CLEVELAND — The man who lived in the house of rotting corpses never gave people a reason to wonder what he was doing behind closed doors.
Anthony Sowell liked to sit on his front steps drinking King Cobra Malt Liquor for $1.50 a bottle, sometimes in the company of a woman. He hung around the corner convenience store bumming change off his neighbors. He scrounged around sidewalks and backyards for empty cans and scrap metal to sell.
The serial-killing suspect seemed so harmless that when he invited neighbors over for a barbecue in his driveway, they came. So benign that when he beckoned women inside his house that smelled of death, they apparently went willingly.
“If it’s up to the people in the neighborhood, he probably never would have got caught,” said 52-year-old LaBaron Simpson. “Because he didn’t cause no problems around here.”
The house where the authorities say 50-year-old Sowell lived among the reeking corpses of 10 women and the paper-wrapped skull of another was silent Friday, and investigators say they have no plans to resume searching for additional remains. The ex-Marine, who served 15 years in prison for attempted rape, is being held without bail on five aggravated murder charges.
So far only four victims have been identified, including 43-year-old Nancy Cobbs of Cleveland, whose name was released Friday. The others are Tonia Carmichael, 52, of Warrensville Heights; Telacia Fortson, 31, of Cleveland; and Tishana Culver, 31, also of Cleveland.
The city coroner’s office is combing through DNA samples from the families of missing women to identify more remains.
Unbeknown to most neighbors, Sowell was a registered sex offender who checked in with authorities from time to time and fooled people into believing he was just another guy trying to scrape out a living.
He smelled pretty bad, but then a lot of hard-up folks in his rough Cleveland neighborhood smell less than clean, people say.
“Nobody could imagine that this man was capable of doing what he was doing,” said Fawcett Bess, owner of Bess Chicken & Pizza, a restaurant across the street from Sowell’s house. “He always showed respect to you — ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good evening’ and that kind of thing.”
