Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (3 page)

Inside, the house was filled with the smell of freshly baked corn bread and the cacophony of children playing, screaming, and scrambling.

“It looked fine,” Melvette says. “His sister was sleeping on the couch; the house was okay, I thought. The kids were all looking at me, and they were smiling. [Food] was cooking. He asked me to go upstairs to his room on the third floor, and I went.”

She wasn’t thinking sex, though Sowell seemed “nice, not a creep. We talked about, well, certain things. But it wasn’t that I was going up there just to have sex.”

However, as soon as they entered the room, Sowell slammed the door, and Melvette’s mind-set changed in a flash. She had been picked up hitchhiking by guys who made lascivious suggestions to her, and she had fended
them off. But Sowell—now this was a Frankenstein monster that she had never encountered.

“I looked at him, and he changed, his face, his look, and I thought, ‘Sister, you’re in trouble.’”

Sowell locked the door with a twist, dragged a large, heavy suitcase in front of the door, and within seconds brandished the largest knife Melvette had ever seen.

For the next twelve unspeakable hours Sowell raped and beat Melvette. He would undress and rape her, then tell her to put her clothes back on. After several episodes of that torture, Sowell then tied her hands behind her back with a belt, stuffed a towel in her mouth, and took a nap.

When he awoke, he choked her until she began to black out, her tiny body losing oxygen and tingling all over. She felt like her eyes would burst from the pressure, even as black spots appeared.

She cited a mantra: “‘The blood of Jesus, the blood of Jesus.’ I said it over and over to myself. Not aloud.”

Finally, he tired of the assaults.

“You might as well say your prayers, because I’m going to kill you,” Sowell told Melvette coldly, staring straight through her. “I am going to beat you, and then I am going to kill you. But I’m going to sleep first because I’m too tired to kill you right now.”

He lay down next to her on the bed, and within seconds he was sound asleep, snoring peacefully.

Melvette Sockwell looked at that small window, tilted open, and thought back to her childhood—a long, long way from
where she now was—and remembered her mother allowing the kids onto the roof on summer nights. Looking up at the stars, sleeping in the open air—it was a pure pleasure that now reminded her that she was once innocent.

She also realized that escape was the only way she was going to live. Sowell had beat her with his fists, cut her with the knife, and was going to kill her.

“I was certain he was going to follow through,” Melvette says. It wasn’t the first time that she’d been afraid for her life. She had jumped from a moving car a few months previously after accepting a ride from two men who began to threaten her.

“I’d rather die from jumping from that car than to have them do something to me,” Melvette says. “And that’s what I did, and my leg was all tore up.”

Now, in Sowell’s room, she rolled off the bed and hit the floor with a thump. She was sure that would have waken him, but he kept snoring.

“Blood of Jesus, blood of Jesus,” she thought as she crept the ten feet to the window, which had a small ledge perfectly situated to help her boost herself up. Growing up in a large family had given Melvette a necessary athleticism—she was still close to the age when she had played King of the Mountain with her brothers and other boys in the neighborhood—and even bound as she was, with her hands behind her back, she could lift herself to the ledge. With her head, she raised the single pane of glass that was the window, opening it to eighteen inches, just enough to slip her small, ninety-five-pound frame through.

That maneuver, too, made noise, but Sowell continued his slumber.

And now, she was free, on the roof in the evening darkness, beckoning to two older women on the sidewalk in front of the house.

“They thought I was playing, and they waved at first,” Melvette says. “I was young looking, and they thought I was one of the kids there. I’m sure these kids were always playing. But I turned around and showed them my hands were bound; he had tied them with a necktie. I didn’t want to scream. They saw that I was tied up, and I heard one of them say, ‘Oh my God, call the police.’”

Within minutes, police, fire trucks, and an ambulance arrived, sirens blazing, and Melvette, lying prone on the roof, felt burly hands under her tied arms.

Melvette could not speak; the sheer terror and brutality that Sowell had inflicted on her had convinced her that a scream would surely end her life right then and there.

Two police officers joined the throng of people in Sowell’s bedroom, where he, amazingly, still slept. Melvette was being tended to in the hallway.

“I was brought back into the room and saw him as he woke up and looked at the police, then at me,” Melvette says. “And he told them he had to explain.”

As the firemen took Melvette downstairs to an ambulance, Tressa Garrison, Anthony Sowell’s younger half sister, who was among the flock of relatives living at the house, beseeched her.

“Why didn’t you scream?” Tressa asked Melvette as the emergency workers escorted her down the stairs.

Tressa had heard the sirens and before the units had even arrived, she was up the stairs and through the door with her key to Sowell’s room. She’d known that something had to be wrong.

But she really had no idea just how wrong.

Anthony Sowell was arrested by the East Cleveland police, and Melvette was taken to Meridia Huron Hospital. He made bond and was indicted by a grand jury in the fall of 1989, but he didn’t show for his court date. The registered notice of his indictment addressed to his home on Page came back, “return to sender.” It would take another crime to bring him in more than seven months later.

In the early morning hours of June 24, 1990, a Sunday, a thirty-one-year-old woman, five months pregnant, told police that she went to a house on East 71st Street in Cleveland where she was drinking with Sowell. At some point, she said, he’d come up behind her and began to choke her with his arm, at the same time letting her know that “she was his bitch, and she had better learn to like it.”

He pulled her upstairs and raped her orally, vaginally, and anally. She said Sowell gave her the lines she had to repeat: “Yes, sir, I like it.”

Then he went to sleep. When the victim returned with the police, he was still sleeping.

The police arrested him, but the victim disappeared. It didn’t matter though because a quick check of the records found the East Cleveland rape warrant for the Melvette Sockwell assault.

For the trial, the state subpoenaed Sowell’s half sister Tressa Garrison; five East Cleveland cops who had been either involved in the rescue of Melvette or the interrogation of Sowell after his arrest; the doctor who treated Melvette; the medical-records librarian at Meridia Huron Hospital; and Melvette Sockwell herself, who bravely testified for the state.

Anthony Sowell claimed to the court that he was indigent, and his court-appointed lawyer bargained the charges down to attempted rape, to which Sowell pled guilty. On September 12, 1990, Judge James P. Kilbane sentenced Sowell up to fifteen years in prison.

Eight days after sentencing Sowell was taken to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s prison in Lorain, Ohio, where he spent nine years, and was then moved to the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.

Once in prison, Sowell was supposed to receive sex-offender counseling, and he even applied. Chillicothe offered an advanced sex-offender treatment program, one of the vaunted elements of incarceration there, but Sowell never underwent any treatment. He was never put in the program because, as explained later by a state sex-offender counselor, “He denied committing the…offense.”

On the other hand, Roosevelt Lloyd, who shared a cell with Sowell for several years in the 1990s in the Grafton Correctional Institution, says that Sowell refused to acknowledge his crime or take the sex-offender classes in
prison because he felt it would make him a target, sexual offenders being scorned even among inmates. In the hierarchy of crimes among the incarcerated, it’s better to be a straight-up murderer than a rapist. Lloyd himself was serving a sentence for sexually molesting a child, a female.

Sowell did take courses to address some of his other issues through programs with uplifting and positive messages in their titles like “Living Without Violence,” “Cage Your Rage,” and “Positive Personal Change.” He also took the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous programs “Adult Children of Alcoholics” and “Drug Awareness Prevention.”

During his time in the Ohio correctional system Sowell received two “tickets,” or write-ups for misbehavior, both on minor offenses: one for malicious destruction, misuse, or alteration of property and another for “encouraging or creating a disturbance.”

What he found, though, was that prison was not as bad as it could be. His time in the Marines had made him come to appreciate institutional living. He couldn’t drink, didn’t mess around with contraband, and actually made some friends.

Sowell was in with the general prison population and was given a job as an electrician to begin with, tapping his military training. Being employed by the Ohio Penal Industries gives inmates time to work on products—clothing, furniture—or services, like printing.

He later handled the electronic wiring for snow-removal trucks for the prison system, and even later, he would be moved to the Madison Correctional Institution to work on engine repair in its dorms and on the yard equipment. There was other work also to which he was assigned over the years. He worked for a time in the kitchen at Grafton Correctional Institution, first as part of the prep and cleanup crew, then as a cook assistant and “shovel guy,” the one who doles out the food.

He finished his prison sentence in minimum security, housed in a barracks-style dormitory within a perimeter fence. This was for people who had completed their time with little fanfare or trouble.

Parole-consideration reports over the fifteen years, culled from police statements, recounted Sowell’s crime in conflicting and sometimes inaccurate terms. If the system was good at keeping people occupied and treated, it was a mess in the paperwork department.

One parole report in 1991 said:

[Sowell] lied to female victim and tricked her into coming to his house, where he threw her onto the bed, clubbed her and raped her vaginally. She got dressed and tried to leave. He would not let her and removed her clothes again and tried to rape her anally. Unable to. Victim had recent surgery and was four months pregnant. [Sowell] raped her vaginally the second time. Then tied her hands behind her back, feet w/a belt and gagged her w/a
towel. Then [Sowell] went to sleep. She finally got free and got out.

There was no mention of the promise of death.

In 1996, Sowell was again up for parole. The report this time assessed the crime: “The victim was at a hotel waiting for her boyfriend. Due to police cars in the lot [Sowell] enticed victim to his house and raped her twice vaginally. He threatened to kill her. She escaped by climbing out a window onto the roof, where she was found with hands tied with a tie.”

But this assessment erroneously listed the crime as not reported until the following summer. This is the trek of inaccuracies the county justice system would take over the years of Sowell’s criminal career.

“The case came to light 8/90, when the victim was in the county jail on an unrelated case,” the 1996 report stated, clearly contradicted by court records. “Victim also said she had been choked and attempted to dress and escape but [Sowell] would awaken and restrain her to the bed.”

The parole records for Sowell portray a system in disorder, complete with crime statements that conflict and reports that have the victim included in the parole hearing when she clearly was not.

“That is something I would remember,” Melvette says. “I never even knew he was being tried back when he went to prison. The first time I ever saw him since that day was when he was on TV for getting arrested. And I started to cry.”

*   *   *

Melvette Sockwell’s life, not the greatest to begin with, would only get worse.

She was arrested in July 1990 on a charge of possession of a controlled substance, then failed to appear for her November court date. She was sentenced to six months in state prison.

In November 1994, Melvette was again arrested and charged with possession of drugs. This time she got eighteen months in prison, probated. She violated probation and was ordered to undergo mental-health counseling and drug rehab. She violated again, spent time in the county lockup, violated again, and again. Her life was a jagged dance of mental illness, drug addiction, and jail time. There were misdemeanor charges in the city of Cleveland for prostitution and disorderly conduct. She was evicted from various apartments and houses numerous times. She had eight children along the way. The judicial system was a circus of the absurd. At one point in 2002 she was declared indigent, but part of her sentence was to donate $100 to Cops and Kids, a local program that rewards kids for keeping straight.

She never worked a regular job, and over the years she was repeatedly arrested for prostitution and numerous other small-time crimes.

Although state reports claim she advocated against Sowell’s release during his parole hearings, she never heard a word of it. She didn’t even hear of his guilty plea.

“I knew that if he ever got out, he would do it again. And they just didn’t seem to care what I thought. They took my statement, they had me ID him, and that was it. I knew he went to prison. I just went back to the streets. That was the end for me. I am not over it.”

[Growing up was] like a war.

—ANTHONY SOWELL

Anthony Sowell was not a terrifying man to look at, of course. That’s what makes real monsters, unlike those in movies or folklore, so scary.

Instead, Anthony Sowell was considered by his neighbors to be an all-around okay guy. He presented well, spoke with an educated air, and smiled when he did it.