Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (22 page)

As the thirty-nine-year-old woman waited alone, a blue Dodge Neon pulled up to the stop, and the passenger-side window rolled down. It was a girl she knew only as Monique, an old friend she knew from the streets and as a co-tenant at the Forest Hill Park Apartments from a few years back.

“Where you going?” Monique asked, her breath coming out in white condensation puffs. It was around forty humid degrees, and a ride home would be better than taking a bus anytime.

Murray jumped in the backseat of the car, and Monique introduced her to the driver. He was unremarkable looking to her; she never did remember his name. A black gentleman, wearing a green dress shirt, khakis, brown leather coat. His hairline was receding slightly, and he had a shadowy beard. And one other thing: his eyes, Murray would later describe, were yellow.

She would later learn she was describing Anthony Sowell.

While Monique and Murray chatted, he drove them to a Walgreens on Mayfield Road, a two-minute ride. Monique jumped out and was gone; she had errands to run and would get a bus home.

Murray got into the front seat and told Sowell her address—Kensington Road—about two miles away. But as the car headed south on Superior, Sowell made a quick right turn onto a side street, taking them away from the most direct route.

“This is the wrong way, the wrong turn,” Murray said, trying to help. Perhaps he was confused.

With that, Sowell turned half toward her and, with an open hand, slapped her across the temple, knocking her glasses onto the seat.

She was in trouble. She didn’t know this guy, and now she was being kidnapped.

She held on as he made a series of erratic turns, twisting the five miles south as if evading an invisible pursuer. Her body jostled in the seat as he turned, and she tried to figure out where she was. Murray was half dazed from being struck, and she was also almost breathless that this was happening to her. After fifteen minutes, the car pulled into a narrow driveway in a place she didn’t recognize. The house was a three-story duplex, and in the dark, it looked to be a brown-brick dwelling.

Murray had regained her composure and was trying to notice these things. She feared for her life, but if she made it, she sure as hell wanted to make sure this guy was caught.

But before she could think about jumping out of the car and running, Sowell had run out of the car and around to her side, pulling her hair and grabbing her in a choke hold while dragging her to a side entrance to the duplex. Her fight was futile; he was amazingly strong for a smaller guy—she could see that he wasn’t a big man now that he was out of the car.

Murray scanned the area as they got to the top of the stairs. He pushed her through a small kitchen area with a table and two chairs and down a narrow hall to a bedroom on the left. On a large dresser, she noticed some items that didn’t bode well; a crack pipe, a filet knife, some sexual lubricant, and some lottery tickets.

But there was something else that permeated the place: an overwhelming smell of rot, something fetid and gaseous and horrible, like mold or old garbage.

She later described it poignantly as “stagnant.”

“You have to be trained like an animal,” Sowell told her. “And you have to call me master.”

He ordered her to remove her clothing. Terrified, she obeyed. And for forty-five minutes, Sowell sexually assaulted her in all ways possible.

And when he stopped, he continued to yell at her and, indeed, treat her like an animal.

“I am a trained killer; I was in the Marines,” he told her. Sowell would begin a sentence, then stop, and begin a whole other thought. He was in a full manic episode, and over the next thirty-six hours, she was subjected to sexual assaults four times. She was a captive, tied to a chair in the bedroom with dress ties when he wasn’t abusing her.

“Do you like to do Ecstasy?” he asked her after the first rape, referring to the mild hallucinogen. He had just returned from the store and carried a bag as he walked into the bedroom. In it were some bottles of King Cobra malt liquor, some rotgut wine, and a pack of cigarettes.

She realized that the attacks were not even close to
over as Sowell poured together a sickening blend of the beer and wine. She knew what was next; he made her drink it and forced a pill into her mouth. With her hands bound, she could not fight what she kept thinking was some kind of super-adrenalized strength that her attacker was gathering from his role as “master.”

As daylight broke on Friday, April 17, Murray awoke and saw the light streaming around the blanket that covered most of the two side-by-side windows in the bedroom. Sowell dozed peacefully, his left arm draped over her, as if the two were just another limb-tangled couple.

She couldn’t bolt; the hallway was too long, and she was sure he could catch her. But he was out pretty good, given the drinking and drugging he had done the night before.

Murray eased herself out from under his arm; she slid her jeans and sweater on, watching her captor the whole time. He moved slightly. She could knock him out, she thought, given the drop she had on him now.

Murray grabbed a framed picture from the wall; she was impressed with his attention to home decor, in fact. It was an ivory frame with glass, and—
whack!
—she clubbed him over the head with it as he groggily looked up.

He was dazed only slightly and jumped up and on her as she tried to run out the bedroom door. Murray picked up a piece of glass from the broken frame and jabbed him on the neck with it as he moved toward her. They began to fight as she ran down the hall for the stairway door, with Sowell putting his arm around her neck from behind, just as he did when he brought her up to this den of horror
on Wednesday night. This time, though, Murray had it figured out; she bit his forearm, hard.

He was bleeding profusely as she ran down the stairs, that she knew. She had looked at him and saw her handiwork; the glass shard had cut him deeply.

Murray ran down the back stairs and came out the side door of 12205 Imperial—that’s exactly where she was—and began a panicked run.

She was unable to later recount her four-and-a-half-mile run home in a terrorized haze. But she made it by 9
A.M.
or so and called a friend. By 9:30, Murray was at South Pointe Hospital, from which she was transported to the emergency room at Hillcrest. It was there she met with Diane Daiber, who called police. Because Murray was picked up in Cleveland Heights, which borders the city of Cleveland, the Heights police were called.

As patrol units sought Monique and some of the locations Murray had detailed in her account of the abduction and assault, Murray was treated for her injuries. A sexual-assault kit was placed into evidence.

The kit is key in catching rapists, and its contents are usually collected by a specially trained nurse. These kits usually contain biological evidence that can be tested for DNA to apprehend a suspect.

In this case, it was Murray’s jeans and bra that were put into the kit as evidence. Nurses also took blood and urine samples from Murray, which was standard procedure.

They handed the rape kit to police investigators. All were then given to the Lake County Crime Laboratory
for testing, then to enter the DNA in a criminal database to see if there were any positive hits.

And police obtained the security surveillance tape from Walgreens for the time Monique was dropped off by Sowell.

Police investigators, though, hit a dead end. They tried rental-car records for a blue Dodge Neon and called the complex, Forest Hill Park Apartments, at which Murray and Monique lived at one time. They traveled with Murray to the areas she thought she was in when she was abducted, during that crazed ride back to the three-story house.

Nothing.

And there was never any DNA put into any database.

That’s because there were actually two sexual-assault kits given to police in one bag. The one with the blood and urine from Murray were given to the lab. The other, which potentially bore the DNA of her attacker, was not part of the drop at the lab.

When the lab opened the box that it thought would contain the evidence, the jeans and the bra, it found only the blood and urine of the victim “rather than being a sexual-assault kit as described on the evidence submission form,” according to a report dated May 5, 2009.

The lab called police “so we can discuss how to proceed.” The detective called back and told the lab to test the blood and urine.

As for the jeans and bra, someone just assumed it was evidence, which belonged in the evidence room.

Murray fell out of pocket shortly after her assault, and police claim they tried to follow up with no success in
September 2009, when Cleveland police inquired about the case; they had a similar rape and had heard about this unsolved assault.

In March 2011, the Cuyahoga County prosecution team contacted Cleveland Heights about the case. What ever happened with that other evidence?

A Cleveland Heights detective hit up the evidence room and found the bag with what police had in 2009 called “a second rape kit.” Actually, it was the evidence needed to get the DNA of the perpetrator. It had never been tested.

There was no mea culpa from Cleveland Heights.

The city’s law director, John Gibbon, claimed that the evidence was handed over in two batches, “utterly unexpected.”

The first batch was the blood and urine of the victim; the second, the kit with the DNA evidence.

“We’ve never seen that,” Gibbon said. “We don’t know why that was done.”

And, as if to wash its hands of a grievous error, the city issued a statement:

“Had the second rape kit box which was in a package of clothes been discovered and analyzed in 2009, there would have been no match with Mr. Sowell’s DNA in the State’s DNA Bank since Mr. Sowell’s DNA was not in the State Bank at that time.”

Which was true; through one more epic episode of bureaucratic ineptitude, Sowell’s DNA, collected during his first prison stint, was never entered into the national DNA criminal database.

The sample was collected by the state prison system and sent to Fairfax Identity Laboratories, in Fairfax, Virginia. The lab was hired by the state to conduct DNA coding and freeze blood samples under a contract while Ohio was building its own lab, in 1990.

Fairfax Identity Laboratories is owned by AIBioTech, a large firm that today holds a number of federal government contracts.

The state claimed the sample was sent to the lab but it was never returned to the state. “I don’t know if it got lost in the mail or if it got lost in the Virginia lab,” said Eve Mueller, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Mike DeWine. “Nobody knows what happened to it after that.”

It seemed that no one was all that interested in competence when it came to the women who fell prey to Anthony Sowell. They were truly, as far as the Establishment was concerned, nobody’s women.

Then there was the curious case of Vernice Crutcher, a longtime felon who claimed that she was raped and beaten by Sowell in a 2006 crime.

Crutcher was the subject of a book, called
I Survived the Cleveland Strangler
, written and self-published by a man calling himself CD Newton, or Charles D. Newton.

The book chronicles the story of Crutcher in a sketchy, streetwise chatter. Newton portrays himself as an ex-boyfriend and now advocate and “caregiver” for Crutcher, hoping to get her off what has been a multi-decade addiction to drugs.

There is little doubt to the allegation, which was published
in the
Plain Dealer
in June 2006, that she was raped in an empty house in the Imperial area by a man in his thirties.

Crutcher provided a sketch of her assailant, which ran in the June 30
Plain Dealer
, and, in hindsight, looks much like Sowell.

And the situation was very similar as well. Crutcher claimed to have met the man she was now saying was Sowell near Kinsman, where he promised to get her high on crack and pay her for sex. He took her to the abandoned house and raped and beat her.

Newton’s book assailed Cleveland police for failing to follow up on Crutcher’s case.

“The Cleveland Sex Crimes unit has covered up Vernice Crutcher’s cold case by engaging in obstruction of justice,” the second page of the book blares. “Why? They don’t want you to know that they had nearly a year to capture Sowell before he started his killing spree.”

His allegations also extended to the murder of Magdalia “Lucky” Roulette, who was murdered in August 2005, her body found near 79th Street. Roulette lived in Kinsman, about a mile from where Sowell was living in Slavic Village with his sister and a slew of kids at the time.

Newton made grandiose claims in the book, which was marketed with savvy acumen via online ads during the trial.

“I deeply owe it to the eleven women of Imperial Avenue to reveal the truth,” Newton wrote. “I knew years before their deaths that Vernice’s attacker from June 18, 2006,
if not captured, would strike again…. Due to her surprised survival the Cleveland Strangler Anthony So-well changed his strategy and started luring women to his home.”

Newton registered his company, Double or Nothing Productions, in 2007 for “artistic productions in theater and film,” he said in state records. He had published an e-book in fall 2010 called
Foreclose the Predators
, a courtroom drama.

I Survived the Cleveland Strangler
, also an e-book, was given out promotionally, protected by a password, then put up for sale at Amazon as a download for $2.

Vernice Crutcher’s adult crime record dates back to 1975, when, at eighteen years old, she was arrested for grand theft.

In 1978, she was arrested for felonious assault and sentenced to one to five years in state prison. Crutcher was out by early 1981 and reoffended with another grand-theft case. She was sent back to prison.

And this is the course of her life as recently as 2011, when the book came out as a download.

Court records for Cuyahoga County show Crutcher with the address of an apartment building (in Euclid, and dating back to 1975) that Newton now presents as his home, although in his book, he contends he met her around 2004.