Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer (25 page)

Bombik narrated each victim’s disappearance, showing a collage of photos of the victims on the screen. They all had drug problems, he acknowledged.

Then he hinted at a surprise, perhaps the only true surprise of the trial.

Bombik mentioned a young lady named Vanessa Gay, whom few in the room or among the media had heard of. He told of how, like other women, Vanessa had gone up to Sowell’s room in September 2008 to get high.

“Vanessa who will come in here and testify that sometime either in September or August 2008, she’ll talk about how she came across and met Anthony Sowell on the streets, and he invited her to celebrate his birthday with her. Mr. Sowell’s birthday is August 19, that will be a clear fact if in fact he wanted to celebrate his birthday with her it would be on or around August 19, 2008. And
she, too, went over, she will testify, that she went over to his house with the expectation of getting high with Mr. Sowell and made it up to the third floor of the house, his living quarters where she will testify he attacked her. And you will hear the details of that in due time. Miss Gay likewise had brushes with the law and substance abuse problems. She will recall being let go by Mr. Sowell but before being let go she will relate to you an observation she made in the other room that will be somewhat disturbing.”

As he wound down an hour of opening, Bombik tersely read a roll call of the victims and how they died.

“Tonia Carmichael, electric cord around neck, naked. Diane Turner, homicidal violence…”

Sowell listened and looked at the pictures of the deceased as they were put up on the screen.

Bombik finished with a flourish. He stopped, creased his brow for the sixtieth time in an hour, and looked at the floor.

“On Saturday October 31, a citizen saw Sowell…. They got him as he was walking down the street, this alleged killer disguised as a normal human being on Halloween.”

He ended: “I look forward to bringing Anthony Sowell to justice. And I also look forward to bringing justice to Anthony Sowell.”

John Parker had little to offer visually.

While Bombik was dressed in a flattering dark suit and
wore a sharp, dark blue tie and was well-coiffed, Parker was not. He looked a bit disheveled, clad in an ill-fitting suit and a light silver tie. He did exactly what he should do, though, speaking about the witnesses and the notion that the rapes and the kidnappings are different from murder.

“You’ll hear from them from the witness stand what happened to each and every one of them as they tell it,” Parker said. “These are two separate categories, cases that the state has decided to bring together—as you heard early on there are 85 cases charges as relates to homicide victims and charges as relates to the other women. It’s critical for you to understand and you will find throughout this trial with respect to the homicides that there are six crimes charged to Mr. Sowell. There are no rapes, there are no attempted rapes, there are no sex crimes charged against him as it relates to the homicide victims. You will also find out as it relates to the homicide victims that there are no eyewitnesses, there are no fingerprints, there’s no evidence linking Mr. Sowell to the homicides…. There is not significant forensic evidence linking Mr. Sowell to the homicides.”

Parker, his glasses occasionally sliding awkwardly down his sweaty nose, continued.

“I think you will also find at the end of this case that the manner in which the crime scene was handled, the house, the backyard, you will find the crime scene was handled very poorly, and that may have impact—or it may not have, that’s up to you.”

He tried to convey the notion that the victims were
subject to dubious honesty, without outright saying that drug users’ characters were not always stellar.

“These women had many problems you will hear about, problems with substance abuse, with health issues. You will have to determine if what they tell you is truthful and if you find them to be truthful, which part of their testimony is truth.”

He ended with a request.

“Please be patient, listen to the evidence,” Parker said.

At the defense table, a bottle of 5-hour Energy drink sat before Rufus Sims. Every day around 3
P.M.
, he would down a bottle. These were fifteen-hour days he was pulling, arriving at the office at 6
A.M.
some days and not getting home until 9 or 9:30 in the evening.

The state came with a full blast of witnesses that tugged heartstrings and told of a street lifestyle that most people never hear of, a life of mental evaluations and jail time and courtrooms and drugs. Relatives of the deceased told heartbreaking stories of their loved ones, of taking DNA to an appointed place to find out if their missing daughter or mother was among the bodies of the murdered women found on Imperial.

Anthony Sowell’s beloved ex-girlfriend Lori Frazier answered questions in her smoky voice, talking of meeting Sowell and the last time she saw him, when he came to see her at Charley’s Grilled Subs.

“He just popped up and asked why I didn’t remember his birthday,” she said. Lori talked about her
friend Crystal Dozier, whom she had known since elementary school. They had gotten high together as they grew up, although she said she never took Crystal to the Sowell house.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Pinkey Carr asked.

“A place on Griffin,” Lori said. “It was all in the same neighborhood, but I don’t remember the date. It was warm out.”

She also told of “somebody” digging a hole in the backyard of the house on Imperial after she’d moved out and was coming back for periodic visits. She said Sowell told her it was because a toilet had backed up. It was a plumbing thing, she figured.

John Parker got the big stuff out in the open right away on his cross-examination.

Lori was staying with her mother, Eleanor, when she met Sowell. “Eleanor’s sister is married to the Mayor of Cleveland,” Parker noted.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Lori spat.

He looked at a report in his hand and remarked that she had lost custody of her four kids at some point during the years before she met Sowell. He asked her why.

“Because I was getting high on the streets,” she said indignantly.

“Where did you get the drugs?” he asked.

“Somebody gave ’em to me,” she said. “People, around.”

She sat, steaming, as Parker silently read a bit more and prepared another question.

“What’s my getting high got to do with this?” she said, her voice raising.

Parker pushed it, getting her angrier. He asked about her hospitalization for mental issues in 2002.

“Did you try to harm yourself?” he asked, knowing it was in the report.

“I don’t know, I don’t remember,” Lori said, now turning in her chair and looking away from him.

“You got treatment, they gave you drugs to take for it,” Parker said.

“I took crack, that’s what I needed,” Lori said, in full anger.

Parker now read aloud from the report, noting a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder and outpatient mental-health care. She was prescribed Paxil, a potent antidepressant, but didn’t take it.

“It made me jittery,” she said, failing to grasp that crack would, to most people, be the most potent inducer of jitters imaginable.

Parker had established one thing early, something that would remain through the four weeks of the trial; almost every one of the women from the street put up by the state had serious credibility issues.

It was all he could do, though. The bodies were still just as dead.

The next day came the surprise.

A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Vanessa Gay
took the stand, a pleasant-looking woman who lived on Broadway, about four miles from Imperial.

As Bombik gently questioned her, Vanessa told of her husband and three children and her inability to control her drug habit, which had begun in 2006.

“The drugs led me to the streets, specifically the Mount Pleasant neighborhood,” she said, an area that included Imperial.

Bombik guided her verbally, as Vanessa was already beginning to sniffle and tear up.

Still, she soldiered on.

She told how, in September 2008, “my life was worse than it had ever been.”

“Sometime in September 2008, did you have occasion to be looking to get high?” Bombik asked.

Yes, she said. “It was around 10, or 10:30 at night. I was on foot, and I was near 140th Avenue and Kinsman on the same side as Key Bank, thinking what I was going to do. I wasn’t high and I didn’t get high that day and I was contemplating whether I was going to go in or stay out.”

A man walked by her as she stood still. He was talking on his cell phone and telling someone that it was his birthday, she said.

When Bombik asked her if that man was in the courtroom, Vanessa broke into tears again.

“He’s over there,” she said, pointing to Sowell, sitting in a pressed sweater and looking on passively.

On that night, Vanessa said, he was telling whomever
he was talking to that he had no one to celebrate his birthday with, “and I said, ‘I celebrate birthdays, so happy birthday.’”

The two began to talk and walk, and Sowell introduced himself and in passing told her he had some crack and some alcohol and asked her to celebrate his birthday with him.

“I said ‘ok,” Vanessa testified. As they walked the few blocks to Imperial, they talked about cooking and he told her of his time in the military, “and it was a pleasant conversation about just cooking, who was the best cook and things like that.”

They arrived at the house, she said, and Sowell pointed out the sign on the porch railing that read “The Sowells,” black with red lettering.

He had some weed, some wine—“E and J,” she said, slang for Ernest and Julio Gallo, which made the popular street wine, Night Train—and told her that he had “a 50,” a $50 chunk of crack, in his hand, which was balled up.

“He told me we were going up to the third floor,” Vanessa said. As she spoke, her voice careened all over the emotional map. The courtroom was riveted. Everyone had known about the alleged atrocities, but no one had heard of how any of them went down, until now.

They went up the stairs to the third floor, and “it was dark in there and it was like stale, just musty, stinky, dirty, it was like dark and gloomy, you could feel the gloom.”

Vanessa described the upstairs apartment in precise
detail, down to the miniature refrigerator and the curtains covering the window in his bedroom, which overlooked the back wall of Ray’s Sausage.

He produced the rock and asked if she had a stem—a kind of pipe used to smoke crack.

“I handed it to him,” Vanessa said, “and he turned around and put something in it…and [lit] it, and [I] could see the smoke come up. After he took a hit, he turned around and punched me in the face and said ‘bitch take your clothes off.’ He told me if I didn’t do what he said to a tee, he was going to throw me in the closet and forget about me.”

And now, on the stand, with what seemed like the whole world watching, Vanessa Gay began to cry uncontrollably.

Bombik stood patiently. Sowell sat stone-faced and watched her cry.

Vanessa composed herself and went on.

“He went into a rant about his ex-girlfriend and how crack made her and how he was going get those women back who did him wrong when he smoked crack.”

“He said, ‘you don’t deserve what I’m about to do to you’ and it was all bad after that,” Vanessa said. Sowell raped her repeatedly, she said. He kept talking about how he was wronged by other women. He hit her again. She kept agreeing with him.

Courtrooms can be uncomfortable places, and the horrors that people inflict on each other are often bared there. But no one was prepared for this.

Vanessa’s sobs muddled parts of her story, but there
was no one who did not believe it. Even under the glare of incandescent lights and with the company of dozens of people, those watching could feel her aloneness in telling this story.

Then it got worse.

The night faded into daylight, and Vanessa asked if she could use the bathroom, which was located just one door down from the bedroom to the right.

Sowell told her where it was, and she got up and walked out the bedroom door. She cast a glance into the bedroom across the hall as she did so. It was dark when they had walked down the hall before, but now, the morning light was filtering in.

And in that room across the hall, she saw a body wrapped in plastic. And in the courtroom, Vanessa came apart, crying and blurting out, “The plastic was pulled up and there was…It looked like it was a body. It looked like there was no head on it. It was propped up, sitting on the floor.”

Everything in the courtroom stopped as she cried in shaking sobs, tears wetting her powder-blue blouse. It took a full minute before Vanessa could compose herself again.

She said Sowell was behind her and she knew she couldn’t react. And she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“I kept thinking to myself, ‘I couldn’t have possibly seen that,’” she said. “‘This can’t be real.’ But I knew what I saw.”

They went back to the bedroom, and Sowell was worried she would go to the police over the rape.

“He said, ‘you’re gonna tell, I know you’re gonna tell.’
And I said I am not gonna tell,” Vanessa said. “I was saying, ‘what is there to tell?’”

He let her go with a promise that she would come back in a few days, when he got paid. She said yes. She walked out of 12205 Imperial alive.

Vanessa stayed at a friend’s house and slept for three days, then called the police.

They told her they couldn’t take a report over the phone; she had to come in.

“I didn’t know who to turn to, I felt less than human already,” Vanessa said. She’d had enough experiences being hassled by the cops.

“I felt horrible going to the police,” she said. “I had no confidence in the police, none, none. They failed me before.”

She never reported it.

A year later, she recognized Sowell’s picture in the newspaper as bodies were being discovered in the house.

After the bomb that was Vanessa Gay’s testimony, there was no future for the defense of Anthony Sowell. It was three days in, and by the tenth witness, Sowell was guilty in almost everyone’s eyes.