The Cleveland Strangler: 11 Victims, Trial, and Aftermath

The Cleveland Strangler was Anthony Sowell, a registered sex offender who murdered 11 women at his home on Imperial Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, between 2007 and 2009. He lured victims struggling with addiction to the house with promises of drugs, sexually assaulted them, and strangled them. Police found the remains in late October and early November 2009 after a survivor reported being raped. A Cuyahoga County jury convicted Sowell on 11 counts of aggravated murder in 2011 and recommended the death penalty on every count. He died of a terminal illness in an Ohio prison hospital on February 8, 2021, at age 61.¹

Who Anthony Sowell Was

Sowell was born on August 19, 1959, and raised in East Cleveland. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in January 1978 and served eight years before his discharge in January 1985.²

On July 28, 1989, a woman reported that Sowell had taken her to his home on Page Avenue in Cleveland, where he bound, gagged, and raped her. He pleaded guilty to attempted rape and was sentenced in September 1990 to five to 15 years in prison. He served the full 15 years and was released as a registered sex offender.²³ Throughout his incarceration, he refused to take responsibility for the assault.⁴

The Murders on Imperial Avenue

After release, Sowell settled at 12205 Imperial Avenue in Cleveland’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Between June 2007 and September 2009, he killed 11 women there.⁵ He targeted women in the neighborhood who struggled with addiction, drawing them in with the offer of drugs.⁶

Autopsies determined that seven victims died by ligature strangulation, one by manual strangulation, and three by homicidal violence of an undetermined type. Many were found nude or partially nude, with bindings on their wrists or ankles.⁶ During police interrogations, Sowell said he heard a “voice” telling him to rape “bad” women, described “blacking out” and dreaming of choking women, and called himself “the punisher.”⁷

The 11 women whose remains were recovered from the property, all identified by DNA analysis, were Crystal Dozier, Tishana Culver, Leshanda Long, Michelle Mason, Tonia Carmichael, Nancy Cobbs, Amelda Hunter, Telacia Fortson, Janice Webb, Kim Yvette Smith, and Diane Turner.⁶ The disappearances had not been investigated by police prior to the 2009 discovery.⁸

Five women survived encounters with Sowell and later testified at trial: Vanessa Gay, Gladys Wade, Tanja Doss, Latundra Billups, and Shawn Morris. Gay testified she saw what looked like a “headless body” in the house that was “taped up.” Billups was strangled with an extension cord until she blacked out, then convinced Sowell to let her go. Morris escaped by jumping from a third-floor window and was seriously injured; Sowell told responders he was her husband and rode with her to the hospital.⁶

How the Bodies Were Discovered

Billups’s September 2009 report to Cleveland police that Sowell had raped and strangled her led detectives to obtain a search warrant.⁹ On October 28, 2009, Cleveland police secured warrants to arrest Sowell and to search 12205 Imperial Avenue. Officers executing the warrant the next evening found the decomposed bodies of Diane Turner and Telacia Fortson in a third-floor room.⁶

Police returned on October 30 with a second warrant, cadaver dogs, and coroner personnel. They found bodies in the basement, on the third floor, and in a shallow grave in the backyard. On November 3, a backhoe uncovered four more bodies on the property. Sowell was not home when officers first arrived. He was arrested on October 31, 2009, on Mount Auburn Avenue after a member of the public recognized him from news broadcasts.⁶

Why He Wasn’t Caught Sooner

Multiple failures kept Sowell free while he continued killing.

The December 2008 Arrest and Release

On December 8, 2008, Gladys Wade told Cleveland police that Sowell had punched, choked, and tried to rip off her clothes. She flagged down a passing cruiser and was bleeding from the head at the station. Officers at Sowell’s house noted blood in the hallway, on the steps, and on a tissue in the driveway.¹⁰⁹

Sowell was released two days later without charges. Cleveland Prosecutor Victor Perez said a detective deemed Wade “not credible” and prosecutors concluded there was “insufficient evidence.”⁹¹¹¹² Police also failed to check whether Sowell was a registered sex offender or had recently been released from prison. After his release, Sowell murdered at least two more women, Kim Smith and Crystal Dozier.¹⁰

Monitoring Gaps and Untested Rape Kits

Sowell was required to check in with law enforcement as a registered sex offender, and authorities conducted home visits (the most recent before his arrest was September 22, 2009). Officers lacked authority to enter his home, however, because he was not on parole or probation.³ Ohio law at the time did not require authorities to notify Sowell’s neighbors of his status because he had registered before the state updated its notification rules in 2008.¹³

Sowell’s DNA was not in the state database despite his prior felony conviction, and Ohio had a backlog of thousands of untested rape kits. When one of those kits was linked to Sowell in 2009, he had already killed at least four more women.¹⁴¹¹ Teresa Stafford, program director at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, later said the victims were “Black, African American females, some who had a past that people questioned,” and asked whether society responds differently “due to the identities that people carry.”

The Smell That Was Blamed on a Sausage Shop

For years, a foul odor hung over Imperial Avenue. Neighbors and local employees attributed it to Ray’s Sausage, a pork processor at the corner of East 123rd Street and Imperial Avenue whose second-floor windows sat about six feet from Sowell’s house. Employees had kept those windows closed since at least 2006. Owner Renee Cash consistently denied the smell came from her business and noted that state inspectors regularly found no violations.¹⁵

Local councilman Zack Reed said his office had contacted the public health department about the smell roughly two and a half years before the bodies were found. “I know darned well that our health department should have been able to tell the difference between the smell of a dead body and the smell of dead meat,” Reed said.¹⁶ Cleveland Health Director Matt Carroll stated that the department had received no recent complaints about foul odors at the address.¹⁵

Trial, Conviction, and Death Sentence

A Cuyahoga County grand jury returned an 85-count indictment against Sowell that included 11 counts of aggravated murder with death-penalty specifications, along with counts of kidnapping, rape, attempted murder, abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence, felonious assault, and aggravated robbery. The case was tried in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas before Judge Dick Ambrose.⁶¹⁷

Sowell pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Prosecutors built the case on testimony from the five surviving victims and forensic evidence establishing what they called a “behavioral fingerprint.” The defense presented penalty-phase testimony about Sowell’s history of childhood physical and sexual abuse, his Marine service, and a 2007 heart attack after which he claimed to have begun hearing voices. Prosecutors countered by pointing to a 1990 personality test in which Sowell wrote, “My mother gave me all a child could want.”¹⁷⁴

On July 22, 2011, the jury convicted Sowell on all counts except one count of aggravated robbery. The trial court acquitted him on three counts related to Leshanda Long, whose remains consisted only of a skull.⁶ On August 10, 2011, the jury unanimously recommended death for each of the 11 aggravated murder counts, and Judge Ambrose accepted the recommendation.¹⁷

Appeals and Death in Prison

Sowell appealed as a matter of right to the Supreme Court of Ohio. On December 8, 2016, the court affirmed all convictions and all 11 death sentences in a 5-2 decision. Justice Terrence O’Donnell wrote the majority opinion, concluding that while the trial court had erred in closing a suppression hearing without journalizing required findings, the error did not warrant a new trial given the “overwhelming independent evidence of guilt.”⁷ A later post-conviction appeal reached the Ohio Supreme Court, which declined jurisdiction on November 10, 2020.¹⁸

Sowell was held on death row at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. On January 21, 2021, he was transferred to end-of-life care at Franklin Medical Center, a prison hospital in Columbus. He died there on February 8, 2021, at 3:27 p.m., at age 61. Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said the terminal illness was not related to COVID-19 but declined to name the specific diagnosis.¹

Civil Settlement and Reforms

Families of six victims (Nancy Cobbs, Telacia Fortson, Amelda Hunter, Leshanda Long, Diane Turner, and Janice Webb) sued the City of Cleveland, Detective Georgia Hussein, Assistant City Prosecutor Loretta Coyne, and other officers and officials, alleging the failure to prosecute Sowell after Gladys Wade’s 2008 report enabled the later murders. The case was initially dismissed in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, then partially revived on appeal, and ultimately settled for $1 million divided among the six families plus attorneys’ fees.¹⁰¹⁹

The case also drove policy changes in Ohio. In 2014, the state required all law enforcement agencies to submit rape kits to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation within 30 days. Subsequent legislation eliminated the statute of limitations on rape and made it illegal for police departments to fail to send kits to state labs.¹⁴ A joint task force involving the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office tested more than 13,000 previously backlogged kits. The state prison system and Cuyahoga County also changed procedures to ensure DNA is collected from every person arrested on a felony charge and submitted to the state database.¹¹

A 2010 mayoral commission issued more than 26 recommendations for Cleveland’s sex crimes and missing persons units, including consolidating cases involving the same suspect under a single detective rather than splitting them across investigators.¹¹ State Senator Shirley Smith introduced legislation to require county sheriffs to retroactively identify and notify communities about sex offenders whose presence had not been announced under older registration rules.¹³

The Garden of 11 Angels

The house at 12205 Imperial Avenue was demolished in 2011.²⁰²¹

Eight formerly blighted residential parcels were turned into the Garden of 11 Angels, which opened on November 6, 2021, with the unveiling of a black granite monument inscribed with the names of all 11 victims and an image of an angel.⁵ A walkway lined with 11 trees leads to the circular monument, which also bears a poem by Maya Angelou.²¹

1
Cleveland.com. Cleveland Serial Killer Anthony Sowell Dies of Terminal Illness in Prison Hospital
2
Cleveland.com. Anthony Sowell Timeline
3
Police1. Officers Find Six Bodies in Home of Ohio Sex Offender
4
Cleveland.com. Prosecutors Cast Doubt on Serial Killer Anthony Sowell’s Story of Childhood Trauma
5
Cleveland19. Ribbon Cutting Ceremony for Garden of 11 Angels Memorial
6
Supreme Court of Ohio. State v. Sowell, 2016-Ohio-8025
7
Court News Ohio. State v. Sowell
8
Cleveland.com. In New Documentary, Victims and Survivors of Anthony Sowell
9
Cleveland.com. Sowell’s Arrest, Release in 2008
10
Courthouse News Service. Police Negligence in Cleveland Blamed for Serial Killing Spree
11
Cleveland.com. Cleveland Serial Killer Anthony Sowell’s Brutal Murders Were Flashpoint for City
12
Cleveland.com. Cleveland Detective Explains Investigation
13
ABC News. Sowell Case Prompts Sex Offender Notification Bill
14
WKYC. Anthony Sowell: Lessons Learned
15
Cleveland.com. Neighbors Wonder How Stench of Death Went Undetected
16
Global News. Neighbours of Alleged U.S. Serial Killer Smelled Something Foul
17
CNN. Ohio Jury Recommends Death for Serial Killer Sowell
18
Supreme Court of Ohio. State of Ohio v. Anthony E. Sowell, Case No. 2020-0798
19
Criminal Legal News. $1 Million Settlement in Cleveland for Six Rape-Murder Victims’ Families
20
Western Reserve Land Conservancy. Healing and Closure Come for Imperial Ave. Residents
21
The Land CLE. Imperial Avenue Rises Above Trauma With Garden of 11 Angels Memorial