Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (26 page)

Parker barely even tried to impugn her. He saved that for later, when it would be too late.

A parade of family members and the other survivors, including Gladys Wade and Latundra Billups, meshed with the faceless officials from the coroner’s office, cops, and so-called experts to create a legal spiderweb from
which Anthony Sowell could never escape. Sixty-two witnesses told of the horrendous trail of death and violence he had left.

The defense, with a price tag now reaching $600,000, lay down. It didn’t call a single witness, deflated by the intensity of the victims and the families of the deceased.

Parker and Sims now simply sought to keep their client alive.

Sowell’s only hope was a mistrial or a sadly misguided jury, and neither appeared to be in the cards.

There were a few lighter moments in the trial, however, when even Sowell broke from his blankness and smiled.

His stepgrandmother, Virginia Oliver, took the stand early in the trial. The eighty-nine-year-old woman, Segerna’s mother, was at the point in her life where she had no filters on what she said.

Virginia was brittle and endearing. When assistant prosecutor Pinkey Carr flashed a picture of Segerna on the video screen, Virginia beamed and said, “That’s my baby.”

She described Segerna’s health woes as her life wound to a close, with seven operations, and told of how Sowell had helped his stepmother.

“And do you see Anthony here today?” Pinkey asked in a motherly voice.

Sowell stood up halfway as she looked at him with a wide smile.

“Hi Anthony,” she said brightly. He returned her smile and waved.

But smiles were brief.

When the two legal teams would break from the script, when the jury and onlookers were out of the courtroom, there would be some lightness, a bit of kidding.

“There were times during the trial when defense lawyers and I would laugh about something,” says Carr. “And Sowell would laugh and I would think ‘why are you laughing? This is not funny for you, you’re the whole reason we’re going through this.’ And I would immediately stop laughing.”

Levity was in short supply.

Anthony Sowell was a killer from the outset.

Vanessa Gay sealed the deal in that first week. The rest was all window dressing.

Bombik came out with closing remarks for the prosecution first. Using a PowerPoint presentation to give his delivery some graphic appeal, he stressed, as he had in his opening remarks, the house on Imperial.

He said the house is “condemned forever.”

“The question that begs for an answer is who lives here?” Bombik said. “And the answer to that question is Anthony Sowell. Make no doubt about it.”

He continued. “This is not complicated. Don’t make it complicated. The evidence in this case is overwhelming. It is enormous. Label him for what he is, a serial killer.”

Bombik added that it takes three to five minutes of intense pressure to snuff out a life via strangulation, and “that is a long, long time. That is a blueprint of prior calculation and design if ever there was one, because you
can stop. But he was on a hell-bent mission to cause their deaths.”

The PowerPoint presentation showed photos of the victims, their underwear, their jewelry, and the ligatures that were used in some cases to snuff out their lives.

The photos of the victims included them alive, smiling, and vibrant, as well as their decomposed remains.

Bombik also noted that most of the women were tied up, naked from the waist down, and wrapped in garbage bags or buried in shallow graves in the backyard of the Imperial house.

He made a last plea for death as he ended his address. If the jury opts for prison, “where’s the punishment? You’re sending him home to a place where he does well.”

Carr then came in with a likewise strong delivery, with a dramatic flair.

Clad in a black skirt and blouse, her long, dark hair artfully tousled, Carr summarized the testimony from the survivors. If that wasn’t enough to make you believe them, she said, “look at the exhibits. Who can make this stuff up?”

“Look at her neck,” Carr said, indicating a photo of Gladys Wade’s injuries to the jury. “What, did she do this herself? Oh no, this has Tony written all over it. Tony likes to choke a girl.” She laid the photo down on the lectern. “What about Latundra? Is she lying too?”

For sarcastic drama, the prosecutor tossed an aside.

“He’s a choker,” she said, drawing it out in two long syllables, as
choke-er
.

“When you strangle somebody, it’s personal,” she
continued. “Personal. You’ve got to get up close to a person…Tony was so close to these girls he could smell the fear.”

To emphasize her point, Carr walked up behind the state’s law clerk, Chris Schroeder, and wrapped her forearm around his neck.

“What about the girls he choked from the front? He had to be in their face, just sucked the life out of them.”

“Three to five minutes,” she said, restating Bombik’s point of how long it takes to exterminate a life through strangulation. “Who does that?”

“He did it because he’s evil. He did it because he’s a serial killer,” Carr said. “He did it.”

“I know everybody said he’s a good guy. He helped out everyone, he I guess ran an all-night cemetery too. ‘Tony, you think I can put this body in your basement?’ Because he was a nice guy.”

Carr slowly held up a picture of each of the eleven women whose bodies had been found in and around the house on Imperial.

“Find him guilty of each and every count. Do justice,” she said softly.

Defense Attorney John Parker came to his final arguments with less flair but just as much candor.

Parker asked jurors to consider the witnesses, singling out Vanessa Gay’s testimony that she saw a headless body in Sowell’s third-floor dwelling.

“She has a history of drug abuse and mental illness. She hears and sees things that aren’t there,” Parker said.

He also noted that there was no DNA that tied Sowell to the murders—and he was correct.

“To prove who strangled these women, wouldn’t you want to test the ligatures? Just one of them? This man, who is an honorably discharged U.S. Marine, deserves better…But the state didn’t even try.”

On Friday, July 22, 2011, after three days of deliberation, the jury announced it had reached a verdict.

Wearing a gray polo shirt, glasses, and clean-cut goatee, Anthony Sowell first stood and then sat, defiant and stoic, when the verdict was read aloud. It took an hour, given the multiple counts. The jury found him guilty on eighty-four of eighty-five counts; he slid on the aggravated robbery count.

When it was over, Sowell yawned.

A team of bailiffs surrounded him quickly. As the lawyers milled about and the gallery stood to watch, to soak in the judicial victory, Sowell had one parting gesture: as he left, he lifted his manacled hands in the air above him, as if in some victory that no one else could understand, as Parker and Sims looked on in surprise. It was the first time in the past month that Sowell had shown his soul.

I truly am sorry from the bottom of my heart. This is not typical of me.

—ANTHONY SOWELL

There was one last element to the proceedings that finished Anthony Sowell’s fate. Would he live his natural life out in a prison, or would he be put to death by the state?

The last Cuyahoga County jury to recommend death was in 2007, when a man named Charles Maxwell was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, shooting her twice while her young daughter looked on. It was the night before the little girl’s fourth birthday.

On Monday, August 1, 2011, the mitigation part of the sentencing began. Under Ohio law, a defendant is entitled to these actions in order to determine if capital punishment is warranted. It is a method of precaution before deciding on the ultimate punishment.

A parade of social workers was scheduled by the defense. They called Roosevelt Lloyd, Sowell’s former cell
mate throughout the 1990s in the Ohio correctional system.

Lloyd, who was released in 2009, said that when Sowell was released, in 2005, staffers hugged him good-bye, hardly protocol in the hardened prison world.

On the stand, Lloyd came across as humble, but his message was a jumbled mess of regret and support for a man who had absolutely zero support among the audience.

“Anthony Sowell, I don’t appreciate what he did,” Lloyd said. “You know what he did as wrong. Very wrong. I mean, very wrong. What you all see of Anthony Sowell today is what he done for that period. But what you don’t see or understand about him, Anthony Sowell, is before he got like that. He’s a nice, loving, caring person. Now what could have triggered this event here today, I don’t know. But what I do know is that the people who love him…some of them don’t even want their names mentioned. These are the people that I know that love him. And I just couldn’t see myself turning my back on him. Because that man you see right over there, I love him like a brother. Regardless of what he done, he deserve not to die…. killing him ain’t going to bring nobody back. He’s a disturbed young man. I didn’t know how disturbed until this happened. But if you knew him 15 years ago, you would have loved him like everybody else. I’m going to ask this court, ask the judge, ask the jury, have mercy on him. Cause we all do bad things in life, we all do bad things. He’s not going anywhere. His life is over.”

As Lloyd made his plea in court, Sowell teared up
unashamedly, and he mouthed the words, “No way” as he shook his head no.

But the biggest of all witnesses took the stand Monday, August 8, when Sowell himself took the stand on his own behalf. Under the law, he could not be cross-examined, since he had already been found guilty.

It was the first time the world would listen to Sowell, aside from the police-interrogation videos that the jurors had been shown during the trial.

Sowell wore a black polo shirt and black slacks and looked every bit the gentleman.

He slumped his shoulders meekly on the stand, but he listened carefully as defense attorney John Parker asked him scripted questions about his life.

Parker’s questions quickly got to a point—that Sowell had been sexually abused by a cousin when he was six or seven years old.

He spoke of growing up in a house with “a lot of sexual activity” among the children, much of it forced on the younger kids by the older ones.

Jurors recalled that Sowell was accused by one of his nieces of having raped her repeatedly when he was a teenager. Now, it was Sowell who was telling of sexual abuse.

He shied away from much of it, though, later saying that he just couldn’t get himself to talk about the abuse despite the probing of Parker.

“I can’t talk about it so freely in front of strangers like that,” Sowell says.

“It was like a war in there,” Sowell said, speaking of
his house as he grew up. It was the first time most everyone, aside from the defense team, had heard Sowell speak anything more than two or three words at a time, and the courtroom was riveted.

Sowell spoke with a Southern accent, vastly different than the Southern-inflected midwestern accent so many people in his neighborhood carried with them.

The word
kids
was pronounced “kee-ids” and
on
became “own.”

Hoping to make Sowell at least a pinch sympathetic, Parker asked him about his school days, about his time in the Marines, and his marriage to Kim Yvette Lawson. Sowell’s replies were a tortured rendering of his emotional state.

If it had been anyone else, it would have evoked great sympathy, but jurors listened and looked in studied fascination, as if a being from another planet was telling a fictional tale.

He told of his incarceration from 1990 to 2005, which the jury was hearing of for the first time; as was typical, priors had been ruled off-limits during the trial.

Sowell also told the jury about his heart attack in 2007, losing his job at Custom Rubber, and the depression that took him over in its wake.

Then, in wrapping up, Parker asked Sowell if he had anything to say to the families of the victims.

“Well, all I can say is I’m sorry. I know that it might not sound that much but I truly am sorry from the bottom of my heart. This is not typical of me. I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it. Well, I know it’s not a lot but that’s all I can give.”

Sims never thought twice about the wisdom of putting Sowell on the stand.

“You never know what you’re going to get when he gets up there,” Sims says. “You just hope he doesn’t go off. He probably thought he did a good job. And I think that some people, no matter what you say to threaten them, are only going to go so far to apologize.”

Almost across the board, Sowell failed miserably in his opportunity to makes things better. It’s not as if words could fix this one, anyway.

The mitigation phase ended with Sowell’s testimony, and the jury was sent home. On Wednesday, August 10, 2011, the jurors returned with a verdict, after deliberating for seven hours. They decided that Anthony Sowell should receive the death penalty.

Sowell was again led off by bailiffs.

The only thing left was for Judge Ambrose to sign off. It was a long process for a short end. Everyone knew what the judge would do.

After two months of courtroom proceedings, Judge Ambrose sat down to finish the case. Before he began, he asked the victims who chose to address the court to do so with “decorum” and again thanked the jury.

Ambrose read back the guilty counts in a droning voice, as well as he could manage with the material.

Sowell, now looking more like a prisoner in his orange
jailhouse jumpsuit, sat at the defense table with his eyes closed. He refused to look up or acknowledge anyone or anything.

Before announcing his own decision, Ambrose asked Sowell if he had anything to say.

“Mr. Sowell you have the right to elocution or the right to make a statement here before the court before the court proceeds any further. Do you wish to make a statement to the court, Mr. Sowell?”

Sowell sat, head slightly turned down, eyes closed as if asleep. Silence.