Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (7 page)

“It tended to be a little rough,” added her husband, Brandon Pompey. “There was a house immediately adjacent to ours that was allegedly selling drugs.”

Thomas Sr., Anthony’s father, lived in 12205 Imperial for years with his wife, Segerna, sometimes joined by other relatives or various tenants. By the 1990s, Thomas Sr. quit drinking and had turned into quite the local handyman, helping others to do painting and other maintenance chores.

“But he still loved to talk about women,” says Sam Tayeh, who owned a nearby market. “He was into those ‘strawberries’ is what we called them. The girls who smoked crack, and it seemed like all of them. But Thomas would come into the store and sit down with me behind the counter—we’d talk. He was a good guy.”

And Thomas was nobody’s sucker. In 1998, he and
Segerna filed a lawsuit against Brooks Financial Corporation alleging the financer had hoodwinked them in a $15,000 second-mortgage scheme. A local court dismissed the case, but the Eighth Appellate Court of Appeals, State of Ohio, kicked back the case on appeal, and in 2000, the Sowells were awarded $150,000, ten times their filed amount.

But on March 11, 2003, Thomas Sowell Sr. fell down dead on the floor of his bathroom at age eighty. The death certificate listed a number of maladies as the cause: heart disease, prostate cancer, and seizure disorder.

Segerna lived there on the first floor alone, with the Pompeys on the second floor, until early February 2006, when her stepson Anthony Sowell came by to ask a favor. In the months since he had been out of prison, he’d been visiting and helping out around the place. He wanted out of his sister Tressa’s overcrowded house and needed a place to stay, someplace with a little privacy. He had money, he told Segerna, and he could pay rent.

It was agreed; Sowell initially moved into the back bedroom on the first floor, then soon moved on up to the empty third floor, after doing some finishing work on it. It had always been livable, but now Sowell redid the drywall, painted, and fixed up the small kitchen and bathroom. He created his own private apartment, accessible by a side door to the rear of the house. Segerna would never be bothered by his comings and goings that way. He got himself a cheap computer with some of the money from his Cleveland Indians job so he could have e-mail, although the only connection he could afford was an analog.

“I had a land phone line for my computer,” Sowell says. It was slow, he said, but he used the computer at his “sister’s place or the library or the programs I was in” as a former prisoner.

He didn’t care. The world was new after being locked away for fifteen years. He had some time to make up for.

The Cleveland Indians job ended with the season on October 2, 2005, and Anthony Sowell got another job, at Nampak, an international packaging operation; then he landed a job as a machine operator, doing molding injection at Custom Rubber in March 2006.

It was a decrepit, greasy shop, near the lake, nestled among other decrepit, greasy industrial joints, including a metal fabricator, a printing shop, and an auto-repair shop that could well have been a chop shop. On the front of Custom Rubber was a sign that claimed it to be a “drug free workplace…all applicants will be tested prior to hiring.” Somehow Sowell, a habitual pot smoker, apparently managed to avoid Custom Rubber’s self-proclaimed stringent requirements. Inside, workers toiled under dim lights that cast a yellow pall on everyone and everything. It was the stereotype of a shop job.

But it was a union shop with solid pay, and for Sowell, it was a good place to land. Sometimes, rather than taking the bus, he would walk the six miles to work, ninety-minutes one-way on foot.

He began to become known around the Mount Pleasant neighborhood as a friendly guy, a drinker, of course,
but nothing more than that, as far as anyone knew. He had a good line of patter—he could talk about the Marines, prison life, food, sports, travel, any number of manual-labor skills like plumbing or electronics. People called him Tony or Tone.

“He came in here when he first moved to 12205,” says Sam Tayeh, the convenience-store owner. “He was sharp, well dressed. He was quiet, but when he got here at first, he came in and asked, ‘Are you Sam?’ I told him I was.”

“I want to thank you for taking care of my parents,” Sowell told him. “My father was Thomas Sowell, and my stepmother is Segerna. They say you were very kind to them, and I need to thank you.”

It was an unusually pleasant interaction with a neighbor for Sam Tayeh. Tayeh had been born in Jerusalem and came to the United States in 1977 to join family members who owned a bodega in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. In 1992, he moved to Cleveland to help some of his brothers operate a market on Kinsman Avenue, not far from Imperial. He stayed there until buying Imperial Beverage, a convenience store three doors down from 12205, from a brother in 2001.

He got to know the locals, many of whom stole from him.

“In terms of a bad neighborhood ranked from one to ten, it was a nine,” Tayeh says. “And yeah, they stole, and I could never catch all of them.”

He saw drug dealers keep coming into the neighborhood, and one day, Tayeh started to tip off the police. His
tips helped put one dealer, Boobie, in jail for a while. Boobie got out, and one night, he came to see Sam.

“I was closing and had my car running. I used to be so nice to Boobie because I knew he was dangerous.”

And he was. On this night, Boobie approached Tayeh on the slim piece of sidewalk between the store’s front door and the running car and rubbed his gun all over his face. Tayeh jumped in his car and got away.

“Then another guy, Sean, knew I knew who he was, that he was selling,” Tayeh says.

One night, Sean came in and slapped down a small package the size of a cigarette pack on the counter. It was a brick of crack. Tayeh called the police, 911, since Sean had just left the store and was in the area.

Five minutes later, Tayeh got a call back—not from the police, but from Sean.

“Why did you call the police on me?” Sean asked. He was not plaintive; he was threatening. Sean’s cousin worked for the city’s 911 dispatch office and had flipped on Tayeh, who gulped loudly.

“If you do that again, I will kill you,” Sean said. Tayeh knew he meant it and that Sean had spared his life this time. This was really serious.

“Thank you,” Tayeh said. He had grown up on the hardest streets of New York and Cleveland, and he was not a particularly humble man. But he was now terrified to find that a guy could easily get killed trying to improve a neighborhood.

Later, one night after work, Sowell came in for some beer and smokes.

“How can you take all the shit going down around here?” he asked Tayeh.

“It’s bad; I do what I can to keep things together,” Tayeh replied.

Anthony Sowell was good for the neighborhood, he thought.

Sowell, too, felt at home in the house and in the neighborhood. But what really excited him was a young lady named Lori Frazier, whom he met on a summer night near his bus stop.

Lori Frazier was a train wreck. In spring 2006, she was living on Forest Avenue, not far from Imperial, and had since 1989 rung up charges for eight drug-possession cases, solicitation, receipt of a stolen vehicle, drug trafficking, and escape from custody. She had given police three different birth dates and a home address for a place that was condemned, and she had variously called herself Lisa, Tharisa, and Thorisa Frazier. She had spent time in jail, on community supervision, and on probation. Lori was thirty-seven years old at the time and the mother of four children ranging in age from seven to nineteen, who were all in the custody of her mother, Eleanor Frazier.

Lori had been hospitalized for depression and other mental-health issues over the years; sometimes, voices in her head told her to run, to hurt herself, or to hurt others, reports showed.

Lori lived in squalor, turning tricks or whatever it took to score crack.

She was also the niece of then newly elected Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson.

*   *   *

Frank Jackson’s political career was a study in government ladder climbing. Born in 1946 to George and Rose Jackson, the Cleveland native was one of five kids, four boys and a girl.

Jackson moved through the academic ranks with ease, earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from Cleveland State University. He began his legal career as a night clerk for the Cleveland Municipal Court, then became an assistant city prosecutor. Jackson always cited the guidance of his mentor, Lonnie Burten (a Cleveland City Council member until his murder in 1984), as crucial to his career. Jackson won a spot on the council in 1989, serving on that panel until being elected mayor in 2005.

Jackson had married his wife, Edwina, in 1975, and by 2005, Jackson’s family included two grandchildren and two great-grandsons.

Lori Frazier was Edwina’s sister Eleanor’s daughter.

It was a side of the family Jackson didn’t publicly acknowledge, a sort of secret known but unspoken.

Lori Frazier was living six blocks from 12205 Imperial in the fall of 2005, a moving vagabond and a slight woman with a husky voice and a long, narrow face. Years of drug addiction had withered her frame until she was a wisp. Frail yet strong, Lori, whom friends called Lo, was a street-savvy opportunist.

She was just walking out of Jay’s, a convenience store
on Buckeye Road and 116th Street, with a forty-ounce tucked into a brown bag. It was dark, around 8:30
P.M.

“I can get you something better than beer.”

She looked at the man standing by a bus stop, leaning, looking at her. He was holding his own paper bag from a nearby Chinese takeout place. Anthony Sowell’s line of patter wasn’t glib or sweet. It was inviting and hit Lori just where she needed to be hit.

“What’s your name?” Lori asked. Then the standard hooker-to-john line: “You like to party?”

The two looked at each other and realized a couple things: First, Sowell was no john. He was a guy who could get things she needed. And two, they were attracted to each other.

They headed to the Phase III, a beer and shot and whatever-you-want joint on Buckeye, right across from the bus stop. It was a brown-brick affair with no windows and a sign on the door that warned, “No handguns.” The place was crowded, but they found a little table.

Sowell offered Lori some of his shrimp-fried rice.

“No, I just want to drink,” she said.

After a couple of drinks, they headed over to the So-well house on Imperial. Sowell was still living on the first floor, and the health ailments that would land Segerna in and out of the hospital were just beginning. She was still at the stage of being glad to have a man around the house. She put up with his occasional female visitors—and there were more than a few neighborhood girls who spent the night.

“I have to get up real early for work,”
he explained to Lori as they settled into his room to work on the beer. “I work at Custom Rubber, at 55th and St. Clair.”

That was okay, she said. They went to sleep early, and when she awoke, he was gone. She stayed for some time before heading back to the place where she was currently living. It occurred to her that she would be back, and soon.

“He was a nice guy, a really nice guy,” Lori said later.

Lori came back the next night, and then the next. Days turned to weeks, and pretty soon, Anthony and Lori were a couple. He put up with her drug addiction. Sowell cooked for her; they partied; they went to the park. She moved into the house within weeks of their first meeting.

“It was our decision,” Lori said. “I wasn’t working, and every day except Sunday, he worked. Things were quiet. We went shopping for groceries together. He bought me clothes.”

Sowell’s ex-wife, Kim, and high school girlfriend, Twyla, had both called him Anthony, but Lori called him Tony.

He called her Lo.

Then, when Sowell’s renovations were complete, they decided to move upstairs to the third floor, first living in a large sitting room at the front of the house, which opened onto a porch overlooking Imperial. Then they moved to a smaller bedroom at the rear of the house, with a window that had an inglorious view of Ray’s
Sausage, a neighborhood institution that manufactured meat products.

“When she came and started living at Anthony’s, Lori was real nice. She’d come in, ‘Hi, Sam,’” says Sam Tayeh, the beverage-store owner. “She was real clean and spoke very well.”

Lori mostly watched television and smoked crack. Sometimes Sowell would just play video games while she got high, but he didn’t partake, despite his previous dabbling in cocaine and his appreciation for good weed. He just didn’t care about the crack back then, preferring to smoke Newport cigarettes and drink beer, sometimes maybe some wine.

He kept reasonably clean and even played chess with some of the neighborhood kids, including Bobby Doss.

“He sure didn’t want anyone using crack around,” Bobby’s older sister Tanja Doss said. She had moved to Imperial Avenue shortly before Sowell got out of prison, across the street from 12205 Imperial. Sowell knew Tanja was a drug addict, but he had bonded with her one evening, before he met Lori Frazier.

“I was sitting on a bench, and he walked past, and we just started talking,” she said. “He went to the store and got a twelve-pack; he was cooking out on his front porch.”

They hung out, dated, she said, for a few weeks in summer 2005, before Tanja moved to New York to care for her sick mother, who had been left partially blind by a stroke. “Give me a call when you get there to let me know you’re in safe,” Sowell told her before she got on
the bus to head out for Queens, New York, where her mother lived. She did, and they followed up with a few conversations after that. It was a fling, though. In the autumn of 2005, it became all about Lori Frazier.

In fact, when Tanja came back to visit her Cleveland friends and stopped by the Sowell house while in the neighborhood, Sowell came around from the side in answer to her knock on the front door.

“I can’t come out; I have a girlfriend,” he explained. Tanja was cool with it, but Lori, who was listening, heard her say something unsettling as she walked away.