Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (17 page)

So when the number of missing women began to mount, people began talking on the street. Although Diane had always been on the fringes, she was always there, getting her hustle on to score some drugs. Things are bad when even the dope hustlers wonder where you are, but that’s what went down.

However, no one ever filed a missing-persons report.

*   *   *

There was one more thing, though; when he could get work, James Martin did construction, and in the summer of 2009, he’d found a job working on a house on Imperial, not far from the Sowell home. He noticed a stench, the same smell so many had been complaining about.

“It smelled terrible,” James recalled. “It’s kind of hard to describe.”

That same summer, Anthony Sowell was spending time babysitting the youngest daughter of his former girlfriend, Twyla Austin. Twyla was working mega hours at her sales job at Radio Shack, and he had plenty of time on his hands—stealing tin had night hours, anyway—and so he borrowed some child-care equipment from his sister Tressa’s house, which was full of kids anyway.

“He got her a stroller,” Twyla says. “He was really good like that with kids, and he really took care of her.”

But her daughter would tell her that Sowell smelled bad.

“You know, you can’t live in a house with a smell without it getting in your clothes,” Twyla says. “I’d imagine if the house smelled, Tony smelled.”

So one day, she asked him why she kept hearing that he smelled.

“Ray’s Sausage,” he said point-blank. And that was as much as he would say about it.

The second week of September, Anthony Sowell got on a bus and headed downtown to Tower City Center, the
centerpiece of Cleveland with two luxury hotels, a mall, and restaurants from fast food to foodie playgrounds. He got off the bus and headed right to Charley’s Grilled Subs, where his beloved Lori Frazier was working.

She had missed his fiftieth birthday, on August 19, never calling, never stopping by. He was heartbroken.

He stood at the side of the counter, waiting until a few customers moved on, and she came out to meet him. They stood in the mall, among smells of food and the noise of people on a busy weekday, looking at each other.

“As long as we known each other, we never forgot,” he said to her. “We never forget our day, birthday, anniversary, nothing like that.”

His eyes betrayed his anguish. He turned to leave.

“Stop, let’s talk about this,” Lori said.

But she said it to his turned back.

There’s a woman in the alley, and it looks like she fell out of a window.

—EMPLOYEE OF FAWCETT BESS

September 22, 2009, was a cloudy Tuesday, Latundra Billups remembers.

She was thirty-six years old and in full bloom of a crack habit that had landed her in jail over the years on charges of theft, drug possession, aggravated assault, disorderly conduct, and drug trafficking.

She even procured drugs at times for Anthony Sowell, the wiry ex-Marine who lived on Imperial. Now that he was living on his own, his drug needs seemed to have escalated. Latundra’s friend Lori Frazier, Sowell’s ex, had left him, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t remain friends.

Latundra was living with her mom on Harvey Avenue, about eight blocks away, a fifteen-minute walk to Imperial.

“My addiction had taken off,” Latundra says. “I was
over to the house on Imperial a lot and that’s why; we did drugs. I used to live over there.”

She had been over there a week or so earlier with her friend Diane Turner.

“It was the first time she had gone to his house,” Latundra says. “I went over there with Nancy Cobb, too. Sowell was so normal; he just liked to get high and drink. He sure wasn’t ignorant or stupid. He liked to have girls around—he liked us, I thought.”

At 9
A.M.
that fall weekday, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office had sent a deputy by the house as part of the random verification of registered sexual offenders and their whereabouts. Sowell answered the door and confirmed, that, yes, he still lived there. And that was it.

Latundra visited first in the early afternoon, left, then came back later. She and Sowell sat on the front porch drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. The talk was the usual, about the neighborhood, about people, and eventually, about Lori.

“He told me I reminded him of Lori a few times,” Latundra says.

She was starting to notice that although the house was a spacious three stories, the only place they ever hung out together lately was on the second floor, a mostly empty space that lacked even a working bathroom.

Of course, they had also sat around in his bedroom on the third floor many times, but this departure from the routine, something in the evasive way he looked at her, made Latundra uneasy. Nonetheless, her nature was to be direct.

“Tone, why don’t we go up to the third floor?” she asked as the two settled into a couple of straight-back chairs on the second floor later that September evening. She knew that’s where he and Lori lived when she was with him. There were bedrooms, a TV, and a working bathroom up there, but down on the second floor, there was just empty space, wooden floors that echoed as they spoke.

“No, it’s just too dirty,” Sowell said. When she asked to use the bathroom, he provided a white industrial bucket.

That’s very odd
, Latundra thought, but that was all as her mind ripped from the tantalizing effects of the crack.

At one point, Sowell left the house to get some wine before Imperial Beverage closed, at ten. Latundra looked at the door leading to the stairway that led upstairs.

“I was on my way up there,” she says. “But as I started to get on the stairs, they were narrow and it was dark, and I turned around. It felt strange.”

When Sowell returned, Latundra was still feeling a little uneasy. But she had heard some things around the neighborhood that she wanted to bring up, and although she was all about having a fun time, this seemed as good a time as any to talk about it.

“Some girls around have been talking about you, Tone,” Latundra said. “They saying you are a rapist or assaulted them.”

Within an instant, Sowell had summoned all of his strength into a single punch to Latundra’s temple, knocking her nearly senseless.

“Take off your clothes,” he screamed at her as she lay prone on the floor. There was a blanket she had fallen onto, and she groggily obeyed. The whispers that Sowell was a monster were true, she thought in a fog. As she pulled at her pants, she saw him pull a white extension cord out of the wall.

Why would he do that?

Sowell was removing his own clothes, and she noticed his pacemaker, which Lori had told her about. It seemed a strange thing to notice at a time like this. He took the electrical cord and pulled it around her neck. His expression was pure rage.

Then she passed out, and all turned black.

When Latundra awoke, she was still on the floor and Sowell was looking at her as he sat over her in a chair. The extension cord was next to her. Her throat ached, and she knew there was blood. She figured that she had been strangled.

“I’m sorry I tore your sweater,” Sowell said. He was partially dressed, and it was still dark out. His voice was a drone, repentant but monotone. “I want to kill you and I want to kill myself. I know I’m going to jail.”

Latundra Billups began to talk for her life, but instead of begging, she simply said that she was not going to send him to jail, she wasn’t going to tell anyone, and they both needed to get some sleep. She pretended it was just nothing; she was sore, she had been raped, she could feel that, but she was intent on getting away alive.

Sowell lay down next to her and the two drifted off. As daylight wakened them—the curtains on the empty
floor were sheer and did little to keep the sun out—Latundra looked at him and he at her.

“I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you,” Sowell said. “I’ll have some money tomorrow; I can give you $50 for a new sweater. I can get you high.”

He went to the basement and got her a sweater to wear, something to replace her own torn garment.

Latundra played along.

“Sure, that’s cool, let’s do it,” she said. She would call him, she promised as she dressed, calm as could be.

She walked out the front door, calmly unbolting the two locks on the wrought-iron security exterior door, and she pulled a piece of junk mail from one of the two mailboxes fastened just to her left. She wanted to make sure she had the right address. Then she walked across the street to Fawcett Bess’s restaurant. And by the time she got in the front door, which was twenty-five feet from Sowell’s, she was already crying huge, heaving sobs of trauma and horror. Bess had been a good friend over the years, never judging her, even in her obvious emotional, legal, and physical demise.

“Tony tried to kill me last night,” she blurted out. “I played dead; I passed out.”

Latundra pulled away the crew neck of the sweater to show him.

“She had these marks on her neck like she had been strangled,” Bess says. He told her to call the police right away, and then get to the hospital. “Then I gave one of my workers $5 to get her some beer, cigarettes, whatever she needed.”

Latundra accepted the kind offer and headed back to her mother’s house, trying to think of what to do. But her mind had already been made up the minute she pulled the mail from the mailbox at the Sowell home. She had his address. She had to report it.

Later that day, September 23, 2009, Bess saw Sowell in the street.

“La La told me that you tried to kill her,” Bess said, trying his best not to be accusatorial.

“No, that’s not even close to what happened,” Sowell said. “What a crazy bitch she is.”

After going home, Latundra Billups headed to the emergency room at Meridia Huron Hospital to report that she had been assaulted and raped. She talked to a counselor at the hospital, “And they already knew of him, of Anthony Sowell,” Latundra says. “I told them I knew him just as Tone, but they knew that address. They said they had five other women that had come in.”

Still, she says, it took weeks before she heard from the sex crimes unit. She spent six hours at the hospital, then was back on the streets, trying to find anything that would blot out the trauma she had endured. Which made it tough for anyone to get in touch with her.

It was the second week of October before she and the police connected, but they dug in, making a case. She gave them times, places, and other details needed to make a good case for an arrest warrant. Detective Richard Durst
handled the interview and diligently moved the case through the maddening bureaucracy and inertia of big government law enforcement. He expected he would get his warrant. He just didn’t know when.

At the same time that Detective Durst was working the sexual-assault cases against Anthony Sowell, going through the various departments and taking statements, fifty-one-year-old Shawn Morris was working her own deals on the street. With a history of drug abuse, Shawn was a tough woman who knew how to handle trouble.

On Tuesday, October 20, 2009, that’s what she found. After a long night of drinking and getting high with a friend, she was sitting at a bus stop on Kinsman when she saw Anthony Sowell. Shawn had seen him around before, and she knew him as a guy who had connections. She had a little cash, and although it was early in the morning, she wanted to keep on getting high. She approached him as he stood at the Key Bank ATM at the corner of 140th Street and Kinsman, about a twenty-minute walk from his house on Imperial.

Sowell agreed to hook her up, and the two had a fine enough time for a few hours that day, drinking beer and wine and smoking crack. By 3
P.M.
or so, Shawn headed home to her place on East 143rd Street, an abode she shared with her husband, Douglas. It was a thirty-minute walk but she knew that if she hurried she could catch the Number 14 bus, which would save ten minutes. In her
haste, though, she realized that she had left her ID at Sowell’s, so she hustled back to grab it.

But as Shawn walked up the stairs—to the third floor, which was now cleaned up—and down the narrow hall to the stairway, Sowell was on her with a choke hold from behind.

“You aren’t going home until I say you’re going home,” he said. He had transformed almost instantaneously into a monster freak, a being possessed with vitriol for Shawn, who had only minutes before bid him a jovial farewell and walked out into the sunshine.

“If you try to scream or run, I’ll kill you,” he promised, pulling his forearm tight across her windpipe. “Do what I tell you to do or I’ll kill you. Whatever I say to you, you better say ‘yes sir.’”

It was a warm day, and Shawn was dressed lightly, providing little bulk to protect her from his adrenaline-fueled rage.

He commanded her to take her clothes off and get on the bed, as he removed his.

“Lie on your stomach,” he yelled as he moved toward her. He raped her, “Violently,” she said later.

When he was done, Shawn started to scream, loudly, bloodcurdling shrieks that tweaked eardrums and beckoned help.

Sowell jumped up and ran first to the room across the hall to the windows, which were open to the Indian summer air. But he failed to notice that one of the two windows in his room was open.

First, she said a quick—very quick—prayer, before leaping
from the bed across the room and pushing out the screen, then crawling out, hanging first on the ledge by her fingertips.

“God, I find myself in a predicament,” Shawn prayed. “In the mighty name of Jesus, please don’t let me die when I go out this window, because I’m about to jump.”

Sowell came in and tried to grab her arms and pull her in, but she fell away from the house, down three stories to the narrow alley and the pavement. She crashed with a bone-crushing
thunk
. And then, silence. She had broken both hands and eight ribs, and she had fractured her skull.

But she was alive.

Fawcett Bess again found himself in the middle of the increasing drama at 12205 Imperial. He was working across the street on an apartment over his restaurant when one of his employees came running up the back stairs.