We have this idiotic system in which violent sex offenders must register with local authorities once they are released from prison in order to make it easier to keep a tab on them. Really? Would it not be A LOT EASIER to keep a tab on them if we never released them from prison in the first place?
Any man who would do what Anthony Sowell was convicted of doing in 1989 is not worth taking a chance on. He never should have been released. He was sentenced to 15 years, but he should have got life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer:
It began at 6 a.m. on July 22, 1989, when police showed up at a motel on Euclid and Lee roads in East Cleveland. The woman was waiting for her boyfriend, and she feared officers were going raid the motel.
Sowell was there, as well, and lured the woman to his car and told her that her boyfriend would want her to stay with Sowell until after the officers left. Sowell drove her to his home -- a third-floor apartment on Page Road in East Cleveland.
Once inside, Sowell threw her on his bed, choked her and repeatedly raped her.
When she tried to leave, Sowell tied her hands with a necktie, wrapped a belt around her feet and stuffed a rag in her mouth. He threw her on the bed and began pacing up and down the stairs.
He later came back into the room and fell asleep on the bed. The woman got her feet loose, spit out the rag and crawled out the window, onto the roof and screamed for help. She feared opening the squeaking door would wake Sowell.
"He told me that he was going to kill me, and I believed him," the woman told police.
Anthony Sowell did not kidnap, terrorize and rape his victim in 1989 because he had some grudge against her. He did that horrible deed because he is a psychopath, one who never should have been allowed out of his cage. Yet we sentenced him to 15 years behind bars, as if he would learn his lesson. Get real. Psychopaths don't learn lessons. They are irredeemable.
What was the result of our mistake in judgment about Anthony Sowell's nature? A lot more rapes and at least six murders.
The NY Daily News:
Cleveland Police were scrambling to identify the bodies of six women found in various stages of decomposition inside a convicted rapist's house of horrors over the weekend.
In a scenario ripped from "The Silence of the Lambs," Ohio ex-con Anthony Sowell allegedly strangled a series of women in his three-story house over a period of months - or even years.
Rotting bodies were found in upstairs bedrooms, the living room, a crawl space, a shallow grave in the backyard and another grave in the basement, police said.
The Sowell case not only demonstrates the insanity of letting convicted psychopaths back on the streets, it shows how incompetent so many of our police officers are.
The New York Times is reporting that "the police were notified repeatedly about violence there, but little was done. (A) neighbor ... said that about two weeks ago he found the rapist, Anthony Sowell, in the bushes alongside Mr. Sowell’s house naked and standing over a woman who was bloodied, beaten and naked. (He) said he called 911, and an ambulance soon took the woman away. But the police showed up two hours later and never interviewed him, Mr. Bess said."
None of that surprises me. A lot of police departments are filled with incompetent cops who are protected by their unions. Lawsuits make it too expensive to fire these boobs. And society suffers for it.
The Daily News:
"Not a pretty sight inside the home. I stood outside the home for about an hour and the stench from inside was overwhelming," said Cleveland Police spokesman Thomas Stacho.
Investigators were gathering DNA samples and dental records and combing through records of women reported missing since June 2005, when Sowell, 50, was freed after serving a 15-year prison term for choking and raping a woman.
Fearing the worst, some family members of two neighborhood women who went missing in April and June gathered in front of the house, joining reporters watching the police work.
A community vigil was being organized for Monday night.
All the dead women were black, and all died of strangulation, the coroner reported.
I wonder if this maniac had been white, as Garrido is, the reaction among his black neighbors would have been different. It's hard to say. It seems like any time a white criminal commits violence or other crimes against black victims, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton do everything possible to stir up racial hatred. But in a case like this, even if the murderer/rapist had been white, the heinousness of the crime may have caused everyone to just be numb to the normal rabblerousing.
The bottom line with regard to the victimization of blacks: Almost all of it is done by other blacks. The same is true with whites or Hispanics. Most crimes committed against anyone of any racial or ethnic group are committed by members of that same group. However, because of our racial history in the U.S., too many blacks continue to pay too much attention to the rare instances where blacks are harmed by whites. They ought to focus their attention on their own; just as white people who are crime victims should largely be looking at other white people.
The Daily News:
Police went to Sowell's house in a dicey neighborhood of southeast Cleveland on Thursday to arrest him for a new sexual assault and serve a search warrant.
Sowell wasn't home, but the smell was so bad the officers headed for the trash-strewn upstairs where they discovered the carnage.
A tipster spotted Sowell walking near his home on Saturday and alerted police, who arrested him without incident.
If the the Phillip Garrido case did not prove to you that keeping a sex-offender registration system in place is a huge waste of money, the Anthony Sowell case should.
Sowell had faithfully met with his parole officer and filled out all his sex offender paperwork.
Neighbors knew something was off about Sowell, who smelled so terrible their eyes would water.
"He came into my store last week and reeked so bad, I had to open the front and back doors," convenience store owner Eli Tayeh told the Los Angeles Times.
"I asked why he stunk. He shrugged, bought his beer and walked out."
But people blamed backed up sewers or Ray's Sausage company, housed in an adjacent building.
"We kept away from him and he kept away from us," said neighbor Tamica Pierceton, 26. "We should have said something to someone. I wish I had."
UPDATE: The AP is now reporting that in addition to the six bodies already found at Mr. Sowell's house of horrors, four more corpses were discovered:
CLEVELAND – Remains of four more people were unearthed from the backyard of a rapist's home Tuesday, raising to 10 the number of bodies found in and near the house, as police also searched boarded-up homes in the neighborhood where residents complained for years of a stench that one even said "smelled like a dead body."
"It appears that this man had an insatiable appetite that he had to fill," police Chief Michael McGrath said.
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