Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello, it's Andrea. So today I want to introduce you to a brand new true crime show that I binged the heck out of, Deviant.
This is from the award-winning creators of Down the Hill: The Delphi Murders. So I am extremely picky about true crime, but the hosts of this show, Dan and Andrew, really bring a lot of journalistic integrity to their coverage, and they handle the gruesome elements with a lot of care, in addition to just being truly excellent storytellers. And without further ado, please enjoy Deviant. Church's original recipe is back. You can never go wrong with original.
Still tastes the same like back in the day. Right now, get two pieces of chicken starting at only $2.99 or ten pieces starting at only $10.99. Churches. Offer valid at participating locations.
Only on Netflix, October 18, rated R.
Hello, Nobody Should Believe Me listeners. My name's Dan Simitovich. And I am Andrew Iden, and we are the hosts of a new show called Deviant. And what Deviant is, is an anthology of true crime stories that we take the amount of time we need to tell them well. So we're going to tell one story for however long it takes to tell it right, and then move on to the next one, and then on to the next one, always giving you the most interesting stories that we can find in the world.
and telling them the best way we know how. And the story we're going to serve up today is the story of Anthony Sowell, who was a man in Cleveland, Ohio, who in 2009, police walked into his house and
and found 11 dead women upstairs and in the backyard, buried in the backyard. And it's a story about red flags, missed opportunities, and frankly, infuriating incompetence. This is the first episode of our series, and multiple episodes are available right now as you're listening to this. So find us where you find your podcasts, follow, and we hope you'll find this story as fascinating as we did. Thanks.
The following episode contains scenes that may not be suitable for all audiences. Before the name Sowell even hit the presses, we were getting phone calls from a young lady, from a lady across the street from the house over a number of years who would say there's a foul smell in the neighborhood and it smells like a dead body. So we would then take that information and we would pass it on to the health department.
And the health department would come out, and as you probably are well aware, there was a sausage factory that's still there today, right next door to the So Well House. So evidently, everybody, you know, people just said, hey, you know, it's got to be the sausage. Sausage places putting out foul meat and this and that and in between.
So they made Ray's Sausage, that's the name of the sausage factory, they made them change a lot of improvements to their facility. The health department would get our sewer department to come out and clean the sewers out simply because of the complaint that we made. Did you smell the smell? Yeah, but I also thought it was coming from Ray's Sausage, but it wasn't. And so Ray's Sausage took a bad, bad beating.
as far as financially and the city coming out, making them redo their sewer. And that was a shame that nobody pick it up. But yeah, you could smell it. In 2009, in Cleveland's Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Ray's Sausage Factory sits at the corner of Imperial Avenue and East 123rd Street.
For 57 years, it's been run by the Cash family, and a lot of residents, it seems, are assuming that the foul smell covering the neighborhood is coming from its doors. They process meat, and meat can be difficult to process, simple enough. But as we all know, assumptions can be dangerous. And in this case, they were deadly. Next to that sausage factory, a White House with a resident named Anthony Sowell.
Back then in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, it's common for women to go missing for any number of reasons. People were used to that, and it allowed Sowell to kill. If police paid just a little more attention, if there was just a little more work put in, he could have been stopped. But they didn't, and he wasn't. We're all wired differently. Some of us are wired for good. Some of us are wired for bad. But a select few step outside all of society's boundaries. From cold open media...
This is Deviant, Anthony Sowell, part one.
Welcome to Deviant, where we chase the truth into the dark corners of what humans are capable of. I'm Dan Sematovich. And I'm Andrew Aydin. And this is the first part of a new exploration of a new deviant, Anthony Sowell. If you don't know who Sowell is, he was convicted of killing 11 women in the Cleveland area in the late 2000s. Now, 11 is the official number, and as you'll hear as we go over the next couple of episodes, he was convicted of killing 11 women in the Cleveland area in the late 2000s.
There is reason to think that that number could be higher. Before we get into the story, though, make sure you're following this show, if you're not already, on whichever podcast platform you use. Interact with us on social. There, we're putting up material that you can see and interact with and, you know, get a sense of what we're doing and how. We're on TikTok, we're on Instagram, at deviant.podcast. Leave comments or send DMs, too. We do look at them and answer them.
And if you want to learn even more about the people and stories we're talking about, check out our Patreon. Visit deviantpodcast.com and there you'll get behind the scenes information. You'll see some of the videos and documents that we're talking about in this show. And you can come hang out with us on Discord too. So check out deviantpodcast.com to see what our Patreon has to offer you. And now it's time to start the story of our next deviant, Anthony Sowell.
There is no real reason why this story should even exist. The story of Anthony Sowell and what he did to women, how he preyed on a neighborhood, should never have been written.
This is a story that shouldn't be. It's a story that's going to make you angry. It's going to make you ask a lot of questions. You're going to want answers. How does one man, a convicted rapist, a registered sex offender with 15 years in prison, have 11 dead women inside a house in a major American city patrolled by a major metropolitan police department? It's a story of red flags, missed opportunities,
and infuriating incompetence. It's a story of Black women, a marginalized community, and a neighborhood dealing with drugs and violence. I'm Zach Reed. I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. I became a councilman from 2001 to 2017. So I was a councilman for 17 years. And Anthony Sowell House just happened to be in the ward, the district that I represented for 17 years. The neighborhood is called Mount Pleasant.
and is one of the most residential neighborhoods in the entire city of Cleveland. As many folks know,
City of Cleveland is one of the most segregated cities in the entire country, has been and continues to be. So when African-Americans, Black folks, were allowed to move out of what we call the central area, the downtown central area, and move out into neighborhoods, they basically moved to two neighborhoods. One was Glenville, which is on the northeast side of the city of Cleveland, and one was Mount Pleasant, which is on the southeast side of the city of Cleveland.
Don Laster, and I live in Cleveland, Ohio. And I live in the 4th District in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. And the Mount Pleasant neighborhood is one of the worst neighborhoods in the state of Ohio.
And I live here and I love it. That neighborhood had a lot of drugs in it and just one of the poorer neighborhoods in Cleveland. And it's just now recovering. Cleveland was going through a lot of drug problems. Crack, I think, was the major drug. A lot of people was losing houses and the economy was pretty bad here.
It seemed like a bomb went off. This story mainly happens in the late 2000s. And much like today, neighborhoods of color like Mount Pleasant, they're neglected. And the people who live there have a complicated, sometimes adversarial relationship with the police force. And it's that environment and those challenges that allow Anthony Sowell to operate for so long.
almost in plain sight. He was eventually stopped, and it all happens within the space of just over a week. That week starts on October 20th, 2009, with an absolutely insane and terrifying incident involving Don Laster, the man you heard that loves Cleveland and his Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Here's Don Laster now, and this story he has to tell. Buckle up. Well, that day I just left a funeral, and I was going to go on the other side for the repast.
And I had two young men with me, two friends of mine. And anytime I'd ride past Imperial, I would ride past my house to check on it. I stopped at my house and got out, looked up and down in the yard, and everything looked good. And I got back in the car and continued to drive west on Imperial. As I went down, I stopped at the stop sign.
And Anthony lived two houses from the stop sign. As I passed the first structure, which was raised sausage, I saw something out my peripheral vision, something fell. And I looked over and it was a body on the ground.
I immediately pulled over and my two friends were saying, did you see that? And I got out the car to see what the hell was that? What was going on? And they all got out the car with me. And we seen a female laying on the ground, unconscious with blood coming from her mouth and her nose. And I know that's bad. And she was crying.
Naked. Didn't have anything on. So she fell like in a cavity and rolled off the roof. She came out the attic window, rolled off the second floor roof, and then fell and hit the ground. She just missed the fence by one foot. I think if she had hit that fence, she probably wouldn't have made it. So those two young guys, they pulled out their phones and started taking pictures. I ran them off.
And I wanted to get some help. But first we wanted to get some clothes on her. And I asked my guys to go back to my truck and get some T-shirts that I had with my construction company on them. Got the construction shirt, and there was a fence between me and the female. And that's when Anthony Sowell came around the corner from the back of the house coming up
I think it was about four or five feet in between the two structures. So I yelled, what the hell going on? Call 911, I told my friend. Call 911. Was she conscious? She was unconscious. But when Anthony came around the corner, I asked him some questions. Well, I asked him, what the hell are you doing? And he was naked too. And looking at him, I seen where he was wet naked.
from having sex. I mean, it was just, it's clearing my mind right now. And I didn't want to look at him. He was butt naked. And I asked him, what are you doing? He said, this is my wife, Don. We was having sex and she fell out the window. I said, man, you lying. He said, I'm going to take her back in the house.
And I said, if you touch her, I'm going to jump this fence and whoop your ass. And he put her down. And I grabbed the fence like I'm going to jump it, but I was too fat to jump it anyway. He would have got away. So we called 911. He put the shirt on her. I gave him the shirt. He put it on her.
We called 911. I heard the fire trucks coming up the street because they was maybe a half a mile away from the scene. And I heard them coming up the streets. I made him pause and he was mad. He was talking. Man, let me take her back in the house. She'll be OK. And he's still standing there naked. Yeah. But she still she still hadn't recovered, hadn't woke up.
And the 911 operator started asking me questions. Now they had the video on a 911 call. That's what they played in court. And so I turned around to stop the fire truck to let them know exactly where we were at. And I turned back around. Andy Sowell had swooped her up and started running with her. Now this guy was strong to be his size. He picked her up and he ran all the way down that cavity, that alley, right?
between the two houses going back towards the back of the house and I had to stop him. So I took off running, me and the fireman. He was right behind me and we ran up the driveway and he had gotten that back door, but I put my foot in it when he was trying to close it. And the fireman told me that he can't go in the house. If he closed that door, he can't go and retrieve the lady.
So I struggled with the door. I got it open and I grabbed her by the ankle because he had her almost upstairs. I grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her. And then I swung at him and he tried to duck my punch. And then the fireman grabbed her other leg. But he was out on the porch. We had got her kind of like out on the porch and we pulled her tug of war. And I swung at him again. Once he tried to slip my punch...
We got her and we pulled her out on the porch and she was still unconscious. And Anthony shut the door and they got her to the hospital. There's a crowd of people outside who see this happen, who see her fall from the window and land on the ground below, and they see him come out after her.
and try and pick her up and drag her back into the house. That's Chris Schroeder. In 2009, he's working in the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office. Now he's a U.S. Attorney in Alaska. He plays a prominent role in the Sowell case. And they're yelling at him, "Leave her alone." And he picks her up, takes her back in the house. The ambulance responds. He rides with her in the ambulance to the hospital and tells the EMS technicians that he's her husband.
And she wakes up two days later with a cracked skull and eight broken ribs. She doesn't go to the police because he threatened to kill her if she did. And the police never followed up on the incident where a naked woman fell out of a third floor window onto concrete below. And he picks her up and drags her back in the house and isn't her husband, which was easily confirmable.
There are some reasonable assumptions to be made here. One, after being found naked in an alley with a woman who's fallen out of his window and then fighting with bystanders while attempting to drag that woman back inside his house,
Sowell is immediately arrested. That would be a good assumption, but he wasn't. Two, another good assumption. There's enough probable cause to walk into Sowell's house right then and there. On paper, that's definitely the case, but that assumption would also be wrong. They didn't.
Or maybe three. Since none of that happened, police would at least be curious and follow up on the case, even if the victim of an apparent sexual assault is hesitant to come forward. That assumption? Also wrong. They did nothing. What finally leads police to Anthony Sowell later that week absolutely isn't what Don Laster witnesses driving down Imperial Avenue. Instead, it's a different assault from nearly a month earlier. Let me ask you this. With Lala...
How come you let her go? She didn't do nothing. All I didn't... She didn't do nothing to me. We didn't do nothing. I mean... Well, when you... I mean... I didn't have her. I mean, you know, I let her go. It's Halloween, and in a downtown Cleveland high-rise, police are sitting in an interrogation room across from Anthony Sowell. They're asking him about something different. A complaint filed against him. A complaint from the previous month. Well, when you took the cord off of her... Cord? Yeah.
Well, what was it? The wire? No. The cord? Huh? There was never no cord. Well, she has marks on her neck. It wasn't from me. Well, maybe not. But she's saying it's you. It wasn't from me. She was fine when she left my house. There was nothing wrong. She left, like I said, she left, her ride came and picked up right in front of my house. She left, we got there with three or four other people.
In late September, Latundra Billups, la-la to her friends, accuses Sowell of sexually assaulting her in his house on Imperial Avenue. She said that we was upstairs, we was kicking it, and we started to get out, and then she said, no, stop. And you didn't stop? That's what she said. But the girl stayed with me all day long. From 7 o'clock in the morning, she'd leave at 5.30. What she said happened after that? She took a...
They didn't really get into it. They just said that she said I made her have sex against her will. And I'm like, well, hold up. She was out there with me, my friends. She was out there. I sent her a post. I let her use my phone. She called a ride. I stayed right there. Her ride came. What friends was she out there with you? People in the area. Your friends? I mean, her friends. They all knew her. No, you said she was out there with you and your friends. Yeah, me and...
When she goes to the hospital, the evidence of a sexual assault is clear. She meets with the police. She names her attacker. She tells them where it all happened. And she also tells them about hearing that Sowell has attacked other women before.
She says that when she confronts Sowell with that, he flies into a rage, and that's when he attacks her. For 35 days, Cleveland Police Department's Sex Crimes Unit and Lala don't connect for a follow-up. In the police report, Detective Richard Durst says, quote,
I'd continually miss her and her phone calls to the office. But on October 27th, Latundra Billups and the Cleveland Police Department finally connect. One big question here. If Latundra gives police a statement the night of the assault and evidence of the assault is clear, why do they need an additional statement from Latundra one month later before finally issuing an arrest warrant for Sowell? We don't know. And despite multiple, multiple requests from us,
Police won't say. They're not talking, at least not yet. You're going to want to bookmark that in your mind for later. A violent sex assault ending with a woman flying out of an upper story window isn't enough to get authorities to the front door of Anthony Sowell's home on Imperial Avenue.
But Latundra Billups' second statement on October 27th is, things finally start to move quickly. On October 28th, police meet with prosecutors and obtain an arrest warrant for Anthony Sowell. And then on October 29th, police arrive and walk up the five steps to the front porch and knock on the door.
From the outside, it looks like most of the houses in the neighborhood. There's three floors, iron railings, a balcony. And remember at the beginning of the show, we talked about Ray's Sausage Factory? Well, Sowell's house is right next door. And that's how things look on the outside. And then police walk in.
I am Theresa Stafford. I am the Chief Executive Officer of the Hope and Healing Survivor Resource Center, which is the home of the battered women's shelter and the rape crisis center serving Medina and Summit counties in Ohio. October 29th, 2009, I remember this date. I was working at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center and we were having an open house for our new office space. And some of the sex crime detectives were there celebrating with us because we are partners, celebrating the opening of our new office space.
And they got a call that they had to leave. They had a warrant that they needed all hands on deck for. And that was the night that they started discovering the bodies. Again, here's former Cleveland Councilman Zach Reed. When it hit my executive assistant, she called me and said, Zach, I'm telling you, I remember that lady calling and continue to tell us there's a foul smell in the neighborhood and it smells like a dead body.
So for that time, that lady knew what a dead, I now know what a dead body smells like because it never comes out of your stents. That stents never leaves you. So she must've knew what a dead body was because she was the one who said, there's a foul smell in the neighborhood and it smells like a dead body.
Chris Schroeder, you heard from him earlier in the show. First time I heard the name Anthony Sowell was the night of October 29th, 2009. It was the night that the first bodies were found in the house. It started out as a small local story because originally only two bodies had been found and made public.
Two Bodies is a significant story in Cleveland, but it's not a nationwide story. And then over the next 48 hours, they started finding more and more and more, and Two Bodies became four, which quickly became six, which then ultimately became 11. And suddenly it was a nationwide story, and it was everywhere. And the perpetrator hadn't been arrested. The homeowner was on the loose somewhere. It's not, in fact, Ray's Sausage Factory.
There are 11 bodies on the property on 12205 Imperial Avenue. The man who lives upstairs isn't home and they can't find him. And as the sun goes down and temperatures drop into a typical October night, more and more investigators arrive on the scene in Mount Pleasant. Now, everyone in Cleveland wants to know, needs to know, where is Anthony Sowell? Next time on Deviant.
Police are searching for Anthony Sowell, and as news gets out, the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Cleveland, the United States, is trying to make sense of what is being found inside of Sowell's house. The full scope of what police have on their hands is becoming clear. Tough questions are getting asked, and everybody wants answers. Right.
That's bullshit, man. Them girls, something out of these doors. That's not the way I felt. Well, feel the way he feel and tell me what I need to know. God, please, man. I don't believe this, man.
Just a reminder, if you're not following the show, please hit that follow button right now. And also follow us on social. We're at deviant.podcast on Instagram and TikTok. And if you want to see some of the videos of Sowell and see some of the documents we're using to piece all this together, visit deviantpodcast.com to check out our Patreon. There, you can also learn how to join our Discord. And once you do, you can come chat with me and Andrew. Deviant is written,
Produced and executive produced by Clark Goldband, Andrew Iden, and me, Dan Sematovich. Editorial and production consultation comes from Jenny Amant with original scoring by Shuvo Sir. Marketing, sales, and distribution support come from our friends at Gemini 13. Deviant is a production of Cold Open Media.
Did you know the cost of each illegal immigrant is nearly $9,000 per year? According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the total cost of taxpayers since 2021 is $72.8 billion. Current Washington leaders have irresponsibly allowed entry of over 7 million illegals, five times the number from our prior elected officials.
As you may know, we have a little bit of a break.
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