Crime Junkie - SERIAL KILLER: The Cleveland Strangler

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

Police in Cleveland enter a home in Mount Pleasant to arrest a man on sexual assault charges. But they don’t find their suspect. And what they do find sends an already struggling community into chaos.  For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/serial-killer-cleveland-strangler/ 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today is one that our highest level fan club members actually voted to hear us tell. It's about a serial killer. A man who stalked the streets of Cleveland for years, luring unsuspecting women, one by one, into what can only be called a house of horrors. But it's also about everyone who saw a community in crisis and chose to look away.

This is the story of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler. It's late afternoon on October 29, 2009, and police in Cleveland, Ohio are pulling together a team of officers to execute an arrest warrant. The warrant is related to a sexual assault report police took two days earlier on the 27th from a woman named Lutundra Billips, who told police that she'd been at this guy's place partying when, out of nowhere, he just snapped. He beat her, sexually assaulted her, even tried to strangle her with an extension cord. In her report, Lutundra told police she'd been unconscious for hours after she was strangled,

and that both she and her attacker were almost, like, surprised when she woke up. There was no doubt in her mind that he was trying to kill her, he meant to kill her. She did, actually. His name is Anthony Sowell, though she and everyone else who knew him just called him Tone, and Tone is no stranger to the Mount Pleasant neighborhood where he lives and where Lutundra spends a lot of time. Lutundra had even been to his place before, he dated one of her friends for a long time I guess, and she'd always known him as this very friendly, very generous guy, always

out on his front steps, talking to the people who passed, always willing to help neighbors who needed a hand. But Lutundra had heard some rumors lately that suggested to her that Tone had a dark side, that he'd been violent with other women too, and it was hard for people to believe that it was even possible just because who he was, again this outgoing generous guy. So mostly folks just kind of, like, brushed off these rumors, even though Anthony had more than just a track record for bad behavior, he actually had a criminal record, and he served 15 years for sexual assault.

In fact, according to online coverage from Ohio's The Plain Dealer, he was a tier three sex offender, the most serious category. So Anthony had to report to law enforcement every 90 days. And in between those reports, the sheriffs would do these random check-ins that they call knock-and-talk visits, and the last time law enforcement spoke to Anthony was actually on the morning of September 22nd at one of those unannounced knock-and-talks. And at the time, everything seemed fine, he was home, he answered the door, they chatted for a while, there was no problems.

The problem came later that very night, which is when Latundra reported being attacked and assaulted by Anthony. Wait, on September 22nd, isn't this arrest supposed to be happening in, what, late October? October 29th, yeah. What the heck was going on between September 22nd and October 29th? Well that's a great question, and I have a complicated answer. Now you see, Latundra actually went to the hospital the morning after the assault and saw a sexual assault nurse examiner who did a rape kit, and she spoke to two officers

from Cleveland PD as well. Now she'd expected to hear from them within a few days, but no one called. It wasn't until late October that she finally connected with them, and not until October 27th that they officially took her report. Okay, that's like five weeks though, and what you described was essentially attempted murder. What were the police doing during all this time? Well, they said that they had tried to reach Latundra in the days just after the assault,

but they had a hard time tracking her down. Like, they said physically they just couldn't find her, couldn't get a hold of her. Because Latundra, like many, many others in East Cleveland at the time, used drugs, crack cocaine specifically. So she didn't live the kind of life where, you know, you go to work at the same time every day. You go home, you have like the same routine, like all of that. And at this point in 2009, Latundra's addiction is really driving her everyday life and every

decision that she makes. According to Robert Suburna's book, House of Horrors, during those five-ish weeks, police said they called and even visited her mother's house looking for her, and tried to follow up. But even the mother said basically like, good luck, she's a hard woman to pin down. They said, you know, they made one appointment to me, but Latundra was a no-show. But it was eventually on the 27th that they finally connected. And now, two days later on the 29th, police are going to arrest Anthony for sexual assault.

And it's a big team that's going in. The plan is for SWAT officers to go into the house first to arrest the suspect, clear the premises, whatever, and then the sex crimes detectives will go in after and look for evidence. Anything that will prove Latundra had been in that house and helped corroborate her account of what happened. But specifically, they're looking for a pink sweater that she said she left behind and that extension cord that she said she had been strangled with. Just before 7pm that night, the group arrives in several vehicles at the house on Imperial

Avenue. It's a three-story standalone home that's split basically into two apartments. So there's one on the main level and another one above that that includes both the second and third floors, and it's the second and third floors, that upper apartment. That's where Anthony stays. Now he spends most of his time on the top floor, but the attack on Latundra happened on the second floor. So police assume that if they're going to find him, it'll probably be there.

Does someone else live at that first floor apartment then? No, not at this point. It was actually Anthony's stepmother who owned the house, and she lived in that apartment below for many years. But at the time this is happening, like she'd been in really bad health and hadn't recovered yet, so she had not been living there yet because she couldn't even live independently at the time. Okay.

Now officers enter the house in groups. Some of them go to the basement, some go to the main level, and the biggest group heads up to Anthony's apartment on those second and third floors. Now when they go in, this house is a mess. There are bags of trash everywhere, there's dirty clothes everywhere. The house had plenty of bathrooms, one on each floor, but here's the thing, there were these industrial sized buckets around as well that have been used as toilets. This place is more than filthy, it is unbelievable, at least for most people, and the smell in

there is just awful. Now the further they go up, clearing the first floor, then the second, and now heading up to the third, the worse that smell gets. At the top of the stairs, according to Stephen Miller's book, Nobody's Women, police find a McDonald's bag with a receipt in it that's dated from earlier that day. Okay, so that's a pretty good sign that they're on the right track. Next they check the two bedrooms, no Anthony, and then they head down the hallway toward the small sitting room at the front of the house facing Imperial Avenue.

Now this is the last room in the house to clear and it also seems to be the source of that terrible stench they're smelling, which again keeps getting worse and worse the closer they get. They find the door locked and they figure, you know, this guy's here, this is where he's going to be. So officers break down the door and move inside guns drawn. It takes a hot second for their eyes to adjust to the complete darkness because the windows had been covered in black plastic, so they use their flashlights to do a visual sweep

of the room. They see a small TV, an end table, a lamp, and then two dark shapes on the floor. One of the officers shouts, police, don't move, but at the same time the words are coming out of his mouth, his brain is processing what his eyes are actually seeing. And it's not Anthony Sowell. What police see amid the beer cans and cigarette butts are two people, two bodies, lying side by side on the floor partially covered in black plastic. Both are in advanced stages of decomposition, too much to make any kind of identification,

but based on jewelry and clothing, officers are pretty confident that the bodies are female. As they back out of the room to exit the house, the officers searching the basement radio the team to say they also found something strange in the space just under the stairs, a pile of fresh dirt, and what looked like a black plastic bag poking out. I mean, for a search that was only supposed to yield a pink sweater, this certainly took a left turn. That's exactly what police are thinking as they carefully make their way out of Anthony's house, doing their best to preserve what is now, in all likelihood, a scene of at least

two murders. And they're realizing now they don't just need sexual assault investigators, they need homicide. Yeah. Within a few minutes, officers have crime scene tape up around the perimeter of the house, and at about 8pm, the homicide detectives arrive along with crime scene technicians to photograph, bag and tag every piece of evidence in the house. The coroner and his team aren't too far behind either, and they head straight for the third

floor when they arrive. But because of the condition of the bodies, they aren't able to provide any solid information that might help police identify the remains, race, gender, nothing. And so all they can do is remove the two bodies from the home and take them off for autopsy. Now as you can imagine, all of this commotion, cops and paramedics, and now the coroner bringing out bodies from the house, it starts to draw a crowd. Police haven't made any public statements at this point, and so all this growing group of neighbors and reporters knows is that police found two bodies in the house, full stop.

And most people are assuming Anthony is one of the deceased. Which I'm pretty sure that's where my mind would go too. He said he was well liked, friendly, polite guy. I don't think anybody's mind goes straight to my next door neighbor is a murderer. Right, and you know here's the other thing worth mentioning is like Anthony had a history of drug use as well. So it's possible they were even thinking you know while he could have died of natural causes maybe there was some kind of incident involving drugs that even again even seems

more plausible than my neighbor is a murderer. So with everyone kind of like talking and speculating, there's like this buzz going around in the crowd and it's that buzz that actually ends up giving police their first lead on where to go next. How so? Well one of the people gathered outside on the sidewalk is this woman named Debbie. She lives across the street from Anthony and had known him for the last couple of years. She didn't know him well, but to her, again he's a super friendly, helpful guy who would

always strike up a conversation. According to Susan Candiotti's reporting for CNN, when Debbie heard that one of the body's police found in the house was probably Anthony's, she decided to go over to his sister's place and let his sister know what was going on. So she gets in her car, she drives a few blocks over to his sister's place and when the front door opened, her jaw nearly hit the floor because there was Anthony just sitting on the couch playing video games. What?

Like did he even know what was going on in his house? I don't think he did actually because once Debbie recovered from the shock of seeing him, she told him that police were at his place saying that they found bodies and he immediately got agitated. But somehow she convinced him that he needed to go home and at least talk to police, try to clear things up and she was going back that way anyway so she's like, I'll just drive you. What?

Like she let him in her car? In her defense, I mean, she had no idea police were treating the deaths as homicides, right? Like we have no idea what's going on in the house but on their way back to his apartment Anthony said, it's all going to come out now and that's when like I think the gears start turning for her and she's like, what's going to come out now? But he doesn't answer that question. All he says is that girl made me do it and that's when it starts sinking in for Debbie and just as they rounded the corner onto Imperial Avenue with the crime scene tape and flashing

lights and the police, things must have started to sink in for Anthony too because he asks Debbie to stop the car and take him back to his sister's place. So she does. Now with the full realization that she is for sure got a killer in the passenger seat of her car and that she's pretty much just a sitting duck. But she drove him back, he got out and she just drove herself home, though admittedly she was shook. Robert Suburna quotes Debbie in House of Horrors saying quote, my knees were shaking so bad

that I could barely drive. I just screamed all the way back home and quote, I'm going to be honest, that's a pretty natural reaction to me like I can't imagine realizing that your friendly polite neighborhood guy that you offered a ride back home to is probably a murderer. Yeah, I literally think she's like in shock, right? Because my first thing is like, what do you mean you go back home and go to the police? But I can't imagine trying to process that. But when she does get back and she like catches her breath, she told her son and a few neighbors

about the whole thing and she says she really wasn't sure what she should do next. But her son was like, I know exactly what we're doing next and they then go and tell the authorities. Yeah. Within minutes, police are en route to Anthony's sister's place. But by the time they get there, of course, he's gone. His sister tells them Anthony left like 10 minutes ago on foot. So he probably can't have gotten that far.

She's also able to provide police a description of the clothing he was wearing, which is a really helpful start to what is already shaping up to be an all hands on deck search for this guy. He's seen streets, abandoned homes, buildings, scrapyards, anywhere Anthony could reasonably be hiding. Even with all their available resources looking for him, they know they need more eyes and ears. And so shortly after 10 o'clock, police give their first press conference.

They tell reporters that police came to arrest Anthony for an alleged sexual assault and found two bodies on the top floor of Anthony's house and what looked like a freshly dug grave in the basement. According to coverage from Cleveland dot com, they tell reporters that they're looking for Anthony and that they need the public's help to track him down. Officers provide a description of their suspect 50 years old, six feet tall, 155 pounds glasses known to usually have a mustache or beard, and they tell everyone what he was wearing that night.

And on top of that, they even offer a $2,000 reward for anyone who helps get him into police's custody. At the same time, crime scene texts are going through Anthony's house inch by inch, room by room, starting in the basement, and specifically that mound of dirt under the stairs. The room itself is pretty much a junk heap, honestly, full of broken furniture, dirty mattress, buckets, trash, and bags filled with women's clothes. The basement has a concrete floor, and it looks like the floor itself has been dug up in the area under the stairs, which is no small feat if you think about it.

I mean, that's work. And so as investigators are stealing themselves for whatever they might find buried there, they're also thinking like, dear God, if this guy is at the point where he is digging into concrete to bury something, how many other places did he dig up before that? Right. And that's the thought that washes over everyone when they remove the top layer of dirt to uncover another body. Is this another woman, or?

Yes, another woman, again partially decomposed. The body is wrapped in duct tape, and there is a green belt around her neck and shoelaces binding her wrists together. Police know they have a huge job ahead of them to search this entire house and property, and in all likelihood, they're going to find more bodies. Okay, so I do have a question, though. You described all three bodies as decomposed or partially decomposed or whatever. What exactly do you mean by that?

Like, they'd only been there for a short while, a long time. So all I have is that they were in a, quote, advanced state of decomposition, according to the plane dealer's coverage of the press conference earlier that night. But I mean, it's hard for anyone to know how long the bodies have been in the house at this point, and police are really only saying that they've been there a long time. They're not giving any kind of like firm answer. Okay, but like, how long is long, though? I guess I just feel like it can't have been that long, or someone would have noticed the

smell. Probably that's what the SWAT team was smelling as they went through the house. But what about Latundra? She was there in late September, or, I don't know, even the neighbors. Okay, so that's the thing. People definitely noticed the smell, or I should say they noticed a smell, and it was bad enough that there had been multiple calls to the city to report it. The problem was, everyone assumed that the horrible stench was coming from somewhere

else. People had been blaming the bad smell coming from Anthony's house, and also from Anthony himself, because dude reeked as well, but they had been blaming it on a bunch of things like body odor, garbage, the fact that the house became essentially a drug den over the years. But mostly, though, people blamed the business next door, Ray's sausage, where they made both sausage and head cheese. According to a vice documentary on this case, the owners of Ray's sausage spent something

like $200,000 from 2007 to 2009 trying to address the smell. Like, they were replacing everything from ventilation to grease traps to installing a whole new sewer line, all by order of the city's health department. Of course, though, none of that worked. And so, the people in the neighborhood kind of just, I don't know, resigned themselves to the fact that the area was going to smell awful all of the time. I mean, I get that not everyone is going to smell a decomposing body and think, oh, that's a decomposing body scent I smell.

I mean, most of us never really experience it, but police certainly do, and from everything I've read or heard over the years, everyone always says it's unmistakable. You smell it once, and you will remember that forever. Right. Okay, so I guess what I don't understand is Anthony is a sex offender, and law enforcement was literally checking in at his house every six weeks, and no one, not a single one, noticed the smell. They even had to check in late September.

I don't know what to tell you, other than I guess they didn't. I mean, they couldn't have, or else I would think someone would have gone inside. Okay, but we're talking about three bodies. We're talking about three bodies right now, but that's just the beginning. Being the one buried under the stairs set off a whole new kind of search that required a really different kind of team. According to reporting by Mark Puente and Joe Guillen for the Plain Dealer, the next day, October 30th, police called in the FBI with cadaver dogs.

Inside the house, the dog heads immediately to that upstairs sitting room where police found those first two bodies the day before. Which isn't too shocking, like they can pick up on a scent for a body that was there previously. Well, yeah, but here's the thing, the dog doesn't hit on that spot. It steps over it and signals to a section of the wall a few feet away where it looks like drywall had been cut open and then like patched back up. So when the detectives pull away the sheets of drywall, they find this like crawl space. And inside the crawl space is a big black garbage bag and another pile of dirt.

Inside that pile of dirt is another body and inside the garbage bag, one more. The FBI's cadaver dog goes outside to the backyard and immediately signals on a spot of fresh dirt near the steps from the house to the yard. So investigators begin to dig and two feet down, they find another body. They can't tell if it's a woman or a man, but there is a phone charging cord wrapped about their neck and cloth binding their wrists together. So this is now what, six bodies? Six bodies.

Police shut down their search at about 8.30 that night and then tell a shocked and horrified public what they found. And while police say that they're planning at least one more day of searching the property, they also say they don't expect to find any more remains. But the next day, October 31st, everyone's focus has shifted in a big way from finding remains to finding Anthony. Um, yeah, Halloween with a serial killer on the loose is an actual legitimate nightmare. Right?

I mean, the pressure is already on at like a 10 for Cleveland PD in terms of finding this guy and getting him off the streets. But the fact that it's Halloween and those same streets are about to be flooded with kids. It really kicks things up a notch. Uh, yeah. I'm sure all the parents listening right now are having like the same exact thought, which is absolutely no way are we trick or treating.

And what am I going to tell my kids? Like literally right now we're recording this, it is July. My daughter just came to me and was like, I want to go tricksy treat today. And I had to tell her, no, this is the day of Halloween with a serial killer on the loose. How do you do that? Well, most people kind of avoid it because you see around noon, according to the Scranton Times Tribune story by Thomas Sheeran, the police chief actually makes a public statement to parents saying it's totally safe for their kids to go trick or treating just as long

as they stay in groups and don't talk to strangers, which like in my mind flies in the face of like what they've been saying all along about Anthony, that he's so violent and dangerous. I mean, one, those are good rules anyway. And two, like they've just pulled six bodies off his property. What? Like in my mind, I'm thinking like they're saying this because sure, like children might not have been his target when he was operating in secret, but like dude's on the run now.

Back a guy like this into a corner and I bet he'd be capable of anything. Like there is no chance I'm letting my kids outside. Not happening. Well, and like my first thought is like, yeah, maybe kids aren't his target, but like he could snatch one up and use it as a shield for sure. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. No.

But the search for Anthony has evolved into an all out manhunt with more than 100 local police officers and the U.S. Marshals who'd been called in from out of state, all knocking on doors, checking in with relatives and people Anthony was known to associate with, searching abandoned houses again, scrapyards, again, they're looking anywhere they think he might go, but they're also getting tips from the public. Lots of them. Now, for the most part, those tips go nowhere. More the result of a terrified neighborhood than anything that is until a neighborhood

resident walks into a police station and says he'd just spotted a guy who looked an awful lot like their fugitive just now down the street, a block away within minutes. Police catch up to the sky and at first he says, you've got the wrong guy and police are like, okay, well, fair, but just come down to the station. We'll get your prints just so we can know for sure and say that's what like everyone would say. Right. Right.

So they get him down there just as they're about to print him so they can compare them against what they have on file. The man says, I'm Anthony, so well, I'm the guy you're looking for. And in a way, he seems kind of relieved and in fact, according to Robert Sabirna's book, he tells one of the officers that he's glad it's over. And frankly, everyone would be glad to have this thing over. And so one of the officers asks him if the five bodies found in the house were all they'd find.

And he says, he thinks so. So then the officer asks, what about outside? And he responds, oh, those two. Those two? Those two, which is a bit of a problem because one, up to this point, they only found one body outside the house. Right. And two, police already told everyone that they didn't expect to find any more.

I mean, they're not even completely caught up on trying to figure out who the victims actually are of the bodies that they have. Because at this point, all the coroner has been able to confirm is that two of the victims are black females, but that's about it. And now they know they have more victims they need to look for. And I assume police are cross-checking missing person reports and all that sort of stuff, right? Yes, they are.

It was in 2005 when Anthony was released from prison. They're focusing specifically on women that were living alone or experiencing homelessness and those with known substance use issues. But police know that a quicker way to identify remains is with DNA. And so on October 31st, they establish a command post in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood and ask anyone with missing relatives to come forward to make a report if they haven't already to provide a picture and details about their loved ones and to bring anything that might have their DNA on it that police could use for comparison.

They say, you know, we can even use DNA from a mother or child to help identify someone. So police must be questioning Anthony by now too, now that he's in custody. I mean, he basically admitted guilt already. Is he willing or able to help identify the victims? He says he's willing to help, but he is very unhelpful, which isn't all that surprising to me since, you know, anything remotely confession like is going to take the legs out from under any kind of like not guilty argument. Right.

And it's going to be pretty hard to say he's not guilty after finding six bodies in his house. Oh, I agree. I mean, that will be hard, but it gets even harder when police uncover more bodies buried in Anthony's backyard. In addition to the four bodies in the backyard, they also find something in the basement of the house. They find a human skull wrapped in paper and stashed inside a bucket.

Now I'm not sure what it is about this point in the search that inspires Cleveland police to once again say we found the remains of 11 people were competent. This is all that we're going to find, but that's what they say. They also said that like what, five bodies ago? Yes. And police acknowledge that. And to their credit, they don't stop searching. They bring in fire department investigators to help search the inside like walls and ceilings

of the house. And according to an associated press story in the Tipton County Tribune, teams continue to look for evidence as well as more bodies. So even though they're saying that they don't necessarily even believe it, I think they might believe it, but at least they're doing their due diligence and not like giving up. And what I'll say is, is they're even kind of spreading beyond his house and yard because search teams also check abandoned houses in the area. Just those within a quarter mile of Imperial Avenue and then another quarter mile.

But they actually do find no more remains. On November 4th, the county coroner's office confirms that all 11 bodies pulled from the house are black women and that at least eight died by strangulation. And they finally announced the identity of the first victim, 49 year old Tanya Carmichael, who has been missing for a year. Tanya was a frequent flyer in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. And according to reporting by Brian Cates for the New York Daily News, she fit the profile police developed for Anthony's victims, which was, well, just based on who he was and how

he lived and who he hung around with law enforcement were pretty sure he'd been targeting women from the Mount Pleasant area who had either alcohol or substance use disorders. So vulnerable women, women who needed something, whether that's a place to stay a place to just sit for a while, drugs, alcohol, a meal, a friend. That was Tanya to a tee. And that profile also fit for the next two victims, who police identify on November 5th. Talisha Fortson and Tashana Culver, both 31, both known to use drugs and frequent in the area.

In fact, Tashana lived just a few doors down from Anthony on Imperial Avenue. She'd been missing for more than a year and her family assumed she was either in jail or living with a boyfriend in Akron. Talisha had been missing since June. Over the next week, police released the identities of seven more victims, Nancy Cobbs, Amelda Hunter, Crystal Dozier, Michelle Mason, Janice Webb, Kim Yvette Smith, and LaShonda Long. Okay, but that's only 10 names, right? Do police know the identity of the 11th victim?

Yeah, the 11th and final victim is Diane Turner, who, despite being the last to go missing and the first of the bodies to be discovered, isn't identified by police until early December. So like I said, all of these women really fit the profile. They all also had criminal records. The women ranged in age from mid-20s to early 50s, and all but one were mothers. Several were even grandmothers. All of these women lived on the margins of society for one reason or another, pushed even further by addiction.

Well, and one thing that stuck out to me is, so many of them had people, kids, and family. How many of them were officially reported missing, and were there ever even investigations? So here's what's interesting. Not all of them had been reported missing, but most had. Gabriel Baird reported for Cleveland.com that missing person reports for three of the women didn't come in until the command post was set up and police asked the public for help. But that means police knew about eight of them. And surely that's enough to pique someone's interest and ask, like, wait, is there a pattern

here? Well, and it's not just the missing person reports. It's the missing person reports and the smell and the fact that he's a sex offender getting regular visits at his house from law enforcement. Like, was no one paying attention? Well, I read this one AP article published in the Lansing State Journal that described Anthony's Mount Pleasant neighborhood as, quote, the type of place where women can disappear almost in plain sight, end quote, where homes like his are interspersed with boarded up and

abandoned ones, where drugs are readily available, and most importantly, where no one asks questions. So it's literally like everything went wrong. I mean, it's impossible for me to understand how repeated reports from the public about that strong smell coming from the home of a convicted sex offender doesn't make anyone step inside or ask questions. And like you said, it wasn't just the smell, dude should have been raising some red flags for police right and left. Police had plenty of other chances to take Anthony off the street because you see, they

had a chance in September 2008 when a woman named Vanessa Gaye calls police to say that she was raped and tortured by a man on Imperial Avenue. Whatever Vanessa spoke to at Cleveland PD that night told her she'd have to come down to the station to file charges, and she was terrified to do that just given her own history with law enforcement, so she didn't go. They had another chance three months later in December 2008 when Gladys Wade flagged down a police car and told officers that a man tried to rape and kill her. Police actually arrested Anthony, and Gladys was willing to do whatever she needed to

do in order for him to stay locked up, but he told them a different story. He's like, oh, she just tried to rob me, and they believed him over her. Oh my God. So in the end, the charges were dropped because police decided she wasn't credible. They had another chance in September 2009 when Latundra reported her assault. Which we know police waited more than a month to follow up on. Yes, and they had one more chance, less than a month later on October 20th, when a woman named Shawn Morris threw herself out of the third story window of Anthony's house naked

after a violent sexual assault because for her, hitting the pavement of a three-story fall was better than being murdered in that room by Anthony. When paramedics arrived, mind you, arrived to the house that smelled like death. Shawn was unconscious, and Anthony, who by the way was also naked and attempting to drag her back into his house, told them that she was his wife and that she'd fallen while the two were having sex. Shawn had broken eight ribs, fractured her skull, and suffered a brain aneurysm and needed surgery.

She woke up three days later, and one of the first calls she got was from Anthony, telling her that if she told police what really happened, he would kill her and her family. Are you kidding me, and police didn't investigate that, like not even as a domestic violence assault? Well, police went to see Shawn while she was recovering in the hospital, but she was terrified, and so she told them that Anthony was her boyfriend and that they were partying on the second floor balcony when she dropped her keys and fell. Except that any officer who'd been to the house even once would know that Shawn didn't

fall off the balcony onto Imperial Avenue. She fell out a side window onto the alley between Anthony's house and Ray's sausage. One of the things that has stayed with me since I started working on this case is something Vanessa Gay said. She spoke to Laura Paglin, who directed the documentary Unseen, about going into Anthony's house with the promise of beer and drugs, but then being sexually assaulted and beaten for quote, hours and hours and hours. She said that she was on her way to the bathroom the next morning when she saw what looked

like a headless body laying just inside one of the rooms in Anthony's house. Vanessa says she knew in her gut that she was not supposed to make it out of there, period, and that if she was going to survive, she was going to have to pretend she'd seen nothing and that everything that happened the night before being beaten sexually assaulted was fine. It's a miracle she survived. But because she survived, she's able to testify at Anthony's murder trial in the summer of 2011.

Anthony was convicted on 82 of the 83 charges against him, including kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder. You know, I'm going to ask, what charge wasn't he convicted of? Well, according to a Reuters article by Kim Palmer, that one charge is related to him stealing $11 from one of the surviving victims. So again, if he's going to be allowed off anything, fine, let's let him off the $11. Right. Right.

Anthony was sentenced to death for his crimes, but earlier this very year, in February 2021, he actually died of an undisclosed terminal illness while he was still on death row. In December 2011, the city demolished the house on Imperial Avenue. Anthony's stepmother, who actually owned the home, remember, died two years earlier without ever knowing the horrors it held. More than a decade has passed since police first uncovered the truth about Anthony so well. The story of his victims, dead and alive, first shook the Cleveland community.

And while the attitudes towards substance use and sex work are evolving, at least in the conversations I'm having, there is still so much stigma and so much fear and so much distrust out there, especially between marginalized communities and the police who serve them. Those things got in the way back in 2007 and eight and nine and allowed a predator to get away with 11 murders and countless sexual assaults. They got in the way later, during the police investigation, when the relatives of missing women were reluctant to provide familial DNA to help identify the bodies. And they're still getting in the way today.

Not just in Cleveland, but in every city. And listen, I know it's a complex problem. I'm not saying I know how to fix it. I'm not an expert and I haven't walked a mile in anyone's shoes. But I think there is one pretty straightforward place to start. And that is by believing women, all women, especially those from marginalized groups who have been ignored or not taken seriously in the past. If we want to build up that trust, if we want to be trusted, then we need to trust first.

You can find all of the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?