Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (24 page)

Eight of the families put together a petition that was presented to the office of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason. The only three families who didn’t sign on were those of Tishana Culver, Nancy Cobbs, and Michelle Mason, each of whom sought the ultimate justice.

“I’m glad they getting ready to move this trial forward,” said Culver’s mother, Yvonne McNeill Williams. “It’s been eighteen months and he’s been sitting down there. They humanizing him. He took eleven lives, so why should his be saved?”

But the petition was a work of art, crafted with impactful words and as heartfelt as if it came from the lips of a, well, lawyer.

“We, the family members of the victims of the Imperial Avenue Murders, hereby petition to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office to accept the guilty pleas of Anthony Sowell with a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” the petition read, in part. “We do not want to endure a trial. We do not want to be witnesses to a media spectacle where our loved ones’ lives and the details of the horrendous criminal acts inflicted upon them are spotlighted. The death penalty
for Anthony Sowell is not necessary, or even desirable, in comparison to the grief we families will continue to suffer under the realities and uncertainties of the criminal justice system.

“We feel that our voices have not been heard as victims’ families. A prolonged trial and re-enactment of Sowell’s demented actions will create great distress on the families of the victims.”

And when the press came calling, it was local attorney Jeffrey Friedman who went on the record, speaking for some of the families who had signed the petition.

Friedman had every reason to wish for a plea deal himself; he was representing eight families in lawsuits against the city over the Sowell case. A guilty plea would have made his job easier and also erased any possibility of a mistrial or of a jury finding of not guilty.

“As the media scrutiny got more intense and every place they went they were confronted, the families got more disillusioned,” Friedman explained.

Indeed, defense attorneys John Parker and Rufus Sims asked that Anthony Sowell be allowed to plead guilty and waive all appeals. The police department was also asking that the court accept the guilty plea, a guarantee of life in prison. Their motivation was a post-conviction interview, where officers could learn about how Sowell had evaded them, how he’d captured his victims. These would be valuable learning tools, and the cops wanted the guilty plea accepted with the caveat that Sowell be required to tell them everything.

He was ready to do it.

But the county rejected the overture.

It surprised the defense; if the state were to lose this case on a technicality, the fallout would be severe.

“I didn’t think the state should be taking such a costly risk,” Sims says. “The state could take that deal and eliminate that risk. We have a decorated Marine here and this country doesn’t have a record of putting decorated Marines to death.”

But the state’s position was that cases such as Sowell’s were exactly why the state has the death penalty.

Rufus Sims was the man who got to know Anthony Sowell best. They shared a military background and bonded over both that and sports.

“He didn’t trust me at all when we started,” Sims says, recalling when he first met Sowell, in December 2009. “I couldn’t get anything out of him. But pretty soon, we just talked sports; it was the best way to get to him.”

They talked about football, basketball, baseball—anything that would fit in Sowell’s comfort zone.

“My approach was ‘we’re going to discuss what he wants to discuss,’” Sims says. “We talked about the Browns, the Cavs.”

Within a week, the two were talking about more serious things. They would do so for the next eighteen months.

At one point, Sims secured a photo of Sowell’s graduating Marine class. When he showed him the picture, Sowell’s face lit up like a new dime.

“Pick me out,” he encouraged. Sims scanned the photo, but he couldn’t find anyone who even looked close.

Sowell beamed when he pointed himself out.

Between the marksmanship accolades and Sowell’s love for military operations, Sims thought, it was a good thing there had never been a shootout involved in the arrest between Sowell and the police.

“I don’t know if the police could have won that one,” Sims says.

Jury selection was the expected cattle call, initially beckoning 1,000 people, quickly paring that down to 300, and then using a computer program to randomly hone that to 200.

Those were the people who were invited to a clandestine meeting with Anthony Sowell on Friday, June 3, 2011.

It was an extra bit of caution on the part of Judge Ambrose, who greatly feared a mistrial. He carefully weighed every move he made, and this introduction of Sowell to jurors was an example of him going a little deeper on behalf of the defendant.

So in the afternoon that day, six jailers waited until Sowell had changed out of his jail uniform and put on a polo shirt and dress pants and escorted him to a room on the fourth floor of the Justice Center complex, where he walked in without handcuffs or leg irons. He was just a guy accused of murder, and everyone, including the prosecution and defense teams, looked at him.

“Hello,” Sowell said when he was introduced. And that was all he had. It was awkward for everyone.

The thirty-six-page juror questionnaire asked the usual questions about views of crime, the death penalty, hobbies, vocations. It asked if they read true-crime books and, if so, asked them to name a couple of recently read titles.

In other places, the form was more direct.

“The facts of this case involve the alleged murders of eleven women as well as charges of rape and attempted rape involving three other women,” it stated. “These incidents occurred from approximately 2007 to 2009, in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of Imperial Ave. and 123rd St., in Cleveland. Do you recall having read, seen or heard any media accounts reflecting these events?”

It listed 132 witnesses and asked if the jury was familiar with any of them, including Cleveland Mayor Frank Wilson. Some of them didn’t know who he was.

By June 27, 2011, the jury was seated, though the middle-class group was hardly a jury of Sowell’s peers. Among the twelve were a social worker, a student, two retirees, a grandfather, an insurance rep, and a UPS worker. Seven women and five men. On the morning of the first day, the group visited 12205 Imperial, which had been fenced off since the bodies were removed.

Little inside had changed since November 2009, although it was hard to tell how orderly the place may
have been kept before the discovery of the bodies. Walls had been knocked out in the search for remains on the second and third floors, although the first floor was left pretty much intact.

The house itself “is not evidence, since conditions may have changed since the time of the events in this case,” Judge Ambrose wrote in a court order. Jurors donned surgical masks to cover the smell of mildew and decay and also wore slip-on coverings for their shoes. They were guided by flashlights and walked over and around piles of men’s and women’s clothing, dishes crusted with food, empty beer cans, and empty bottles of Wild Irish Rose.

The tour, if done with the time and eye of a trained investigator, told the story of Sowell himself.

But much of what could be considered evidence had been carted away, of course. Although the jurors saw Sowell’s bed, strewn with papers, they didn’t see it as it was on October 29, 2009, when it was topped with a cheap beige velour blanket, pulled back to reveal a gray sheet that was stained with what looked like blood.

Although the jurors could note the small collection of CDs, including titles by Jay-Z and Ray Charles, as well as Abba and a collection of the band Chicago’s hits, they missed the massive selection of movies on both VHS and DVD that had been taken as evidence. Among the titles:
Hannibal, Final Destination, Cradle 2 the Grave, Toy, Death on the Nile, The Medallion, The Replacement Killers
, a Looney Tunes collection,
Live Free or Die Hard, The Odyssey, Panic Room, In the Bedroom
, and
The Matrix.

Sowell also had a porn DVD featuring Jake Steed, a
black performer whose films usually featured white females with Steed.

Some of the videos were stashed in suitcases, including a purple nylon case that was brimming with more pornography as well as a religious video from televangelist Jack Van Impe.

A nightstand, with a cheap single-CD boom box on it, no longer had several black-and-white photos—some dated and faded, some newer—of Sowell’s sister Tressa and a number of small children.

On his dresser, a stereo-gear enthusiast would have noted a high-end Optonica stereo amp, made by Sharp in the late 1970s. Collectors still revere the defunct brand.

Some of the missing items, like the photos of his nieces and grandkids, would have perhaps evoked a more human perception of Sowell, although it’s doubtful that, given his alleged deeds, anyone could connect the words
human
and
Sowell
at that time.

So, taking it all in, the jurors walked, looked, and said nothing.

The media tagged along, and it was a scene, with cop cars, three white county vans that ferried the jurors, and satellite trucks again lining the streets, like it was the body discovery all over again.

Prosecutor Pinkey Carr was also along to look through the house.

“It was surreal,” she says. “I knew what happened in there, and I was just speechless. My homicide detectives talked to me and said, ‘We’ve known you your entire
professional career, and I don’t think we’ve ever known you to be speechless.’ It was just knowing what went on in that house that took me.”

Judge Dick Ambrose came along as well, watching the jurors file into the house.

“I really don’t want to have to do this over again,” he confided to a cameraman from a local news station. His anxiety was palpable.

Square jawed and silver haired, Ambrose was used to pressure, though. He was a local hero from his days as a middle linebacker for the Cleveland Browns from 1975 to 1985, a standing that elevated him to sainthood in many eyes. When election time came around, Ambrose used a photo of himself on his reelection website, smiling, wearing his robe, with the Cleveland Browns Stadium behind him.

After his graduation from law school in 1987, he joined a local firm and spent seventeen years in private practice as a business employment law specialist.

He was appointed to the bench in 2004 by then Ohio governor Bob Taft, and in October, he ran to be elected. He used his former celebrity candidly, going with a football theme and Browns colors for his campaign literature. Postcards he handed out at events showed a photo of him in his Browns uniform on the front and the 2004 Browns schedule on the back.

His defeat in that election didn’t keep him off the bench, though; he was appointed again by Taft in January 2005, and this time he kept the office.

Area politicos liked Ambrose. He was a friendly man as well as being considered an earnest judge. But he was also sensitive to the notion among some that he was a jock who’d been elected on the merits of his gridiron prowess, not his legal expertise.

“He works harder because of that,” says one local political observer. “Ambrose was a very popular football player, and the things he does now draw more attention. So he always seems to be as good as he can be, and that’s usually very good.”

Ambrose’s cases ran the gamut, from small stuff like prostitution rings and burglary to murder. He upheld the death-penalty recommendation of a jury in 2005 in the case of Delano Hale Jr., who shot a man to death in a Cleveland motel room.

The Ohio Supreme Court upheld a challenge to procedural errors in Ambrose’s court.

In other words, Ambrose had no reservations about the death penalty.

But as a Republican in a Democratic stronghold, Ambrose was also no straight-ticket partisan; when the Ohio legislature attempted to loosen the restrictions on criminal-record expungement for prisoners who had served their time, Ambrose took up the cause.

Now, at fifty-eight, he was presiding over a murder trial that he knew would magnify any judicial fumble. Among his defense arsenal: he issued a gag order limiting attorney comment outside court and putting his office off-limits to reporters.

*   *   *

“You are about to begin a rather disturbing journey,” assistant Prosecutor Richard Bombik told the jury. “It will be burned into your memory for as long as you live.”

It was 2
P.M.
on Monday, June 27, 2011, and the jurors were fed and watered after their trip through the Sowell house. Security was heavy, both for the safety of others from Sowell, whose crimes were unspeakably violent, and to protect Sowell from any family member whose rage simply couldn’t be quelled.

Anthony Sowell sat between his attorneys, John Parker and Rufus Sims, wearing a white sweater and black pants. He also wore a blank expression, as he would for much of the four-week trial.

“There are 14 main victims in this indictment,” Bombik continued. “Eleven that are dead and three who lived to talk about it. Everything that happened in this case happened in the house you visited today, 12205 Imperial. It begins and ends with this house.”

At that, a picture of the house flashed on a large screen in front of the jurors.

“It’s an old house, and it’s been the Sowell household for many many years…. It goes way back.”

Bombik went through the history of the house and the Sowell family, starting with John Sowell. He noted that Segerna Sowell had died on December 19, 2009, after a long illness. But before she did, she lived with her stepson for a while. Bombik described the living quarters upstairs.

Bombik referred to Sowell’s relationship with Lori Frazier as “very important.”

“Miss Frazier would spend the better part of the next two years, 2006 and 2007, living with Anthony Sowell,” he said. “I think the evidence is going to show at the beginning of this relationship, she had a drug problem, which eventually would go over to Anthony Sowell. It was an up-and-down relationship, but it was a relationship that was very important to Anthony Sowell, very important. But like many other relationships in life, this did not work out and she moved out of this house sometime in 2007. She would occasionally maintain contact with him. Evidence will show shortly after she moved out, things began to happen.”