Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (27 page)

“I don’t believe he wishes to speak,” defense attorney John Parker said.

“He’s not going to make any verbal response to that?” Ambrose said, somewhat taken aback.

“No,” Parker said, standing.

“All right then, Mr. Sowell, I’m proceeding on the basis that you do not wish to make a statement,” Ambrose said. “You’ve been advised that you have the opportunity; you chose to remain silent when the court offered you that opportunity.”

Ambrose continued, “It is necessary for me to review with the defendant his registration requirements again because there are several rape charges here and also sexual motivation specifications for which the jury has found the defendant guilty of. I have to review with him the requirements as a tier III sex offender before we can go any further.”

Ambrose read the long list of reporting obligations for a sex offender. It was ridiculous—Sowell was never going
to be free again, and the requirements applied only to a free man. But Ambrose pushed ahead. Sowell kept his eyes closed, not moving.

When the judge finished and asked Sowell to sign the form stating that he understood the registration requirements, Sowell continued to simply sit, eyes closed, head bowed. It was a long five seconds of silence.

“I don’t think he’s going to sign this,” Parker said, pulling the form close to sign on behalf of his client.

Ambrose showed no inclination to make things lively; indeed, his straight-ahead legalese made lids heavy, until several others joined Sowell in the eyes-closed, head-down pose.

Ambrose read his own review, naming the specialists who showed what proved Sowell’s guilt.

“The court, having gone through its independent analysis, has accepted the jury’s verdicts,” Ambrose said.

Ambrose then addressed Sowell, who sat at the defense table with his eyes still closed.

“If you did feel bad, then I would have some hope for you,” Ambrose said, looking at the lethargic Sowell. “Not for your physical well-being here on earth, because that’s been decided in court—but for your eternal well-being.”

Ambrose set an execution date of October 29, 2012, the third anniversary of the discovery of the first bodies on Imperial, though the reality was that it would probably be decades before the execution.

The family members berated him, poured out their pure grief.

The most piercing, heartrending statement came from
Donald Smith, the father of victim Kim Smith. He had cried when he testified, and he wept now.

“He took my heart, my life,” Donald said. “And I might as well die, too, because he killed a part of me.”

Others vented their hatred for Anthony Sowell in statements that dripped with agony.

“In my opinion you’re going to hell for your actions,” Donnita Carmichael said. “Anthony you are an animal and hell awaits your arrival. I won’t stand up here and tell you that I’m not bitter, because I am. I’ll never forgive you.”

Sowell kept his eyes closed. Three bailiffs stood behind him. When the proceeding was over, Sowell rose wearily and was taken back to his cell. He looked bored.

The day after the verdict, Pinkey Carr took the day off. And she skipped the gym.

“I watched TV,
Judge Mathis
,” Carr says. “It was a relaxing day; I stayed in the house. I was grateful and thankful for the experience.”

She was still angry about Sowell’s lackluster apology on the stand, his “this is not typical of me” defense.

“When I was sitting there listening to that, I was pissed,” Carr says. “My mouth was wide open, Rick and I were sitting next to each other. When Sowell said, ‘That’s all I can give,’ well, I was surprised his lawyers didn’t prepare him better.”

Sims was not surprised. He says he got to know Anthony Sowell “better than anyone.”

“You don’t know what you’re going to get when he goes up there,” Sims says. “Some people no matter what you say, even if you threaten them, they are only going to go so far to apologize. He probably thought he did a good job that day. But people want to see the emotion, and he didn’t have that.”

In November, Carr was elected as a judge for the Cleveland Municipal Court, defeating an incumbent appointee.

On August 30, Sowell was again in the courtroom of Judge Ambrose, as Parker had filed a motion for a new trial based on what he claimed was juror misconduct.

After delivering the verdict, the jury made a highly unusual move; as a group, it called a press conference to address the media.

In particular, the jury foreman, a woman of around thirty-five, went on camera and dropped two bombs that will no doubt provide years of legal wrangling over the impartiality of the jury and the Constitutional rights of Anthony Sowell.

The woman told reporters that during the jury’s tour of the house on Imperial Avenue, she became “overwhelmed.” She said she had to take a second to get it together before completing the tour.

“I think [Sowell] made a lot of eye contact when it was to his benefit,” she added. “And it personally offended me because he even winked at me once. What was that about? Why are you winking? This is serious here, your life is on the line, why are you winking?”

*   *   *

Sims and Parker subpoenaed a tape of her comments and asked Judge Ambrose to declare a mistrial. It was quickly denied.

It was Sowell’s attitude that again shocked when he was brought back into the courtroom for the hearing.

“Don’t bring me back here for that bullshit,” he complained to the bailiffs. “I was sleeping nicely.”

The jurors never reconciled one thing: the smell that was widely but randomly discussed, as if it was just assumed that the smell was the rotting corpses of Sowell’s victims.

Frazier said that she became aware of an odd smell in early 2006. The Pompeys, who lived on the second floor with their infant daughter at the time, also said they smelled something like decay.

It wasn’t until June of 2007 that the city received a complaint and sent someone out to look into the odor and ordered Ray Cash Jr. to spend $20,000 on cleaning things up, thinking that would end it. It didn’t.

So what was it that was stinking in 2006, when the women didn’t start disappearing until May 2007, when Crystal Dozier was last seen?

There are varying accounts of the odor that wafted through the Imperial Avenue area. Some claimed it had been part of the environment for years, even prior to Sowell’s arrival in 2005.

Eobbie Dancy, Amelda Hunter’s son, says he worked
at Ray’s Sausage during the summer of 2005—preceding Sowell’s arrival to the neighborhood—and there was a smell then.

“It turned out to be a skunk,” Dancy says.

When Richard Bombik delivered his masterful, one-hour opening statement, he didn’t mention the smell that had been in so many news reports.

Several trial witnesses, such as the Pompeys and Raymond Cash, mentioned the smell. But the odor was never a factor in the conviction of Sowell.

There is little doubt that the decomposing bodies emitted a bad smell. Coroner’s office workers had to wear masks when they began gathering up the remains at the house on Imperial.

But what was it that Lori Frazier smelled in 2006? Were there other bodies that Sowell had stashed before her arrival, during that two or three months that Sowell and Segerna lived there on the first floor? The questions create a one-year window of wonder; surely there were other women going missing in that time, perhaps women who were never recovered. The questions still stand out there, wavering, wafting.

On September 14, 2011, Sowell left the Cuyahoga County Jail, where he had been for nearly two years. He first went to the Lorain County Jail for processing; then, on September 15, he went to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown, Ohio. He was assigned a one-man cell on death row, awaiting the day he would be moved to
Lucasville, to spend the night before his execution. As of September 30, 2011, there were 148 inmates awaiting execution. Some had been there since 1983.

Anthony Sowell most likely has a long time to wait.

As I was writing this book, the chapters hit me like a chest thump, one tragic story after another, all gathered together by this guy who had become a real presence to me, Anthony Sowell.

There is an order to this story, and it’s composed of women going missing and women being violently attacked. I tended to grab off chunks that were stories and write them, then assembling all in a cut-and-paste fashion.

I finished the piece on the Gladys Wade case before I did that of Tonia Carmichael, even though, technically, Carmichael went missing shortly before Gladys had her encounter with Anthony Sowell.

There were so many of these encounters that sometimes it became a confusing timeline. It was put together like a puzzle, and I hope it works for you.

I read it back, and it brings home the thudding ferocity and rapid-fire intensity of these incredibly violent incursions and the hard lives of the victims. One after another, women went missing. And each had a story that was almost unbelievable in its misfortune, heartbreak, calamity—name that tortured element.

One evening I watched the brief, edited video of Donald Smith, father of victim Kim Smith, testifying at Sowell’s trial, and I fought the urge to call him, at 11
P.M.
on a weeknight, just to let him know he wasn’t alone in his grief. These kinds of things happen a lot when I write this material, which may mean I’m not cut out for it. Seems that the heavyweights can just cruise through it. I can’t. I struggle with it; I dream about it; I stare into space.

As the individual vignettes were completed, I would write next to each name
DONE
in caps to let me know I had given that victim’s story. It was weirdly satisfying, even though I knew that subsequent phone calls and visits with survivors would yield more and give each person more importance and humanity. When I read news accounts of Diane Turner’s sad life and looked through her numerous arrests for drugs, I found myself deep in her pathological need for drugs, trying to wrap my head around it.

The same week I wrote of Turner’s saga, a friend of mine died of a heroin overdose. I had seen him ten days previously, and we had a great visit, laughing and talking about mutual friends and the neighborhood and the city
we both lived in, Lansing, Michigan. Then he was dead. Just like that. He didn’t live like Diane Turner, who fought all her life just to score. He just bought some dope, shot it up, and it all stopped.

I was very depressed about the whole thing and spent part of each day in mourning. Then, at night, I would again sit down to write this book. Cue darkness. Somehow, Diane made sense to me. A craving is a craving, and we all do what it takes to get by.

Then there was the frustration I felt for the families trying to navigate a system that seems skewed against anyone having to deal with it.

Frequently, I would try to refer to the state of Ohio’s corrections department website for assistance in tracking an offender, perhaps to see if he or she was now in state custody. The site was almost always out of commission, and I realized that the state had little interest in helping people who are trying to find out the status of someone, perhaps a victim wanting to make sure an offender isn’t running free.

It was the same thing with the prison’s system for setting up a phone account so one may have phone contact with a prisoner. The bureaucracy was stifling, and I can imagine someone unaccustomed to navigating such a thing being overwhelmed by the frustration. The burden is already heavy; the system makes it worse.

It really shouldn’t be that way, but this is how the families of criminals are treated, as if it were their fault the crime happened.

It comes back to the lackadaisical and inept responses that the Cleveland Police Department gave the families of these victims. The attitude is one of great dehumanization and disdain for a large part of the public that pays for its existence.

At the very least, some simple training is in order. These officers are smart to put on their game face at the same time they put on their uniforms, because civilized traits like empathy and helpfulness are often seen as signs of weakness on the street. But like anyone else, you have to adapt to circumstances. Someone reporting a missing person is not an immediate threat.

The department has an incredibly burdensome job in handling both society’s most unfortunate as well as our most pathological and evil.

And the numbers provided by the police department tell a compelling story. In 2009, the year Sowell was apprehended, the Cleveland police took 2,232 missing-persons reports, and 2,227 were found, returned, or otherwise accounted for. Most frequently, those reported missing are teenagers, and around 83 percent are black.

In Sowell’s case, one has to remember that police said only three of the eleven victims were actually reported missing—Tonia Carmichael, Janice Webb, and Michelle Mason—although some other families claimed they filed reports, when cops say they didn’t, or that their claims were dismissed.

Police often decline to take a report if there is not some evidence that a missing-person’s life is endangered. And that’s not just Cleveland police. And who’s to say, in their
panic and grief, that the family members trying to explain their concern did an effective job?

A month after the Sowell case broke, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson established a three-person panel to study the way the police handle sexual assaults and missing-person cases.

So began the roundabout, a blur of surveys and white papers that mean nothing to the cop on the street, who is dealing with life and death and horrors that most people watch on their flat-screen TVs as a form of entertainment on sanitized shows like
Cops
.

Within months, the panel released a report with twenty-six recommendations. Among them was the creation of a missing-persons unit.

In April 2011, the city hired Wilson Research Strategies, now known as WPA Opinion Research, to embark on a study that includes an audit of detectives’ caseloads, a quality-assurance investigation, and a survey of the community’s perception of police.