10 Horrifying Facts About Anthony Sowell, AKA the Cleveland Strangler

Anthony Sowell, also known as the Cleveland Strangler, killed 11 women in a two year period. He was apprehended in 2009 and received the death penalty after being convicted on 68 counts of rape, kidnapping, abuse of a corpse, and tampering with evidence.

The horrifying details of Sowell's crimes terrified the world, making him one of the worst serial killers in modern history. His Cleveland house of horrors and his murderous rampage that targeted vulnerable women living in Sowell's neighborhood is the stuff of nightmares. The Anthony Sowell facts listed here are just the tip of the disturbing iceberg. 

After the police arrived at Sowell's house with a search warrant, they began to find all sorts of grisly thing, including a human skull stashed in a bucket in his basement. They also found a body stuffed in a black garbage bag and bodies stuffed in the crawl space.

As police made their way through the house, they found personal belongings of Sowell's victims: jewelry, clothes, and social security paperwork. 

In 1989, Sowell was charged with the attempted rape and torture of a woman who visited him at his home. When the woman tried to leave, a tied up her hands and feet, and began to strangle her. She got away and went to the police. He then spent 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to the attempted rape charge, and was released from prison in 2005. From that point forward, he was a registered sex offender. 

Anthony Sowell had a profile on a dating site called Alt.com, where people who enjoy "alternative fetishes" could communicate. According to his profile, he stated that he enjoyed dominating women, and called himself a "master" who "was looking for a submissive person to train." Sowell wrote that he was a sexual performer who loved being around people, adding that he was willing to have sex anytime and anywhere.

He set up his profile in 2005, and checked it repeatedly until he was caught. 

After his release from prison in 2005 for an attempted rape conviction, Sowell moved back into the Imperial Avenue home of his mother, Claudia Garrison. She was alive when he began murdering women in the house two years later and keeping their bodies on his property.

Neighbors on Imperial Avenue were puzzled for years about a strange smell coming from an unknown source on their block. Ray's Sausage Shop - a sausage making plant - was located right next door to Sowell's house. Thinking it was coming from their shop, factory employees took extra steps to clean and sanitize the space, but to no avail. Many assumed the smell was coming from the factory. Some residents lobbied for the sewers to be cleaned, but when that didn't fix the smell, they gave up. 

Sowell himself told a friend the smell came from his elderly mother. 

Sowell had five women buried in shallow graves in his backyard. Some of the women had decomposed so badly that they could only be identified by jewelry they were found wearing or by their dental records. Six other bodies were found inside of his house, and police believed some had been there for at least a year or more. 

In 1978, Sowell joined the Marine Corps. He was 19 and had just gotten a woman pregnant. They parted ways and he later married a fellow marine. She followed him from post to post as he earned a Good Conduct Medal, Letters of Appreciation, a Meritorious Mast, and a Sea Service Deployment Ribbon before his discharge in 1985 at the rank of corporal. He and his wife divorced shortly after his discharge.

Police are looking into similar unsolved strangulation cases from the 1980s, and are working with law enforcement in other states to see if any related crimes took place while he was in the Marine Corps.

Police from East Cleveland said there were several cold cases where murders were committed by strangulation - Sowell's modus operandi - that stopped once Sowell was arrested in 1989. After Sowell was arrested for his murders, a woman in California claimed Sowell raped her in the '70s while he was stationed at Camp Pendleton, though police were unable to confirm. 

Sowell was nine when his niece and six of her siblings moved into the home that he shared with his mother, sister, and brother. According to his niece's testimony at Sowell's trial, when he was 11 and she was 10 he began raping her on a regular basis. She and her siblings were also abused, whipped with electrical cords, and subjected other forms of torture at the hands of Sowell's mother Gertrude. According to his niece, who remains unidentified in news articles, Sowell and his siblings were not abused and would watch while the torture took place.

Most of the women killed by Sowell were prostitutes with a history of drug abuse. Since Sowell's arrest, many have criticized the Cleveland Police Department of not doing their job and letting Sowell slip through the cracks. 

Family members of Sowell's victims filed a lawsuit against the city saying some of his crimes were preventable. Between his release from prison and his arrest, four women accused Sowell of rape, but he was never arrested. In 2008, a woman said Sowell attacked and raped her. She managed to escape and flag down a police officer, which produced an arrest warrant for Sowell on one count of rape. When police came to his house to serve the warrant, they found two bodies in his living room. 

Officers visited Sowell's home multiple times before his arrest because he was a sex offender - once just hours after he attacked one of his victims - but never investigated him beyond talking.

Police argued they are not legally allowed to enter an offender's house without probable cause or permission. 

Sometime after Sowell's release from prison in 2005, he started seeing Lori Frazier, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson's niece. She even moved into Sowell's house on Imperial Avenue for a time. According to reports, she moved out in 2008 after he lost his job and started smoking crack cocaine. This means that she lived in the house while some of the early murders were taking place.