation hearing in the downtown courts building. In May, she had made a bid to have her supervisory status changed from the onerous “intensive supervision” program to “major drug offender” status. Although neither sounds like much of a deal, when you had fifteen felony drug cases behind you, as Diane did, you took what you could get to free you up to score more easily.

She would still be “on paper,” as the street term went, and could be hauled back into court if she tested positive for cocaine, which seemed inevitable. Being on paper meant you still had to check in with the law. Diane had been on paper for almost half her life, dating back to her first bust, in 1991.

In May 2009, Diane had been ordered to attend daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for ninety days and three meetings a week after that. If she violated the terms of that order, she would be sent back to prison.

Diane had already been to Laura’s Home, the same rehab facility where Telacia Fortson had unsuccessfully tried to reform. She’d been in therapy, community control, the county jail, and several other drug-rehab establishments.

Nothing worked. She was a frequent presence on the streets, an aggressive prostitute.

In a 2000 story in the local
Plain Dealer
newspaper on rehab and life in the county jail, Diane told her support groups, “They said I was never gonna be nothing, and I believed them. I been in and out of here my whole life. I never had no family. I always been by myself.”

Hard words from a hard life.

By the age of twenty-four, Diane had had three children, all in the custody of the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services. Even the loss of her kids wasn’t enough to quell her insatiable need for crack. The kids were taken “due to her drug abuse problem and inability to provide proper care and support,” according to a county report.

Her fourth child, born in 1994, a daughter, also landed in state custody.

“Mother has had numerous opportunities to involve herself in services,” records said. “She has not done this and is not likely to provide for the child in the near future. The child is of a young age and would best benefit from a grant of permanent custody and adoption.”

Diane would have two more kids by 2009. She never got custody of them, either.

Diane had little consistency in her life. Plagued by
epilepsy and dubious mental health, she could never go long without drugs.

The one person she held on to was James Martin, a one time boyfriend who steadfastly took her calls and tried to help her whenever he could.

They would talk on the phone, but the last time they spoke was when she signed off after a call in early September 2009. When he asked around a couple weeks later, no one had seen or heard from her.

James was worried. “Diane always let someone know where she was,” he said.

Diane periodically washed dishes at Dailey’s, a Jamaican restaurant on 116th Street not far from Anthony Sowell’s house. Jasneth Groves, who was foster mother to Denise, one of Diane’s daughters, helped her get the job. At one point or another, almost all the women who were rapidly turning up missing would be in there, Groves said.

The Mount Pleasant world was a small one. Many of the people of this world, though sitting firmly on the fringes of society, were at least familiar with each other. They would see each other at the store, at the bus stop, at the social services office.