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Cleveland Stench ID'd! Serial Murderer!

Neighbors griped about odor at Cleveland home for years

AP Cleveland Police Department
Anthony E. Sowell.


The Associated Press
Posted Nov 03, 2009 @ 02:56 PM
Last update Nov 03, 2009 @ 02:57 PM
CLEVELAND —


For the past few years, neighbors assumed the foul smell enveloping
their street corner had been coming from a brick building where workers
churned out sausage and head cheese.

It got so bad that the owners of Ray’s Sausage replaced their sewer line
and grease traps. Now they know the odor was coming from a three-story
house next door where the decomposing bodies of six women were found.

A city councilman on Tuesday said he and other community leaders want an
investigation into whether police and health inspectors missed any signs
that could have tipped them off to the bodies inside the house where
convicted rapist Anthony Sowell lived.

Councilman Zack Reed, whose mother lives a block from the area, said he
called the city health department on more than one occasion.

“What happened from there, we don’t know,” he said. “It was no secret
that there was a foul odor. We don’t want to point fingers, but clearly
something could have been done differently.”

Police discovered the bodies Thursday after a woman reported being raped
at Sowell’s home. The 50-year-old Sowell is being held in jail on an
arrest warrant, but he hasn’t been charged in the rape investigation or
in connection with the bodies.

He is a registered sex offender and required to check in regularly at
the sheriff’s office. Officers didn’t have the right to enter his house,
but they would stop by to make sure he was there. Their most recent
visit was Sept. 22, just hours before the woman reported being raped.

Reed said he can’t imagine how police officers and sheriff’s deputies
could have missed the smell. His office records show that he called the
health department in 2007 after a resident told him about an odor that
“smelled like a dead body,” he said.

One of the bodies was found in a shallow grave in the backyard. The rest
were inside the house — one in the basement, two in the third-floor
living room and two in an upstairs crawl space, said police spokesman
Lt. Thomas Stacho.

The bodies could have been there anywhere from weeks to months to years,
said Powell Caesar, a spokesman for the Cuyahoga County coroner.

All the victims were women and five were strangled.

On Tuesday, detectives brought in cadaver dogs and digging equipment to
scour the home and backyard, looking for evidence to connect Sowell to
the bodies, Stacho said.

Authorities also were searching vacant homes within a few miles of the
home, which sat in a crowded inner-city neighborhood of mostly older
houses. Police did not say Tuesday why they were searching the vacant
homes or indicate whether they believe more bodies could be found.

Neighbors are bracing for what could be inside a boarded-up home across
the street and a shuttered school a block away.

“We hope they don’t find anymore,” said Renee Cash, whose family has
operated the sausage company for 57 years.

About four years ago, she and other workers started noticing a smell
that was so bad on some days that it forced them to leave their office.

“In the summertime, it was gross,” Cash said. “You could always smell
it. It smelled like something rotten.”

They poured bleach down the sewer in the basement and eventually had it
replaced. Health inspectors thought the meat processing was to blame,
she said.

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