Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (8 page)

“I’m gonna get him back.”

It wasn’t a threat so much as it was a girl who wanted Anthony Sowell, who was considered a prize by some girls.

But at this point Sowell wouldn’t waver.

“He treated [Lori] so well,” says Shelia Phillips
¹
, a neighbor who lived nearby and clerked at Sam Tayeh’s store in exchange for breaks on her rent.

“Tone and Lori would come into the store all the time; he was so good to her. And really a decent guy.”

During the years that Anthony Sowell spent in prison, from 1990 to 2005, amazing technology strides were made. Portable phones, once only a possession of the wealthy, were now ubiquitous. Compact discs had replaced records and tapes and were now the most popular format
to buy and sell music. And the Internet was now a haven for anyone seeking information or reaching out to make contacts.

Sowell had learned to keep up with developments as an electrician in the military, reading and rereading theory on repair and watching as new equipment was developed.

In other words, he was keen on this Internet thing. And it held something very important for him. He had been attracted to pornography for years, and now there was a whole new world of it available at one or two keystrokes. Shortly after setting up his apartment on Imperial, he furnished it with a battered, used computer. He became an avid Internet junkie like so many others attracted to emerging technologies. He paid his taxes online and enjoyed playing Internet chess.

Sowell also created a profile at Alt.net, a site for people with more unusual sexual proclivities. Dominance and submission, sadomasochism, and other sexual quirks that don’t appear on the traditional sexual radar were all available on the meet-and-greet site, which also offered a chat room.

He named himself Tony 223936 and gave his audience a message:

“If your [
sic
] submissive and like to please, then this master wants to talk to you,” he wrote on his Alt.com profile. “So get you’re [
sic
] ass on over here NOW!”

He described his ideal partner as submissive and willing to “please…anytime, anyplace and anyway.” He
also described himself as a “performer,” someone who “loves to be around people.”

Several months later, Sowell also created an identity for himself on BlackPlanet, a social website that catered to African Americans. He listed himself as Anthony E and represented himself as single.

Sowell described himself as working in “manufacturing and production,” said he’d attended Shaw High School from 1974 to 1977, and had “some college coursework completed” at Cleveland State College in 1985 and 1986. His favorite music was “slow jams,” and his favorite TV show was
Ray
. His favorite web page was that of Kimora, host of the E! TV network’s
Life in the Fab Lane
.

His head shot photo was the same on both websites and showed him in a gray knit cap and gray T-shirt, his PC visible on the right.

So although he was smitten with Lori, Sowell was also exploring another avenue of life, something that titillated him.

“He wanted to get a third person, a woman, into our sex,” Lori said. “He wanted to watch; he wanted her to do me while he watched.”

Lori, in love and not finding Sowell’s request all that far out, talked among her friends and even offered a bit of money that Sowell promised. But when they found a taker, “all we did was just sit around and get high,” Lori said.

So Sowell lived his life with Lori, his computer alter
ego, and his work. Relatively speaking, Sowell was a winner. He had some money, he had a girlfriend, and he was taking care of his elderly, sickly stepmother. He paid his rent. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him.

“In fact, people liked him,” says Sam Tayeh. “But then he started to change.”

¹
Denotes pseudonym

Anthony, are you getting high?

—TRESSA GARRISON

There had always been a smell in the neighborhood of Imperial for as long as residents could remember. For decades, it was the savory smell of sausage being cooked at Ray’s Sausage, a redbrick two-story building on the corner of Imperial and 123rd Street, next door to the Sowell house. Ray’s Sausage was an institution, employing locals and selling both to vendors and walk-ins.

The business opened in October 1957, launched by Raymond Cash’s father, and by 2006 was owned by Renee Cash and her brother, Raymond Jr. Their uncle was the famed Cleveland Indians first baseman Luke Easter, who himself had owned a sausage factory when he spent time in the minor leagues with the Buffalo Bisons.

In high school, Renee had handed out pencils with “Ray’s Sausage” emblazoned on the yellow paint. It was a proud family carrying on a proud business.

The company prospered for decades, crafting head cheese and fresh beef and pork sausage, establishing a strong distribution network throughout northeast Ohio and extending to stores as far south as Columbus, places willing to pay for the extra freight for some of the good stuff.

The original Ray died in 1977, just as the neighborhood began its slow fade. Businesses shuttered, foreclosures jumped, crime increased. But although the family business teetered, it never faltered. Its inspection reports were always solid, and the product sold itself.

Raymond Jr., a gruff-voiced, gentle-natured man, had known the Sowell family for a long time, beginning with John Sowell, the grandfather.

“Thomas Sr. and John Sowell were master carpenters and painters, and they did a lot of work for us when we opened up,” Renee Cash says.

“Thomas [Sr., Anthony’s father] was my buddy,” Ray said. “I used to go over there all the time.” After Thomas died, in 2003, it was Ray who put new siding on the house for Segerna.

But by early 2006, Lori Frazier noticed a bad smell at 12205 Imperial, and it wasn’t the sweet scent of Ray’s. It was a sickly, putrid odor that filtered through the entire house, as if something had crawled somewhere and died.

And it wasn’t just Lori who was smelling things; the Pompey family, renting space on the second floor, also became aware of the stench. First the Pompeys started seeing mice in their apartment several times a week. A
pest exterminator was called, but it did no good. Then came the smell.

“There became a smell that I didn’t recognize,” Brandon Pompey said. “Maybe rotten food, if you will.…It would become stronger as you moved into the apartment. We speculated that a dead animal had crawled in there and died…It smelled like rotting fruit.”

“It’s Segerna, downstairs,” Sowell said when Lori asked about it one day. His stepmother was becoming increasingly ill, her organs failing and her care requiring more work. Family members tended to her and she was hospitalized more and more.

Sowell gave Segerna’s nephew, Jermaine Henderson, another excuse for the scent.

“He said it came from a flooded basement,” Jermaine said. But most people, for some reason, just blamed Ray’s Sausage next door.

“People assume it’s us because we’re in the meat business,” Raymond Cash said. Eventually, residents complained to the district’s city councilman, Zachary Reed.

“My office actually called the health department in 2007 to say that one of our residents called to say there’s a foul odor across the street and it smells like a dead body,” Reed said.

“He made us tear up the street, invest $25,000 to $30,000 for a new grease trap,” Ray said of the councilman.

All told, the company would spend more than $20,000 on new vents and an updated exhaust system over the next four years.

The shop was inspected routinely for any sanitary violations as part of state and federal practice, and those inspection reports were all clean, showing no reason for a bad odor.

The grease trap replacement, along with cleaned and flushed drains on the street, didn’t do it. Pouring bleach into the sewer outlet in the basement of the sausage place also didn’t do anything to staunch the smell.

Finally, a local health department official determined that it was probably a dead animal trapped in an unfortunate, obscured location.

“He told us not to worry about it,” Ray said.

The odor was palpable to people in the second-floor offices of the sausage shop, and employees would inhale the rancid smell as they walked up the steps, Renee Cash said. It was enough to force the business to keep the windows closed, even on the kindest of summer days.

Soon the nasty smell just became part of the landscape, one more thing that would add up, or not, to what was Anthony Sowell’s world.

Sowell always knew where to score for Lori, even though she was quite capable of copping her own drugs. But Sowell, a jealous man, didn’t want to run the risk of her selling her body for the drugs, and he didn’t have the money to just hand over to her. He was savvy enough to know that the algebra of need—the drug user’s equation that reads, “Need divided by supply equals use”—would sap his wallet.

Shortly after they met, though, “He started smoking,” Lori said. “I told him if he started smoking, we weren’t going to be together.”

There are varying codes among drug users and their mates. Some users feel that to have a partner who also uses creates a friction that is untenable. Others are glad to have a partner in crime, someone who will cop and use with them.

For Lori, her code was clear; she cared enough for Sowell that she wanted him to be the one who stood straight in the face of her addiction because she knew where it would lead if he began to smoke crack. And it didn’t take long to see she was right.

Lori came home one day and saw that Sowell was being secretive.

“What have you got?” Lori asked, looking at him. He stared back, blankly, then went down the stairs from the third floor apartment and out the front door. She knew there were going to be problems. She had been there before. And sure enough, shady characters began to come around the house, intruding on what was their safe place.

“He kinda turned on me,” was how Lori put the evolving household dynamic over the next few weeks. The couple began to fight over drugs; who used more, who scored from whom. Hard drugs are a selfish endeavor by nature, prompting secretive and often combative behavior. The drug was often the love.

By June 2006, Sowell had quit paying rent to Segerna, who was complaining to friends and relatives. She asked him to leave but had little power to enforce her demand.

“She was trying to kick him out,” says the younger Thomas Sowell. “But he just said he wouldn’t leave.”

Allan Sowell came by a couple of times, at his mother Segerna’s request, to talk to Anthony about the rent, but he was never there.

Tressa would still come by and visit both her brother and her stepmother. Up to the third floor, down to the first.

“Anthony, are you getting high?” she asked him one day. There were signs; he was a little unkempt. He was tired. But he denied anything was going on. Tressa had distrusted Lori right away. She knew Lori was a drug user and that her brother was mostly a drinker.

“He was not smoking crack” until he met Lori, Tressa says. “He was just drinking until he fucked her. Her family helped out by keeping her kids. She couldn’t even buy a pack of cigarettes. He rode buses with her so that she wouldn’t go to crack houses. That’s the kind of person he is. He likes to help people.”

But he was digging the drugs now, just like Lori.

In the spring of 2006, Sowell hit what some in the neighborhood would have viewed as the lottery. Always wise in the ways of money, having made and managed a bit when he was in the military, Sowell got his tax return for those six months of full-time work for 2005. He had paid in but didn’t make enough to pay out. He got back $3,000.

Sowell began looking for DVD players, CDs, clothes, and drugs. There was crack, pot, booze, girls. All day, all
night, the party never stopped, and Lori was all of a sudden cast aside.

She came home one evening from her mom’s after visiting her kids and found a full-on celebration in progress. The music could be heard down the street, and Lori came to the side door. She was met at the door by a young man she didn’t recognize, who told her that Sowell wasn’t there. Lori walked inside and couldn’t believe what she saw. Kids as young as fifteen were inside the house dancing, listening to music, drinking cheap wine.

The party was out of control, and she turned into the mother that she was. She screamed at everyone. They didn’t listen.

“I went downstairs, and there were girls hiding behind the furnace,” Lori said. “I didn’t know anyone there, and I left.”

She went to her sister’s place, not far from Imperial. She was heartbroken; even mired in her addiction, she could still feel. And she felt spurned in a very public way. It hurt. But she could forgive him. After all, she loved Anthony Sowell. He really was a good guy.

One morning in the summer of 2006, Lakeesha Pompey walked out to her car in the driveway of 12205 Imperial and knew it was time to move out when she found a scrap of T-shirt tied to the side mirror of her car. The material’s placement was a sign to locals that it was okay to sell drugs at that house. People had been walking through the
backyard, day and night. There had been a party or two, in the past month, but things were getting weird. Segerna was still battling health woes, although Lakeesha would see Virginia Oliver, Segerna’s mother, over there almost every morning, having breakfast. It was a ritual. Sometimes Virginia came by bus, other times by the service shuttle for the elderly.

Once the Pompeys moved out, Anthony Sowell’s third-floor apartment and Segerna’s first-floor living space were separated by a whole empty floor in the huge house.

Lori moved back in shortly after that, but things weren’t much better. She was arrested on October 3, 2006, for possession of crack, and three days later, Sowell secured the $1,000 bail for her. Although she had always given her mother’s address as her home, for the first time, Lori told the court that she received mail at 12205 Imperial. It was comforting to her having a place she could get her court summons directly. And her mom, who was sick and dying, wouldn’t have to know about her latest arrest.