Anthony Sowell, image courtesy of Cleveland Police Dept.

Cleveland, Ohio -The identification of  Leshanda Long means only one victim of the Cleveland serial killer remains nameless.  Long was 25, making her the youngest victim found at the home of suspected murder Anthony Sowell.   She is also the only one without a criminal past.

But authorities have not stopped their search for bodies. They moved it next door.  On Wednesday, trucks hauled trash and weeds from 12201 Imperial Ave., a forlorn two-flat that has been vacant for more than a year.

The serial murders have heaped insult upon a neighborhood that long been injured.

Mount Pleasant is riddled with abandoned homes and foreclosures, the detritus of predatory lending and foreclosures. The crisis began in 2006. The nation noticed in June 2007, when presidential candidate John Edwards walked through Mount Pleasant streets during his national poverty tour.

The neighborhood has a 25 percent foreclosure rate, according to cleveland.blockshopper.com. On Imperial Avenue, 17 percent of the houses were vacant when the census was taken almost a decade ago. With that rate of deterioration, it’s stunning to realize that a generation ago, African Americans boasted about living on Imperial Avenue.

The first African Americans lived in Mount Pleasant in 1893,when laborers received property instead of wages. By 1907, more than 100 Black  families lived alongside Germans, Jews, Czechs, Russians and Italians.

African-American newspapers promoted the community as a suburban alternative to Cleveland’s crowded neighborhoods. A Mount Pleasant address was coveted because it implied home ownership.

But Imperial Avenue had its own cachet. Football great Jim Brown lived on the street. So did teachers, doctors and other professionals. Working class families lived on Imperial as well, but values mattered more than salary.The street was solidly middle class.

Amir El Hajj Khalid Samad, a local anti-gang activist, had family on the block. He recalled a cohesive, tightly knit community that touted the athletic prowess of its youth. Players with skills flocked to Lafayette Elementary School.

“On any given day, you’d go to Lafayette and the playground was packed,” Samad told trueslant.com. “Lafayette was a proving ground.”

The school has been empty for 14 years, and is slated for demolition. On Nov. 9, law enforcement officials led cadaver-hunting dogs through the dank and trash-filled building. The building is only two blocks from Anthony Sowell’s home, but he didn’t experience the nurturing environment of the avenue. He grew up seven miles away, in the suburb of East Cleveland.

The facts of  Sowell’s past have been gleaned from an evaluation he underwent before  his release from prison.

Anthony Sowell as an eighth-grader

According to the report, Sowell was an infant when his father left his mother. Although he played with other children, he was bullied by them, too. He left high school and joined the Marines in 1978, nine months before a woman had his child.

He married in 1981 and divorced in 1985. In 1987, he was convicted on domestic violence, and in 1990 of attempted rape. That crime was brutal. He lured an acquaintance into his car. Once he got her home, he tied her up, gagged her,and assaulted her.

Sowell served 15 years for the crime. In prison, though, he didn’t mention his offense.

“A lot of the guys don’t talk about what they’re in there for,” former inmate Freddy B told trueslant.com. “‘Cause if you find out something about somebody, you can give that information to the prosecutor and …you’re going to try to strike a deal so you can get out. That’s why they clam up and don’t tell nobody nothing.

Freddy B did time with Sowell at Grafton Correctional Institution,about 30 miles southwest of Cleveland. The two came in contact constantly, Freddy B told trueslant.com. He remembered Sowell had one idiosyncracy.

“Sowell stood out because of the way he wanted you to pronounce his name. He wanted it pronounced ” ‘So Well,’ ” Freddy B said.

But mispronouncing his name didn’t spark a confrontation – unless the violator was a female correctional officer.

“A lot of people, he knew who he could go off on… And those lady (correctional officers) was pretty much who he went off on when they pronounced his name wrong,” Freddy B said. “If it was one of us, he was like ‘Man, it’s “So Well.’ ”

Otherwise, Sowell was so unremarkable, Freddy B didn’t make the connection between the man in the news and “So Well.” The flash of recognition came when Freddy B returned to Grafton to lead a faith-based support group. A female correctional officer who’d had a tussle with “So Well” brought up the killings.

“She said, ‘Did you see So Well?’  I’d have never thought it was him until she brought it to my attention, ” Freddy B told trueslant.com. “He looked kind of drawn in and totally different. He looked old on TV.”

“(In prison) He wasn’t that bad of a guy. It wasn’t like he presented any kind of threat to anybody,” Freddy B said. “To see what they found out about him, and to have been around him in prison, it’s two totally different individuals.”

more to come
(read part 1)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This is the first of a  multi-part post on Anthony Sowell, who has been charged with of strangling at least five women in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cleveland, Ohio – Eleven women entered the modest duplex at 12205 Imperial Ave., and never left.  Now we know who two more are. The bodies of Janice Webb, 49, and Kim Yvette Smith, 44, were identified on Monday.

What we know of them mirrors what we know of the other seven victims. The victims were African American women, and most were in their 40s. They had criminal records for theft and drug possession.  Several frequented Mount Pleasant, the neighborhood where the house is located.

How they died isn’t in dispute; authorities say all the victims were strangled. Seven of the bodies still had ligatures around their necks. And soon we will know “when” the women died, although some have been missing for more than a year.

Anthony Sowell, image courtesy of Cleveland Police Dept.

The questions that remain center on Anthony Sowell, who lived in the duplex on Cleveland’s southeast side.  He sits in jail, under a $5 million bond, and has been indicted for rape.

Enough information is known to answer the what, when and where of his life. Sowell, 50, was convicted of attempted rape in 1989 and served 15 years. He grew up in the suburb of  East Cleveland, and committed his crime there. The city’s police have reopened three murder cases that are similar to the Cleveland crimes.

He spent time in the military and was stationed in North Carolina and California. Authorities in both places are taking a second look at unsolved crimes committed when Sowell lived in the vicinity.

But the dry facts don’t begin to explain who he is, especially to those acquainted with him. They, like many, are trying to square what they know about Sowell with the events swirling around him.

“I know that (guy),” community activist Amir El Hajj Khalid A. Samad told trueslant.com.  Anger and disgust seemed to rise from his gut and push words from his mouth. “I know that (guy). ”

Samad is the executive director of  Peace in the Hood, a Cleveland anti-crime and gang-prevention organization. He has deep personal ties to Imperial Avenue.  Family members lived on the street, so he often visited when he was a youngster, he said. As an officer in the youth gang unit of Cleveland Municipal School District, he fought the cliques that helped bring down a former prosperous, middle- and working-class community in southeast Cleveland.

According to Samad,  Sowell appeared in the neighborhood in 2005.  It wasn’t his neighborhood;  he’d grown up in East Cleveland, a suburb about 5 miles northeast of  Mount Pleasant. But his stepmother owned the house, and he came there after getting out of prison.

Although he worked off and on, Sowell was  known for breaking into houses and stripping them of  copper and siding, Samad said.

And the man was known to have a drug problem. “There were people who knew what he was about, that he was using the house to get high,” Samad said.

Still, the traffic into the house wasn’t constant, Samad told trueslant.com. And he pointed out that the corner of  123rd and Imperial, just feet from  Sowell’s home, was  in the heart of a lively drug market.

“(123rd street) was a known street for drug activity,” Samad said. “The whole street was just bad.”

Dwight Sutherland agreed.

He grew up on Imperial Ave., across the street from the Sowell’s home. He didn’t know the family, but he knows the neighborhood. And he knows there’s lots going on.

“People were up day and night,” he told trueslant. “Drugs is a problem in the area. It wasn’t a quiet community.”

Perhaps, then, it was no wonder that Sowell’s activities didn’t raise suspicion. The neighbors had him pegged: he was a scrapper who sold metal when he found it, however he found. He liked to drink and he liked to get high.

That was his front, the face Sowell wore when he greeted his public. So sociologist and criminologist James Chriss is not surprised that neighbors had no idea something was terribly amiss at the house.

Chriss, a professor at Cleveland State University, believes Sowell was doing what everyone does: he was putting his best foot forward.

“Through socialization, we learn to present a respectable front: how to be courteous, to stay out of trouble,” Chriss, a professor at Cleveland State University, told trueslant.com

That strategy works well for folks who have something to hide, because people judge by outward appearances. Chriss even thinks the appearance of the house blinded onlookers to the possibility of wrongdoing there.

“The house is well-kept,” he pointed out. “You can do all sorts of stuff behind closed doors. ”

-more to come-

(read part 2)

(read part 3)

When I called Inez Fortson to request an interview, she said “Yes, if you print what I say.”  I offered to tape her, and she agreed.

Her beef ?  The media claimed she hadn’t searched for her daughter Telacia when she went missing last spring.

Telacia’s remains were found in a home on Cleveland’s southeast side. The small two-flat has been dubbed “The House of Horror” because 11 remains were discovered inside and on the grounds.  Police arrested the resident, Anthony Sowell, and charged him with five counts of aggravated murder.

“Did-they-or-didn’t-they” controversies have been swirling around the case. Did families report their loved ones’ disappearances to the police? Did the police ignore the women because of their backgrounds and arrest records? Inez Fortson gazes into the camera and addresses those questions. The answers aren’t what you’d expect.

The first clue about the Cleveland serial killings  wafted through the neighborhood where the remains of 11 women have been found. It was a powerful odor that eluded attempts to find its source.

The smell wasn’t constant, but it was always  unbearable.  Everyone wanted to know the source. They started  pointing fingers at Renee Cash and her family’s business, Ray’s Sausage.

Neighborhood scuttlebutt said company was fouling the air.  Cash knew they were wrong. But she didn’t argue with the health inspectors who came by every day.

“(The inspectors) smelled it, too,” Cash said when I interviewed her. “They thought it was our sewers.” So the business had the sewers fixed.  That didn’t work, because problem wasn’t in the pipes.

It was in the house next door.

From her second-story of her business, Renee Cash watched police uncover corpses at the house next door.

“We watched police uncover the eighth body right there,” Cash told me while pointing out the second-floor window. The backyard next door had clearly been overturned, as if a conscientious homeowner had cleaned up the yard for winter.

What the neighbors smelled depended on where they lived, and where the bodies were stashed.

Police found a skull and 10 skeletal remains.  Five of the remains were in the yard, and six were in the house, Powell Caesar, the spokesman for the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s office, told me. “What (the Cashes) was smelling was coming from a crawl space in the house.” He explained that the bodies in the house decomposed more quickly because they were in open air.  The subterranean corpses decayed more slowly.

The combination gagged the neighbors. They complained to their council member, Zack Reed, who said he notified the health department.

Two years, and 11 lives later, questions about the odor have stopped.  A new question has come up: why did it take so long to realize so many were being killed?

Bernadette Jackson adds her daughter's picture to a board advertising missing persons. Jackson's daughter, Fasania, went missing on Oct. 1.

Bernadette Dawn Jackson hugs her brown paper bag as if it were her child. In a way, it is.  The bag is filled with fliers about her daughter, Fasania.

The girl disappeared more than three weeks ago. It wasn’t the first time, and like always,  Jackson filed a missing person report.

But that was before police found 11 decomposed remains in a modest, white two-flat in Cleveland. That was before the resident, Anthony Sowell,  was charged with five counts of aggravated murder. That was before the corner of Imperial Ave. and 123rd St. became clearing house for folks looking for missing loved ones.

So today, a month after she last saw Fasania, Jackson stands on the spectators’ side of police tape. She pulls the bag to her chest, and wonders whether to add her daughter’s picture to the wall of the missing.

“It makes me worried,” she tells me. Am I putting my daughter’s life in danger?”

“Will someone see her poster and say, ‘we’ve got this child’…” her words trail off a bit. She looks at the house. “Could she be in there?”

Jackson said her daughter is bipolar and is on medication. The girl, now 18, has been victimized before. “A man 27 years old had sex with my daughter, ” Jackson said.

The wind picks up and the leaves swirl. Spectators come and go, gazing at the fliers stapled to piece of white poster board. There’s Nancy Cobbs, missing since April. Her family and friends were among the first ones to show up on the corner because Cobbs was last seen near the house. There’s Michelle Mason, who lived about 10 blocks away. Her family, like Cobbs’, plastered the neighborhood with photos begging for information.

Finally, Jackson she makes up her mind. She runs to get tape from the corner store. When she returns,  she puts Fasania’s picture  right underneath the flier for Georgina “Gina” DeJesus.

DeJesus was 14 when she disappeared in 2004.

Please share tips and information on missing persons with Cleveland CRIME STOPPERS 24-hour hotline at 216.252.7463