Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (9 page)

A week later, on October 10, 2006, Lori was given a citation for having an open alcohol container in a car. She was riding with a friend on the way to score. She received a suspended sentence. Lori skipped her November 15 drug-charge hearing, and a warrant was issued for her arrest. They wouldn’t find her for almost two years.

At home, she had something worse than the law to deal with. Sowell was raging, now that he was smoking crack, a drug known for inducing all kinds of aggression. It affected different people in different ways, but with Sowell, it made him crazy.

Now there were fights, physical scraps, between the two.

“Sometimes he would get so mad, so into his rage, he would scream and holler in my face,” Lori said. “He smacked me and I fell on the table, and I tried to kick him. One time he told me he was gonna throw me out the window.”

They would punch and scratch each other in drug-fueled battles. Still, she was never scared of him. She could hold her own anyway, but “he was getting high more and more” often with other people in the third-floor apartment. “I never went up there and got high with them,” Lori said.

Eventually, Sowell threw Lori out, and she left; then he called and begged her to come back. Their chaotic relationship was headed nowhere fast, and neither one of them had any way to put on the brakes.

Overwhelming sense of loneliness and sadness and I couldn’t get away from it.

—ANTHONY SOWELL

February 2007 was the most frigid in Ohio in almost three decades, with temperatures averaging nineteen degrees. But most remarkable was the fifteen to twenty inches of snow that swept through Cleveland starting the second Tuesday of the month, and ending the next day, the fourteenth.

Anthony Sowell was alone in his apartment after work, Lori Frazier being back at her mother’s during an “off” part of their on-off relationship. Although he wasn’t paying rent, Sowell still helped maintain the house on Imperial, and shoveling snow came with the territory. So he bundled on his winter gear and went out to clear about twelve feet of the front walkway; then he tackled the sidewalk. He wasn’t feeling well—“I thought I had the flu,” he later said—but went on with his chore. It took several passes for him to get it all, and the snowfall was relentless.

The snow had shuttered the city; businesses had ground to a halt, and schools were closed the whole week. On Thursday the fifteenth, Sowell got up and began to walk over to his sister Tressa’s, about four blocks away. On his way there, an older woman was doing her best to push a shovel to create a path from the sidewalk to her doorstep and her mailbox on the porch.

“Ma’am, you shouldn’t be shoveling snow like that,” Sowell told her.

“The post office said it wouldn’t deliver my mail otherwise,” the woman said.

Still feeling poorly himself, Sowell asked if she would allow him to do it. When he was done, he handed the shovel back to the woman, who thanked him profusely, and he continued on to his sister’s house.

He walked in the door and immediately ran to the bathroom to throw up. Sowell had joked before about being around the germ-ridden flock of kids—nine in all—at Tressa’s and how it increased his chance of coming down with something.

“I can’t believe I can just walk in the door and get something,” he kidded to Tressa when he came out of the bathroom. But it was much worse than he thought. He couldn’t make it home. The subzero temperatures, the snow, and his rapidly diminishing health made him too weak.

Still, when the weather cleared, he went back to work, but his health hadn’t improved.

“I kept on going to work and I was getting sicker and sicker,” Sowell said. “I was taking Theraflu and stuff like
that, still getting sicker. So just finally…my boss has been asking me about being sick and I told her, no, I was all right.

“And so I finally got really sick when I came in but I was determined to—I come in to work at six [
A.M.
]. Christine, which is the front office don’t get in until eight, so I worked till eight and I stopped but at that time my body totally shut down. I couldn’t—I could barely—I had to crawl up the steps almost and they called Chris over and Chris told me to go home but don’t come back until I get well.”

For days, Sowell tried to navigate the bureaucracy of the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs, where, he felt, he would receive the best health care available to a military veteran like himself. But between sleeping and arguing with the agency, which refused to admit him because he had lost his driver’s license, Sowell kept fighting with what he still thought was the flu.

By Saturday, February 24, 2007, he had gotten replacement identification and headed on the Number 50 bus to the VA hospital. When it pulled up at the hospital, he fell out the door of the bus and onto the sidewalk.

He was taken into the emergency room, where doctors immediately found the problem: three arteries in his heart were clogged, two of them completely, and the other was 80 percent closed. Sowell’s situation was too dire for the skeleton crew at the VA hospital, and he was ferried by ambulance to the Cleveland Clinic, home of some of the nation’s best heart doctors.

They put him directly onto an operating table, but
despite their opening up the two completely closed arteries, it looked like it would be too late. Sowell had suffered a heart attack more than a week earlier, and there was damage. He was also suffering from atrial fibrillation, a condition in which the normal electric pulses of the heart are overtaken by abnormal pulses that speed the heart.

By Monday, February 26, Anthony Sowell was moved to the critical ward and was dying. He was given three stents first, a hope for stemming the damage to the front of his heart, which was essentially gone. A last resort was a pacemaker, but his overwhelmed heart couldn’t take any more surgery. Instead, he was given a temporary pacemaker, which went through an opening in the neck. It saved his life.

Sowell was released a few days later, with a more common pacemaker in place, one that could also control his atrial fibrillation. He was also told that rehabilitation therapy was essential, to recondition his heart muscles, which were damaged.

He had no money for the rehab, though, and the VA wasn’t going to pay.

“I was only sent to Cleveland Clinic on the VA [for] a heart problem, not the after care,” Sowell said. “That bill alone was almost $200,000. I cannot—there’s no way I could afford. And they wanted me to go to rehab every day of the week, from that morning to, basically eight hours. I said, number one, I wouldn’t be able to pay for it. And number two, I would lose my job.”

So he returned in March to Custom Rubber, walking through the door with a new pacemaker and a damaged heart. He lasted until July, when he began to have trouble breathing at work, and an ambulance had to come.

“That was the nail in the coffin,” Sowell said. “It was the worst thing that could have happened. I got sick again after a heart attack. At work.”

After eighteen months of working there, sometimes twelve-hour days and seventy-hour weeks, he left Custom Rubber on mutual agreement.

He applied for unemployment, and for the first time since he was released from prison, he was without a job. He had always worked, from being a paperboy and cutting lawns as a preteen to this point, July 2007.

What did he have now? An ailing stepmother, a girlfriend who seemed bent on leaving him—a departure he prompted with his uncontrollable violent behavior—a crack habit, and a lot of days with nothing to do. He was on Plavix, a beta blocker, and five aspirin a day.

Sowell also noticed little things that had changed with his life. He used to play chess on the computer and easily defeat the software. Now, he no longer could win, no matter how hard he tried.

“It affected me in all kinds of ways,” Sowell says. “I could never do my old job as a machine operator, my coordination was off. Everything was off. I was sad, I must have had some kind of depression. There was just this overwhelming sense of loneliness and sadness and I couldn’t get away from it.”

*   *   *

In early 2007, Latundra Billups moved to Imperial Avenue and was surprised to run into her old friend Lori Frazier, while on the way to a local store. The two women had grown up together for a time in the city’s Fifth Ward, both kids with potentially decent futures.

Latundra was a military brat who’d graduated as a sixteen-year-old from an elite Catholic boarding school with a life full of promise. She had spent her childhood in exotic places like Germany, Hawaii, and California. There was no reason to expect her not to succeed. Her parents split when she was still in high school, and she and her sister moved in with her mother after she got out of school. She got a job as an inspector at Avon Cleaners, a family dry-cleaning business that had promise for a future for her.

“Except that there were the drugs I fell into, all my fault,” she says. “There were so many fun things for me to do, and I was older. I got a boyfriend and had three children by the time I was twenty…. I had a bad point by 2002. I had five felonies, and then I caught a drug-trafficking case with my kids’ father.”

She was in and out of prison: eighteen months here, a year there.

“And when I got out in 2004, I was all the way downhill. My kids were taken away and lived with my mom. I was an alcoholic crackhead.”

Lori, four years older than Latundra, was well into her own habits. The two caught up quickly and found they
had more in common now than they had as kids—lengthy criminal records and a love of crack.

The two would go over to Latundra’s place and score—“I was dealing with someone who had drugs”—and hang around and get high.

Latundra didn’t go over to the house on Imperial much at that time. She liked Sowell—she called him Tone and he called her La La—but he was taken. She did notice that he and Lori fought a lot. But she just figured it was the drugs.

Like Latundra Billups, Crystal Dozier knew just about everyone in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. She was tight with Lori Frazier, to start. The two had gone to elementary school together. Crystal had never been to the house on Imperial, but she had sure walked past it enough times. Lori had seen her in the neighborhood, buying crack.

Crystal never came home on the night of Mother’s Day, May 13, 2007. At thirty-five, she wasn’t known for her punctuality, nor was it unheard of for her mother or her sister not to hear from her for a few days. But her mother, Florence Bray, had a bad feeling this time. Crystal had walked a hard road, made trickier to navigate by her own mistakes.

But, like Latundra, there had been a time when a preteen Crystal had had a chance. She’d gone to school as much as she could stand, and her parents gave her a decent home. Born in 1971, Crystal was the second of four kids.
The family lived in the Imperial area at a time when the neighborhood was still relatively safe, and the people who lived there took care of their property.

Crystal played dress up, and she enjoyed it when people paid attention to her. She liked to sing; she liked to cook. But she also liked to get high.

She was thirteen when she got pregnant for the first time. The father was seventeen. She got pregnant again at fourteen. The father was twenty. The future was not so bright after that. (By the time she was thirty-five, she had seven children by three different men.)

Crystal soon dropped out of school, and her parents divorced. Her mom, Florence Dozier, took the kids and moved to East Cleveland. Although the area was going down fast, she hoped the change would help Crystal.

Instead, the young girl dug in her heels and rebelled. She moved in with the father of her second child.

“He coaxed her into running away. I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t sleep,” Florence remembered. “I sat outside; I walked up and down the streets looking for my child. That’s a scary, hurting feeling. I was a wreck. I didn’t know where my child was; I didn’t know if she was all right. She was afraid of him. After he won her over…he coaxed her into doing stuff, and she did it. He had total control over her.”

Crystal eventually married a fellow seven years older than her named Anthony Troupe, records show, and the two moved into a place on Bessemer, not far from the neighborhood. Over the years, she gave each of her children names that started with an
A
, a curious habit that
made sense somewhere deep in her soul. She was lost and getting more so.

In 1987, Crystal and her husband were deemed unfit parents by a social worker, who claimed that her oldest child, Anthony Dozier, then three, “has marks on his body from beatings.” He was removed from the home, and his brothers and sisters followed him into a maze of foster care.

Then there was Crystal’s long list of arrests.

She had arrests for drug possession, theft, and receiving stolen property and did some jail time. In 1990, she was pulled over for a routine traffic violation, then didn’t show up for her court appearance. It happened repeatedly, eventually turning a misdemeanor into an arrest warrant. One time, she used her daughter’s name, Annette Bell, in an effort to keep from having her real identity known. (That later gave the real Annette Bell a helluva time trying to clear her name.)

Crystal’s husband, Anthony Troupe, also had legal trouble. Drug possession, domestic violence. Even her mother, Florence Dozier, had problems with the law. She was arrested two days after Christmas 1991 and charged with drug possession. She briefly served time in 1993, then was arrested again shortly after her release on theft charges. In June 2002, she received a ticket for open liquor in a car, then failed to show up for her court hearing. She settled the case in 2006, records show.

Although Crystal stayed in touch with her oldest two children, she never managed to get the family together. Her four youngest daughters were adopted by one family.
Her son Andre was adopted by a foster mother but died at age eleven from complications of asthma, relatives said.

Her oldest child, Anthony Dozier, enlisted in the U.S. Marines at the age of eighteen in 2003, and he would come home on leave every year. And each time, it would be apparent that his mother had not licked drugs. He would see her only “if I could find her,” he said.