Read Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer for Free Online

began to run away, preferring to escape than face the wrath of Claudia, who didn’t believe anything they said anyway.
    Ramona was caught the first time she ran off and put in Metzenbaum Children’s Center, a temporary shelter and diagnostic center for troubled and runaway kids. Leona willingly followed her, managing to sneak into the facility and hide for two months before being detected.
    The system failed them over and over, returning them to Page Avenue and their life of torment.
    Finally, Leona figured a way out.
    “I set some clothes on fire in Claudia’s room while she was at work. It was summertime, and everyone else was downstairs. I went up there, closed the door. I had some matches, and I lit those clothes. I walked out, and pretty soon, the fire department was there because there was smoke coming out the window, and someone called them. And I confessed. I finally got into Metzenbaum myself, and I never had to go back to Page. I got admitted to Sagamore Hills Children’s Psychiatric Hospital. And someone there believed me.”
    Still, Leona’s fortunes didn’t improve all that much. Her life from then on became a blur of suicide attempts, blackouts, psychotic episodes, and advanced mentalillness, all a hangover of her days on Page at the hands of Anthony Sowell.
    By the late 1970s, East Cleveland was falling apart, part of the urban decay sweeping America. The town of 40,000 was losing population, leaving only the poor, primarily black residents to hold down the place. To be from C-Town, as East Cleveland was called, was to be from poverty.
    “It was getting to be terrible, just terrible,” recalls Twyla Austin.
    The stretch of once glitzy Euclid Avenue was now a decrepit haven of drug dealing and thuggery.
    Anthony Sowell was also starting to find trouble; by 1977, he was a high school dropout with a varied trail of misdemeanors, including shoplifting, domestic violence, drunk and disorderly, breaking and entering, and minor assault.
    He paid a fine for the disorderly charge and served thirty days on the domestic violence case. The aggravated burglary charges were dropped. The police had bigger fish to fry.
    For the first time in his life, Sowell had to make a move on his own. He lacked the credits for a high school diploma. So, like quite a few of his peers, facing a life of crime or poverty, armed for life with nothing more than some minor street smarts, in the spring of 1977, Sowell enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp (though he first tried to join the army before changing his mind).
    He was underage, still only seventeen, and his mother, Claudia, didn’t approve. “She argued against it, but she end[ed] up signing the papers, because this might happen anyway when I turn eighteen in August that year [1977],” Sowell said. “I finished school when I was seventeen, so I was going. I got into the Marines. That started off early that year. I actually signed up with the army—I was literally with the army at first. Early that year, around February or March [1977], I started at the recruiting camp at school but then [the army recruiter] came up, and he started talking to me and talked to my parents, and I initially took my entrance test with the United States Army.”
    The Marines, he said, were tougher and that’s where he went “because I have a point to prove,” he said. “That I can do it.”
    He had told Twyla that he was considering the move.
    “But he never gave me any real reason, and I supported him doing it,” she says. It would give him some money, and he was going to need it; a month after he left Cleveland for training, Twyla called and told him she was pregnant.
    “He was really happy,” Twyla says. “I think he was proud.”
    A daughter, Julie, was born in August 1978.
    Sowell reported for boot camp on January 24, 1978, at Parris Island, South Carolina, before being dispatched for basic training at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina.
    It was the smartest thing Sowell would ever do, and