Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (23 page)

The book made a minor stir in the community, but Cleveland police said the book’s claims had no merit after a DNA test cleared Sowell of the 2006 case.

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Sowell’s DNA was not entered into the national database when it was supposed to be, but it wouldn’t have mattered. How many other criminals have escaped detection, or had delayed detainments, because of such a massive screwup?

The Sowell case exposed all the holes in the system. And the women on the streets of Cleveland and their families were paying for it.

There was another line of chatter going on in the black community as the trial approached. Black leaders, as well as citizens, were justifiably upset at the bungling of law enforcement, which had failed to arrest Sowell on several occasions, most notably the Gladys Wade assault. Community members were also angry over the perception that cops didn’t care about black people, a mistaken notion but one that has had traction for generations.

And among a subgroup of these complainants, the name Arthur Feckner came up. Feckner was a white drug dealer also known as White Art among the black community. With a good source in Miami, Feckner moved a lot of cocaine in Cleveland, much of it among the black community.

Feckner also had a number of charges dating back to 1975, including drug trafficking, larceny, possession of drugs, and receiving stolen property.

So after being busted once again in 1985, Feckner agreed to turn snitch in order for leniency, working for a
specialized narcotics unit in the Cleveland Police Department known as the A-Team.

But before he could begin his work with the A-Team, Feckner told police he had a $560,000 debt he had to pay up with his Miami connection. And to do that, he had to sell more drugs.

Thus, while working with the Cleveland police as a drug informant, Feckner also sold drugs out of an eastside house across from the housing projects, about three miles from Imperial Avenue.

Police later said they thought Feckner was making the money by collecting on old debts.

The A-Team, working with cash from the DEA, was targeting the Miami connection, a big-time score that would reflect well on the department and help some political ladder climbers in the department move forward.

The bust was deemed a success at the time: fifteen people arrested, six of them convicted, and forty-six kilos of coke taken off the streets.

Cleveland Mayor George V. Voinovich, along with a couple of the agents making the bust, posed with the money and drugs for a photo.

But shortly after the celebration had died down and the details of the operation began to come out, some people began to realize that Feckner was selling drugs to the black community for the political gain of law enforcement.

U.S. Congressman Louis Stokes in 1990 told hundreds of people in the black community at a Cleveland church about his investigation into charges that Cleveland police
allowed Feckner to sell cocaine to blacks on the east side. He said that police used money from the drug sales to finance an operation that eventually captured Feckner’s suppliers.

“What happened with Feckner…are troubling reminders of things permitted to happen in America’s black community that wouldn’t be tolerated in the majority community,” Stokes told a reporter at the time. “You can search history, and you simply don’t see this happening in white communities.”

Five Cleveland police officers were indicted on drug-trafficking charges.

At the trial, a Cuyahoga County prosecutor said the cops were more concerned with making a possible bust down the line than with keeping drugs off the street.

Two ex–drug cops testified that one of the five on trial, Sergeant James Bistricky, who headed the A-Team, had told them to keep their men away from the area where the drug sales were going on, indicating that he knew they were taking place.

The judge in the case granted the defendant’s motion for acquittal, and they walked.

The black community felt like it was being marginalized. But nothing ever happened as a result.

And here in 2009, it once again felt like no one cared about crime in its midst. Sowell preyed on the black community just as Feckner had, with a nod and a wink from the Cleveland cops.

There are fourteen main victims….Eleven that are dead and three who lived to talk about it.

—CUYAHOGA COUNTY ASSISTANT PROSECUTOR RICHARD BOMBIK

For all the fanfare and attention, murder trials most often go down with few surprises. Most people, both those involved in the trial and the spectators, have their own ideas of what happened and who did it and why.

Anthony Sowell’s trial was clearly along that line. He was a dead man walking well before the trial began with jury selection in June 2011, after two previous delays.

Although there was media interest, his trial also coincided with that of Casey Anthony, the pretty young woman in Florida whose two-year-old daughter, Caylee, turned up missing, then dead, in 2008.

Her case had a whodunit element that was indeed compelling, while the case in Cleveland was pretty standard, or as standard as the wholesale slaughter of eleven women could be.

Casey Anthony was white, twenty-two, and loved to party in nightclubs.

Anthony Sowell was fifty-two, black, and smoked crack and drank King Cobra.

The result: while Casey Anthony’s case was carried live by CNN at some points, there was little coverage of the Sowell trial outside of Cleveland.

But as open and shut as the Sowell case might have seemed at the outset, there would be surprises along the way, starting with a petition to accept a guilty plea signed by the families of eight of the eleven victims, and ending with Sowell’s taking the stand on his own behalf.

The state brought on two prosecutors with vastly different records and backgrounds to deliver a guilty verdict for the people.

Richard Bombik was a white older man, set to retire until this case came along. He was a steady toiler in the courtroom and out, his blue eyes and white hair driving home his dignified elder-statesman air.

But in a town with mostly poor-on-poor violent crimes, Bombik prosecuted mainly ghetto slayings and passion shootings, heartbreakers like the mother who killed her four-year-old daughter.

But if Bombik was the sage, the star of the state was Pinkey Carr, a forty-five-year-old black female who was also running for a county judgeship, though in doing so, she’d had to forsake her book club, golf, and her travels, three of her favorite hobbies.

Instead, she would get up at 4
A.M.
, hit the gym, and be downtown in her ninth-floor office at the Justice Center by 6:30.

Carr had devoted herself to the cause of putting guilty people in prison. She got the legal bug when she was a toddler; when she was three years old, Perry Mason on TV drew her attention like no other character.

She graduated from Cleveland’s John F. Kennedy High School, where she was a “high stepper”—“Like a majorette, but I didn’t carry a baton,” she explains—and went on to Baldwin-Wallace College to earn her bachelor’s degree in political science, followed by law school at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. Shortly after law school, Carr scored a job as an assistant prosecutor with the City of Cleveland. Promotions came quickly, and she became chief counsel for the city’s law department just as the city became mired in political scandal over questionable promotions by outgoing mayor Michael R. White, in 2001. She left the city around the same time White did only to get a call from Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason in early 2002. He posed a simple question: would she come back? She returned, and within two years, Carr was part of the team handling major trials.

Her colleagues became both friends and educators. She looked at Bombik as a mentor, “and a great lawyer,” she says.

She and Bombik had worked together before; in 2004, they handled the rape-murder trial of Daniel Hines, whose victim was an eleven-year-old girl, though that eight-week trial had ended in an acquittal.

Carr, in the meantime, had socked away some victories. She got a life sentence for a cop killer in 2008, and in February 2011, as a deputized U.S. attorney, she helped convict an arsonist who’d set a blaze that killed nine people.

Anthony Sowell’s defense team came down to two relatively unknown attorneys named John Parker and Rufus Sims.

Parker was a quiet veteran of the defense-attorney ranks. Born in 1962, Parker grew up in Belpre, Ohio, on the West Virginia border in the southeast corner of the state. His first move away from home was to Columbus, where he earned his undergrad degree at Ohio State University. His second move was to Cleveland, where he attended law school at Case Western Reserve. He liked the city well enough; in 1991, he bought a house, took a job as a public defender with Cuyahoga County, and struck out on his own as a defense attorney.

He had plenty of death-penalty trial experience, with some considerable success. In 2007, Parker represented Vernon “Broadway” Brown before the Supreme Court of Ohio. Brown, who carried a .45 caliber handgun he called Mike Tyson, had received death for a 2004 street murder. Parker convinced the court that the prosecution had withheld witness statements that could have helped the defense. In a retrial, Brown was convicted on murder charges and received a life sentence.

In the defense world, that’s a victory.

But Parker had also unsuccessfully represented Kenneth Biros in federal appeals. Biros in 2009 became the
first person in American history put to death by a single drug rather than the usual three-drug cocktail. The new one-drug method was used to stem a lawsuit that claimed the three-drug system was painful for the prisoner.

Parker, a strident foe of the death penalty, attended the execution.

And when the call came for the Sowell case, Parker realized he had another shot at saving someone from death. He accepted quickly.

The Sowell case was a career maker as well, and at age sixty, Rufus Sims was smart enough to realize it.

When Cuyahoga County Judge Eileen T. Gallagher summoned Sims to the arraignment room at the courthouse shortly after Sowell’s arrest, Sims had feared he was going to be chastised for something or other, though he and Gallagher had a cordial relationship.

Sims had three years earlier defended the judge on national TV when the judge threw a rape case out after the prosecution was late to court. Gallagher and Sims had gone on CNN as a guest of Nancy Grace in the wake of the judge’s action, where Grace indelicately berated Gallagher. Sims, who was representing the defendant, supported Gallagher’s decision.

Now, the usually abrupt judge told Sims to sit down.

“I’d like you to represent Anthony Sowell,” Gallagher said.

The words couldn’t get out of her mouth quickly enough. Nor could Sims get his yes answer out any faster.

“I didn’t hesitate,” Sims says. “I really wanted it. It was a make-or-break a career case.”

Born in 1951 in Cleveland, Sims was a black man who’d grown up in the civil rights era, when his father had to ask a white man to buy milk at a store that refused to sell for blacks.

“I realized that law was an effective way to create change,” Sims says.

He’d been raised on the city’s east side, a couple miles from the Imperial area. He went to Glenville High School and then joined the U.S. Air Force in 1971. Sims took undergraduate classes throughout his military assignments in a number of locations, including San Antonio, Miami, and San Diego, then attended law school at Cleveland State University.

He passed the bar in 1988 and had worked as an assistant prosecutor in East Cleveland before opening his own defense law practice. Sims was an ACLU member and a strident foe of the death penalty.

Both he and John Parker knew that they had the case of their lives.

They filed motion after motion in a blur of paperwork, asking for mental evaluations, paging through Anthony Sowell’s military and high school records, going over surveillance video taken of the neighborhood by five cameras put up by Ray Cash, owner of Ray’s Sausage, next door to 12205 Imperial.

A year into the trial preparation, the team had already run up the highest bill ever for a defense team in Cuyahoga County.

The judge, Dick Ambrose, of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, was in a tight spot, though,
both financially and politically. To refuse the fiscal overtures of the defense team was to risk an appeal on the grounds of a lack of funds to mount a proper defense.

At one point, Parker and Sims asked for $62,000 toward the cost of mitigation experts, people like psychologists who could testify to the defendant’s state of mind and the effects of his upbringing and environment.

Ambrose refused them, writing in his opinion, “Clearly the defense team has put considerable effort into justifying its proposed budget to the court. But to attempt to interview 198 individuals in order to prepare a mitigation case, at this point, seems excessive to say the least.”

Although they struck out on a number of requests, by December 2010, they had rung up $185,000 in costs.

They tried all the standard maneuvers to keep moving the trial back, creating as much time as possible between the crime and the trial, a traditionally sound defense move to remove emotion and familiarity, especially in this case, given the gravity and emotional nature of the crimes. Sims and Parker filed the standard motions for delays, moving the trial out of the county, and continually asking for more money.

After two extensions for the trial were granted, in February and May, jury selection finally began on Monday, June 6, 2011.

But the families of the victims had been talking among themselves. Some of them were done crying, and it had been eighteen months since their loved ones were found
murdered. They wanted to forget as best they could, they said. Some feared Anthony Sowell might walk away from the murders, perhaps on a mistrial. Imagine that—the man who had already pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, then simply not guilty, freed after all this.

“Every time that I see him on television, it is just like watching the detectives walk back up on the porch again,” said Joann Moore, Janice Webb’s sister.