Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (5 page)

Ramona was caught the first time she ran off and put in Metzenbaum Children’s Center, a temporary shelter and diagnostic center for troubled and runaway kids. Leona willingly followed her, managing to sneak into the facility and hide for two months before being detected.

The system failed them over and over, returning them to Page Avenue and their life of torment.

Finally, Leona figured a way out.

“I set some clothes on fire in Claudia’s room while she was at work. It was summertime, and everyone else was downstairs. I went up there, closed the door. I had some matches, and I lit those clothes. I walked out, and pretty soon, the fire department was there because there was smoke coming out the window, and someone called them. And I confessed. I finally got into Metzenbaum myself, and I never had to go back to Page. I got admitted to Sagamore Hills Children’s Psychiatric Hospital. And someone there believed me.”

Still, Leona’s fortunes didn’t improve all that much. Her life from then on became a blur of suicide attempts, blackouts, psychotic episodes, and advanced mental
illness, all a hangover of her days on Page at the hands of Anthony Sowell.

By the late 1970s, East Cleveland was falling apart, part of the urban decay sweeping America. The town of 40,000 was losing population, leaving only the poor, primarily black residents to hold down the place. To be from C-Town, as East Cleveland was called, was to be from poverty.

“It was getting to be terrible, just terrible,” recalls Twyla Austin.

The stretch of once glitzy Euclid Avenue was now a decrepit haven of drug dealing and thuggery.

Anthony Sowell was also starting to find trouble; by 1977, he was a high school dropout with a varied trail of misdemeanors, including shoplifting, domestic violence, drunk and disorderly, breaking and entering, and minor assault.

He paid a fine for the disorderly charge and served thirty days on the domestic violence case. The aggravated burglary charges were dropped. The police had bigger fish to fry.

For the first time in his life, Sowell had to make a move on his own. He lacked the credits for a high school diploma. So, like quite a few of his peers, facing a life of crime or poverty, armed for life with nothing more than some minor street smarts, in the spring of 1977, Sowell enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp (though he first tried to join the army before changing his mind).

He was underage, still only seventeen, and his mother, Claudia, didn’t approve. “She argued against it, but she end[ed] up signing the papers, because this might happen anyway when I turn eighteen in August that year [1977],” Sowell said. “I finished school when I was seventeen, so I was going. I got into the Marines. That started off early that year. I actually signed up with the army—I was literally with the army at first. Early that year, around February or March [1977], I started at the recruiting camp at school but then [the army recruiter] came up, and he started talking to me and talked to my parents, and I initially took my entrance test with the United States Army.”

The Marines, he said, were tougher and that’s where he went “because I have a point to prove,” he said. “That I can do it.”

He had told Twyla that he was considering the move.

“But he never gave me any real reason, and I supported him doing it,” she says. It would give him some money, and he was going to need it; a month after he left Cleveland for training, Twyla called and told him she was pregnant.

“He was really happy,” Twyla says. “I think he was proud.”

A daughter, Julie, was born in August 1978.

Sowell reported for boot camp on January 24, 1978, at Parris Island, South Carolina, before being dispatched for basic training at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina.

It was the smartest thing Sowell would ever do, and his time in the Marines was marked with success, at least professionally.

He finished first in his basic-training class of forty. Soon he would find that he could hit a target with a rifle from 600 yards. Like all Marines, Anthony Sowell was taught how to defend himself and emerge victorious from battlefield conflicts, how to hurt an enemy by hand, using choke holds, punches, and weapons in hand-to-hand combat. These are special fighting skills, similar to those taught and embraced by the vaunted U.S. Navy SEALs.

In May 1978, Sowell began his military career as an electrician at Camp Lejeune, first obtaining his high school equivalency and then studying electrical wiring before moving up the coast to Cherry Point, where he stayed until March 1980 with the Second Marine Aircraft Wing, an aviation unit supporting Marine ground operations in wartime. A solid Marine, Sowell moved around a lot, adapting anywhere he went. He even boxed in the camp boxing clubs, again showing he had something to prove.

He next moved on to Camp Smedley D. Butler with the Third Force Service Support Group, Fleet Marine Force Pacific, in Okinawa, Japan, for a year.

It was there that he met Kim Yvette Lawson, an officer.

For Sowell, it was the best relationship he would ever have in his life.

“She understood me better, could handle me better than anyone I ever seen,” he said. “I don’t know, we just had that connection. I know I had come up from a bad—I had a bad childhood, and after we got married I had, you know, I had some issues that she helped me on.

“I could be affectionate but she was one of those really touchy kinds of females and I could just learn just one time…we’d be sitting on the couch and I think she put her arm around me or something like that, I [would] almost act violent…. I didn’t like her touching me like that,” he later confessed.

But Kim, he said, helped him learn to accept love.

They were married in 1981 in a civil ceremony in New Bern, North Carolina, at the Craven County Courthouse after both returned to Cherry Point

The ceremony was performed by a magistrate, and the couple moved to a trailer in a small, seven-unit trailer park located off-base in a remote area.

During that time, Sowell endured a traumatic injury while working on his car. His daughter, Julie, and his sister Tressa were visiting the couple, and Claudia was on her way as well.

“My sister and my daughter had been down to visit me and my mom was on the way to come down at night,” Sowell said. “A friend of mine, another Marine, was being transferred to Washington, D.C., the next day and so he was having—him and his wife were having a going away party and because my mom was coming, Kim had to stay home plus you know my daughter and sister was there too and she—my sister was only sixteen. So my wife stayed home and I went ahead to the party. On my way home, my car overheated and shut off, and when I went up by the hood, and when—I was messing around because it was hissing at the hose—It just blew off and when it blew
off, they pointed straight to my face so it did hit me in the face but I didn’t have a chance to close my eyes so it actually just hit me straight to my eyes and my face.”

Sowell received second- and third-degree burns, and it split his eyes. He was blind for more than three months. Kim nursed him the whole time.

“That’s all I had,” Sowell said. “Well, I didn’t want my sister and daughter there, you know going through that, so I just sent them home.”

But if Kim represented everything good to him, her mother said her daughter told her Sowell was drinking to excess. She married him to help him.

“She didn’t want him to get a dishonorable discharge,” said Kim’s mom, Norma Lawson. “She was trying to get him through the Marine Corps.”

The marriage was marked mostly by transition; both Kim and Sowell were on the move and spent only two years physically together, because in January 1984, Sowell was again transferred back to Camp Butler, in Okinawa.

The couple divorced less than a year later, shortly before Sowell left the Marine Corps, in January 1985. “She divorced him the day she got out,” Norma Lawson said. Sowell later told a prison counselor that the couple split because of the physical distance their Marine careers required. Kim Lawson later died in 1998, in an industrial accident back in California, her home state.

Sowell served the last of his tour of duty at Camp Pendleton, California.

His military stint was marked by his good performance; Sowell received awards during his seven-year Marine Corps career, including a Good Conduct Medal with one star, a Meritorious Mast certificate, a Sea Service Deployment ribbon, a Certificate of Commendation, and two Letters of Appreciation.

“He did exceptionally well…Mr. Sowell was promoted meritoriously to private first class at the end of recruit training, which is an extreme distinction,” said Walter Bansley III, a military lawyer who analyzed Sowell’s military records.

Unfortunately, then he came home. And was never quite the same.

If East Cleveland was in decline when Anthony Sowell left, it was a full-on ghetto when he returned. It was plagued by crime and had a city government infused with ineptitude and corruption.

Crack, a smokable form of cocaine that many people found irresistible, was decimating inner cities all over the United States. Crack came to the cities of America in 1986, although its cousin, freebase, had been around since the early 1970s. Crack was essentially pure cocaine; the recipe was cocaine, baking soda, and water. The coke was dissolved in water and baking soda and dried.

Smoked by users in a metal chamber hollow on both ends called a stem, or a glass pipe that can be made of anything, from a piece of Pyrex to glass tubes used to sell
single-stem roses, crack was characterized by its burnt-hair odor and its ability to hit the user in a flash, creating a rush; it was an orgasmic flush that went through pleasure zones that many didn’t even know they had.

The drug became popular in coordination with a surplus of cocaine on the streets of America via South America. The supply drove the price down, and the intensity of a crack high drove its allure up. It was a potent piece of math. Crack was initially dubbed “Ready Rock” in Los Angeles, where it caught on first, because cocaine pieces were called rocks and it was being sold in a ready-to-smoke form.

Crack is heavily addictive because of the speed with which it reaches the brain. Although people who snort cocaine get high, it takes some time for the drug to hit the pleasure center, as it’s absorbed through the nasal membranes. The lungs, however, have a ready connection to the bloodstream. The rush creates the motivation to repeat the ingestion. Over and over.

“It’s like once you smoke it, it’s like a big rush, and it doesn’t last but five seconds,” says Dawnetta Cassidy, who hung out in the Imperial neighborhood over the years. “And that’s why everybody likes it. It’s the drug that makes you run back and forth. You just don’t get up and leave. You gotta have the next hit.”

The Imperial neighborhood was riddled with the drug in 1990, when Sowell was sent to prison, but it was an epidemic by the time he was released, in 2005.

But in 1985, after his discharge from the Marines, Sowell, who loved his booze and weed, would find almost
everyone he ran into smoking crack on these streets. It was an amazing change for him; the very Euclid Avenue on which he used to walk to school was now a hotbed of drug sellers. And with those vendors came women willing to do anything to obtain crack.

Anything.

And Sowell could just imagine what that meant.

He was a divorced twenty-five-year-old with a predilection for drinking, dogged by the fatherly demands for a seven-year-old daughter he had out of wedlock, and a family situation that was more like war, as he put it, than anything else. He began drinking as often as he could, which was very often. He began drinking in the morning. He had blackouts and cravings. Almost every day, there was booze, mostly beer, sometimes liquor. He moved into the attic of the house on Page Avenue, now converted from two bedrooms into one large space. He met girls, but things never worked out.

And he was angry.

“He was very direct…You see the change when they go into the Marines,” his half sister Tressa described it later. She saw it when she stayed with her brother and his wife, Kim, in North Carolina as a teenager. He was much more serious, less lighthearted.

“They come back very different,” she said. “Very stern, almost.”

By the time Sowell returned to Cleveland, Twyla had moved into Tressa’s house with their daughter, Julie, although Sowell made it clear they were not a couple. He took the full upstairs room for himself—“He sort of
kicked me out, and I moved downstairs,” Twyla says—and hid out up there.

“He just stayed up there, and rarely came out, although he would be a good father for Julie,” says Twyla, who was working at a nearby restaurant. “He would come down and play with her. But other than that, he was either out or up in the room.”

And he had started using drugs, she says. “He was snorting cocaine, which he had never done before,” Twyla says. “He wasn’t smoking crack. [But] he was drinking and snorting coke.”

And the encounters with the law grew more frequent. Sowell was arrested in 1988 on a domestic-violence charge, and he served eight days in the East Cleveland jail.

He was violent with others, too. One day, a girl in the neighborhood got in Tressa’s face. Sowell, drunk, didn’t like it.

“He hit this girl that was talking to me ’cause she was talkin’ to me real aggressively, and Sowell said one time, he was like, ‘Leave her alone,’ and she kept on talkin’, kept on talkin’; next minute all he did was hit her once. She was bleeding all over the place,” recalled Tressa.

Soon enough, Sowell began to sample crack, which agitated him even more. He got popped once for possession of cocaine, and between 1986 and 1989, he was arrested numerous times on charges, including public intoxication and disorderly conduct. East Cleveland police
records, though, are in the same state for that time period as the city: complete disarray.

It was a bad time.

And it got worse.

A low probability rating to reoffend…

—OHIO DEPARTMENT OF REHABILITATION AND CORRECTION

The fifteen-year sentence served by Anthony Sowell for the assault of Melvette Sockwell was hardly an eye-opener for him. Although he had a few problems with his fellow inmates, he was slow to understand the severity of his crime.