CLEVELAND - The discovery of 11 bodies in one home in a run-down neighborhood here has relatives of the presumed victims wondering how such a gruesome scene could have gone unnoticed for perhaps years, and they charge that police ignored their missing person reports.
The man who lives in the home, 50-year-old Anthony Sowell, was ordered held without bond Wednesday on five counts of aggravated murder.
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 recovered bodies in the living room, crawl spaces and backyard graves from the home on Imperial Avenue. There was even a skull in the basement.
"They told us to go home, and as soon as the drugs are gone, she'll show up," said Markiesha Carmichael-Jacobs, whose 53-year-old mother, Tonia, a drug addict, vanished Nov. 10, 2008. Police identified her Wednesday as one of the victims, saying her body was found buried in the backyard with marks indicating strangulation.
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"It's hard to imagine," Carmichael-Jacobs said as she stood shivering on a street corner across from Sowell's home Wednesday, "but that's what they told us to our face: 'She'll turn up.'"
Even neighbors seemed unfazed by the disappearances: They say many of the women were known prostitutes or drug users.
But some wonder whether police just didn't look for the women because they were from the city. Or because they were black.
"There's this fear that the neighborhood has been forgotten," said the Rev. Rodney Maiden of Providence Baptist Church.