The Macabre and brutal case of 11 murdered women

November 4, 2009, in a Cleveland courtroom, 50 year old registered sex offender, Anthony SowellAnthony Sowell, was charged with five counts of murder, rape, kidnapping, and felonious assault. Judge Ronald Adrine ordered him held without bond, after commenting that the charges were the worst he had ever seen.

Police found four more bodies and a skull in Sowell’s shambled death-chamber of a home and back yard. Including the skull, the death toll at the hands of a man who already spent 15 years in jail for rape could total eleven victims.

CNN confirmed late Wednesday that police did find an eleventh body. It was unclear if the severed skull was considered part of the 11th corpse.

Officials will continue the search for more bodies through out the house and will expand the back yard search into nearby fields.

“I would like to believe there is nothing else there, but we won't know until we search everything," said Police Chief Michael McGrath. “…this is a person who obviously had an insatiable appetite.”

People had been complaining about a foul and disgusting odor coming from the house and the general area for years. It even caused a sausage shop next door to overhaul the sewer and grease traps, fearing it might be the cause of the stench.

Sowell was released on parole in 2005, and since has eked out a living pan handling and doing various odd jobs. Sheriff officials would do their perfunctory calls on him, without entering the house or questioning the smell that must have been there, since neighbors had been complaining about it all along.

It did not appear that the women, who were black, were forced into Sowell’s home and since he didn’t own a car, there remain questions on why and how he managed to get the women into his home.

Particularly, with the stink that came from Sowell himself, as well as the house.

Did he lure women there with the promise of drugs, alcohol, or some other irresistible thing?

The police had been called a few weeks prior to Sowell’s arrest, when a naked woman jumped out of this second story window, but she refused to file charges, so they let it drop.

Evidently, the police left without entering the house, even though a naked woman was found with cuts and bruises on the front lawn of a registered sex offender.

The chain of events that finally cracked open the grisly life style of Anthony Sowell, who only marginally tried to bury and hide the corpses—happened when police got around to investigating a rape complaint filed over a month earlier-- by a woman who said, she was invited for a drink, and ended up getting strangled and raped, but she had managed to escape.

She filed her complaint on September 22 and officers were finally dispatched to Sowell’s house on October 29th—over a month later.

“I can imagine how families feel who have reported a missing person, and anxiety that they are going through," said Cleveland Mayor, Frank Jackson. "We want to assure them as soon as we know something they will be the first to know."

City Councilman Zack Reed said that he and other community leaders wanted an investigation into whether police and health inspectors missed signs that could have tipped them off to the bodies earlier, and even saved lives.

Reportedly, some of the bodies have been there for months or even years. Undoubtedly, lives could have been saved.

In what some might consider a colossal understatement, Reed was quoted as saying:

“We don’t want to point fingers, but clearly something could have been done differently.”

Some media reports have compared the gruesome nature of Sowell’s crimes to that of Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial rapist, who dismembered, cannibalized, and kept body parts of his victims as trophies. Several years after his conviction, Dahmer was beaten to death by a fellow cell mate.

***Copyright DelilahStarling 2009