Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer Read Online Free

firemen took Melvette downstairs to an ambulance, Tressa Garrison, Anthony Sowell’s younger half sister, who was among the flock of relatives living at the house, beseeched her.
    “Why didn’t you scream?” Tressa asked Melvette as the emergency workers escorted her down the stairs.
    Tressa had heard the sirens and before the units had even arrived, she was up the stairs and through the door with her key to Sowell’s room. She’d known that something had to be wrong.
    But she really had no idea just how wrong.
    Anthony Sowell was arrested by the East Cleveland police, and Melvette was taken to Meridia Huron Hospital. He made bond and was indicted by a grand jury in the fall of 1989, but he didn’t show for his court date. The registered notice of his indictment addressed to his home on Page came back, “return to sender.” It would take another crime to bring him in more than seven months later.
    In the early morning hours of June 24, 1990, a Sunday, a thirty-one-year-old woman, five months pregnant, told police that she went to a house on East 71st Street in Cleveland where she was drinking with Sowell. At some point, she said, he’d come up behind her and began to choke her with his arm, at the same time letting her know that “she was his bitch, and she had better learn to like it.”
    He pulled her upstairs and raped her orally, vaginally, and anally. She said Sowell gave her the lines she had to repeat: “Yes, sir, I like it.”
    Then he went to sleep. When the victim returned with the police, he was still sleeping.
    The police arrested him, but the victim disappeared. It didn’t matter though because a quick check of the records found the East Cleveland rape warrant for the Melvette Sockwell assault.
    For the trial, the state subpoenaed Sowell’s half sister Tressa Garrison; five East Cleveland cops who had been either involved in the rescue of Melvette or the interrogation of Sowell after his arrest; the doctor who treated Melvette; the medical-records librarian at Meridia Huron Hospital; and Melvette Sockwell herself, who bravely testified for the state.
    Anthony Sowell claimed to the court that he was indigent, and his court-appointed lawyer bargained the charges down to attempted rape, to which Sowell pled guilty. On September 12, 1990, Judge James P. Kilbane sentenced Sowell up to fifteen years in prison.
    Eight days after sentencing Sowell was taken to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s prison in Lorain, Ohio, where he spent nine years, and was then moved to the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.
    Once in prison, Sowell was supposed to receive sex-offender counseling, and he even applied. Chillicothe offered an advanced sex-offender treatment program, one of the vaunted elements of incarceration there, but Sowell never underwent any treatment. He was never put in the program because, as explained later by a state sex-offender counselor, “He denied committing the…offense.”
    On the other hand, Roosevelt Lloyd, who shared a cell with Sowell for several years in the 1990s in the Grafton Correctional Institution, says that Sowell refused to acknowledge his crime or take the sex-offender classes inprison because he felt it would make him a target, sexual offenders being scorned even among inmates. In the hierarchy of crimes among the incarcerated, it’s better to be a straight-up murderer than a rapist. Lloyd himself was serving a sentence for sexually molesting a child, a female.
    Sowell did take courses to address some of his other issues through programs with uplifting and positive messages in their titles like “Living Without Violence,” “Cage Your Rage,” and “Positive Personal Change.” He also took the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous programs “Adult Children of Alcoholics” and “Drug Awareness Prevention.”
    During his time in the Ohio correctional system Sowell received two “tickets,” or write-ups for misbehavior, both on minor offenses: one for