Free Nobody's Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer by Steve Miller

being cooked at Ray’s Sausage, a redbrick two-story building on the corner of Imperial and 123rd Street, next door to the Sowell house. Ray’s Sausage was an institution, employing locals and selling both to vendors and walk-ins.
    The business opened in October 1957, launched by Raymond Cash’s father, and by 2006 was owned by Renee Cash and her brother, Raymond Jr. Their uncle was the famed Cleveland Indians first baseman Luke Easter, who himself had owned a sausage factory when he spent time in the minor leagues with the Buffalo Bisons.
    In high school, Renee had handed out pencils with “Ray’s Sausage” emblazoned on the yellow paint. It was a proud family carrying on a proud business.
    The company prospered for decades, crafting head cheese and fresh beef and pork sausage, establishing a strong distribution network throughout northeast Ohio and extending to stores as far south as Columbus, places willing to pay for the extra freight for some of the good stuff.
    The original Ray died in 1977, just as the neighborhood began its slow fade. Businesses shuttered, foreclosures jumped, crime increased. But although the family business teetered, it never faltered. Its inspection reports were always solid, and the product sold itself.
    Raymond Jr., a gruff-voiced, gentle-natured man, had known the Sowell family for a long time, beginning with John Sowell, the grandfather.
    “Thomas Sr. and John Sowell were master carpenters and painters, and they did a lot of work for us when we opened up,” Renee Cash says.
    “Thomas [Sr., Anthony’s father] was my buddy,” Ray said. “I used to go over there all the time.” After Thomas died, in 2003, it was Ray who put new siding on the house for Segerna.
    But by early 2006, Lori Frazier noticed a bad smell at 12205 Imperial, and it wasn’t the sweet scent of Ray’s. It was a sickly, putrid odor that filtered through the entire house, as if something had crawled somewhere and died.
    And it wasn’t just Lori who was smelling things; the Pompey family, renting space on the second floor, also became aware of the stench. First the Pompeys started seeing mice in their apartment several times a week. Apest exterminator was called, but it did no good. Then came the smell.
    “There became a smell that I didn’t recognize,” Brandon Pompey said. “Maybe rotten food, if you will.…It would become stronger as you moved into the apartment. We speculated that a dead animal had crawled in there and died…It smelled like rotting fruit.”
    “It’s Segerna, downstairs,” Sowell said when Lori asked about it one day. His stepmother was becoming increasingly ill, her organs failing and her care requiring more work. Family members tended to her and she was hospitalized more and more.
    Sowell gave Segerna’s nephew, Jermaine Henderson, another excuse for the scent.
    “He said it came from a flooded basement,” Jermaine said. But most people, for some reason, just blamed Ray’s Sausage next door.
    “People assume it’s us because we’re in the meat business,” Raymond Cash said. Eventually, residents complained to the district’s city councilman, Zachary Reed.
    “My office actually called the health department in 2007 to say that one of our residents called to say there’s a foul odor across the street and it smells like a dead body,” Reed said.
    “He made us tear up the street, invest $25,000 to $30,000 for a new grease trap,” Ray said of the councilman.
    All told, the company would spend more than $20,000 on new vents and an updated exhaust system over the next four years.
    The shop was inspected routinely for any sanitary violations as part of state and federal practice, and those inspection reports were all clean, showing no reason for a bad odor.
    The grease trap replacement, along with cleaned and flushed drains on the street, didn’t do it. Pouring bleach into the sewer outlet in the basement of the sausage place also didn’t do anything to staunch the