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

1984, Sowell was again transferred back to Camp Butler, in Okinawa.
    The couple divorced less than a year later, shortly before Sowell left the Marine Corps, in January 1985. “She divorced him the day she got out,” Norma Lawson said. Sowell later told a prison counselor that the couple split because of the physical distance their Marine careers required. Kim Lawson later died in 1998, in an industrial accident back in California, her home state.
    Sowell served the last of his tour of duty at Camp Pendleton, California.
    His military stint was marked by his good performance; Sowell received awards during his seven-year Marine Corps career, including a Good Conduct Medal with one star, a Meritorious Mast certificate, a Sea Service Deployment ribbon, a Certificate of Commendation, and two Letters of Appreciation.
    “He did exceptionally well…Mr. Sowell was promoted meritoriously to private first class at the end of recruit training, which is an extreme distinction,” said Walter Bansley III, a military lawyer who analyzed Sowell’s military records.
    Unfortunately, then he came home. And was never quite the same.
    If East Cleveland was in decline when Anthony Sowell left, it was a full-on ghetto when he returned. It was plagued by crime and had a city government infused with ineptitude and corruption.
    Crack, a smokable form of cocaine that many people found irresistible, was decimating inner cities all over the United States. Crack came to the cities of America in 1986, although its cousin, freebase, had been around since the early 1970s. Crack was essentially pure cocaine; the recipe was cocaine, baking soda, and water. The coke was dissolved in water and baking soda and dried.
    Smoked by users in a metal chamber hollow on both ends called a stem, or a glass pipe that can be made of anything, from a piece of Pyrex to glass tubes used to sellsingle-stem roses, crack was characterized by its burnt-hair odor and its ability to hit the user in a flash, creating a rush; it was an orgasmic flush that went through pleasure zones that many didn’t even know they had.
    The drug became popular in coordination with a surplus of cocaine on the streets of America via South America. The supply drove the price down, and the intensity of a crack high drove its allure up. It was a potent piece of math. Crack was initially dubbed “Ready Rock” in Los Angeles, where it caught on first, because cocaine pieces were called rocks and it was being sold in a ready-to-smoke form.
    Crack is heavily addictive because of the speed with which it reaches the brain. Although people who snort cocaine get high, it takes some time for the drug to hit the pleasure center, as it’s absorbed through the nasal membranes. The lungs, however, have a ready connection to the bloodstream. The rush creates the motivation to repeat the ingestion. Over and over.
    “It’s like once you smoke it, it’s like a big rush, and it doesn’t last but five seconds,” says Dawnetta Cassidy, who hung out in the Imperial neighborhood over the years. “And that’s why everybody likes it. It’s the drug that makes you run back and forth. You just don’t get up and leave. You gotta have the next hit.”
    The Imperial neighborhood was riddled with the drug in 1990, when Sowell was sent to prison, but it was an epidemic by the time he was released, in 2005.
    But in 1985, after his discharge from the Marines, Sowell, who loved his booze and weed, would find almosteveryone he ran into smoking crack on these streets. It was an amazing change for him; the very Euclid Avenue on which he used to walk to school was now a hotbed of drug sellers. And with those vendors came women willing to do anything to obtain crack.
    Anything.
    And Sowell could just imagine what that meant.
    He was a divorced twenty-five-year-old with a predilection for drinking, dogged by the fatherly demands for a seven-year-old daughter he had out of wedlock, and a family situation that was more like war,