Anthony Sowell Victims

In late October 2009, Cleveland police went to a house at 12205 Imperial Avenue on the city's east side to serve a warrant connected to a rape complaint. Inside the home of Anthony Sowell, a 50-year-old former U.S. Marine and registered sex offender, officers discovered the decomposing remains of two women. Over the following days the search of the property expanded, and by early November investigators had recovered the remains of eleven women in all, buried in shallow graves in the yard and basement, hidden in crawl spaces, and in one case a skull found in a bucket. The case drew national attention and Sowell became known as the 'Cleveland Strangler.'

All eleven victims were African-American women, most of them mothers, who had disappeared between 2007 and 2009. They were Crystal Dozier, Tishana Culver, Leshanda Long, Michelle Mason, Tonia Carmichael, Kim Yvette Smith, Amelda Hunter, Nancy Cobbs, Telacia Fortson, Janice Webb, and Diane Turner. Most were middle-aged; the youngest, Leshanda Long, was 25. Many struggled with addiction or lived on the margins, and several had not been reported missing at all. Coroners determined that most had been strangled.

The discoveries prompted sharp criticism about missed warnings and neglected victims. Neighbors had for years complained of a foul odor around the house, which was often attributed to a nearby sausage plant. Sowell had served roughly 15 years in prison for a 1990 attempted-rape conviction and was on the sex-offender registry after his 2005 release, yet the disappearances of the women drew little sustained investigation. Relatives of several victims later said police were slow to take reports seriously; the family of Crystal Dozier said they were left to search hospitals and post fliers on their own. Advocates and commentators argued that the victims' race, poverty, and struggles caused their vanishings to be overlooked, though such critiques are attributed to family members and community groups rather than established as official findings.

Sowell was arrested on October 31, 2009, about a mile from his home after a tip to police. His trial began in June 2011. On July 22, 2011, a Cuyahoga County jury convicted him of aggravated murder and dozens of related counts including kidnapping, rape, and abuse of a corpse. The jury recommended a death sentence, and on August 12, 2011, the judge formally sentenced Sowell to death. The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed his convictions and death sentence in December 2016, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in 2017.

Anthony Sowell died on February 8, 2021, at age 61, at a prison medical facility in Columbus, Ohio, after an unspecified terminal illness unrelated to COVID-19; he had been moved to end-of-life care weeks earlier. His Imperial Avenue house was demolished by the city in December 2011, and a memorial known as the 'Garden of 11 Angels' was later established at the site to honor the victims, dedicated in November 2021. The convictions stand as a matter of record, and the case remains widely cited in discussions of how the disappearances of marginalized women can go uninvestigated.