Remember Anthony Sowell, the guy who pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity for killing all those women??? Well there are more details to what was going on in Cleveland:
The bodies could have been buried anywhere. In the garbage bin next to his house, which occasionally reeked with the smell of something rotting inside. In the bowels of a boarded-up house down the block. Beneath a pile of debris in an overgrown, vacant lot. There are many places to hide a body in East Cleveland — a crime-ridden neighborhood where a man once lived among the corpses of 11 women for months and nobody noticed. Ever since those bodies were found stashed throughout Anthony Sowell’s home, investigators have wondered: Did he bury more bodies nearby?
“I think it was on everyone’s mind,” says Richard Bell, one of the city’s chief prosecutors and director of Cuyahoga County’s cold-case unit. “We were not only finding bodies in his attic, but there were bodies out in the yard. The crew had to stay out there extensively, for days and days, wondering if they had dug deep enough.” County Prosecutor Bill Mason said there was nothing to do but reopen the cases of the old, unsolved murders of women who resembled the victims found in Sowell’s house: poor, drug-addicted black women. “Our approach to all of this was to find more Sowell victims,” Mason says. “Because we believed there were more.”
Mason’s cold-case team pulled the files of 75 unsolved homicides from within a three-mile radius of the two homes on the east side of town where Sowell — who has pleaded not guilty to killing the women — had lived since the 1980s. They dusted off old paperwork, pored over the reports and searched for any biological evidence that might still be tested for DNA. Nicknamed the “Sowell surge,” the project was meant to assuage the fears of a city still shaken by the violent deaths of so many women.
“What we didn’t expect to find,” Bell says, “was another serial murderer.” The evidence is buried in storage rooms all over the city, stuffed in boxes and bags and manila envelopes. At police headquarters, the cluttered property rooms are overflowing with hundreds of drawers and shelves, each one stuffed with pieces of a crime: guns, metal cages, lawn rakes, egg crates, battered car seats, an old car muffler.
“This ain’t like CSI, where everything you need is in a pretty white box,” says Michael Beaman, one of the investigators. The investigators rely on a stack of red leather-bound books dating back to 1911 that list each item and where it is stored. Evidence for a single case could be scattered among several storage facilities on opposite ends of town, from a suburban police precinct to walk-in freezers at the coroner’s office. Retired homicide detectives in their 50s and 60s make up most of this cold-case team, along with a couple of scientists from the coroner’s office, a paralegal and a prosecutor. Paid with soon-to-end federal grant money, they’ve investigated old cases since 2006, focusing primarily on unsolved rapes and sexual assaults — the crimes that yield the greatest potential for DNA evidence. Until the Sowell Surge, they had filed 13 indictments in unsolved cases. One day in November, a year after the bodies were found in Sowell’s home, O’Malley walked into Bell’s office and said there was a DNA hit in one of the surge cases: Mary Thomas, 27, who was strangled and beaten to death in 1989.
But the name on the lab report was not Anthony Sowell. It was Joseph Harwell, who pleaded guilty to fatally strangling a woman near Columbus in 1997 and is currently serving 15 years to life at a prison in Mansfield, an hour south of Cleveland. Harwell, 50, has a long criminal history dating back to the 1970s, including a conviction for felonious assault in 1989, when he attempted to strangle another woman, who survived. Harwell had already shown up once before on the cold-case radar. In 2008 — before any bodies were found in Sowell’s home — investigators had traced Harwell’s DNA to yet another woman killed near that East Cleveland neighborhood.
Tondilear Harge, 33, was found dead in September 1996 in a lot overgrown with shrubbery, blocks from where Harwell lived. The abandoned building where Thomas was killed seven years earlier was but 1.5 miles from Harwell’s home. Sowell’s home was nearby. Prosecutors say Sowell, 51, lured vulnerable women to his home with the promise of alcohol or drugs. Police discovered the first two bodies and a freshly dug grave as they investigated a woman’s report that she had been raped there. For months, the stench of death wafted down the street where Sowell lived, but it was blamed on a sausage factory next door.
Investigators say there’s no evidence that Sowell and Harwell even knew each other. What they had in common was jail time for attacking a woman before they were accused of killing anyone. Investigators say they also shared a desire to rape and kill poor, drug-addicted black women.
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