Alleged Ohio serial killer rare among mass killers

AP - By JOHN SEEWER and ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS

Photo By AP

Save This :

Top Photos

More Photos »

< >

Authorities say Anthony Sowell lured women into his home in a busy neighborhood, killed them -- most by strangulation -- and scattered their remains throughout the inside and buried some in the backyard.

Such brazenness defies logic, but experts identify a narrow subcategory of serial killers, including the 1893 Chicago Fair killer, Dr. H.H. Holmes, and Milwaukee cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, who hunt from home.

"These types are so rare that you can't make a summary estimation as to why or what went wrong or anything," said Robert Keppel, a national serial-killer expert who investigated serial killer Ted Bundy in Washington state in the 1970s.

"There's just not a whole lot of these folks running around the world," he said.

Sowell had the perfect lair.

His home and backyard -- a burial site for five victims -- were shielded by an empty home to the left and the windowless brick wall of a sausage company on the right.

Anytime the stench of decaying bodies blew over the street, neighbors blamed the meat processing next door.

His house stood out only because it was one of the nicest on a block dotted by homes with peeling paint and broken windows, some of them vacant.

It looked safe.

Sowell often sat on the front steps, sipping beer out of a bottle and greeting residents passing by on their way to the corner store that was just steps away for alcohol, snacks and cigarettes.

Neighbors say he'd offer a few the chance to get high.

Sowell's alleged approach reflects an obvious point, said forensic psychologist N.G. Berrill: the potential role of mental illness in such unusual behavior.

"The fact that they would dirty their own nest, as it were, is peculiar to me and suggests a level of mental illness or sickness," said Berrill, director of the New York Center for Neuropsychology and Forensic Behavioral Science.

Tanja Doss told The Associated Press that when she went up to Sowell's third-floor bedroom for a drink last April, he attacked her. "I'm sitting on the corner of the bed and he just leaped up and came over and started choking me," she said.

She said she escaped the next morning when he left for the store.

When people think of serial killers, they imagine predators like Bundy, who stalked women and killed women in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Colorado and finally Florida.

Or Gary Ridgway, dubbed the Green River killer, who pleaded guilty to the deaths of 48 women, many of them found in or near Washington State's Green River.