Anthony Sowell: The Imperial Avenue House, the Women Police Didn't Believe, and 11 Death Sentences

For two years, the neighborhood around Imperial Avenue and East 123rd Street in Cleveland's Mount Pleasant section smelled like something had died. Residents complained to the city. Inspectors came and blamed Ray's Sausage Company, the family plant on the corner, whose owners replaced grease traps, a sewer line, and a ventilation system trying to make it stop. It did not stop, because the source was not the sausage plant. It was the house next door, at 12205 Imperial Avenue, where Anthony Sowell lived on the third floor, and where, between May 2007 and September 2009, eleven women died.

This file is built from the trial record, the Ohio Supreme Court's 2016 opinion affirming his death sentences, the city's own review of what its police missed, and the settlements the city eventually paid. The video this file accompanies draws on surveillance material and a recorded interview; where a claim in that footage cannot be verified against the record, this file says so rather than repeat it.

The man on the third floor

Sowell was born in East Cleveland in 1959, served in the Marine Corps from 1978 to 1985, and in 1989 bound, gagged, and choked a pregnant woman at his home. He pleaded guilty to attempted rape in 1990 and served 15 years, released in 2005 as a registered sex offender. He found work through a re-entry program, suffered a heart attack in 2007, left his job that July, and settled into the Imperial Avenue house, where his stepmother occupied the lower floors until her death in 2009 and he occupied the top.

The first woman to disappear was Crystal Dozier, 38, in May 2007. Over the following 28 months, ten more women vanished from the same few blocks. Most were women in their 30s and 40s with histories of addiction, which prosecutors and the city's later commission both identified as the reason their disappearances drew so little attention.

The victims

Name	Age	Last seen	Where found
Crystal Dozier	38	May 17, 2007	Backyard
Tishana Culver	31	June 2008	Third-floor crawlspace
Leshanda Long	25	August 2008	Skull, in a bucket, basement
Michelle Mason	45	October 8, 2008	Backyard
Tonia Carmichael	53	November 10, 2008	Backyard, shallow grave
Kim Yvette Smith	44	January 17, 2009	Backyard
Amelda "Amy" Hunter	47	April 2009	Backyard
Nancy Cobbs	45	April 24, 2009	Third floor, plastic bag
Telacia Fortson	33	June 3, 2009	Third-floor room
Janice Webb	48	June 2009	Basement, under the stairs
Diane Turner	48	Late September 2009	Third-floor room

Seven died of ligature strangulation and one of manual strangulation; for three, the medical examiner could determine only "homicidal violence" of an undetermined kind. Their ages vary slightly across sources; the figures above follow the trial record and contemporaneous reporting.

The women who got out

The case was broken by survivors, and its worst failure was a survivor who was not believed.

On December 8, 2008, Gladys Wade declined a drink Sowell offered, was dragged toward the house, choked unconscious and punched, and told, in her account at trial, that she could scream all she wanted because she was going to die. She escaped and flagged down a police cruiser. Officers found blood on a tissue in the driveway and scratches on Sowell's face. He was arrested, held for two days, and released. The detective on the case told an assistant city prosecutor she believed Sowell's version over Wade's, and the report was marked "unfounded." The Ohio Supreme Court's opinion describes it more narrowly: the arresting officer had mislabeled the offense on the incident report. Six of the eleven victims disappeared after that release.

Three more women survived encounters on the third floor in 2008 and 2009. Vanessa Gay was raped there in September 2008 and saw what appeared to be a headless body wrapped in tape. Tanja Doss was choked in April 2009 and let go the next morning. On September 22, 2009, the same day county deputies came by to verify Sowell's sex-offender registration address, Latundra Billups was raped twice and strangled with an extension cord until she lost consciousness. She reported it that day.

On October 20, 2009, Shawn Morris went out a third-floor window, naked, and fell. Neighbors called 911. Ray's Sausage's security camera recorded the fall. Sowell told responders it was an accident; Morris declined to speak to police, and no charges were filed. Nine days later the house was searched.

October 29 to November 3, 2009

Detectives obtained arrest and search warrants on October 28. On the evening of October 29, a SWAT team executed the search. Sowell was not home. On the third floor they found the bodies of Diane Turner and Telacia Fortson. On October 30 they found Janice Webb in the basement and Nancy Cobbs and Tishana Culver upstairs, and a cadaver dog located Tonia Carmichael in the yard. On October 31, a citizen recognized Sowell walking on Mount Auburn Avenue and called police; he was arrested and interrogated for roughly twelve hours by Detective Melvin Smith and Lieutenant Michael Baumiller. On November 3, a backhoe search of the yard turned up Michelle Mason, Kim Smith, Amelda Hunter, and Crystal Dozier, and Leshanda Long's skull was found in a red bucket in the basement. The last identification, Turner's, came on December 4.

The 85-count indictment was returned on December 1, 2009.

The trial

State v. Sowell, Cuyahoga County Common Pleas case CR-09-530885, was tried before Judge Dick Ambrose, a former Cleveland Browns linebacker. Jury selection began June 6, 2011, and testimony on June 27. Five survivors testified: Gay, Wade, Doss, Billups, and Morris. Sowell's former girlfriend, Lori Frazier, testified that he often bled, grew withdrawn, and that she had blamed the smell first on his stepmother and then on the sausage plant.

On July 22, 2011, the jury convicted Sowell of 11 counts of aggravated murder, each with death specifications, along with kidnapping, rape, attempted rape, attempted murder, abuse of a corpse, and tampering. He was acquitted of a single robbery count. The jury recommended death on August 10, and on August 12, 2011, Judge Ambrose imposed eleven death sentences.

The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed on December 8, 2016, in a 5-2 decision; the central appellate issue was the closing of a suppression hearing and part of jury selection to the public. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review in 2017, the Eighth District rejected his post-conviction petition in 2020, and a federal habeas petition was pending when he died. Our explainer on what actually happens at an appeal hearing covers why a capital case takes a decade to move through those stages.

What the city admitted

Mayor Frank Jackson appointed a three-member commission after the arrests. Its report, issued March 31, 2010, made 26 recommendations, including a dedicated missing-persons unit, the elimination of any waiting period for missing-persons reports, a public missing-persons website, and relocation of the sex-crimes unit. The city accepted all of them.

The families of six victims sued in December 2010. After years of litigation over which officials could be held liable, the city paid $1 million in September 2018, split among the families of Cobbs, Fortson, Hunter, Long, Turner, and Webb. In July 2019 the city settled with two survivors: Billups for $260,000 and Wade for $40,000.

Ray's Sausage, which had spent by various accounts $30,000 to more than $80,000 chasing a smell that was never theirs, received a promise of relocation help from the mayor's office in 2009 that never materialized. The family business is still on the corner.

After

Sowell was scheduled for execution on October 29, 2012, the third anniversary of the search; the date was stayed, reset for November 2020, and stayed again pending federal review. He was moved to an end-of-life unit at the Franklin Medical Center in Columbus in January 2021 and died there on February 8, 2021, at 61, of a terminal illness the state never identified beyond confirming it was not COVID-19.

The house was demolished on December 6, 2011. The lot and seven neighboring parcels became the Garden of 11 Angels, dedicated on November 6, 2021, with a twelve-foot black granite monument carrying the victims' names and lines from Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise."

Why this case file matters

Serial-murder cases are usually told as detective stories. This one is a records story. The women who disappeared were reported missing and the reports went nowhere. A survivor named the house in December 2008 and the case was marked unfounded. A business next door spent years and tens of thousands of dollars fixing a problem it did not have because the people whose job it was to find the source did not look. Everything that finally worked, Billups's report, the warrant, the citizen who recognized Sowell on the street, was available two years and six women earlier. For how bodycam-era cases differ, and why first reports are weighted the way they are now, see our guide to how to read body cam footage.

Sources & records

• State v. Sowell, 2016-Ohio-8025 (Ohio Supreme Court, Dec. 8, 2016)
• Court News Ohio: summary of the Sowell affirmance
• CBS News: "Missed Opportunities in Sowell Case" (March 2010)
• NBC News/AP: the December 2008 arrest and release
• Cleveland 19: investigation timeline
• WKYC: $1 million settlement with six families (Sept. 2018)
• WCBE: survivor settlements (July 2019)
• AP: Sowell dies in prison (Feb. 2021)
• Cleveland 19: Garden of 11 Angels dedication (Nov. 2021)
• Cleveland Scene: "The Imperial 11" (Oct. 2010)

Case status as of this writing: Anthony Sowell was convicted July 22, 2011, of 11 counts of aggravated murder and related offenses, sentenced to death August 12, 2011, and died in state custody February 8, 2021, before any execution; his convictions were affirmed by the Ohio Supreme Court in 2016. This article is based on the trial record, appellate opinions, the 2010 mayoral commission report, settlement records, and contemporaneous reporting. Featured image: the Cuyahoga County Justice Center in downtown Cleveland, where the trial was held, via Wikimedia Commons; photographer and license credited below the image.