The smell had lingered for years on Imperial Avenue, in Cleveland, Ohio’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood.
Neighbors blamed it on Ray’s Sausage, the sausage business operating right next to Anthony Sowell’s house. City authorities inspected the factory and forced its owner, Ray Cash, to install new plumbing, grease traps, and ventilation systems, at a cost of up to 30.000 dollars. The smell never disappeared because it had never come from there.
On October 29, 2009, police arrived at Sowell’s three-story house while investigating a rape report. They found six bodies inside the home, one of them a skull wrapped in paper inside a bucket in the basement, and five more buried in the yard. The eleven victims were Black women, many homeless or struggling with addictions, who had disappeared between 2007 and 2009 without anyone urgently searching for them. Sowell was convicted and sentenced to death; he died in prison in 2021, twelve years after a court acknowledged what the neighborhood had never imagined.
