Negative Blogs

The run-down Cleveland neighborhood where 50-year-old Anthony Sowell quietly carved out an existence is the type of place where women can disappear almost in plain sight.

Crack users sneak into vacant houses to do drugs, have sex, steal copper pipes and wiring to make a few bucks.

No one asks a lot of questions, even about the smell of rotting meat that came when the wind blew a certain way. Some likened it to the smell of death, and it seemed to follow Sowell around.

No one is sure how long Sowell, a registered sex offender who would offer free barbecue to the neighbors, had been living in his three-story house with corpses lying around, many of them black women who had been strangled. Police have now recovered 11 bodies from the home on Imperial Avenue, in the living room, crawl spaces and backyard graves. There was even a skull in the basement.

But if Sowell’s street is seedy, it’s far from abandoned. Occupied homes are sandwiched between vacant, boarded-up houses and scattered small businesses with a steady stream of customers.

“We’re not talking about some desolate area, some abandoned barn,” said Councilman Zach Reed, whose mother lives a block away. “How did somebody get away with this in a residential neighborhood?” Hard money training