Living With Death

It is beyond belief that someone could get away with the acts that Anthony Sowell committed for so many years, from the time he was released from prison in 2003 after serving the entirety of a fifteen year prison sentence for a very violent attempted rape, which from the description sounds like it was probably also an attempted murder, on until the time he was finally apprehended-on Halloween of this year, appropriately.

Eerily enough, the crime for which he was initially arrested, and which lead to the gruesome discovery of six decomposing bodies in his home-along with the skeletal remains of four others and the skull of yet one more past victim-was yet another attempted rape committed near the Autumn Equinox.

Nevertheless, he was finally apprehended, and later denied bond by a judge who described the crimes for which Sowell is being accused as beyond anything he had ever faced.

Indeed, you have to wonder what kind of individual could live alone with the stinking, rotting, and decomposing bodies of six human corpses. The stench was so overpowering, the neighbors assumed it must have either been coming from the sewers or from the neighboring pork store, which was next door to Sowell's residence.

In fact, Sowell was described by one of the employees of the store, which he patronized, as a nice man who made him cringe due to the bad smell that emanated from the man, which the employee in question was ashamed to ask him about.

Despite assurances that the smells did not come from the store, and despite countless man hours of work done on the sewers in the neighborhood, there was no respite from the stench.

Nor did it even arouse any undue suspicions when a nude woman was seen either falling or jumping out of Sowell's window one time, which he explained away as the accidental result of a cocaine and alcohol binge. The woman in question said nothing to contradict this statement, to be fair, but still, this seemed to also set off no alarm bells for the Cleveland cops who, after all, were well aware that Sowell was a registered sex offender, one who in this instance openly admitted to illegal drug use at the very least.

It took all of six weeks for the last surviving victim to tell her story to the police, and for them to finally act on the information. But, after all, this was a drug addict and possibly a prostitute, like so many of the other missing women who have fallen through the cracks in the general vicinity of this East Cleveland neighborhood, many of whom are potentially past victims of Anthony Sowell.

Here is the link to another story told by a woman who claims to be yet another of Sowell's victims, a woman who survived, if the story is to be believed, merely by keeping her head and wits about her and appealing to whatever sense of humanity and reason Sowell, a former Marine, still had at his disposal.

The system let down a lot of people in this story, including even Sowell, a seriously disturbed individual who, while yet in prison, requested sex offender therapy which he never received. The women are another story. They have gone down the road they traveled for the most part of their own volition, in some cases never to return. This is not the fault of the system. By the same token, unfortunately, the system found it far too easy to disregard reports of their disappearance. They were drug addicts, alcoholics, and prostitutes. They were, simply put, not a priority.

Now the only thing it can possibly do to make restitution is tie up the loose ends that are the remnants of tragic, wasted lives.