Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (18 page)

“Bess, Bess—there’s a woman in the alley, and it looks like she fell out of a window,” the employee said.

Bess ran down the steps and into the street, looking down the narrow patch of concrete between the Sowell house and Ray’s Sausage. He saw Shawn, whom he didn’t recognize as anyone he knew, lying in a naked heap, and bleeding profusely from her wounds, while Anthony Sowell, also naked, stood over her, trying to pull her to her feet. Which was proving difficult.

Sowell looked sideways at Bess as he struggled with her prone and unconscious body. “It’s cool; it’s cool,” he said distractedly, hoping to get rid of the attention.

“No, it’s not cool at all,” Bess said angrily. An ambulance
had already been called, and a crowd began to gather at the foot of the alley, on the front lawn of 12205.

Some were taking photos of the scene with their cell phones. Jermaine Henderson, Segerna Sowell’s nephew, happened by in his truck as the situation unfolded. He noted the crowd surrounding the prone woman but didn’t bother to stop his truck.

“She was on the ground yelling, ‘Please help me,’ and people were filming her,” said Jermaine.

A passerby, Don Laster, finally injected some civilization into the crowd, admonishing them and telling people to put away their phones.

Another passerby, Leroy Bates, came over with a T-shirt for Shawn to cover herself as Sowell continued to try pulling her around the back of the house and up the stairs.

“I can take care of this; you all don’t need to call anybody,” Sowell told people. “She’s my wife. I’m going to take her back into the house.”

But police were already arriving, and Sowell stopped. He repeated his story to an officer that Shawn was his wife and said that she fell out the window while they were having sex.

Paramedics took her first into the house, then emerged with her in a full neck brace, with Sowell, now clothed, following them. He hopped into the ambulance for the ride to MetroHealth Medical Center. For all they knew he
was
her husband.

She was out cold by then and couldn’t say otherwise.

*   *   *

At the hospital, Shawn Morris was wheeled into an X-ray room. As she waited, police officers, following up the case, asked her what had happened.

Shawn was a married woman who’d been found naked with another man. She did what many would do in such a compromising situation: she lied.

“I was in the house partying, we were getting high, doing coke, and I dropped my keys off the balcony,” she said. It seemed plausible to anyone who wasn’t familiar with the house on Imperial, where there was no balcony on the side of the house where she was found.

The scenario was pondered by the cops, and then Anthony Sowell was called into a hallway outside the waiting room. He delivered something close to the same story.

“This is my girlfriend, and yes, we were partying and she fell off the balcony after her keys,” he told them. Had they talked at any point before the police questioned them? There was little time for any communication. It was uncanny—unless Shawn had made the whole thing up as a smoke screen to cover for her wayward stray.

The officers contacted their supervisor, who signed off, satisfied. It had just been an accident. Sowell went home later that evening.

A few nights later, Sowell went over to the Cleveland Clinic hospital to see his mother, Claudia, who had suffered a
stroke the previous week. She wasn’t doing well at all, and the family felt she was in her last days. It pained Sowell to think of losing her. At the same time, his stepmother, Segerna, was also being hospitalized intermittently and was also thought to be close to death. The whole thing was taking him down. Claudia made it, but Sowell left feeling saddened.

He hated to see a death in the family.

That girl made me do it.

—ANTHONY SOWELL

“At 12205 Imperial, 2nd floor, Cleveland Ohio, Anthony Sowell did force the victim Latundra Billups to engage in sexual conduct. Sowell strangled the victim with an extension cord and raped the victim while the victim was unconscious in his home at 12205 Imperial.”

The probable-cause affidavit was signed on October 28, 2009, and when the Cleveland Police Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team met on the second floor of headquarters the next day, Thursday, October 29, at 6
P.M.
, thirteen members were assigned to the warrant.

There was reason to believe, based on the description of the offense, that Anthony Sowell was a violent offender, and it was possible he would put up a fight.

The plan was for an apprehension, a fairly simple task but one that could go wrong in a hurry. The officers went
over a diagram of the house on Imperial, noting that it was a two-family home with a basement and third floor to search as well as the second floor. The first floor was not included in the warrant. The third floor was noted as Anthony Sowell’s residence, and the second floor was listed as the place of the alleged crime. Their focus would be on the third floor; they were going there to arrest Sowell.

After the quick briefing, the team members, some clad in black ninja gear and others looking as if they were headed for a day of touch football or a bike ride, gathered in several cars at Luke Easter Park at the western foot of Imperial. It was unseasonably warm; temperatures had hit sixty-five, but the day had born the predictable grayness of fall abutting winter.

One of the team members, Officer Richard Butler, was thirty-four years into his career at the Cleveland Police Department, and had been on plenty of these raids. In fact, he loved them—he’d spent twenty-six years with SWAT. He walked with a swagger, and his graying mustache and receding hairline gave him a muscular dignity. Were he to be portrayed in a movie, Sean Connery might be a good choice to play him.

In keeping with his SWAT team image, Butler led the entry into the house, carrying a shotgun with a lighted scope that cast a bright, wide light. Six officers, including himself, headed straight up the side door entryway to the third floor; five officers went to the second floor, and two went to the basement. All the officers had drawn weapons of various sizes and shapes and were fully prepared to use
them if need be; Sowell had already been to prison once, and no one knew if he had a “never take me alive” thing going on.

The officers had no idea whether Sowell would be home, but with this manpower, they would steamroller him regardless.

The officers reached the third floor and split off into each room as they walked down the hall, almost choreographed. As they passed one room, one or two would disappear into the darkness, shouting “Police” at the top of their lungs.

In the kitchen they found a McDonald’s bag, with a receipt from earlier that day. The refrigerator was stocked, somewhat, as if someone had shopped for groceries recently.

Two dove into the first room on the right, with its door open. The other two rooms, Sowell’s bedroom and the sitting room, had closed doors.

Two other officers opened the door to Sowell’s room, where they found a glass crack pipe and some marijuana. There was also mail on the dresser addressed to Sowell. They had the right house, one officer noted to his relief.

Butler walked to the closed sitting room door, stepping on garbage bags full of clothes and debris, and tried the knob. Locked.

The patrolman had been inside a lot of criminal’s houses, places with meth labs, months-old garbage, and even bodies. Clearly, 12205 Imperial was a typical crack house and crash pad, with huge chunks of drywall coming
loose and the ceiling in the bathroom literally falling down in a big, ripped piece of plaster.

Butler thought he caught a familiar smell—the putrid, gassy odor of death. He had smelled it as he’d entered the floor, and now, as he tried the locked door, the smell was more intense.

It took little to break down the door. Butler’s partner gave it a good hard kick while Butler covered him with his shotgun.

They entered the room, and Butler looked to his left and saw two people.

“Police, don’t move,” he shouted, drawing his weapon on the two.

He adjusted his eyes to the glare his light cast on the individuals. He looked at the windows in the room, which would’ve looked onto the lights of Imperial, if it weren’t for the black plastic taped over them. He looked back at the people on the floor. One had a clover-shaped silver pendant on a necklace on her neck. The other wore a white dress pulled up to the waist, her feet wrapped together in a garbage bag. There was a shovel to the left of the body with the white dress.

He had found Telacia Fortson, last seen in June, and Diane Turner, who was last heard from in September.

Butler paused and flashed his light around the room, doing a quick inventory. He saw a computer table with a PC on it, a dresser, a closet on the right, and a table lamp with a frilly white shade. A brown FUBU work boot lay on its side, maggots crawling in the tread.

At the same time, in the basement, the officers found freshly turned earth beneath the seven stairs, suggesting a grave or at least the start of one. They would soon discover that it was the resting place of Janice Webb.

Butler called for a coroner and headed to get a different kind of warrant, one for murder, not rape. This was going to be even more serious than anticipated.

As emergency vehicles began to arrive, a light rain fell. A police command post was set up, and the media began arriving. By 10
P.M.
, 12205 Imperial was a full-fledged crime scene, the likes of which the area had never seen.

Cleveland Police Commander Thomas Stacho called a press conference and declared Anthony Sowell a suspect.

“We’re asking for the public’s help in finding this suspect, Anthony Sowell,” Stacho announced. “He is 6 feet tall, 155 pounds, wears eyeglasses, generally wears a mustache, sometimes wears a beard.”

Stacho noted that the suspect was a “scrapper…he picks up scrap metal and turns it in for cash.”

And he ended his announcement by making it known that anyone who called Crime Stoppers and provided information leading to a conviction was eligible for a $2,000 reward.

Debbie Madison didn’t wait around to hear that, though. Madison had bought the house across the street from the
Sowells in 2002 and had quickly become fond of Thomas and Segerna Sowell. When Anthony moved in, she befriended him as well.

She knew him as a polite and helpful neighbor, a guy who wasn’t even afraid to show her his pacemaker scar while she was trimming her shrubbery one day in 2007.

She had good feelings for him, so when her kids woke her up from a nap around 8
P.M.
that evening, telling her that the police found two bodies across the street, she knew she had to find Sowell. That is, if he were still alive.

“We better tell Sowell. He’s probably at his sister’s house,” Madison told a neighbor, who by now was on the street in front of the house with the growing throng, watching the commotion.

Madison quickly drove the few blocks over to Tressa’s house, on 130th Avenue, and found Sowell on the couch.

“When I saw him sitting there, he was so nonchalant. At first, I was shocked to see him there,” Madison says. “I figured if two people are dead in your house, you should be one of them.”

So she said the first thing that popped into her head.

“There are two dead bodies at your house, and the police are there,” she told Sowell, who was immersed in a video game with his twenty-two-year-old nephew Ja’ovvoni Garrison.

She began to cry. “I’ll take you back over there; you need to talk with the police.”

Madison paused uncomfortably. Sowell did not look up. “Maybe there was an accident, someone fell against the cocktail table?” she said hopefully, now fully in tears.

“Calm down; let’s go over there,” Sowell told her, slowly getting up off the couch. The other kids continued to play and make their usual noise, a symphony of mirth amid the uncovering of evil.

He grabbed his coat, and he and Madison walked to her car. Ja’ovvoni began to get his coat as well. He wanted to go, too, concerned about the worried look on his uncle’s face.

But Sowell stopped him. He couldn’t leave the kids at home without an adult.

“Wait here; your mom is going to be home soon,” Sowell said, then jumped in the passenger seat of Madison’s car. On the two-minute ride over there, he said just two things.

“That girl made me do it” was the first thing.

“Now it’s all gonna come out” was the second.

Debbie Madison pulled up at the foot of their block, in front of Imperial Beverage, and looked at the blare of lights and law-enforcement vehicles.

“Take me back,” Sowell said quietly to her. He said it without any intimidation, and it was not in the form of an order. Just a softly spoken request. But Madison had never felt such tension before.

She did as he asked and dropped him off at Tressa’s, then headed back to her house. She parked her car and walked into her house, where her son stood looking out the window at the commotion.

“Tony did it,” Madison blurted out.

With that, her son walked out of the house and up to the first officer he could find.

“Anthony Sowell is at a house on 130th Avenue,” he said, giving the street number and a quick description of what he was wearing. Madison turned on the TV and all the lights. She began a long, sleepless night.

After Debbie Madison dropped him off, Anthony Sowell walked in the door, grabbed his backpack, and left his sister’s house on foot. Within minutes, two Cleveland police detectives knocked on the door.

“They didn’t fully explain what was going on; they just said they found a body and asked if we had seen him,” Ja’ovvoni says. “Then, twenty minutes later, they came back with another officer and said, ‘We know he’s here,’ like in a movie.”

They had Debbie Madison in the car in case they found Sowell and needed a positive ID. The officers did a brief search of the house, but he was gone. They officially had a murder suspect on the lam.

By the next morning, Crime Stoppers and U.S. marshals had put together a $12,000 reward for information leading to Sowell’s arrest, upping the cash announced on Thursday night by the Cleveland police by $10,000. The U.S. marshals called in officers from across the Midwest to help Cleveland police look for Sowell.