Police: 4 more bodies found at Ohio rapist's home

AP - By JOHN SEEWER and THOMAS J. SHEERAN

Photo By AP

Save This :

Top Photos

More Photos »

< >

More remains were discovered Tuesday at the Cleveland home of a convicted rapist, raising to 10 the number of bodies that have been found there, authorities said.

Four more bodies and a skull were found at the home, where the remains of six women were removed last week, said police Chief Michael McGrath. Fifty-year-old Anthony Sowell, who lives in the home, is in jail and was charged Tuesday with five counts of aggravated murder.

"It appears that this man had an insatiable appetite that he had to fill," McGrath said.

He said the additional bodies were found buried in the backyard of the home. The skull was found in a bucket in the basement.

Authorities do not know whether the skull belongs to an 11th victim, said police spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho.

The search was to continue Wednesday, with fire department crews planning to search in the walls of the home, McGrath said.

Last week, investigators said they found one body in a shallow grave in the backyard. The rest were inside the house -- one in the basement, two in the third-floor living room and two in an upstairs crawl space.

Police discovered the first six bodies Thursday and Friday after a woman reported being raped at Sowell's home, and Sowell also was charged Tuesday with rape, felonious assault and kidnapping related to her complaint.

Sowell is to be arraigned Wednesday, Stacho said.

The Cuyahoga County coroner is attempting to identify those women through DNA and dental records. All six were black, and five were strangled.

The bodies could have been there anywhere from weeks to months to years, said Powell Caesar, a spokesman for the coroner.

On Tuesday, detectives brought in cadaver dogs and digging equipment to scour the home and backyard, looking for evidence to connect Sowell to the bodies, Stacho said.

Police turned up nothing in a search of a quarter-mile swath of abandoned, boarded-up homes near Sowell's residence, which sits in a crowded inner-city neighborhood of mostly older houses.

They plan to scour another quarter-mile area Wednesday, McGrath said. He said Sowell did not have a car would have had to take a city bus to travel.

A crowd of about a hundred people milled about and chatted near the home Tuesday evening.

One of those in the crowd, Antoinnette Dudley, 29, lives a few houses away. She said she could smell a terrible odor like something was dead all summer. She said she saw Sowell only a few times, mainly drinking beer while he sat on his porch.