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

his time in the Marines was marked with success, at least professionally.
    He finished first in his basic-training class of forty. Soon he would find that he could hit a target with a rifle from 600 yards. Like all Marines, Anthony Sowell was taught how to defend himself and emerge victorious from battlefield conflicts, how to hurt an enemy by hand, using choke holds, punches, and weapons in hand-to-hand combat. These are special fighting skills, similar to those taught and embraced by the vaunted U.S. Navy SEALs.
    In May 1978, Sowell began his military career as an electrician at Camp Lejeune, first obtaining his high school equivalency and then studying electrical wiring before moving up the coast to Cherry Point, where he stayed until March 1980 with the Second Marine Aircraft Wing, an aviation unit supporting Marine ground operations in wartime. A solid Marine, Sowell moved around a lot, adapting anywhere he went. He even boxed in the camp boxing clubs, again showing he had something to prove.
    He next moved on to Camp Smedley D. Butler with the Third Force Service Support Group, Fleet Marine Force Pacific, in Okinawa, Japan, for a year.
    It was there that he met Kim Yvette Lawson, an officer.
    For Sowell, it was the best relationship he would ever have in his life.
    “She understood me better, could handle me better than anyone I ever seen,” he said. “I don’t know, we just had that connection. I know I had come up from a bad—I had a bad childhood, and after we got married I had, you know, I had some issues that she helped me on.
    “I could be affectionate but she was one of those really touchy kinds of females and I could just learn just one time…we’d be sitting on the couch and I think she put her arm around me or something like that, I [would] almost act violent…. I didn’t like her touching me like that,” he later confessed.
    But Kim, he said, helped him learn to accept love.
    They were married in 1981 in a civil ceremony in New Bern, North Carolina, at the Craven County Courthouse after both returned to Cherry Point
    The ceremony was performed by a magistrate, and the couple moved to a trailer in a small, seven-unit trailer park located off-base in a remote area.
    During that time, Sowell endured a traumatic injury while working on his car. His daughter, Julie, and his sister Tressa were visiting the couple, and Claudia was on her way as well.
    “My sister and my daughter had been down to visit me and my mom was on the way to come down at night,” Sowell said. “A friend of mine, another Marine, was being transferred to Washington, D.C., the next day and so he was having—him and his wife were having a going away party and because my mom was coming, Kim had to stay home plus you know my daughter and sister was there too and she—my sister was only sixteen. So my wife stayed home and I went ahead to the party. On my way home, my car overheated and shut off, and when I went up by the hood, and when—I was messing around because it was hissing at the hose—It just blew off and when it blewoff, they pointed straight to my face so it did hit me in the face but I didn’t have a chance to close my eyes so it actually just hit me straight to my eyes and my face.”
    Sowell received second- and third-degree burns, and it split his eyes. He was blind for more than three months. Kim nursed him the whole time.
    “That’s all I had,” Sowell said. “Well, I didn’t want my sister and daughter there, you know going through that, so I just sent them home.”
    But if Kim represented everything good to him, her mother said her daughter told her Sowell was drinking to excess. She married him to help him.
    “She didn’t want him to get a dishonorable discharge,” said Kim’s mom, Norma Lawson. “She was trying to get him through the Marine Corps.”
    The marriage was marked mostly by transition; both Kim and Sowell were on the move and spent only two years physically together, because in January