Body count reaches 10 at Cleveland house

CLEVELAND (AP) — Remains of four more people were unearthed from the backyard of a rapist’s home Tuesday, raising to 10 the number of bodies found in and near the house, as police also searched boarded-up homes in the neighborhood where residents complained for years of a stench that one even said “smelled like a dead body.”

Anthony Sowell, 50, a registered sex offender who lives in the home, was charged Tuesday with five counts of aggravated murder.

“It appears that this man had an insatiable appetite that he had to fill,” police Chief Michael McGrath said.

He said the four bodies were found buried in the backyard of the home, and a skull was found in a bucket in the basement.

Authorities do not know whether the skull belongs to an 11th victim, said police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho.

The search was to continue through the night and into today, with fire department crews planning to search in the walls and ceiling of the home, McGrath said.

Police discovered the first six bodies Thursday and Friday after a woman reported being raped at Sowell’s home. Investigators said they found one body in a shallow grave in the backyard. The rest were inside the house — one in the basement, two in the third-floor living room and two in an upstairs crawl space.

The Cuyahoga County coroner is attempting to identify those women through DNA and dental records. All six were black, and five were strangled.

Sowell was also charged Tuesday with rape, felonious assault and kidnapping related to the woman’s complaint.

He is to be arraigned today, Stacho said.

The bodies could have been there anywhere from weeks to months to years, said Powell Caesar, a spokesman for the coroner.

“What kind of man was this?” wondered Regina Woodland, who lives about two blocks away.

“He couldn’t have been human,” she said.

Detectives used cadaver dogs and digging equipment to scour the home and backyard Tuesday, looking for evidence to connect Sowell to the bodies, Stacho said.

Police turned up nothing in an initial search of a quarter-mile swath of abandoned homes near Sowell’s residence, which sits in a crowded inner-city neighborhood of mostly older houses.

Investigators have brought lights and heavy equipment to the home and are putting a tent around the yard, WKYC-TV reported.

They plan to scour another quarter-mile area today, McGrath said. He said Sowell did not have a car and would have had to take a city bus to travel.

A crowd of about 100 people milled about and chatted near the home Tuesday evening. A short while later, about 50 people joined hands and put their arms around each other in the middle of the street and prayed aloud.

Sowell is a registered sex offender and required to check in regularly at the sheriff’s office. Officers didn’t have the right to enter his house, but they would stop by to make sure he was there. Their most recent visit was Sept. 22, just hours before the woman reported being raped.

For the past few years, Sowell’s neighbors thought the foul odor enveloping their street corner had been coming from a brick building where workers churned out sausage and head cheese.

It got so bad that the owners of Ray’s Sausage replaced their sewer line and grease traps.

The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.