Original subtitles

[ominous music]

- They knew they had a monster and they let him go.

They had've only listened to me.

[ominous music]

- Anthony Sowell's home is being called

a house of horrors.

This house is the scene of horrific crimes.

- [Reporter] Some wrapped in blankets,

some buried in the basement.

[ominous music]

- It was the smell of death.

The smell of a dead body.

- Oh my God,

could this be where she has been for the last year?

People don't just disappear.

[ominous music]

- They're not runaways.

These are women that are mothers.

- Do we have a mass murderer?

Someone that likes to kidnap and torture.

- Nobody was saying, got a serial killer.

They had no idea. [ominous music]

- He begins raping by the time he's 11.

- They taught him how to kill.

He didn't know how to turn it off.

[dramatic music]

Somebody answer me!

[dramatic music]

[melancholy music]

- How could this happen?

You've heard of stories of mass murderers.

The John Wayne Gacys and the David Koreshes and those.

You've heard of those things.

But when it hits home,

there's a different sound.

[melancholy music]

How could this happen

in our community?

[melancholy music]

- Crystal Dozier was a 35-year-old mother of seven.

She was a caretaker and a nurturer.

- Me and Crystal's birthday was the same day.

Cryssy used to buy me and her a outfit together of the same.

And we'd go out and we'd eat, drink, and be merry like

to celebrate our birthday.

Me and her was

like this.

We was like this.

That was my partner.

[suspenseful music]

I looked for my child

where she would go.

I called her friends.

Nothing.

I called the hospitals.

She was in none of them.

And they said, just keep calling back.

[suspenseful music]

- At that time, the procedure was,

you could make a missing person's report

for an adult person,

but there may not be a search for that person.

- A lot of the time, a person don't wanna be found.

They on their own.

They're doing their own thing.

- Those persons are free to go as they please.

- It's hard.

As a mother, it hurt me so bad.

'Cause when you first feel a movement in your body,

you first feel their first tooth,

you have to understand how that feels from that point.

It hurt me to my soul. [suspenseful music]

- Crystal had a history of domestic violence.

And she also had a drug problem,

perhaps to escape this domestic violence situation.

But at the time of her disappearance,

she was actually on the road to recovery.

Law enforcement may not have taken Crystal's case seriously

because she's a known drug user

and she's frequenting the Mount Pleasant area,

which is known as a place for people to go to get drugs.

[suspenseful music]

- That's my daughter, my heart and my soul.

What happened for my child?

Who took my baby?

Somebody answer me!

[suspenseful music]

[melancholy music]

- Anthony Sowell grew up in East Cleveland

during a time when it was predominantly

a middle class African-American community.

He was raised by his mother and grandmother.

- Growing up, it was my myself,

my brother, Anthony Sowell, and my oldest brother,

Anthony did a lotta school functions.

He loved going to school because he played baseball.

He boxed.

He also played chess and painted.

[melancholy music]

- Anthony was very sensitive.

I remember Anthony's said, when we were growing up,

"I just feel like Ma didn't tell me I love you enough."

[melancholy music]

The children were acting out in different ways.

The twins set the house on fire three times.

It's very traumatic,

especially with a lot of children in the home.

My mother had just had it.

- His mother and grandmother,

they would mete out corporal punishment,

especially to the girls

in the most, what we would consider today,

very cruel and unusual way.

- Dirty dishes, stove ain't washed off.

We would get a beat.

The boys would get hit,

but they didn't get a whooping as much as the girls did.

She started tying us up to the pole on the stairs.

Just the girls.

Stripping us butt naked.

And she would whoop us.

Anthony, he would watch when we get beaten.

- He's going through puberty.

It's possible that this violence

and his sexuality become fused at this point.

- I was 10 and he was 11. [suspenseful music]

Anthony, all of a sudden,

he just tell me, go upstairs.

And I went upstairs.

And he raped me.

[suspenseful music]

And then it just started happening on a daily basis.

- He begins raping by the time he's 11.

These fantasies must have been there prior.

Sexual sadists often begin fantasizing

about hurting other people during young childhood.

- He never got punished for what he did to me.

Anthony was evil.

[suspenseful music]

- After Crystal's family filed a missing person's report,

they put out flyers, they canvassed neighborhoods,

but got very little support from the police.

From law enforcement's perspective,

she may have OD'd because she's a drug user.

[suspenseful music]

- There was a lot of complaints about a foul stench

in that area of 123rd and Imperial.

- 123 and Imperial.

It's a four-way intersection.

One corner, you have a neighborhood store.

Across from that is Ray's Sausage Factory.

- The health department checked out the sausage place,

but never cited the sausage place

for being the source of the smell.

[suspenseful music]

- It starts to get progressively worse.

The residents said it was the smell of death,

the smell of a dead body.

[suspenseful music]

A year after Crystal Dozier's disappearance,

we have another woman going missing.

And then another.

A pattern is starting to emerge.

Women are starting to go missing

in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

[suspenseful music]

They're not runaways.

These are women that are mothers.

That have jobs.

- You would think that a red flag would go up.

Do we have a mass murderer?

Someone that likes to kidnap and torture?

Someone should have been doing some special investigation.

[suspenseful music]

- But there's nothing in the news

about these missing women.

Police aren't telling women in the area

to take extra precautions.

[suspenseful music]

This mysterious smell is getting stronger and stronger.

- The city inspectors came up with the conclusion

that Ray's Sausage had a issue with the grease trap.

- He invested 200, 300 some thousand dollars

cleaning his traps and filtration system.

But the smell was still there.

[melancholy music]

- My mom was...

Oh, her personality was so mighty.

Strong, determined, fun,

energetic, loving, multi-talented, spiritual.

Single mother of two girls and a boy.

Worked two jobs.

Vacations we went on, water parks, skating.

There was nothing that our childhood lacked.

Absolutely nothing.

There was not a day that my mother didn't reach out

to somebody in the family.

The last day that we saw her was November the 10th, 2008.

My mother had a cell phone.

No answer the cell phone.

Next day, no answer.

[suspenseful music]

We go over to the apartment.

She's not there.

Now it is going on 48 hours.

I'm fearful that something terrible has happened to her.

We went to the Warrensville Heights Police Department.

We get the speech that adults have the right to go missing.

But where is she?

People don't just disappear.

[suspenseful music]

[footsteps thudding]

[suspenseful music]

- Anthony went straight from high school,

straight in the Marines.

- He liked that fact that it was harder

and it was more manlier to him in his mind.

It's manlier.

[melancholy music]

- It gives him this regimented lifestyle

and he's great at it.

And he becomes what's called the honor man.

He's top of his class at graduation.

He wrote to his mother to tell her of his accomplishment

and she never responded.

And he begins to develop a real resentment toward women,

which ultimately blossoms into an anger

and a rage toward them.

[men shouting] [suspenseful music]

- He had got real, real aggressive.

They taught him how to kill

and he didn't know how to turn it off.

- He was struggling with anger.

He was visiting strip clubs and frequenting brothels.

He would brag that he was gagging and binding women

and choking them during this time.

So we see this MO starting to develop.

[guns popping] [suspenseful music]

[suspenseful music]

- At the third day,

we were trying to file a missing persons report.

And they see she has a small, non-violent criminal record.

And they're like, well, oh, you know, she uses drugs.

I didn't ask you that.

I'm trying to file a missing persons report.

[suspenseful music]

You go into natural instincts,

which is I'll conduct my own search.

My mother frequents this Mount Pleasant area

when she's out using.

We pass out missing person flyers

to the convenience store, to the gas station,

to the mom and pop's fast food restaurant.

But we haven't seen her.

Nobody knows what happened.

[eerie music]

We were going up into these abandoned houses

that were boarded up.

We were ripping the plywood right off the front door.

That's a property where a body could be.

[suspenseful music]

You don't want to be looking for remains,

but you can't put that outta your mind.

[suspenseful music]

- In Mount Pleasant, they have an epidemic going on.

Several African-American women going missing,

one after the other.

We've also seen this increase in odor

that is permeating this neighborhood.

And there is absolutely no connection

being made between the two.

[suspenseful music]

- Thanksgiving.

No, Mommy.

And Thanksgiving was her favorite holiday.

Let alone Christmas.

No Mommy.

New Year's. No Mommy.

February. No Mommy.

March. April. May. June.

But you have to have hope.

The search never ended.

We never stopped searching.

[suspenseful music]

[ominous music]

- After Sowell returned from the Marines,

people who knew him said he was just different.

He's unhappy.

- That day, I was trying to see my oldest daughter

and I started having car problems.

[ominous music]

I see a guy that was across the street.

So I'm like, hey, you got a phone I could use?

He's like, I just live right up the street.

And we go in the house.

Then he was like, let's go upstairs.

I don't wanna bother my sister.

When I get up there,

I said, you gonna get the phone?

He was like, oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.

The last thing I'm thinking, he gonna pull something stupid.

'Cause it's still daylight outside, his sister downstairs.

I could hear him locking the door.

He came from behind.

He had a knife this long

and then put it up under here.

And I'm like, oh Lord. [ominous music]

He tied my hands and my feet.

And as the night and day turned into night and day,

I just said the blood of Jesus.

[ominous music]

After maybe a total of two or three days,

if I had to guess,

because it seemed like eternity.

His words to me was, "Say your prayers.

I'ma feed you. Then I'm kill you."

[suspenseful music]

I'm going out that window knowing I'd be dead.

So then I started inching, pushing myself to that window.

And then I rolled out the window.

I didn't care if I broke every bone in my body.

But there was a ledge.

[suspenseful music]

The police pulled me back in the room.

So once I'm back through the window,

I see he's still asleep.

He looked like the devil.

- We can never know how an MO of any rapist is developed,

but certainly the binding and total control

over Melvette Sockwell hearkens back

to what he saw in childhood

with Leona being beaten.

[suspenseful music]

- They knew they had a monster and they let him go.

If they only had've listened to me.

[suspenseful music]

- You can see the escalation

in the number of women disappearing from 2007 to 2009.

Now 11 women are missing.

- Still, even at that point,

nobody was going into it saying, got a serial killer.

They had no idea.

None of these women had even been on the news

as a missing person.

Nobody knew any of these women were connected.

- My pictures.

It's all I got to remember her by.

Looking at the pictures.

[melancholy music]

- You have no answers.

It was never a time where we didn't want a answer.

- Crystal's family. Tonia's family.

Other families never gave up because they wanted to know.

And they wanted to rescue their daughter,

their sister, their mother, if they could,

do whatever they could to bring them home.

[suspenseful music]

A woman came forward saying that a man had tried to kill her

and sexually assaulted her in a house on Imperial Avenue

in Mount Pleasant.

[suspenseful music]

- Turns out it is a woman

that is very much like the victims that have vanished.

It actually breaks this case wide open.

[ominous music]

From this small community's perspective,

in Mount Pleasant,

they have women that are missing over the span of two years.

There are no additional resources

to help this community try to figure out what is happening.

[ominous music]

Latundra Billups, she has a lot of friends

in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

One resident invited her back to his house for drinks.

This is someone that she has said hi to on the street.

She didn't feel like she was in any danger.

[ominous music]

- They had started getting high.

Once he started taking those drugs, he had snapped.

He flipped on her.

[ominous music]

- When he punched her in the face and he raped her.

And he began to put a ligature on her to choke her.

She passed out.

And when she regained consciousness,

she really began to realize

that she might not get outta this situation alive.

[suspenseful music]

And it worked.

He walks her to the door and she's like, yeah,

I'll see you later.

- But instead, she filed a complaint against him

to the police for kidnapping and rape.

She named this person

as Anthony Sowell.

- And she gave the address of 12205 Imperial Avenue

in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

[suspenseful music]

[gentle music]

- He was doing really, really well

when he got out of prison.

And he had a good job.

He met this new girlfriend and I noticed

that he was a little more upbeat.

- In that evaluation,

he is classified as a low-risk offender.

And he's only required to register as a sex offender

and check in once a year.

- He was doing everything he was supposed to do,

going to his meetings.

But his girlfriend was addicted to cocaine, crack.

I noticed that he started getting high.

[suspenseful music]

- He's drinking more.

He's using crack.

He's becoming unstable.

[ominous music]

- Now he's addicted.

But his girlfriend, she started getting better.

- Ultimately she decides she wants to move out.

In his mind, his perception is I did so much for you

and you abandoned me.

You used me.

And now he's really angry.

- Repeatedly he talks about women using him,

women leaving him,

and not appreciating him.

Sowell would later say all of the women

that he victimized reminded him of her.

He felt that they needed to pay,

that she needed to pay.

- If you put the pieces of the puzzle together,

I think, collectively,

this is what brought him to the point of no return.

- He's without a girlfriend.

He's angry.

And he begins to devolve.

To become a serial killer.

[ominous music]

[suspenseful music]

- No one's making the connection

between the number of missing women

from the Mount Pleasant neighborhood,

until we meet Latundra Billups.

- By her filing this police report for rape

and felonious assault and kidnapping,

it's kicked things off into the investigation

to Anthony Sowell.

[suspenseful music]

Upon arriving to that house,

you could smell the stench right away.

[heartbeat thudding] [suspenseful music]

They secured the first floor.

It was vacant.

And then they proceeded to the second floor.

It was also unoccupied.

Upon arriving on the third floor,

they recognized that someone was living there.

Anthony Sowell was not there.

The south bedroom was locked.

Once they broke the door, it was dark.

The stench was strong.

There were flies, maggots everywhere.

And they discovered two decomposed bodies lying

on the floor in that bedroom.

[ominous music]

[siren wailing] [suspenseful music]

- The SWAT unit went to 12205 Imperial.

No Anthony Sowell in the home,

[suspenseful music]

but two decomposed bodies.

[dramatic music]

- Whoever was responsible had to have no feeling

toward a human being whatsoever

to leave it sitting on the floor.

- [Detective Griffin] The bodies were almost skeletal.

You could tell both were black females.

- So the next question, of course, are there more?

[eerie music]

- I went downstairs to the basement.

Behind the stairwell, there was a pile of dirt.

- The more we dig, the stronger the smell gets.

We knew that had to be a grave.

We are able to uncover the entire body.

This was a female as well.

This is becoming more bizarre, more macabre.

[suspenseful music]

- Anthony Sowell's home is being called

the house of horrors.

This house is the scene of horrific crimes.

- Police immediately put the mugshot out,

hoping that somebody might see him.

It was nonstop.

Everywhere you looked, Anthony Sowell's picture.

- [Reporter] Inside this home on the city's East Side,

police found the bodies of six women,

some wrapped in blankets, some buried in the basement.

- Police find the bodies all over the house,

all over the property.

You had a couple of bodies upstairs,

just out in the open in a bedroom.

You had a skull in a bucket in the basement.

You had other bodies in the house.

And then you had more in the backyard.

- [Reporter] In Cleveland today, FBI agents,

again, dug through the backyard

of suspected serial killer, Anthony Sowell.

So far the remains of 11 women have been found

inside and outside his home.

- It was like a gasp in the community.

11 bodies in one home.

- We see the news.

Now it's like, oh my God,

could this be where she has been for the last year?

This is the same neighborhood where she went missing.

[eerie music]

There are so many people coming out

because they have a missing loved one.

- How could this happen in our city,

in our community, on our street?

[eerie music]

- Now he's off the street.

So there's a sigh of relief,

but still, we didn't know if he was gonna talk to us.

- We interviewed Anthony Sowell 10 to 12 hours.

- You have to keep your composure.

This guy's a monster.

He's a stone killer.

- And so we asked him, what was your dreams about?

Sure enough, he said, his dreams,

he was hurting people with his hands.

[suspenseful music]

- At this point, he's drinking more.

He's using crack. He is angry, angry, angry.

[ominous music]

- He met her one evening

and enticed her with wanting to get high.

She went back to his place.

[ominous music]

- After getting high,

she realized, this is not a nice guy.

This is a monster.

[suspenseful music] [cars whooshing]

- Anthony Sowell would lure his victims

in with conversation and what I call props.

Props, meaning beer, crack cocaine.

- For Crystal Dozier,

what may have happened is that, you know,

she had her guard down

because she expected to chill and relax

and have a good time.

- And then, bam, he would change.

His demeanor would change.

- In her mind, she is hanging out

with someone that she knows.

But she's met with a punch in the face, a rape,

a brutal assault from which she wasn't able to escape.

- Sowell tied her ankles with cable

and a knotted cloth around her neck.

She was choked with this.

[ominous music]

- The last few moments of her life,

beyond the betrayal and the pain

and just the terror of what's happening to her,

have to be unreal.

[ominous music]

- She died of ligature strangulation.

- Yeah. I was angry.

I was sad.

You buried these women

and you discarded their bodies like a piece of garbage.

- Most sexual sadists have a particular fantasy in mind.

The details of how Crystal was found are remarkably similar

to what happened in 1989 with Melvette Sockwell.

There's a binding. There's a gagging.

There's complete control over the victim.

This becomes the MO of Anthony Sowell.

[melancholy music]

- My telephone rings.

It's my grandmother.

And she's telling me

that they had come to her home to notify her

that her daughter, Tonia Carmichael,

remains have been positively identified.

That's where your heart breaks.

But what I do know is God brought her home.

[melancholy music]

- It hurt me so bad that one of mine was down there.

But it was also a relief.

Now I know where you at.

But I couldn't say goodbye to her.

[melancholy music]

That's one of the things that broke me so bad

that I'm trying my best to get over.

That was my child.

[suspenseful music]

- It's very normal to wonder

what causes somebody to become a serial killer?

Was it the abuse they suffered in childhood?

Was it being rejected by girlfriends?

Fact of the matter is, it's not about abuse.

There's no causal relationship there.

- He specifically picked middle-aged

women who were mothers.

And, in some way,

maybe these women were a proxy

for the people that Anthony wanted to punish.

His mother or his ex-loves.

[ominous music]

[melancholy music]

- These were mothers.

These were daughters.

These were sisters.

These were family members.

They're human beings.

- Nobody has a right to take nobody's life.

And the things that he did to those women,

if I don't stay mindful,

I'll be right back there.

You're looking at a walking, breathing, living miracle.

'Cause I could be dead. [melancholy music]