Cleveland trial opens for man held in 11 deaths

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

The bodies were removed many months ago, but the stench of them still clings to the boarded-up house on Imperial Avenue.

The smell surfaces every so often: a reminder of the horrors that unfolded here in November 2009, when police began pulling the remains of 11 women from the depths of this rundown white duplex on an impoverished Cleveland street.

“Every once in a while you can hear people saying ... ‘What’s that smell?,’” says Tracy Chapman, who lives across the street.

The murder trial gets under way Monday for Anthony Sowell, 51, a convicted sex offender and ex-Marine charged with killing the women and hiding their remains in his home and backyard. The trial, expected to last several weeks, will force Cleveland residents to revisit a dark chapter in the city’s history that most would rather forget. Prosecutors say Sowell, who has pleaded not guilty, lured women from the neighborhood into his home with the promise of alcohol or drugs, then killed them.

In a surprise secret meeting Friday, prospective jurors were introduced to Sowell behind closed doors while reporters covering the case waited on another floor for trial credentials. Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Dick Ambrose had previously said jury selection would begin Monday in his courtroom.

The discovery of the bodies ignited an uproar that has yet to subside, with most of the anger directed at the city’s police department. Some of the victims’ families allege the police never bothered to look for their loved ones because they were addicted to drugs and lived in a dangerous part of town, near Sowell’s home. All of the victims were black. Most were strangled with household objects and had traces of drugs in their systems.

Residents of Mount Pleasant, Sowell’s neighborhood, had complained about a rotting smell for months, but they say their complaints went unheeded.

The women disappeared one by one, starting in October 2007. The last one vanished in September 2009.

They were disposed of in garbage bags and plastic sheets, then dumped in various parts of the house and yard. Five were buried in the backyard; four ended up on the third floor. One woman’s body, found in the basement under a mound of dirt, was nude and gagged at the mouth.

All that remained of Leshanda Long, 25, was her skull, found in a bucket in the basement.

Michelle Mason, 44, was strangled with a cloth and buried in the backyard. Her mother, Adlean Atterberry, chose to re-bury her in a cemetery within walking distance of her home because she could not bear to be far from her daughter. She visits the grave almost daily.

It was a relief when Mason’s body was identified because it put an end to the lurking fear that she was locked in a basement somewhere, suffering. Atterberry is convinced that her daughter was killed quickly — that she could not have remained in that house for long.

“He killed her right there,” she says. “He couldn’t have kept her in that house because she’d have been screaming like somebody — she had the loudest voice you ever heard. She would’ve been screaming. Somebody would’ve heard her.”

The public outcry picked up steam when it emerged that Sowell had been arrested in 2008 when a woman accused him of attacking her, only to be released shortly afterward because police didn’t believe the woman was credible. Several families are suing the city in a slew of lawsuits alleging wrongful death, negligence and racial discrimination.