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CLEVELAND – Authorities say Anthony Sowell lured women into his home in a busy neighborhood, killed them – most by strangulation – and scattered their remains throughout the inside and buried some in the backyard.
Such brazenness defies logic, but experts identify a narrow subcategory of serial killers who hunt from home.
“These types are so rare that you can’t make a summary estimation as to why or what went wrong or anything,” said Robert Keppel, a national serial-killer expert who investigated serial killer Ted Bundy in Washington state in the 1970s.
Sowell often sat on the front steps of his house, sipping beer out of a bottle. Neighbors say he’d offer a few the chance to get high.
Sowell’s alleged approach reflects an obvious point, said forensic psychologist N.G. Berrill: the potential role of mental illness in such unusual behavior.
“The fact that they would dirty their own nest, as it were, is peculiar to me and suggests a level of mental illness or sickness,” said Berrill, director of the New York Center for Neuropsychology and Forensic Behavioral Science.
When people think of serial killers, they imagine predators like Bundy, who stalked and killed women in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Colorado and finally Florida.
But some of history’s most notorious serial killers literally worked close to home.
In Milwaukee, Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to killing and dismembering 17 people since 1978, some of whom he mutilated and cannibalized. His victims included 11 males whose remains were found in his apartment.
Dahmer was serving a series of life sentences when he was killed by another inmate at a Wisconsin prison in 1994.
The crimes that Sowell is accused of put him in the same category, said Jack Levin, a Northeastern University criminologist.
“They never leave town. They never travel to another state. They stay close to home, where they’re familiar with the victims and escape routes and dump sites,” Levin said.
Hunting from home may have been easier because of the marginal lives led by Sowell’s alleged victims. All four of the Cleveland women identified until now battled addiction in their lives.
It wasn’t unusual for some of them to disappear for a week or two and then return.
