Serial Killer Anthony Sowell's House Was Like Something Out of a Horror Movie — Where Is He Now?

In August 2011, the family of Anthony Sowell was in a courtroom sharing the painful details of childhoods spent with the convicted serial killer, reported Reuters. His niece, 50-year-old Leona Davis, testified that as a child Sowell was abused by both his mother and grandmother.

The women supposedly stripped all the children naked, tied them to poles or banisters, and then repeatedly whipped them. Sometimes the weapon of choice was an electrical cord.

Sowell's nephew, 48-year-old Jesse "Darnell" Hatcher, said he was beaten so badly he never wore shorts due to the extreme scarring on his legs. Both Davis and Hatcher were asked if they abused their own children. They responded no, choosing to end the cycle.

The same cannot be said for Sowell who began sexually abusing Davis when he was 11 and she was 10. This pattern of abuse continued into adulthood and escalated to murder. Where is the man known as the Cleveland Strangler now?

Sowell was sentenced to death and spent the next decade in an Ohio prison until he passed away on Feb. 8, 2021, at the age of 61, per CNN. He had been admitted to a prison medical facility a month earlier. A spokesperson for the prison told Ideastream public media that his cause of death was not related to COVID-19 but rather an unnamed terminal illness. Five years after his conviction, the Ohio Supreme Court voted to uphold Sowell's death penalty sentencing, reported Court News Ohio.

The bodies of Sowell's victims were discovered in his three-story Cleveland home after a woman told police she had been raped there. In October 2009, they obtained a search warrant for the man who was already a registered sex offender, via CBS News.

Residents complained for years about the odor emanating from his resident, often saying it "smelled like a dead body." What police found was shocking, and could only be compared to the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy.

Sowell's home was described as a house of horrors. A few days after they began searching, authorities found a total of 11 bodies buried in and around his residence, reported Cleveland.com. Six of the bodies were decomposing inside the building while others were scattered around the house either in a shallow grave in the basement, or various crawl spaces. Eventually, they located four bodies buried in his backyard.

The similarities between Sowell, Dahmer, and Gacy didn't stop at their deaths or the means by which their bodies were "disposed of." Four months after Sowell was convicted, the city of Cleveland demolished his home, per CBS News.

"A lot of the families still live in the neighborhood and it will be good for it to be gone," the sister of one victim told the Plain Dealer (via CBS News). "The place is an eyesore and some people have tried to use things from the home for personal gain."