Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler

Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler

In the autumn of 2009, Cleveland police executing a search warrant at 12205 Imperial Avenue discovered what would become one of the most devastating serial homicide cases in American history. Inside a three-storey duplex in the city's neglected Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, investigators found the remains of eleven women, murdered, concealed, and forgotten by the institutions that should have protected them. Their killer was Anthony Edward Sowell, a registered Tier Three sex offender whose crimes had been enabled not only by his own calculated predatory intelligence but by a cascade of institutional failures spanning two decades: a missing DNA profile, an ignored rape complaint, years of unin vestigated odour reports, and a police detective who chose to believe a violent man over the bleeding woman who had escaped from his home.

This book is both a forensic biography of a serial killer and a structural indictment of the systems that made him possible. Drawing on court records, autopsy reports, legislative history, and the testimony of survivors and victim families, it traces Sowell's development from a traumatised East Cleveland childhood through military service, incarceration, and the four years of killing that ended only when a city finally looked at what it had been refusing to see. At its centre are eleven women whose names deserve to be remembered long after his.