Original subtitles

[woman] He invited me to go with him to his house.

It seemed like it was all right.

We finally got to his house.

The air was thick with just something not good.

Those eyes went black.

He wasn't there.

He kept telling me,

"You don't deserve what I'm about to do to you."

I'm thinking...

-[gasps] -"Is this how I'm gonna die?"

Welcome to very scary people.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

In 2007, women began vanishing from the streets of Cleveland, Ohio.

They all had one thing in common.

They were all last seen in the city's Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

In the middle of this community

was an unassuming house,

The man who lived there was friendly,

and always ready to lend a hand.

But behind closed doors, that friendly neighbor

was actually a vicious psychopath.

And that unassuming house,

was his personal House of horrors.

Home to the worst serial killer

Cleveland has ever seen.

This is the Cleveland Strangler.

[phone ringing]

My sergeant received a telephone call

from SWAT requesting that a homicide unit

come to the location of 12205 Imperial Avenue.

[siren wailing]

We were informed at that time,

that detectives had started an investigation of a suspect

in a rape case by the name of Anthony Sowell.

[siren wailing]

And 12205 Imperial was in fact

the residence of Anthony Sowell.

Now we were responding to a suspected homicide,

but Anthony Sowell was not present.

He was gone upon arrival.

[indistinct chatter on radio]

[Melvin] When we arrived at the outside grass lawn,

the house seemed to be unkept.

But there was nothing unusual at this time that I saw.

Everything changed the moment we entered the rear door.

That's when the smell hit you.

No, it was faint.

You could smell it. But it didn't reach this extreme point yet.

I've seen a lot of dirty houses

and unkept and untidy houses.

But this was extreme.

Clothing everywhere, garbage everywhere.

Seemed like the person whoever lived there

wherever they decided to discard something.

Whatever it was, it was discarded in that location.

[eerie music playing]

Now, you can't see two feet in front of you

unless you use a flashlight.

So you're not sure

what you're gonna bump into or what you're gonna feel

Our area of entrance was the third floor.

And as you proceeded upward,

the smell became stronger and stronger.

Then we're following the SWAT unit

to this locked door, this closed room.

But we're in a tight hallway.

Now you're starting to feel

this smell physically, into your throat.

Into your nose.

Depending on your gag reflex,

it may make you throw up, and it may not,

But I'm a homicide detective.

We have a job to do.

[door opens]

And now we move into this room...

[eerie music playing]

...and this is not gonna be good.

[children chattering]

[Mark] The neighborhood is called Mount Pleasant.

It's a working class African American neighborhood

where families lived for generations.

Neighbors hung out on the porch,

played cards, dice, chess, checkers.

Everybody knew everybody.

People could walk to the corner store,

walk to the pizza shop or sandwich shop.

[children laughing]

The people who lived there for generations and decades.

They loved the neighborhood.

They weren't leaving. It was where they were born and raised in Cleveland.

It was Cleveland.

[Tressa] Oh, my goodness!

We have parties, street parties.

We knew all the neighbors.

If somebody got in trouble,

you know, the neighbor would call your mom,

and then you would be in trouble with the neighbor and your mom.

[Donnie] It's into this vibrant Cleveland neighborhood

that Anthony Sowell is born.

Anthony was a good child.

Good in school.

He had a lot of friends.

He used to go out and play baseball with his friends

or they would play basketball right there

in front of the house or up at the park.

The house that Anthony grew up in was large.

Myself, my brother, my sister,

seven children.

My grandmother and my mother lived

in the house on page.

Anthony's father had lived in the house on Imperial.

When my sister passed away

prior to my mom getting the house,

The children were in foster care,

but they weren't being taken care of

and so they asked my mom to take the kids in.

[children chattering]

At times it was stressful, definitely.

Because there was so many of us.

The house was expensive for a single black mother.

My mother worked three jobs.

In order to keep it up.

And so it was hard.

[Donnie] With 11 people under her roof and a mountain of debt.

Anthony's mother does what she thinks is right

to keep the house in order.

My mother was raised the old fashioned way.

You get a whooping period.

[boy groans]

[Tressa] One time he got punched

because she was mad

about not doing his housework.

Anthony was growing up in an environment

where physical abuse likely mental verbal,

emotional abuse was so common

that it became part of who he is.

The kid's got the belt and the switch as well.

[Katie] Just because someone is abused doesn't mean

that they're going to become an abuser.

But many people who become abusers

have suffered abuse in their own history.

-[whipping] -[groaning]

[Donnie] But young Anthony

is subject to something more horrific

than abusive punishment.

He was witnessing abuse constantly in the home.

His niece was raped multiple times

by the family members.

At 12-years-old, he was learning

that it was okay to rape his own niece in the house.

So he also participated in it.

[Donnie] When Anthony is 18,

he announces he's leaving home to join the military.

[Mark] His mother kind of mocked him,

said he wouldn't survive in the military.

And he joined the Marines to prove her wrong.

Anthony as a child, was already exposed to violence,

and now he joins the Marines where he's learning

how to take his anger and apply it,

learning how to fight people,

learning how to take someone down.

[Donnie] In his first few years as a Marine.

Anthony is the perfect soldier.

His good behavior earns him medals

and letters of appreciation.

[soldiers shouting]

[Donnie] Then he's stationed in Okinawa,

and that's when things change.

He starts acting out and getting into bar fights.

He never dealt with the fact that there was abuse and rape

going on in his household.

So he started drinking,

likely to kind of cope with some of that

negative trauma that was revamping all in his brain.

He was ignoring it, pretending that it never happened.

[Mark] Anthony Sowell was discharged

from the Marine Corps in 1985.

He moved back into his home on Page Avenue.

[Donnie] Anthony comes home to find

that his old neighborhood,

is very different from the one that he left behind.

[Mark] The change happened in mid '80.

When crack flooded the many urban cities in America

and Cleveland's one of them that suffered.

Because of the drugs,

gang activity had increased

in the Mount Pleasant area,

[Mark] Violent crime went up,

robberies went up, burglaries went up.

It was still a good community, but it was starting to decay

and slowly get worse and worse and worse.

[Donnie] And it isn't just the neighborhood that's changed.

[Tressa] He was totally different after he came out of the Marines.

The least little thing would upset him.

[Katie] So after Sowell left the military,

he's going back to Cleveland,

and it's all brought right back to his brain.

That this is where I was raised.

This is where I socialized. This is where abuse happens.

It kind of is going to be a re-triggering moment to him.

It's inevitable that he's going to act out

on those old desires on his old behaviors.

That violence that was ingrained into him at such a young age.

[groaning, crying]

My name is Melvette Sockwell

I grew up in a domestic violence situation.

My mom, now that I look back on it,

God rest her soul,

she was doing the best that she knew how to do.

So I was a runaway

and I learned to live on the streets,

so I learned to adjust to the street life.

I was sitting, like on a concrete stoop, and I saw him.

He was talking to another young lady.

But I didn't care.

I just wanted to use his phone.

So I'm like, "Hey, can I use your phone?"

So he looks at me.

And he was like, "Yeah, well, I live up here.

We're gonna go through the back door."

And I'm like, I didn't think nothing of it.

He says, "Well, come on, I live upstairs

and I wanted to disturb my sister."

She was sleep on the couch.

So, honey, when we get upstairs.

We gone up there, he said, "Well, here's my room right here."

He said "Here you sit here."

Which he had my back to the door.

And I heard him close it.

[door creaks]

So but when he came back in

he came from behind me,

he had a knife as long as my arm.

[screaming]

He put the knife right here. I said, "Oh, no."

[screaming]

Honey, he hogtied me like a pig.

He said, um,

"Say your prayers

Because I'm gonna feed you.

Then I'm gonna kill you."

[screaming]

[Mark] For several days, Anthony repeatedly assaulted,

raped and beat Melvette

and wouldn't let her leave

and threatened he would kill her if she didn't leave.

[Melvette] Actually, how many days I was in that room?

My hand to God, I really don't know.

Because I was traumatized.

[Katie] When he was a child,

he was learning from the environment

he was in to rape, beat, torture, his niece.

And so he was re-enacting those traumas on Melvette.

Anthony transformed into the devil.

Because he no longer had

red or white in his eyes.

It was black.

Like he was a demon,

like he was under possession.

And all I knew was I don't want to die like this.

Why did I come here?

And I couldn't plead with him

because he had me bound and gagged.

So when he finally did go to sleep,

like an inchworm.

I got to the window.

[sighs]

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

I just needed to get out of that house.

I knew that I would be safe.

I used my head to raise that window up,

and what saved me was a ledge.

So I didn't actually fall to the ground.

There was like a a little roof type that caught me.

I saw two old ladies,

when I said "Mmm, mmm, mmm."

Then I turned around and I showed her my hand.

And I could hear her saying, "My God!"

And I knew I was saved.

I could hear the fire truck coming.

I could see the police because I'm outside on the roof. But then-

[screaming]

Something grabbed me back through the window.

I'm thinking it's him and I'm screaming.

But it was his sister.

[Tressa] When I saw Melvette

she had a rope in her hand, but her hands weren't tied.

I asked her why she was on the roof.

She said, "Because he tied me up and put me out here."

I said, "Well, why would you not come in?"

She said, "Because I was scared to."

I just couldn't believe it.

She also said that he raped her.

I couldn't believe that, either.

He told his sister Teresa that Melvette set him up

to steal from him.

[Tressa] I think somebody tried to break into the house.

I think it was her friend.

She was working with somebody else.

God bless her because she carried that lie.

Like, "Oh, my brother didn't do that.

She was stealing from him."

When the police took me to the hospital,

Yeah, they did their little routine rape kit.

They didn't give me anything to put on but the hospital gown.

I had nobody to call to bring me clothes

because at this point I just I want out of here.

So I'm walking down East Cleveland

with a hospital gown with my whole derriere hanging out.

Because just only hours ago, I'm hogtied,

wondering if I'm gonna live or die.

They knew what the man did to me.

They knew.

And I was left to fend for myself.

[Chris] Anthony Sowell was arrested for kidnapping

and raping Melvette Sockwell.

[Katie] When Anthony told the police

that he was paying for sex with Melvette,

he was trying to find an excuse

as to why this happened.

Then he could claim he doesn't remember

because drugs, alcohol,

anything else that might have kind of cut that memory out.

And he's sentenced to 5-15 years in prison.

He continued to maintain his innocence

for the rape of Melvette, despite pleading guilty to it.

While he was in prison, he had to fill out a questionnaire

where you were given a prompt and you fill in the blank.

One of the prompts was most women,

and in the blank space, he wrote, "Just tell lies."

It pissed him off that he did 15 years for that rape.

But I didn't believe it.

[producer speaking]

No.

[Donnie] During his 15-year prison term,

Anthony Sowell is on his best behavior.

He was released in 2005 after serving his full sentence.

He's back on the streets of Cleveland.

And Melvette has to hear about it through the grapevine.

[Melvette] When he got out,

-I called the police department myself. -[phone ringing]

Told them who I was

and why wasn't I notified that he was out of prison?

The snobby, nasty police officer said

he'd done his time for what he did to you.

So there was no reason to notify you.

And I became frightened all over again.

It was years that I stayed in the house.

And I didn't come outside

because see, now I've got this awful thing that happened to me.

That left me traumatized, nightmares.

But if they had listen to me,

and took in consideration

of what this man was capable of doing.

Women would still be alive to this day.

Anthony Sowell's life changed a little bit when he got out of prison.

Once he was released, he moved in with his father.

On Imperial.

Because his father had a whole house

and it had a third floor and a second floor that was empty.

After his father passed away,

it became Anthony's permanent home.

[Donnie] Friends and family see a change in Sowell,

this time for the better.

[Tressa] He was doing good.

He was doing real good.

He worked at a factory

he was seeing a counselor.

I actually had talked to the counselor on the phone.

She said he was doing really good in his program.

And he was doing everything he was supposed to.

[Mark] He talked to people.

He hung out, shared a beer,

shared a drink with them on the porch,

play dice, play cards, checkers, barbecued hot dogs.

[Lem] The people within the neighborhood

actually liked him.

He was like a jack of all trades.

He would help them with different things.

Painting.

He would cook.

Anything electrical he would help out with.

[glass clinks]

[Mark] He looked like a normal neighborhood guy who lived there.

Fit in with the crowd,

didn't draw attention to himself.

[Donnie] It looks like Sowell is turning things around

when a new woman enters his life

and changes his heart.

[Lori] The day I met Anthony Sowell,

I was walking down Buckeye

and I wanted something to drink

and I didn't have no money.

So Anthony was coming down the street.

When I first saw him, I thought he was a nice guy.

He was clean cut, well dressed.

Well mannered.

Talked real nice.

And he asked me, did I want to go to the bar and have a drink?

So I said, I want to go with you.

So we went in the bar. We sat down and ate, drank.

I told him I wanted some crack,

so he picked me up some crack

and we went to his house.

He never smoked, I only smoked.

and he was okay with it.

[in English]

[Lori] He went to work.

He cleaned the house. He cooked for me.

And he took care of me.

[in English]

He was a nice boyfriend.

He was um... gentle.

He did everything for me.

He was a nice guy.

He finds in her what he's always kind of been looking for.

Someone to love him. Someone to care for him.

His mom, you know, that's the person

that everyone is supposed

to be able to trust is their mother.

She failed him. She didn't protect him.

She didn't save him. She didn't believe in him.

He meets Lori, she accepts his past.

Anthony told me that he had did 15 years for raping a lady.

But then he told me that he didn't do it.

And I believe that because the way he treated me,

I didn't think nothing else of it.

[Katie] So she becomes this perfect person,

this relationship that he always wanted.

And doesn't ever want to lose

because she is someone to trust.

He would refer to his mother as a bitch.

[Katie] Sowell didn't tell anyone about his mother.

It's the trauma that he just shut in a box

and just kept that all to himself until he met Lori.

She was the one person in his entire life he could truly trust.

[Lori] I was happy with Anthony.

But he started changing as time went on.

At first, when I met Anthony, he didn't smoke crack,

and after a little while we started smoking together.

He was trying to get her clean and end up started smoking.

Himself.

Anthony was smoking from sunup to sundown,

[Tressa] Things began to change for Anthony

when he lost his job.

He started breaking into houses to steal copper.

[Lori] He started taking stuff out of abandoned houses.

Taking it to the junkyard

Getting money and he just started looking so nasty.

I didn't want him to touch me.

When I seen his hands

look like he was working on cars

and this- he just turned me off.

2007, my mother passed away,

so I decided to stop everything

and go home with my children.

Yeah, I told Anthony

that I had to get my life together.

[in English]

She got clean, and now he was dirty.

[Tressa] After she left,

I seen that anger that I had seen

after he was discharged.

[Katie] He still loved her,

but that probably was a moment where he really flipped.

[detective speaking]

[in English]

[Donnie] That breakup,

turned into a breaking point for Anthony Sowell.

Between Lori's leaving him and his heavy drug use.

A darkness overtakes him,

and Cleveland will never be the same again.

In June 2007, 35-year-old Crystal Dozier went missing.

She was a mother of seven,

In 2008, Tishana Culver went missing.

She was known for her kindness,

but she also battled substance abuse.

Leshanda Long went missing shortly after.

She was known as the backbone of her family.

Michelle Mason went missing in October 2008.

She was a strong woman, loved by her family,

Many people didn't know these women were missing.

Unfortunately, they didn't garner headlines

in the newspaper or on the TV stations.

It didn't draw the attention of a wider audience

to realize that there was a problem

going on in this neighborhood

and that somebody needs to intervene. Nobody did.

In the air following his breakup with Lori,

four women vanished from the neighborhood of Mount Pleasant.

Their families hit the streets

desperately trying to find their missing daughters,

sisters and mothers.

What no one knew was that Sowell's reign of terror

was about to get much worse.

[indistinct chatter on radio]

[siren wailing]

We responded to the suspected homicide,

at 12205 Imperial.

[woman on radio]

[Lem] Upon arriving to the house,

we went straight up to the 3rd floor area,

[intense music playing]

[Melvin] We moved into this room

and I observed two bodies on the floor,

badly decomposed, to the point that we can't determine gender,

male or female, we don't know.

Based upon the size we think it's an adult.

The victims were strangled

and the rope or cords or whatever ligature he used.

He left them with the body.

The odor from the bodies was tremendous.

The odors will adhere to your clothing.

You'll have to wash them or you'll destroy them.

[Melvin] In this particular crime scene,

We didn't have any knowledge of what was going on.

And it is very important that we be careful

as to where we walk, what we touch,

what we pick up, what we move,

because everything is considered evidence.

One of the things that really stuck in my head

was the amount of dead flies

in that room.

That degree of insect infestation tells us

that these bodies have been here for a long time.

So now you have two victims here.

Whoever is committing what I suspect is a homicide

has no regards for anyone.

Who could put these bodies there?

And live there under those conditions of the stench.

It is a stench that's the worst stench you can ever imagine.

So that alone is just- it surpasses what anyone could think

about what was happening in that home.

Who was living there?

How was he living there?

That was the question.

I still think about it.

This case, uh, you can't forget it.

[woman indistinct on radio]

[Lem] And I was wondering, were there any more bodies?

Was this it?

[Donnie] By the fall of 2008,

there are four women missing from Mount Pleasant.

And soon there will be a 5th.

[Mark] Tonia Carmichael was a good mom

who was responsible, caring

But she also liked going out and having a good time

going to parties like extravagant events.

She left her house in the suburb.

Later on, that night, she ended up in the Imperial Avenue neighborhood,

and she went missing.

Her truck was later found

down the street from Sowell's house.

Tonia was extremely close with her family

when she didn't come home and later went missing.

That caused concern for family

because she always returned home.

After her family filed a missing person's report.

They didn't stop there.

They posted missing flyers and posters all across the neighborhood.

When Crystal Dozier went missing,

her family went to multiple police districts

and police stations.

As they were bounced around between stations

like a ping pong ball.

Nobody knew which one should take the report.

Because she lived outside of the city.

That played into where she should be reported missing.

[Melvin] Leshanda Long was living in East Cleveland

and traveling to the area of Mount Pleasant.

Mr. Long made a police report

for his daughter being missing in East Cleveland.

But we wouldn't have never received

that information in Cleveland.

Unfortunately, looking back at that,

that was probably one of the flaws of missing persons.

They never shared that information between departments.

There was at the time, no network

in regards to missing persons.

It's all happening around the same neighborhood.

And they're all very similar life stories.

Very similar back stories. Very similar people.

A lot of them struggled with drug addiction.

They were the kind of people that the police would not be out looking for.

The streets knew this a long time before any of us did.

It's one of the marks of shame

that we have as a community here.

That this was such an open secret in the community

and people just weren't working on it.

[Donnie] Missing women aren't the only thing

that has the community on edge.

[Mark] There was a stench.

The stench was the talk of the neighborhood.

The neighbors were complaining that the smell was so bad

that they couldn't live in that neighborhood anymore.

[Lem] Next door to Anthony Sowell

was a sausage factory, Ray's sausage

and everyone thought that the older that they smelled,

came from this particular building.

The owner of Ray's sausage put a lot of money

and invested a lot of money in cleaning

what he thought needed to be clean.

[Mark] But the smell persisted at times.

It didn't permeated every day, but certain times

is when it did permeate the neighborhood

or anything close to the neighborhood.

[Lori] I didn't smell nothing up in the house when I was there.

After I got clean,

I went to see Anthony about three or four times.

I tried to tell him to go to AA get some help.

We could probably be together

if he, you know, get himself together.

But he would never would go.

The first time I went to see Anthony,

I get off work.

He was at home.

The house was bad and everything,

and he was looking real bad.

Anthony looked like a monster.

He looked dirty, not shaved.

Just horrible.

So I wanted to get something out the room,

a piece of my clothing that I had.

When I was over there, I left it there.

I was going up to this front room

and he jumped up and ran and stopped me and said,

"What you want- What you wanna- You need something out of there?"

So I said, "No. Just leave it right there. I don't even want it."

I kept going to visit him.

But every time I go, there's something different going on.

One time I went in one room,

I seen lye bag in the room on the floor

and I seen cords.

[Tressa] He got real secluded.

Didn't want anybody in the house.

Didn't want to be around nobody.

Just kind of-

Now that I think back on it

kind of giving up on himself.

Man, I tried to talk to him

and asked him what was wrong, but he didn't tell me.

[Lori] And then he has sores on his head.

He had his throat cut.

His face was scratched up.

I would ask Anthony about it, but he always had an excuse.

Like he said he was in an abandoned house

and that something fell on his head.

Or he was going through the park

and he asked somebody for a light

and they slit his throat.

I believe everything Anthony told me

about the injuries that he had

because I didn't expect him to do nothing like this.

[detective speaking]

[in English]

[detective speaking]

[Anthony sighs]

[siren wailing]

[in English]

[detective speaking]

[Chris] There were two Anthony Sowell,

there was the one that interacted with his neighbors,

who was described as affable, friendly,

would shovel their snow,

would help them run errands,

would have barbecues with them,

and he would talk to them about current events.

What's going on in the neighborhood?

What's that smell in the neighborhood?

[Lori] He cut grass, go to the store

for people and he was-

he did some good things for people.

[in English]

[detective speaking]

And then there was the other Anthony Sowell,

the one who only revealed himself

to these women when they were alone in his house.

[detective speaking]

[Katie] I do think he learned from his mom

how to have these two different personas.

The outside person, the inside person.

So his mom inside the home was abusive.

Outside the home,

it was totally fine and normal to any observer.

And so through that, Anthony learned to socialize

inside his violent tendencies

outside to be an upstanding citizen

that can get along with everyone.

Neighborly person.

Everyone likes him.

On the inside he was committing these horrible, heinous acts.

Where no one ever even suspected him.

[Donnie] In the decaying neighborhood

in which Sowell lived.

It is the perfect place for him

to commit these gruesome crimes.

[Katie] It was a high crime neighborhood,

predominantly black community,

and unfortunately, that was largely part of the problem

that the police were ignoring it.

[Chris] Cleveland didn't have a missing persons unit.

You just called the detectives at the Detective Bureau,

and they may or may not have made time for this.

Officially, we do not look for people missing

unless there is a official missing person's report made.

And checking the reports

we did not see any official missing persons reports

for most of the victims.

I hate to say that, but that's true.

Me being a black police officer, detective.

I can understand that there was mistrust

between the black community

and the police department.

Their thinking was that they're not going to do anything

for my loved ones,

so maybe if we do it ourselves,

then will be more effective than the Police Department.

[Katie] He was able to keep bringing in these victims,

and he keeps getting away with it.

If you get away with things over and over again,

why are you gonna get- think you're gonna get caught the next time?

This case was really just a perfect storm

of every the risk factor you could possibly have.

Take a convicted sex offender

with a crack, cocaine addiction

put him in a densely populated urban area.

Surrounded by people.

Who the police will not go looking for once they're missing.

And then you give him

six years of United States Marine Corps

military training.

And an intense, misogynistic hatred.

And it's a recipe for disaster,

and that's exactly what happened in this case.

[Melvin] So we found two decomposed bodies

on the third floor in the south bedroom.

Now we decided to check any closet,

in any enclosed area.

We need to make sure

that we leave nothing unchecked.

Until we make sure that there's not a body.

[indistinct chatter on radio.]

What we discovered

was there were two plastic garbage bags.

We knew one, it was full of clothing.

But there was another garbage bag.

It was tied up.

Unfortunately tapping in the bag and touching it,

we discovered that it was not clothing.

There was actually another body in that plastic bag.

And that was located on the floor

next to the two victims that we discovered on the floor.

Now, as a homicide detective,

you're thinking.

Okay, we discover another body in the bag.

How many bodies are there?

We need to be checking everything.

There was a large mound of dirt in the basement,

And when I say large,

this is extremely large and unusual

to have this much dirt under a stairway

leading to the basement.

You stuck the shovel into the pile of dirt

Immediately, the decomp smell

would start to emanate from the dirt.

We felt that this could be a victim as well.

They uncovered another body

under that dirt.

[Melvin] The ligature was still there.

He just decided this the way I'm going to kill you.

And this is the way I'm gonna bury you.

With it around your neck.

[Donnie] This is the fourth dead body police have discovered

in Anthony Sowell House of horrors.

[Lem] Further investigating the basement

We found the skull

in a red bucket.

No flesh on the skull.

But it was a human skull.

What came into your mind

automatically was where's the body?

[Melvin] We never discovered or found the body.

I think he buried it somewhere different.

And then the crew went back to the third floor

because now we have daylight hours.

We're gonna do further investigation.

We're gonna look for more evidence.

There was a crawl space in there, saw a bedroom,

and there was a large mound of dirt in the crawlspace.

So we organized a dig party for that as well.

And we discovered another body in the crawl space.

And during that process,

Anthony Sowell is still missing.

Police discover multiple decomposed bodies

at the House of horrors.

And they're not even done searching.

How many women has Anthony Sowell killed?

And how many more will die

before they can track him down?

I was in homicide for about eight years.

So I've seen some crime scenes

that was really terrible.

But the number of bodies I've never seen that before.

And the way they were hidden and buried.

Never seen that before.

Most of the victims were killed through ligature strangulation.

When the police arrive on the scene,

people come out.

They want to know what's going on.

The media, they're reporting it

[woman screaming]

[Melvin] It had spread panic throughout the city.

They're seeing us pull our bodies

on carts going to the coroner's office.

Who are the bodies?

What's going on?

Why are all these bodies here?

Because of the stage of decomposition

of their bodies,

we could not make proper identification.

[Mark] Multiple people showed up

holding photos and it became,

Oh no. Could these women be in the house?

They were holding candles, flowers,

but they stood silent and you're seeing tears.

[woman] I stayed right down the street,

I wouldn't have never thought

nothing like that being in one house.

I got a knock on the door.

It wasn't the police.

It was somebody that had been at the house.

And all they said was they found somebody dead in the house.

Now my kids are crying.

Everybody is hysterical

because we're thinking

it's Anthony in the house dead.

[Lori] No one would ever think

Anthony was capable of doing this.

He was smooth with people.

He was so smooth and clever.

[Tressa] I went over there, but they wouldn't let me in.

They just said we found somebody dead in the house.

We'll come and we'll talk to you.

You have two decomposed bodies

that was taken out the first day.

the three decomposed bodies that was taken out the next day.

And a skull that was in a red bucket.

Could there be bodies in the backyard as well?

I had walked outside

and walked to the backyard.

What made this backyard

particularly different was it was lumpy.

There were areas in which

where you would suspect the lawn to be leveled,

or smooth, even though the grass is high,

We had mounds in which there was dirt.

No grass growing there.

Why is this mound here?

We had a K-9 come

and the handler took the dog throughout the backyard.

There was a spot closer to the house,

the bush right at the back stairs.

The dog had sort of hit on that spot,

so we broke ground.

And now we found there was an additional body.

In the yard.

[reporter] Two o'clock, the 19 action news chopper arrives

over Anthony Sowell's house after sources told us

they found more bodies in the backyard.

[Lem] The rest of the bodies

were found in the rear yard.

And it was escalated gingerly.

Because 15 inches on the ground.

That's how deep they were. Only 15 inch.

We found five more in backyard.

It was very personal.

I live southeast of that location.

[in English]

You have girls. You spoil them.

You want to be their protector.

I felt that way.

And so, seeing these women become victims

of a person like this,

I felt like man, It's just too close.

[Mark] You could see the panic

in everybody's eyes

that how bad is this going to get?

[reporter] Kyana Hunt has not seen her mom,

Nancy Cobbs, in six months.

[Mark] I called a top law enforcement official

at the Cleveland Police Department

who was inside the scene.

And I said, "If I report right now

is the number 11, is that accurate?"

He says, "It is accurate. God help us."

[woman sobbing]

[Mark] I sat on the porch watching

[tearfully] when that story published

the screaming and wailing occurred

[gasps]

Mothers broke down.

They fell to their knees.

People ran around.

They were just in shock and fear.

I've never seen anything like that and never want to see it again.

[Donnie] As police remove

one body after another from Sowell's house.

One question hangs over everything.

Where is Anthony Sowell?

He got the name the Cleveland Strangler

from the news media.

And once everything started getting out

into the media, it was chaos.

People were seeing him everywhere.

I was telling my guys.

It's like the Michael Myers effect.

From the movie Halloween.

Everybody saw him everywhere.

There was reports that he was at his sister's house,

walking down the street with a beer in his hand.

But they were all dead ends,

and Halloween was the next day.

And there was concern amongst many mothers

should they cancel Halloween because this man was on the loose.

[Donnie] Police searched for this monster on the eve of Halloween,

but they had a chance to zero in on him

a year earlier in 2008,

when one of his surviving victims

told her horrifying story to Cleveland investigators.

[Vanessa] I never knew Anthony Sowell

before that day.

I didn't grow up in Mount Pleasant,

and I just became an honorary member.

I was a happy mother of four.

well balanced children,

you know, we sat down to dinner together.

We played together.

We learned together.

We worshiped together.

I was working a full time job,

and then started my own business.

I met my husband,

and that's how I got introduced to drugs.

I started off going down to Mount Pleasant,

probably about once a week,

to purchase drugs,

and it just got to the point

where I didn't go back home.

When I first met Anthony,

I was standing near the bus stop,

and he comes walking past

And he says, "It's my birthday.

Ain't nobody celebrating my birthday."

And I said, "Happy birthday."

He invited me to go with him to his house,

celebrate his birthday.

He said he had

some crack and some drink and some weed at the house.

He said, and, um...

He asked me, did I want to come?

We started to walk to his house.

And as we were walking,

there were people,

you know, waving to him.

He got a lot of respect

as we walked to the house.

It seemed like it was all right.

We finally got to his house.

When he opened the door,

I could just feel the...

I could feel the eeriness, the...

the air.

It was thick with just

something not good.

And...

by that time,

it's too late to turn around.

As we went

to where he stayed, in the third floor,

you could smell

a smell.

And he explained the smell away.

He said, "That's the smell coming from the sausage factory."

So...

we're sitting there.

He was talking about a relationship

that he was in...

where the girl did him so wrong.

How he hated her for that.

Those eyes went black.

He... He was...

He wasn't there.

I see them eyes.

That's the most...

[exhales]

Empty, lifeless...

evil I've ever seen.

Ever.

I ain't never seen nothing like that before.

He turned around and punched me in my face.

For the next hours and hours,

it was all bad.

And he kept...

He kept telling me...

"You don't deserve what I'm about to do to you."

I'm thinking, "What that mean?"

He kept telling me,

he gonna throw me in the closet

for three days and not let me out. I mean...

What do that mean?

But...

as...

as he hit me and raped me and whatever,

I'm thinking,

"Is this how I'm gonna die?"

Ain't nobody gonna know where I'm at. I'm...

My family ain't gonna know.

[Vanessa crying]

I finally asked, "Could I use the bathroom?"

So he said, "Yeah."

And when he went to walk me to the bathroom,

there was a space

where there was a tarp.

The tarp was pinned back.

And out the corner of my eye...

I look at...

I know I don't see what I'm seeing.

Looked like a body.

It ain't had no head on it.

It was wrapped up

in plastic.

[woman gasps]

[Vanessa] I've never

seen nothing

like that in my life ever.

Never.

I didn't even

let him know that I seen it,

or that I acknowledged it,

or I think he would have...

I don't know what he would have did.

[Katie] Most likely, Anthony knew

she was gonna see that body.

He knows where it was.

Why would you just leave a headless body there

if not to cause fear?

[door creaks, closes]

[Vanessa] It was the next day.

He was contemplating on

what he was gonna do with me.

And I said, "Say, um,

it was just rougher than I'm used to.

But I'll come back or whatever."

And whatever the words were

convinced him to...

let me go.

[Katie] He gets off by making

these women uncomfortable,

by hurting them.

By making them scared.

And using that to

get off.

And so by her saying,

"Actually, I kind of liked it,"

he's no longer aroused by her.

He's got to have that fear.

[door creaks]

[Vanessa] He opened the door and it was like...

like birth.

The sun was out.

Everything was alive and...

And I'm walking

as fast as I could to get away.

And people

are looking at me like I...

like I'm some kind of piece of trash.

And nobody helped me.

So, made it to the corner, called the police.

The police told me

to come to them.

Told me to come to them.

I couldn't come to y'all. I couldn't even walk.

So I laid on the bus stop.

I just laid there...

until somebody I knew

walked me down the street.

Sex Crimes detectives did not have

cell phones issued to them.

They did not have email accounts issued to them.

So if you needed to get in touch

with a detective who worked at the Sex Crimes Unit,

you had to physically go downtown

to the Sex Crimes Unit.

Any expert in this field

will tell you that's an absolutely terrible way

of handling sex assault cases.

People don't want to go into the police station.

They don't feel comfortable doing that.

You have to be able to meet people on their own ground.

And the Sex Crimes Unit,

which was already understaffed and underfunded at that point,

just wasn't getting the job done.

[Vanessa] On different occasions,

I've tried to tell the police what happened.

They never wanted to listen, you know.

It's just appalling levels of failure

over and over and over again.

I think a lot of women did try to come forward

about Anthony Sowell.

Every time they were ignored.

Um,

there was no urgency.

We have policies and procedures

and ways in which we perform certain duties

as the law enforcement,

and it needed to be revised.

So many people have dropped the ball

and not done what they were supposed to do.

In 1997,

while Anthony Sowell was in prison

for the rape of Melvette Sockwell,

Ohio created a statewide database for DNA.

So they took Anthony Sowell's DNA,

and it was sent to a lab in Fairfax, Virginia,

where it was to be tested,

logged, entered into the system.

It got lost in the mail.

So it was very easy for him to continue to do what he did

long after

he should have been arrested.

[Melvin] We went back to the house

the next morning,

first sign of daylight.

I can recall we were digging the backyard

for other victims.

One of the uniform officers came

and told me that

there was a lady that requested to see me.

She was a grandmother,

and she wanted to make

a missing persons report at that point in time.

Later on, it turned out

it was her granddaughter,

Tishana Culver,

who was actually one of the first victims.

She disappeared in 2007.

[Donnie] Forensic evidence identifies

Tishana Culver

as one of the women found on the third floor house,

along with Nancy Cobbs,

Diane Turner,

and Telacia Fortson.

The woman discovered in the basement

behind the stairs

is identified as Janice Webb.

The skull found in the bucket nearby

is Leshanda Long.

And the five women discovered in the yard

are Tonia Carmichael,

Crystal Dozier,

Michelle Mason,

Amelda Hunter,

and Kim Smith.

Investigators identify all 11 victims.

Anthony Sowell,

The Cleveland Strangler,

is officially

the most notorious serial killer

in the city's history.

[Lori] The day that I found out

that this stuff was going on,

somebody had called my phone.

They were screaming and hollering, saying,

"We thought you were one of the bodies in the house that's dead."

And I'm like, "What?"

They was like, "Turn the TV on."

[reporter] It's the case that broke open

a suspected serial killing house of horrors.

Everything started coming back. Why was this...

Oh, I was doing this. He was doing...

Oh, everything came back. Everything.

I was shocked.

I got a psychiatrist.

They say I'm diagnosed with antipsychotic schizophrenic.

All kinds of stuff. I'd be looking over my shoulder.

I just had a lot going on.

And I cried because them ladies didn't deserve that.

[Donnie] Even though Anthony Sowell

is the most wanted man in Cleveland,

police make another huge mistake

and let him slip away.

A zone car had him the night before,

and he lied his way out of it.

And they let him go.

We're out there looking,

and we probably

searched

well over 100 vacant houses.

There are hundreds and hundreds of officers out there

searching for this guy.

[Donnie] While police are going house to house,

an interesting call comes into 911.

[operator speaking]

[man speaking]

[operator speaking]

[man speaking]

[operator speaking]

[man speaking]

[operator speaking]

[man speaking]

[officer speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

[officer speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

They were locking down the bus station,

the airport,

the train station.

I was like, "He's not gonna be there.

He's a person of the neighborhood.

You know, he's somewhere here."

[Lori] The detectives had me riding all around the city,

asking me what I know.

I kept telling them, "No, I don't know where he at, I haven't seen him."

I feel like I was a suspect,

but I knew in my mind, in my head,

that I didn't do anything.

[telephone ringing]

[woman] Anthony called me.

He said,

"The police are gonna tell you some things that I did."

He said, "I did them."

And that was it.

When I found out what Anthony did,

I couldn't believe it.

All I can say is

that was very selfish.

[Donnie] During most of his murderous rampage,

Sowell is never a suspect.

Partly

because Cleveland police

barely bother to investigate reports from women

about his violent attacks.

Women like Gladys Wade,

who was attacked in December of 2008.

I think a lot about

how many times

Anthony Sowell should have been caught

during this serial murder spree.

I think a lot about Gladys Wade.

Gladys Wade lived on the east side of Cleveland.

One night she was walking home.

She walked past Anthony Sowell's house on Imperial Avenue.

And he was outside and he said "Merry Christmas."

She said "Merry Christmas" back to him.

And he invited her into his house.

And she said no, she wasn't interested.

She kept on walking.

And then the next thing she knew,

he grabbed her from behind.

He physically dragged her inside the house.

She did not go willingly.

And she passed out.

He took her up to the third floor

where he was living at the time.

The same place where police would later find the bodies.

And that's where she woke up.

She was lying on

the front room of the third floor

on the south side of the house.

He came back into the room,

closed the door behind him.

Then he said something to the effect of,

"You can scream but no one's gonna hear you."

Will Gladys Wade end up like so many other victims

of The Cleveland Strangler?

Dead and buried in his house of horrors?

Or will she somehow escape

and live to tell the tale?

Gladys Wade decided to fight.

She grabbed his testicles. She gouged his eyes.

She gouged his face.

She was able to get past him

and run down the stairs down to the first floor.

He chased her, he struggled with her in the front lawn,

and she was able to fight him off again.

After Gladys Wade came forward,

Anthony Sowell was arrested.

But the arresting officer

incorrectly labeled the incident as rape

in his incident report.

Gladys had been very clear,

a rape didn't actually take place.

There was a kidnapping,

there was an assault,

but she fought him off before the rape could happen.

So the city doesn't charge it

because the arresting officer

checked the wrong box on his incident report.

[Donnie] This shocking act of police incompetence

lets Anthony Sowell off the hook again.

And that incompetence costs lives.

Sowell murdered six more women

after Gladys Wade escaped from his house.

He leaves behind another witness

less than a year later.

In September 2009,

he attacks Latundra Billups.

[Mark] Latundra Billups met Sowell.

He lured her in the house to party.

While in the house, she told Anthony Sowell

about a rumor that he had raped

a woman prior.

That set Sowell off.

That was a triggering moment for him

because he didn't want

to be found out.

And so she's calling him out on this.

As he's bringing in these women,

there's part of him that's probably just hoping

maybe this is the new Lori.

Maybe this is someone I can love.

But as he talks to them,

as he's interacting with them,

something probably clicks and he goes, "No,

this is not Lori."

And that's when he starts, you know, harming them.

And so by making that single statement,

Latundra changes the whole dynamic

as someone who is his mother, not the Lori.

[Mark] He attacked her brutally.

He strangled her with an electrical cord.

He thought she was dead.

But she woke up. And that surprised him.

And he let her go.

Maybe at that point, he felt some sort of excitement that, "Oh,

she knows that I've done this and yet she's still here."

Maybe he wanted

to see what would happen by letting her go.

[Donnie] A friend brings Latundra to the hospital

where police take a statement.

But after that first interview,

Latundra vanishes.

Police have no way to follow up.

And they never questioned Sowell about the attack,

leaving him free to continue raping and murdering

whenever he wants.

And in Sowell's twisted mind,

he believed he was doing some kind of public service.

These were women he thought deserved to die.

He saw it as helping society,

removing drug-addicted mothers from the streets.

Sowell definitely was aware

he was committing these crimes.

The question is whether or not he thought they were crimes,

as opposed to appropriate behavior.

[Sowell speaking]

When you can blame a victim,

someone that you murdered,

for their own death,

then

you have no feeling whatsoever

for anyone.

[Donnie] One month after he attacks Billups,

Sowell strikes again.

[Mark] Shawn Morris went to Sowell's house to party.

After partying with Sowell,

Shawn Morris left the house.

On the way to somewhere else,

she realized she left her ID.

She went back to the house to retrieve her ID.

He attacked her.

[Katie] Anthony seemed to have

a ritualistic approach to all of these attacks.

By targeting certain women,

bringing them into his home,

getting them comfortable, before he then

went on to the rampage attack.

We'll start with the beating, we'll strangle them,

make them fearful.

[woman moaning]

[Katie] As he was assaulting Shawn Morris,

he was screaming, "I hate bitches."

[woman moaning]

[Mark] She fell out of a window

from the third story of his house.

And Sowell came out of the house naked,

trying to pull her back into the home.

He doesn't fear being seen.

The neighbor called the ambulance.

[neighbor speaking]

[operator speaking]

[neighbor speaking]

[Donnie] While Shawn Morris recovers in the hospital,

police finally track down Latundra Billups.

This time, she gives them a full statement.

And enough for a warrant to search Sowell's house.

Two days after the first bodies were found,

a call comes in to 911.

[line ringing]

[Ronald] A citizen called and said,

"Hey, there's a guy that looks like this Anthony Sowell

that you're looking for over on Mount Auburn."

We were close by, and I told my guys,

"We're gonna get him today."

[indistinct chatter on police radio]

[siren wailing]

[Ronald] We got there, and I'm looking at him,

and he didn't look like the picture that I had.

But there's just something that told me

that...

I gotta look a little bit further.

He had a scratch on his face,

like somebody scratched him.

[indistinct chatter on police radio]

So I said, "Hey, we're looking for a guy.

You're pretty close to who we're looking for."

I said, "I'll make a deal with you."

I said, "We've been out running around.

If you're not the guy we're looking for,

you can go to breakfast with us, 'cause we're hungry."

[indistinct chatter on police radio]

[Ronald] He was relaxed. He was

cool as a cucumber.

And...

For a fleeting moment there, I said,

"Well, maybe this isn't him."

And he goes, "I'm Anthony. I'm Anthony Sowell.

I'm the guy you're looking for."

[indistinct chatter on police radio]

[handcuffs clicking]

And he goes, "I just want to die."

We were all standing around looking at each other, like,

wow.

-[indistinct chatter on police radio] -[siren wailing]

We just got

the biggest serial killer in Cleveland history.

We didn't know what to say.

There was like a really weird silence

the whole time.

So after Anthony Sowell was arrested...

[indistinct chatter]

[Melvin] ...my partner and I, we conducted an interrogation.

This is my partner, Detective Griffin.

I'm Detective Smith with the Homicide Unit.

Our thought process at this time is,

you have

to work for the victims.

And you have to figure out why are they there,

how did they get there,

and what happened to them.

[Lemmy speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

[Lemmy speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

Anthony Sowell's answers mostly were

nonspecific answers.

Wouldn't give us anything, any details.

But what he started to do

was to relate things

to dreams.

So we thought maybe we could get these answers,

pull these answers from him

by talking about his dreams.

[Lemmy speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

-[Lemmy speaking] -[Melvin speaking]

[Lemmy speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

[Melvin] We understand that

doing interviews and interrogations,

it's gonna be hard to get to the details.

Most of the time,

they want to give us a story.

My philosophy is,

as long as you tell me a story,

I'm gonna listen.

And I'll ask questions from your stories.

So, fortunately for us,

his stories happen to be his dreams.

[Melvin speaking]

[Lemmy speaking]

[Anthony] No.

[Anthony speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

When Anthony was talking with the police,

he was the Cleveland neighbor,

that upstanding, good citizen.

But when he was in his house,

he was well aware of what he was doing

when he was talking to the police.

He's most likely seeing it in that dreamlike state,

because he's

completely separated these two personas

and created that outside-inside person.

[Lemmy] He was frightening in the sense that

he would trick these individuals

to come to a location,

knowing all what he had plans on doing.

You would never think

that he would do those things that he did...

from talking to him.

[door creaks, closes]

He's a monster in sheep's clothing.

[Donnie] Police keep pushing Sowell for answers.

He claims he can't remember important details.

But his contempt for vulnerable women

comes through loud and clear.

[Katie] So, for Anthony,

his crimes

and these violence against these women

is playing out the violence he learned from childhood.

Where he learned to physically harm women.

They are women who he doesn't think deserve to live.

He divided women that he met on the street into two categories.

The good ones and the bad ones.

The good ones are the ones who were doing something with their lives.

And the bad ones were just walking the street.

[Anthony speaking]

[woman grunting]

[Chris] He connected that

to his experience as a child

where he watched his mom...

[kid groaning]

[Chris] ...beat, torture, really mistreat the children.

And he was able to associate those two things in his mind,

that the women that he met on the street,

they were the bad ones.

And that's the way he treated them.

From the moment he met them until their bodies were found,

they didn't matter.

[Donnie] Detectives press Sowell.

They believe he might have even more victims.

[Anthony speaking]

[Melvin] Emotionally, I'm...

I'm a little more extreme on this case, particularly.

[Anthony speaking]

[Melvin] Mm. Mm. Mm.

[Melvin speaking]

So yeah, I'm a little emotional.

But I'm also a detective.

I need to know before I leave here

that we have all the victims,

because there could be possibly more.

[Melvin] I looked into the eyes of Anthony Sowell

and I saw

a person who did not care

about anyone but himself.

[Lemmy speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

[Melvin speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

[Anthony speaking]

[Donnie] Anthony Sowell

never admits to having more victims.

What still haunts me about this case?

That there's more bodies.

I truly believe there are more bodies out there

that are attached to Anthony Sowell.

How do you have that much hate

to do that to people,

and just keep doing it?

To me, that is the,

like, epitome of all evil.

[woman] What did you have to kill them for?

I didn't understand it.

I still don't understand it.

[Donnie] Despite a staggering amount of evidence against him,

Anthony Sowell pleads not guilty

and goes to trial.

[reporter] Sowell faces 85 criminal counts

in connection with attacks on women.

[Lemmy] I was there for the whole duration of the trial.

I think the strongest piece of evidence

are the testimonies from the females who got away.

I was the prosecution's star witness in the trial.

She got on that stand,

and I knew what was coming,

and I just felt like the pressure

in that courtroom was just turned up to 100.

[Vanessa] I wouldn't have had problems with testifying,

but it was about me, too.

I'm still alive, dealing with this every day.

Every day.

[woman gasps]

[Lori] I answer questions.

Anthony was over there smiling, giggling,

and everything.

He was acting like nothing ever happened.

I didn't want to be there.

I didn't want to see him ever in my life again.

[judge] "We, the jury, being duly impaneled and sworn...

[Donnie] On July 22nd, 2011,

the jury reaches a verdict.

Guilty of all 11 murders.

[Chris] Deputies came in and handcuffed him,

and as he was being lead out of the courtroom, he put

his hands up, handcuffed,

in a show of defiance for the cameras

as he's being lead out of the courtroom.

I always wondered what was going on in his mind when he did that.

If he was saying, like,

congratulations, you got your pound of flesh,

but look at all the things that I was able to accomplish beforehand.

You could just tell

there was a vacuum there where,

uh, a soul would normally be,

where his empathy for other people would normally be.

"We therefore unanimously find that the sentence of death

should be imposed upon the defendant, Anthony Sowell."

[crowd clapping]

[Lynette] Today my sister can rest in peace now.

That's all. She can rest in peace,

along with all the other ladies.

[Doniesha crying] It feels good.

It feels really good.

[Lori] I really don't want to say this out,

but Anthony needed the death penalty after what he did,

because them 11 women didn't deserve that.

[Mark] The house was eventually torn down.

It's now a memorial to the victims.

But I don't think Anthony Sowell

will ever disappear in Cleveland.

I still think the lore

of a serial killer in this quiet,

working-class neighborhood won't ever go away.

I still think

his crimes will haunt that corner for eternity.

To me, he turned into a monster,

didn't care about nothing but his self.

Nobody.

He wanted what he wanted.

And he wanted to hunt, and he got it.

[Lemmy] What is so frightening about this case is

that he embedded himself

within the community,

and they would never believe

that he would be the culprit.

Never.

[Katie] He is scary because nothing was gonna stop him.

He was gonna continue targeting women.

He was going to continue acting out

exactly as he did.

It's how he got off sexually.

It's how he coped with his childhood trauma.

Without any intervention,

it would have continued onward.

[Vanessa] Is it justice or is it just us?

And I think it's just us,

'cause he got away with it.

They let him slip through the crack, you know?

He was allowed to kill women.

Anthony Sowell was never executed.

His case was under appeal until 2021,

when he died in prison at the age of 61.

But the shocking revelations of his case

still resonate throughout the city.

If disappearances hadn't been ignored,

if survivors' accounts hadn't been shrugged off,

lives could have been saved.

Today, there is a Garden of Eleven Angels on Imperial Avenue,

where The Cleveland Strangler's house of horrors once stood.

It's a tribute to the memory

of the 11 women Sowell murdered.

But it also serves as a painful reminder

of a damaged man

who preyed on the city's most vulnerable women,

in a system that failed to protect them from a monster.

I'm Donnie Wahlberg.

Thanks for watching. Good night.

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