Anthony Sowell, who terrorized the city of Cleveland with a macabre series of murders and hid the decaying bodies of 11 black women in his home, died on Monday of an undisclosed terminal illness, said a spokeswoman for the prison agency in Ohio. He was 61 years old.
Sowell, who has been on death row since 2011, was admitted last month to an end-of-life treatment unit at Franklin Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio, a facility run by the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, the spokeswoman. JoEllen Smith said in an email Monday night. She did not elaborate on Mr. Sowell’s medical diagnosis, just to say that it was not Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Mr. Sowell was designated a “sexually violent predator” by the criminal justice system in Ohio after being convicted in 2011 on 11 counts of murder, as well as attempted murder, kidnapping, rape, assault and corpse abuse.
The decomposing bodies of the victims were found in Mr. Sowell’s house and in his backyard on the East Side of the city.
At the time of his arrest in 2009, relatives of his victims expressed anger that Mr. Sowell, who had spent 15 years in a state prison for attracting a 21-year-old woman to his home, then strangling and raping her, had unnoticed past. He was released from prison in 2005 in that case.
They also complained that their attempts to get the police to open cases of missing persons were unsuccessful.
When Mr. Sowell was arrested, he pleaded not guilty because of insanity. But that did not stop him from being sent to death row.
Over the years, lawyers for Sowell, the most notorious serial killer in Cleveland’s history, have mounted several unsuccessful attempts to reverse his death sentence.