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Speaker 7: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 7: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 7: written about them Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 7: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 7: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 7: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 6: Good evening to his neighbors. Anthony Souel was a friendly
Speaker 6: and helpful former marine, but they didn't know about his
Speaker 6: dark side or the gruesome secret inside his soul. Secret
Speaker 6: life was revealed to the nation on October twenty ninth,
Speaker 6: two thousand and nine, when a Cleveland police swamped entered
Speaker 6: his house to arrest them for an alleged rape. They
Speaker 6: didn't find soul, but they encountered a nightmarish scene to
Speaker 6: decomposed bodies as his third floor living room. Eight more
Speaker 6: bodies were hidden throughout the house and burned in the backyard.
Speaker 6: In the smith that discovered a human skull. All of
Speaker 6: the bodies were female and all appeared to have been bound.
Speaker 6: Two days later, police captured Soul, sexual sadist, who had
Speaker 6: served a fifteen year prison sentence for kidnapping, raping, and
Speaker 6: torturing a twenty one year old pre woman. House of
Speaker 6: Horrors exposes the shocking, detailed Soles to pray of crimes
Speaker 6: and twisted ski He preyed on neighborhood women, luring them
Speaker 6: to his home with alcohol and drugs. Soul then murdered
Speaker 6: the women and lived among their corpses. Five other women
Speaker 6: were attacked by Soul, but managed to escape. After a
Speaker 6: dramatic trial in the summer of twenty eleven, Seul was
Speaker 6: convicted sentenced to death. In House of Horrors, readers are
Speaker 6: given a rare glimpse inside the mind of a serial
Speaker 6: killer through interviews with souls neighbors and relatives, the surviving victims,
Speaker 6: and exclusive interviews with Soul himself. The book they were
Speaker 6: in his House of Horrors, the shock looking choosy Soul
Speaker 6: The Cleveland with my special guest journalist and author Rob Spyrna,
Speaker 6: welcome to the program, and thank you for a Greenedness interview.
Speaker 6: Rob Spyrna, thank you for having me.
Speaker 8: Dan glad to be here.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much. Incredible book and an incredible case.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about what were the circumstances that brought you
Speaker 6: to writing this book House of Horrors.
Speaker 8: The Actually it was a matter of ethical convenience. I
Speaker 8: don't live very far from the crime scene, and in
Speaker 8: watching the televised newscast of it, because there was a
Speaker 8: very big, very big event, I decided one day just
Speaker 8: to head over there. I'm an ex newspaper reporter and
Speaker 8: my you know, you never lose that nose for news.
Speaker 8: And as I stood on the sidewalk across the street
Speaker 8: from the crime scene, watching the corners assistance work and
Speaker 8: law enforcement work, I started talking to some of the
Speaker 8: people and some of the women were crying, and they
Speaker 8: were crying because they suspected or had reason to believe
Speaker 8: their loved ones were in that house, either daughters, mothers, sisters.
Speaker 8: And in speaking with the women and learning about some
Speaker 8: of these ladies who kind could have possibly been in there,
Speaker 8: I just became interested in their lives. For the most part,
Speaker 8: there were women who had jobs, they had families, and
Speaker 8: there was one common denominator and that was drugs. They
Speaker 8: all had drug problems, had a history of drug abuse,
Speaker 8: So I want to know more about those women and
Speaker 8: how that occurred. And then my inspiration writing the book
Speaker 8: was fueled when the media because when the bodies were found,
Speaker 8: there was a long, fairly long period of time between
Speaker 8: the murders and the discovery, so they were in various,
Speaker 8: varying states of decomposition. So the media really didn't have
Speaker 8: much to go on because the women weren't identified yet.
Speaker 8: But once they started finding out who they were, even
Speaker 8: the mainstream media kind of started branding and labeling them
Speaker 8: as by their past. So in other words, they were
Speaker 8: all women who had criminal histories, prostitution, drug abusers. So ultimately,
Speaker 8: what I wanted to do is give some sense of
Speaker 8: humanity back to the women, to show them as people
Speaker 8: who god hooked on drugs, lived basically a terrible life,
Speaker 8: and then endured a terrible death.
Speaker 6: Now let's talk about Cleveland, because we really do have
Speaker 6: to talk about that, and you do talk about that
Speaker 6: in your book extensively. Talk about Cleveland in the seventies
Speaker 6: and eighties, you note that at one time it was
Speaker 6: the fifth biggest city in the US. About Cleveland and
Speaker 6: the changing Cleveland, and especially then get to East Cleveland
Speaker 6: where this story occurs.
Speaker 8: Cleveland Industrial city. Of course, steel mills, manufacturing. In the fifties,
Speaker 8: those industries started contracting, basically left gaping holes in the
Speaker 8: inner city in terms of population. When the jobs went away,
Speaker 8: a lot of your middle you had middle class flight,
Speaker 8: both both black and white, left the inner city. Housing
Speaker 8: values really plummeted. Obviously, jobs went away, the safety net,
Speaker 8: social services started contracting. Into the seventies, Cleveland saw a
Speaker 8: lot of racial problems, a lot of a lot of
Speaker 8: racial strife. In the sixties, there was always a mistrust.
Speaker 8: It seemed to be quite quite a long history of
Speaker 8: mistrust between the black community and Cleveland police department. And
Speaker 8: there were two notable riots, Glenville and Huff where there's
Speaker 8: three three police officers were killed in the Huff riots.
Speaker 8: So there was a lot of tension, a lot of antagonism,
Speaker 8: and that mistrust carried through into two thousand and nine.
Speaker 8: Actually when the bodies were discovered I'll get to that
Speaker 8: in a second, but within when the population went away,
Speaker 8: what it left was a lot of poverty. Drugs came in.
Speaker 8: We had a big influx of drugs in the seventies.
Speaker 8: In fact, nineteen seventy two, Cleveland had three hundred and
Speaker 8: thirty three murders. That was, let's right on par with
Speaker 8: Chicago and New York, and the population was quite significantly
Speaker 8: less than them, so you know, there were some problems
Speaker 8: in Cleveland. Now. The neighborhood that Anthony Soul moved into
Speaker 8: was actually a one time a very affluent, so to speak,
Speaker 8: black community. If you were African American and you lived
Speaker 8: on Imperial Avenue in the fifties, that was a sign
Speaker 8: of prestige. Jim Brown, the NFL player lived there. Don
Speaker 8: King boxing Fromoter live there, Doctors, attorneys, so that was
Speaker 8: a nice street at one time. And as we saw
Speaker 8: the population decline and you know, housing values deteriorate, a
Speaker 8: lot of the big houses on Imperial got cut up
Speaker 8: into multi family apartments and became rental units. So of
Speaker 8: course there generally there's you know, less upkeep, and then
Speaker 8: the drugs moved in, so it was kind of a
Speaker 8: rough area. Now actually where the East Cleveland is actually
Speaker 8: an inner ring suburb of Cleveland. It's just east of
Speaker 8: the Cleveland city limits where this, uh, these crimes happened.
Speaker 8: It was actually in Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood called Mount Pleasant,
Speaker 8: which is a hot spot for crime, and the FBI
Speaker 8: charts it's one of the that's one of the highest
Speaker 8: violent crime rates in the nation. So that was the
Speaker 8: environment that that we were looking at for these crimes.
Speaker 8: Very high crime, drug plagued, poverty stricken neighborhood.
Speaker 6: And as you know too at this time.
Speaker 8: With the record probably more probably higher.
Speaker 6: Okay, now let's get to the subject of this story.
Speaker 6: Anthony Edward Soul, his mother, Claudia Garrison. So take us
Speaker 6: back and tell us about Anthony Edward Soul's upbringing, tell
Speaker 6: us about the family, and tell us what you what
Speaker 6: you have found in the book vote Anthony Soul.
Speaker 8: Anthony was a complicated figure who came from a complicated family.
Speaker 8: His mother, very religious, very hard working, had seven children
Speaker 8: with Anthony's father. Anthony's father was a rolling stone. He
Speaker 8: got married, he had a children out of wed lock.
Speaker 8: He had different different women he had children with, so
Speaker 8: Anthony really wasn't exposed him very much. He grew up
Speaker 8: in a house with thirteen a blended family of thirteen
Speaker 8: half siblings, nieces and nephews and uncles. Really no significant
Speaker 8: male role model in that house. It was just his
Speaker 8: mother and his grandmother. His mother was very demanding, very strict.
Speaker 8: She worked a lot of hours. There was a big
Speaker 8: house actually, this house was in East Cliff and a
Speaker 8: very nice house. And she was a very stern disciplinarian
Speaker 8: and her if she expected certain shores to be done
Speaker 8: and things to be done a certain way, and if
Speaker 8: they weren't or if they weren't done to her satisfaction,
Speaker 8: she would use physical, physical discipline. And one of her
Speaker 8: favorite methods was to strip the kid's naked. And her
Speaker 8: favorite targets for this were two girls. They were twins,
Speaker 8: Ramona and Leona. They were about eleven twelve years old,
Speaker 8: just going through puberty, and she would come home if
Speaker 8: they hadn't done their chores, strip them naked, tie him
Speaker 8: to a banister with an electrical extension chord, and then
Speaker 8: beat them with another cord until they either bled or
Speaker 8: cried enough to make her relent. Now she do this
Speaker 8: with all the other kids gathered around. So here you
Speaker 8: have these two young girls going through puberty naked, and
Speaker 8: the other kids associating whatever those sexual feelings, they were
Speaker 8: those confusing feelings with violence. So it's a very twisted
Speaker 8: atmosphere that she endured. And then just jumping ahead real
Speaker 8: quick to tie that in later on. Anthony's eleven victims,
Speaker 8: all of them were found with some form of an
Speaker 8: extension chord, either wrapped around there, binding their hands or
Speaker 8: wrapped around their neck. So going back, he grew up
Speaker 8: in this environment. I did not cover this too much
Speaker 8: in my book, but there was incest, there were sexual
Speaker 8: violence against the younger girls, just not a real healthy atmosphere. Now,
Speaker 8: Anthony seemed to be one of her favorites. He didn't
Speaker 8: get disciplined as much as the other ones did, but
Speaker 8: there were a few stories which I felt was important
Speaker 8: to his development. One of those one anecdote was he
Speaker 8: was in the front yard playing, he might have been
Speaker 8: about twelve thirteen, and his mom pulled in the driveway
Speaker 8: after work and he ran up to say, you know hi, mom,
Speaker 8: and she reached out of the car and punched him
Speaker 8: in the nose. She actually broke his nose, according to
Speaker 8: his siblings, And he just stood there and said, Mom,
Speaker 8: why'd you do that? She said, well, that'll teach you
Speaker 8: not to clean your room when I tell you too.
Speaker 8: So just a remarkably dysfunctional childhood.
Speaker 6: What I found remarkable is what you note in the
Speaker 6: book when and Claudia is whipping the nieces, and you said,
Speaker 6: in particular the two nieces and the one nephew, but
Speaker 6: Anthony was watching but laughing at their torment, which pretty telling.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, very confusing. Probably did not know what to
Speaker 8: make of that. Obviously, his and the other kid's psychosexual
Speaker 8: development was not proceeding, you know, as it should have
Speaker 8: with that blend of violence and you know, pubescent sexuality
Speaker 8: that they were exposed to.
Speaker 6: And at the same time, the elder father that you
Speaker 6: said was out of his life was also incarcerated for
Speaker 6: most of his life as well.
Speaker 8: Wasn't he incarcerated? Came out, met another woman, had four
Speaker 8: children with her. She, unlike Claudia, uh, was caring, nurturing
Speaker 8: interest in their children's development. All four of those children
Speaker 8: turned out very well. They all had jobs, they kept
Speaker 8: them until retirement. They had families, there were homeowners, very
Speaker 8: different experience than the children that grew up in Claudia's home.
Speaker 6: Now you mentioned the first infamous twelve one two two
Speaker 6: o five Imperial Avenue and Thomas Senior and Sigurna Henderson
Speaker 6: settle into the first four of this duplex. So tell
Speaker 6: us a little bit about this house.
Speaker 8: House had been in the Solo family for three generations.
Speaker 8: They actually were well respected. The family was well respected
Speaker 8: in the in the community. There were carpenters and handy men.
Speaker 8: Nice house, big house, three stories, a big frame house,
Speaker 8: double balcony off the double porch, roofed porch off the
Speaker 8: first floor, and then also the second floor and the
Speaker 8: downstairs were the mom. The mom lived downstairs and dad
Speaker 8: died while Anthony was imprisoned during the eighties or not
Speaker 8: the nineties, I'm sorry. And so Anthony's stepmother lived in
Speaker 8: that house but rented out the second and third floors.
Speaker 8: She gained some rental income from that. But that house
Speaker 8: was situated rate next right adjacent to a sausage factory,
Speaker 8: and then next door of this, just up the streets
Speaker 8: of the sausage factory was kind of a deli where
Speaker 8: a lot of the neighborhood people went to buy groceries
Speaker 8: and beer cigarettes. So there was some traffic on impurely
Speaker 8: because of Imperial. Because of that deli.
Speaker 6: Now tell us about his relationship with his real siblings,
Speaker 6: which are Patricia Owen and Tresa. How close was he
Speaker 6: to these siblings.
Speaker 8: They were quite a bit older than him, Tressa was,
Speaker 8: and Tressa was a little younger than him. Patricia well, sadly,
Speaker 8: nearly every woman that lived in that house, every girl
Speaker 8: in that house started having children at age thirteen, which
Speaker 8: perhaps that's biologically when they could have children first. So
Speaker 8: there was, you know, there was just different generations of
Speaker 8: the family in there. Now, Patricia had some serious health
Speaker 8: problems and she had seven children, and after about the third,
Speaker 8: third or fourth child, doctors told her, if you keep
Speaker 8: having children, you're putting your life in danger. Well, she
Speaker 8: kept having children, and in fact she did die. Tresa. Perhaps,
Speaker 8: you know, I think Anthony was closest to Tresa. Very sharp,
Speaker 8: very intuitive, very street smart woman, kind of a lengthy
Speaker 8: criminal history. She was a little bit of a hustler
Speaker 8: and a scammer, and perhaps you know, maybe they had
Speaker 8: that in common that that seems to be Yet who
Speaker 8: he was closest with, In fact, I think that's the
Speaker 8: only sibling that he kept in touch with after everybody
Speaker 8: moved out of that house. In East Cleveland.
Speaker 6: How was his academics as school? Tell us about that.
Speaker 8: Never lived up to his potential very bright. I talked
Speaker 8: to a couple of his teachers. They recognized a real
Speaker 8: spark in him. He just didn't seem interested in school.
Speaker 8: He was more interested in playing chess and reading. And
Speaker 8: he was an unusual kid. He was quiet and kind
Speaker 8: of kind of nerdy, and he was bullied in junior high.
Speaker 8: He was bullied, he got pushed around, so he wasn't
Speaker 8: really motivated academically, And of course there was probably nobody
Speaker 8: at home that was really pushing him and supporting him
Speaker 8: in any great direction to get good grades. He like
Speaker 8: the other kids, were left to their own devices, and
Speaker 8: eventually I think they all dropped out of school at
Speaker 8: some point.
Speaker 6: He talk in the book about it really affecting him
Speaker 6: later not to jump ahead, but that he was called
Speaker 6: dumb and stupid and dramatic moment in the book where
Speaker 6: Anthony decides that after this uneventful high school or lackluster
Speaker 6: time in high school, that he'll enlist in the army,
Speaker 6: and his mother says something that spurns him on. So
Speaker 6: tell us what she says to him that motivates him
Speaker 6: to go into the military.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know, I don't have that exactly on tip
Speaker 8: of my tongue, but she did say something like, you'll
Speaker 8: you'll never make it in the military. He probably wanted
Speaker 8: to go into a certain branch of the military and
Speaker 8: she said you'll never make it. Well, she was wrong,
Speaker 8: I mean one hundred percent. He was an excellent marine.
Speaker 8: He was the honor he went into Marines. And what
Speaker 8: we have to look at first is this. He was
Speaker 8: very obsessive, compulsive, very organized, very orderly, and those qualities
Speaker 8: served him very well in the Marines, in the job market,
Speaker 8: and then of course in prison. So he went into
Speaker 8: the Marines, and he was orderly, he was organized, he
Speaker 8: was punctual to a fault. He followed orders. I mean,
Speaker 8: he was an interesting guy. He was not a rebel.
Speaker 8: I mean he was really looking to be loved and
Speaker 8: really wanted a leadership force in his life. So he
Speaker 8: could be persuaded, he could be influenced depending on who
Speaker 8: that person was. So he really thrived in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 8: He was in fact, he was named the honor Marine
Speaker 8: of his platoon. So out of seventy seventy Marines in
Speaker 8: his boot camp, he was the one that was picked
Speaker 8: that best exemplified the Marine attributes of integrity, leadership, honor.
Speaker 8: And he did well, I mean he did well in
Speaker 8: a very structured environment. In fact, during the trial, to
Speaker 8: jump ahead a little bit, an officer came to testify
Speaker 8: as to his record and said that he would have
Speaker 8: stayed in the Marines. He could have really made a
Speaker 8: nice career out of it.
Speaker 6: Now, he did re enlisting, so he did have a
Speaker 6: fairly lengthy you know, I mean relatively, didn't just go
Speaker 6: for the one hitch. But he was located in different
Speaker 6: places in the world, which becomes important a little bit later,
Speaker 6: at least for police authorities. So tell us where some
Speaker 6: of the places that he was stationed.
Speaker 8: He yeah, he spent a lot of time in North Carolina.
Speaker 8: He was actually his military operational specialty was actually electrician. Interestingly,
Speaker 8: he was stationed for a while, he made sergeant. He
Speaker 8: was promoted to sergeant. But he had a drinking problem
Speaker 8: in the Marines, and in fact, he met a female
Speaker 8: marine who married him just because she saw that he
Speaker 8: was gonna probably get thrown on the Marines because of
Speaker 8: his drinking, so she kept him straight. But he at
Speaker 8: one point in time, was deployed to Okinawa, and in
Speaker 8: talking to some of his associates, while he was in Okinaw,
Speaker 8: he'd go out sometimes on weekends and he would exhibit
Speaker 8: some of his dev and behavior there. He would go
Speaker 8: meet bar girls, prostitutes in the red light district, take
Speaker 8: him back to a motel. He'd tie him up to
Speaker 8: a chair and then abuse him. Now, I don't there's
Speaker 8: no evidence that he would have killed a woman but
Speaker 8: over there, but of course we really wouldn't know that. Now,
Speaker 8: the women didn't report him, probably for a couple of reasons.
Speaker 8: He was an officer in the Marine Corps. They would
Speaker 8: have gotten in trouble. So he seemed to have been
Speaker 8: able to get away with that quite a bit while
Speaker 8: he was over there. He eventually, though, he did re enlist.
Speaker 8: One time, he had an a accident in a car
Speaker 8: or something splashed into his eyes, and I think maybe
Speaker 8: he decided at that point in time to get out
Speaker 8: of the Marines. The day that he left the Marines,
Speaker 8: his wife at the time divorced him.
Speaker 6: Now, some of the deviant behavior that you spoke of,
Speaker 6: we have to put this because I think it's important,
Speaker 6: is that he mentioned to he didn't mention any.
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Speaker 6: The rape or anything. But he talked about how he
Speaker 6: enjoyed choking and also when he tied somebody to a chair.
Speaker 6: What we didn't mention was that there was testimony later
Speaker 6: that that's something again Anthony Souls saw as a young child.
Speaker 8: He was a sexual sadist. He derived gratification, sexual gratification
Speaker 8: from seeing women in pain. So that type of personality
Speaker 8: deviant of prefers to choke their victims because it prolongs
Speaker 8: the agony and then they can actually watch, you know,
Speaker 8: the pain. They like to choke them from looking at
Speaker 8: him so they can actually see the pain. He enjoyed dad,
Speaker 8: He enjoyed binding women. He wanted to control women. That
Speaker 8: became kind of interesting from talking to women to escape
Speaker 8: from him, because it seems in a sense his mother
Speaker 8: was never there. Whenever he saw his mother, she was leaving,
Speaker 8: She had three jobs. Is it possible that he was
Speaker 8: binding women as a way to hold them there? It
Speaker 8: seems realistic as far as hurting the women. Don't know
Speaker 8: what he did in Okanawa, but forensic psychiatrists say that
Speaker 8: generally a person's pattern is pretty consistent, So if he
Speaker 8: was sexually abusing women here and even killing women here
Speaker 8: as possibly he was doing it there.
Speaker 6: Certainly. Now let's talk about he did have some problems
Speaker 6: in the military, but relatively minor compared to his impeccable
Speaker 6: achievements in the military. And so he was a sergeant
Speaker 6: when he was discharged. They'll tell us what his transition
Speaker 6: was like coming back to Cleveland finally from the Marines.
Speaker 8: Okay, I think just to pick up from the Marines.
Speaker 8: I think his rank outgrew his maturity. He had a
Speaker 8: drinking problem, and I don't think it was probably difficult
Speaker 8: for him to find sergeants, you know, his peers to
Speaker 8: go out drinking with them. So he was drinking with
Speaker 8: you know, with the privates, and that's round on. So
Speaker 8: we got in trouble there. So he gets a discharge.
Speaker 8: They did give him an honorable discharge. He comes home
Speaker 8: to Cleveland in nineteen eighty five. He served eight years
Speaker 8: and really at loose ends, didn't really need to work
Speaker 8: because he he had places to stay.
Speaker 4: So he.
Speaker 8: Came home and whatever deviant behavior he had been exhibiting
Speaker 8: in Okinawa, he just brought back with him. Now, between
Speaker 8: in nineteen eighty nine, he went away to prison. However,
Speaker 8: between nineteen eighty five in nineteen eighty nine, that four
Speaker 8: year period, there was a series of murders in East
Speaker 8: Cleveland called the Strawberry Murders, and they found four women
Speaker 8: discarded bodies shallow graves or just in abandoned houses, who
Speaker 8: were naked with electrical cords wrapped around them. Of course,
Speaker 8: very similar to what his his actions were later on.
Speaker 8: But anyhow, in nineteen eighty nine, when Anthony's soul got
Speaker 8: arrested and went to prison, those Strawberry murders ended. Now
Speaker 8: I know the authorities tried to look into that to
Speaker 8: try to tie him to those, but the East Cleveland
Speaker 8: Police Department records were shambles, were either not existed or destroyed.
Speaker 8: They didn't have the records, so then they were never
Speaker 8: able to pin those murders on him. But some think
Speaker 8: that possibly that's how he occupied himself when he came
Speaker 8: home from the Marines. For that four year period. We
Speaker 8: know he was drinking heavily, so he was not productive
Speaker 8: when he came home, and makes sense he did not
Speaker 8: have the structure environment that he had with the Marines.
Speaker 8: So take an OCD person out of a structured environment,
Speaker 8: and they become very anxie. They don't know, they don't
Speaker 8: know how to handle themselves. They almost become a victim
Speaker 8: of their own idleness, their own desires, whatever those might be.
Speaker 8: And in his case, they were evil. Of course.
Speaker 6: Now you call them the strawberry murders, are you referring
Speaker 6: to the term strawberry which this first time I read
Speaker 6: it was those that trade sex for drugs are called strawberries.
Speaker 8: Correct.
Speaker 6: You just mentioned briefly what it seemed like, the moor
Speaker 6: or certain circumstances surrounding these murders. What did police did
Speaker 6: police identify as serial killer at that time? Did they
Speaker 6: tie in all those murders to one? What was the
Speaker 6: police official reaction? Was there immediate reaction about that?
Speaker 8: Yeah? Well, East Cleveland is one of the if not
Speaker 8: the most poverty stricken communities in the nation, and it's
Speaker 8: really in bad shape. It's just bombed out, it abandoned.
Speaker 8: The police for the city is in receivership and has
Speaker 8: been for a long time, so arrily they're not in
Speaker 8: a position to really investigate crime or even stop crime.
Speaker 8: So I don't with so many violent crimes in East Cleveland,
Speaker 8: I just don't know that anybody databased or track these
Speaker 8: murders in a way that would have led somebody to
Speaker 8: think they were part of a pattern. And that's we
Speaker 8: saw that in Cleveland too. Nobody put together these eleven
Speaker 8: women in this locus, in this hub, disappearing at the
Speaker 8: same time. So I think the connection between those four
Speaker 8: women's deaths seemed to have occurred afterwards, after a period
Speaker 8: of time, and spurred by Anthony Soule's murders, and somebody
Speaker 8: finally said, well, wait a minute, these four cases all
Speaker 8: seem like those cases, and then they became collectively the
Speaker 8: Strawberry murders. But I don't know that there was any
Speaker 8: real formal investigation into a suspected serial killer at the time.
Speaker 8: And if I may back up real quick, that was
Speaker 8: one of the confusing things about Anthony Soul's case. In
Speaker 8: a conventional serial killing, of course, you know there's a
Speaker 8: body a period of time, maybe we find another body
Speaker 8: in a different location a period of time. You know,
Speaker 8: when you think about you know, the that cliche trucker
Speaker 8: serial killer, where there's bodies in different areas. Well, we
Speaker 8: didn't have that in Anthony's case. What we had was
Speaker 8: a situation where the victims, the crime scene, and the
Speaker 8: suspect we're all find found at the same time. So
Speaker 8: in a sense, it was more like a mass murder
Speaker 8: than a serial killing nobody really put together.
Speaker 10: Go ahead, I'm sorry, you introduce You introduce a character
Speaker 10: name Asad Sam from a corner store in the same
Speaker 10: tight neighborhood where right near raised.
Speaker 6: Sausages, which becomes important to the story. And the Imperial House,
Speaker 6: this former grand looking, bigger home, and this corner store.
Speaker 6: So tell us what Sam says he observed at that
Speaker 6: time in terms of the person Anthony Soul was when
Speaker 6: he was introduced, the kind of character he could kind
Speaker 6: of deduce from his interactions with him, and the decline
Speaker 6: he saw and some of the strange behavior he witnessed.
Speaker 8: Anthony. Well, I get we will have to jump he
Speaker 8: met Anthony after Anthony came out of prison. I don't
Speaker 8: know if you want me to cover that period of time.
Speaker 4: But.
Speaker 6: Yeah, let's go. Let's go back. I'm sorry, we should
Speaker 6: really talk about what led the circumstances that led up
Speaker 6: to obviously his incarceration for the fifteen years, and we
Speaker 6: talked about he didn't fifteen years, but before that, because
Speaker 6: I think chronologically it is what is the first report
Speaker 6: of odor in the neighborhood and what's authorities respond or
Speaker 6: how do people respond?
Speaker 8: Okay, we'll talk about that real quick. Um. The two
Speaker 8: thousand and seven, the first neighbors started complaining about the
Speaker 8: smell of rotting flesh. And Asad we'll call him Sam,
Speaker 8: his Americanized name is Sam. He noticed it too. I mean,
Speaker 8: the smell was just horrible. There was a lot of complaints.
Speaker 8: The building inspector came out, the health inspector came out.
Speaker 8: Nobody really took too much time to pinpoint it. They
Speaker 8: blamed it on the sausage factory which is next door
Speaker 8: to Anthony's house, and in fact, they forced them to
Speaker 8: put about twenty twenty five thousand dollars of work in
Speaker 8: sores and grease pits and traps to try to remedy
Speaker 8: that problem, and it never did. In fact, the sausage factor,
Speaker 8: the smell was so bad that the sausage factory kept
Speaker 8: their windows closed to keep the smell out. But the
Speaker 8: inspectors that came out, which is very perfunctory about it,
Speaker 8: and Sam. Now the reason why it might have bothered
Speaker 8: Sam so much is. The theory is that Anthony Anthony
Speaker 8: will just jump ahead real quick. Here. He had no
Speaker 8: way to get rid of bodies. He didn't have a car,
Speaker 8: he had a small backyard. So the thinking is that
Speaker 8: he might have thrown a body into the Sam's dumpster
Speaker 8: or the sausage factory's dumpster, and that could have been
Speaker 8: why the smell was so bad. If I can backtrack
Speaker 8: a little bit, So Anthony gets out of the Marines
Speaker 8: in nineteen eighty five, we think there's a possibility that
Speaker 8: he was committing some murders at that time. In nineteen
Speaker 8: eighty nine, he kidnapped a woman named Melvett Sockwell, and
Speaker 8: he took her back to the house in East Clevel
Speaker 8: where he was living. After he got out of the Marines,
Speaker 8: he went back to that house in East Cleveland, the
Speaker 8: big house for his mom raised thirteen kids. He got
Speaker 8: Melved up to the third floor, stripped her, took her
Speaker 8: clothes off, duck taped her, raped her over a twenty
Speaker 8: four hour period, then told her he was going to
Speaker 8: kill her. He goes, she goes, I'm gonna kill you,
Speaker 8: but first I'm gonna take a nap. While he was sleeping,
Speaker 8: she somehow managed to wiggle her way out of the
Speaker 8: window and sit on the roof and get the attention
Speaker 8: of neighbors. It was early in the morning, who were
Speaker 8: going to work, and she was rescued. She did the
Speaker 8: right thing. She went to the police. She put the
Speaker 8: time in to file the report and follow it through,
Speaker 8: and because she was persistent enough to get the police
Speaker 8: to investigate and believe her. He went away for fifteen years.
Speaker 8: Now he did do the whole fifthteen years. He could
Speaker 8: have done less time. He went away for a tempted rape.
Speaker 8: That's what he pleaded down to. He could have got
Speaker 8: out early if he would have taken sex offender classes.
Speaker 8: But in Ohio at that time, you had to self
Speaker 8: identify as a sex offender in a prison to have
Speaker 8: access to the classes. Well, of course, you know, the
Speaker 8: lowest person that tot him poll is a sex offender.
Speaker 8: So for him to have identified himself as a sex
Speaker 8: offender would have not only put himself at risk, but
Speaker 8: him being a marine and knowing how to kill and
Speaker 8: hand hand combat, it might have created a situation where
Speaker 8: he might have had to kill somebody in prison to
Speaker 8: protect himself. So he didn't, so he served the whole
Speaker 8: fifteen years. He came out of prison in two thousand
Speaker 8: and five, he moved into that house. His stepmother moved
Speaker 8: into a nursing home. So now Anthony's got a third,
Speaker 8: three story house to himself. He was living in an
Speaker 8: eight by eight cell up to that point. He's got
Speaker 8: crack dealers on the street. He's got a beverage store
Speaker 8: up the street that has a constant supply of women
Speaker 8: walking back and forth. So he was in pretty good
Speaker 8: shape if he wanted to exercise his predatory desires in
Speaker 8: that neighborhood, which he did, but before he did, he
Speaker 8: met a woman named Laurie Frazier. He met her shortly
Speaker 8: after he got out of prison. Now, Laurie was the
Speaker 8: niece of Cleveland's mayor, Frank Jackson, very well African American mayor,
Speaker 8: very well respected in the community. And Anthony, an individual
Speaker 8: with very low self esteem that needed to be accepted,
Speaker 8: didn't really have an identity of sorts. He would tell
Speaker 8: women that he met that he was a chef. Well,
Speaker 8: his cooking training came from prison, and he was a
Speaker 8: cook in prison. So now he met a woman he
Speaker 8: was very enthralled to be going out with the mayor's niece.
Speaker 8: She was a very she had, by her own admission,
Speaker 8: she had a raging drug addiction. It was very good
Speaker 8: for Anthony because now he had to go to work.
Speaker 8: He had to work a lot of hours to support
Speaker 8: her drug addiction, which suited his obsessive compulsive disorder. He
Speaker 8: worked piece work at a rubber factory. I talked to
Speaker 8: the HR person. He was one of the most productive
Speaker 8: employees they had. He worked a lot over time. So
Speaker 8: Anthony his relationship with women, he was literally at their feet.
Speaker 8: I mean he would serve Lori Fraser breakfast in bed
Speaker 8: or at their throats if he felt they betrayed him.
Speaker 8: So a strong woman could have her way with him.
Speaker 8: So that was a good thing for him. That kept him,
Speaker 8: you know, that kept him busy for a couple of years.
Speaker 8: Lorie Fraser left him in the spring of two thousand
Speaker 8: and seven. What happened is Anthony had a heart attack.
Speaker 8: He had shoveled some neighbor's driveway. He was always trying
Speaker 8: to be helpful. Again, he wanted to be liked, he
Speaker 8: wanted to be respected, so he'd help his neighbors. He
Speaker 8: was shovling a neighbor's driveway with snow. He had a
Speaker 8: heart attack, had a pacemaker. Put In tried to go
Speaker 8: back to work but couldn't, so over that springtime he
Speaker 8: was of no use to her anymore. He couldn't work,
Speaker 8: he couldn't support her habit. She left, well, he was devastated.
Speaker 8: She left in April of two thousand and seven. In
Speaker 8: May of two thousand and seven, the first of his
Speaker 8: eleven victims went missing, Crystal Doser. So now his serial
Speaker 8: killing spree as we know it started shortly after Crystal
Speaker 8: when missing in May. That's when the neighbors first discovered
Speaker 8: or first noticed the horrific smell in their neighborhood.
Speaker 6: Okay, so they noticed the smell. He just sort of
Speaker 6: dropped off up there. He becomes what's important, slightly important
Speaker 6: to the story too, becomes a metal scrapper because he
Speaker 6: can't get regular employment. So he's in around for closed buildings,
Speaker 6: abandoned buildings, and he's hustling to get money. At that time,
Speaker 6: he even hustled to get crack. So he was ambitious
Speaker 6: buying drugs for Laurie and and it seems at that
Speaker 6: point that's when he got the addiction himself again.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he scrapping is quite epidemic in probably probably other
Speaker 8: areas too, not as Cleveland. But he actually make a
Speaker 8: lot of money scrapping, pulling wiring out of house and
Speaker 8: so forth. So he was still Laurie was still coming around.
Speaker 8: She's still coming around every now and then. But he
Speaker 8: was driving quite a bit of money. He didn't have
Speaker 8: to pay any expenses. There's a possibility that some of
Speaker 8: his stepmother's checks were being diverted. So what happens now
Speaker 8: is track of course five ten dollars. You know, it's
Speaker 8: very affordable, as it was designed to be. He gets
Speaker 8: a reputation for giving away free drugs and being a
Speaker 8: cool guy to party with. Okay, so he did. Yes,
Speaker 8: he did get addicted to crack himself when Laurie left
Speaker 8: him not to be redundant, but again he had no structure,
Speaker 8: left his own devices. He he really didn't do well
Speaker 8: at all. So he didn't have to lure anybody, he
Speaker 8: didn't have to track anybody. He didn't have to course
Speaker 8: girls to come to his house when they found out
Speaker 8: he was giving away free drugs. There's literally literally a
Speaker 8: line outside his door. In fact, he told me that
Speaker 8: he had to disconnect his doorbell. There were so many women,
Speaker 8: women that wanted to get in the house to party,
Speaker 8: so he had, uh, you know, he had a supply
Speaker 8: of women coming over, and uh, we are fortunate that
Speaker 8: some women, through their instincts and their bravery, were able
Speaker 8: to escape from him and when he tried to kill them,
Speaker 8: and through their stories we find out how his mind works.
Speaker 8: And generally what he would do is he'd have a
Speaker 8: woman come over and he would leave something of value
Speaker 8: on his desk, he you know, his watch or a
Speaker 8: couple of dollars. He'd leave the room. He'd want to
Speaker 8: come back, You'd want to see if that was still there,
Speaker 8: if it wasn't there. In his mind, he had been betrayed,
Speaker 8: let down, just like his mom had done to him,
Speaker 8: and now he gave him the license to trigger his rage.
Speaker 8: And he would go into a rant about how these
Speaker 8: we have kids at home, and why aren't you home
Speaker 8: with your kids? Why are you out on the street partying,
Speaker 8: never mind the irony that he invited them to party,
Speaker 8: but anyhow, you should be with your kids. He'd go
Speaker 8: into this whole thing. He'd get in his crazy mode,
Speaker 8: his heating up mode, and then he would start strangling them.
Speaker 8: He was strong. They were under the influence of drugs.
Speaker 8: They weren't expecting it, you know. Unfortunately, in most cases
Speaker 8: he was successful. He didn't have any way of getting
Speaker 8: getting rid of bodies. He just started. He stashed them
Speaker 8: in walls, in the basement, in the backyard, and then
Speaker 8: at some point in time, I mean, he had so
Speaker 8: many bodies he had to shut off the third floor
Speaker 8: and move down to the second floor. He never went
Speaker 8: to the first floor. When the police went to the
Speaker 8: first floor, when they finally got in the house, it
Speaker 8: was as spotless as there was when his stepmother left it.
Speaker 8: So he continued unabated for over two years. Over two
Speaker 8: years he was killing women. Now he eventually after a
Speaker 8: certain period of time, you know, the women talked on
Speaker 8: the street, and he did get her reputation as being
Speaker 8: rough than a person that couldn't be trusted, and you know,
Speaker 8: maybe even dangerous. But it did not stop women from
Speaker 8: coming over to the house. In fact, one woman, Tany,
Speaker 8: a woman named Tany, he tried choked her and then
Speaker 8: he finally lost interest in her. Because if a woman
Speaker 8: didn't show fear, he lost interest. He let her go.
Speaker 8: She left. She had marks in her next she told
Speaker 8: her friend Nancy Cobbs, look what that psycho did to me. Well,
Speaker 8: Nancy never indicated that she even knew to Anthony Souel.
Speaker 8: The next day, though, Nancy went to the house to party,
Speaker 8: and she was never seen again. So the lure of
Speaker 8: the drug, the craving for crack, dictated these women's actions.
Speaker 8: At one point in time, there was probably six dead
Speaker 8: bodies in that house and women were still going in
Speaker 8: the house to party. In fact, I was you know,
Speaker 8: I asked the women. Didn't She ask him about the smell,
Speaker 8: and he would make up a story that he his mother,
Speaker 8: his stepmother was there and she was cooking, and she
Speaker 8: was a bad cook. But they really didn't care. They
Speaker 8: were there for the drugs. They knew what they were
Speaker 8: going into when they got in there, and some of
Speaker 8: them came out.
Speaker 6: You hear the story of Sorry, you include the story
Speaker 6: of Tanya Dos. It's interesting because it really probably typically
Speaker 6: how he operated. He said that they were playing cards.
Speaker 6: He invited her to a barbecue. I was beer and
Speaker 6: food and he was cooking. He had been to her
Speaker 6: family's home, so they weren't strangers. And then at night
Speaker 6: they went in he suck watching football game, I believe,
Speaker 6: and he showed her something he had bought Laurie again,
Speaker 6: say he was off and on with Laurie, but something innocent,
Speaker 6: and he flipped out and said things like I could
Speaker 6: I could kill any crackhead bitch and uh and no
Speaker 6: one would give a give a damn basically, you know.
Speaker 6: And then yet the next day like he acted like
Speaker 6: nothing had happened.
Speaker 8: He he had that what they call it heating up
Speaker 8: cooling down period of a killer, this type of killer,
Speaker 8: with this psychopathology. It's possible that she said something to
Speaker 8: trigger him. She might have been angry that he was
Speaker 8: still seeing Laurie and she threatened to leave him, probably
Speaker 8: something like that. It's probably threatened to leave him, and
Speaker 8: that set him off. He couldn't stand being abandoned and
Speaker 8: left alone and being betrayed by women. These women, clearly
Speaker 8: they were all proxies for his mother. He hated his mother, Tanya.
Speaker 8: The women I talked to, they're very interesting though. To
Speaker 8: be able to survive on the street neighborhood at the
Speaker 8: mercy of pimps and drug dealers and the felons that
Speaker 8: they associate with, they had to be smart. They had
Speaker 8: to be very instinctive. And you know, when you talk
Speaker 8: to these women, I was very impressed by them. They
Speaker 8: know they don't have that platform of education. They don't
Speaker 8: have that, you know, that core of upbringing maybe that
Speaker 8: other people have. But their street smarts were incredible, and
Speaker 8: the smart ones intuited that this guy was nuts. The
Speaker 8: ones who survived, don't give in, don't show fear. He'll
Speaker 8: let you go, and he did. And Tanya was one
Speaker 8: of those people. So she got away.
Speaker 3: And it doesn't make sense to break up with your
Speaker 3: one and only unless you're fall in for something saucier,
Speaker 3: something crispy, southern breading, and one extra ingredient, something that
Speaker 3: makes you tasteful, its tingle. Yeah, it's time to dump
Speaker 3: your old wings and get a new honey, a lemon
Speaker 3: type of wing from Bobba's. And if that's not your type,
Speaker 3: don't worry. We've got five other flavor. So sauntered down
Speaker 3: to Popa's and get a six piece, which is five
Speaker 3: ninety nine. We don't make sense. We make chicken chicken
Speaker 3: from at participating in US restaurants. Price may vary.
Speaker 8: He would go back to normal because Anthony, I guess,
Speaker 8: like any deviants to talk to him on the phone.
Speaker 8: I think I talked to about eight to ten times.
Speaker 8: There's no indication that this guy was any less rational
Speaker 8: than you or I. There had to be certain triggers
Speaker 8: that set him off, but for that majority of the
Speaker 8: time when he was a normal, highly functuring person, you
Speaker 8: couldn't tell. Just during that small percentage of time when
Speaker 8: he was exercising against devians that he was so he'd
Speaker 8: go back to being normal, and nobody knew. I mean
Speaker 8: at some point, I mean, I mean, this is a
Speaker 8: very important part of this book. I think too. The
Speaker 8: community was very angry after these serial killings, and they
Speaker 8: criticized the police, mostly in the city, for not doing
Speaker 8: something about it. But realistically, you know, and they said,
Speaker 8: the suburbs, if this would have if eleven women went
Speaker 8: missing in a suburb, affluent suburb, the police would have
Speaker 8: been on it. Well, of course they would have, But
Speaker 8: in that neighborhood, nobody was relating to the police what
Speaker 8: was going on. There were women running from his house screaming,
Speaker 8: there were naked women falling out of windows. The word
Speaker 8: on the street was he was a killer. No, they
Speaker 8: were telling each other, They weren't telling the police. Without
Speaker 8: that front line of defense of the community's eyes and ears,
Speaker 8: the police just didn't have much to go on. And
Speaker 8: that was a huge missing link in this in this
Speaker 8: story that the community because they were afraid of being
Speaker 8: a snitch. And honestly, he was giving drugs away people.
Speaker 8: I don't know whether people were bird dogging women for him.
Speaker 8: That probably wasn't necessary, but he was giving drugs away
Speaker 8: to some of the neighbors around him, so they certainly
Speaker 8: didn't want to see that supply drugs go. So that
Speaker 8: was a very important component in this case that the
Speaker 8: a the neighborhood wasn't telling the police what was going on.
Speaker 8: And then secondly, when some of the family members did
Speaker 8: try to go report their loved ones missing, the police
Speaker 8: were reluctant to take those missing reperson reports. Technically, an
Speaker 8: adult can't go missing. We can disappear anytime we want.
Speaker 8: So in a cash strapped city with somewhat jaded police department,
Speaker 8: they're going to allocate their resources towards looking for missing children,
Speaker 8: not looking for missing adults who have a history of
Speaker 8: disappearing on the streets for a couple of weeks at
Speaker 8: a time. And that was an another factor in how
Speaker 8: this crime speed went on for so long.
Speaker 6: Now, let's talk about Latundra Billups and fascinatingly, Soul met
Speaker 6: her through his former girlfriend, Laurie Fraser, unbelievably, but Latundra Billups,
Speaker 6: she's thirty six years old. Tell us about this and
Speaker 6: the police response, tell us about this? Okay.
Speaker 8: Even writing this book, there's a lot of challenges in
Speaker 8: writing this book, and one of them was trying to
Speaker 8: find a sympathetic character, trying to find somebody that a
Speaker 8: reader could identify with. And the only heroic figure I
Speaker 8: could really come up with in this book other than
Speaker 8: a woman named Gladys Waye, but even more than her
Speaker 8: was Latundra. And Latundra men Anthony. She willingly, by her
Speaker 8: own mission, went to party with them. She was a
Speaker 8: woman who had a pretty good life, stayed upbringing, nice mother,
Speaker 8: caring mother, and got hooked up on crack. Got hooked
Speaker 8: on crack. So she's partying with Anthony. Everything's going well,
Speaker 8: and all of a sudden he gets crazy. He wraps
Speaker 8: the cord around her, and he prolongs it. He prolongs
Speaker 8: the agony. He keeps choking her until the brink of unconsciousness.
Speaker 8: Releasing the cord doing it again. So he really tortured
Speaker 8: the poor woman. So at one point in time she
Speaker 8: was blacking out and she just felt this is it.
Speaker 8: Her last thoughts before she Presumablelio was dying, was of
Speaker 8: herth children. She thought of her children. A couple hours later,
Speaker 8: she wakes up. I mean, she's surprised that she's alive.
Speaker 8: She looks up and he's sitting in a chair next
Speaker 8: to her, smoking a cigarette. He was surprised she was alive.
Speaker 8: Now she wasn't afraid because she sensed that he wasn't
Speaker 8: angry anymore. He'd already got off, he already got his gratification.
Speaker 8: So he took her down to the basement, gave her
Speaker 8: a shirt to wear home, asked her if she's going
Speaker 8: to come back, and you know, of course, she's, yeah,
Speaker 8: sure I'll come back. But what she did, she did
Speaker 8: the right thing. She contacted the police. She was a
Speaker 8: crack addict. The last thing she wanted to do was
Speaker 8: go down to the police headquarters, sit there for five
Speaker 8: hours amongst police to make a report. She probably had warrants.
Speaker 8: She didn't want to do that, but it took a month,
Speaker 8: but she did that. She did the right thing, and
Speaker 8: because of her that crime speed was eventually stopped. The
Speaker 8: city for some reason, took a month to get a
Speaker 8: search warrant. In that period of time, Anthony was still operating,
Speaker 8: he got a woman named Sean Morris up to his house.
Speaker 8: They partied. She was naked, real street smart, like Litundra.
Speaker 8: It was a hot day. She was recognized. She here's
Speaker 8: some shutting windows and locking windows in the house. She thought,
Speaker 8: this can't be good. She kicks out the screen. She's
Speaker 8: gonna jump out the second floor window. He runs in,
Speaker 8: he sees or He tries to pull her in. He can't.
Speaker 8: He starts banging on her fingers to break her fingers,
Speaker 8: wanting her to drop hard because there is concrete between
Speaker 8: his house and the sausage factory. She falls, She fractures
Speaker 8: her skull, breaks some ribs. She's laying their naked. She's
Speaker 8: a bigger woman. He runs downstairs. She tries to half carry,
Speaker 8: half drag her back into the house. A guy who
Speaker 8: owns some rental property in the neighborhood's driving by. He
Speaker 8: sees people gathered in that little alleyway with her cellphones
Speaker 8: taking pictures, so he stops, Well, what everybody was taking
Speaker 8: pictures of was this naked wounded woman being dragged by
Speaker 8: a naked man into a house? So he calls nine.
Speaker 8: He yields the kids to get out of there. He
Speaker 8: calls nine one one. She goes to the hospital. She's
Speaker 8: in a calma for a week. She wakes up. She goes,
Speaker 8: I gotta call my husband. She was married. The nurse says,
Speaker 8: your husband wrote in the ambulance with you. Well, that
Speaker 8: was Anthony's soul.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 8: In spite of all this, Sean Morris never made a
Speaker 8: police report. She refused to cooperate. So now it's even
Speaker 8: more important that the Tundra filed her complaint. So October
Speaker 8: twenty ninth, two thousand and nine. Because Anthony Soul had
Speaker 8: a previous violent sex offense, the sex crimes detectives had swat.
Speaker 8: They called Cleveland Swat Team to accompany them to conduct
Speaker 8: the war. To execute the warrant, they go through the house,
Speaker 8: room by room by room. They get to the third floor.
Speaker 8: There's towels under the door, clearly to keep smelling or out.
Speaker 8: Push the door open. There's two bodies. They seal off
Speaker 8: the premises to preserve the evidence called homicide in the meantime,
Speaker 8: the neighbor, Debbie Madison, hears right away that there's two
Speaker 8: dead bodies in the house. Well, she liked Anthony, he
Speaker 8: had fixed her sing first several times. Well, she assumed
Speaker 8: that one of the bodies was his. So she gets
Speaker 8: in the car and she drives to Tressa Garrison's house
Speaker 8: to give her the bad news. For years about it
Speaker 8: on the news, that your brother's dead. Well, she knocks
Speaker 8: on the door and there's Anthony sitting on the couch
Speaker 8: playing video games. She's thinking, there's two dead bodies in
Speaker 8: your house. You're here playing video games. Something's not right.
Speaker 8: So Trissa had talks. She doesn't voice this, but Tressa
Speaker 8: talks her into driving Anthony back to the house because
Speaker 8: Anthony is going to clear this up, as he says.
Speaker 8: So we get to the house and Anthony, of course
Speaker 8: jumps out of the car and we don't see him again.
Speaker 8: It took two days to capture him. Halloween Day and
Speaker 8: nine police picked him up, and even then he almost
Speaker 8: talked his way out of being arrested. He said he
Speaker 8: was somebody else, but when confronted with a little bit
Speaker 8: of evidence, he said, this is as close as he
Speaker 8: came to confessing, he said, yeah, I'm the guy you're
Speaker 8: looking for, and he never really said anything more incriminating
Speaker 8: than that. He did apologize at one time during the trial,
Speaker 8: but he never said what he was apologizing for. So
Speaker 8: that's finally I think because of La Tundra we the
Speaker 8: crime spree was stopped.
Speaker 6: Now you describe in great detail what police discover in
Speaker 6: the home. Initially they find the body, so he can
Speaker 6: tell us about that, but tell us about the state
Speaker 6: of decomp in that they didn't know the gender, the color,
Speaker 6: they didn't erased gender, They didn't really know much. So
Speaker 6: tell us about the initial discovery and what they discovered
Speaker 6: with more investigation.
Speaker 8: Bad decomposes. We all turned black, we turned leathery and
Speaker 8: black fat dissolves, So they didn't know what they had there.
Speaker 8: So what they did the coroner put out a call
Speaker 8: to the community, Hey, anybody, if you got any loved
Speaker 8: ones missing, come on in donate some DNA. We'll try
Speaker 8: to match them up and see if these people are
Speaker 8: the victims that you're missing ones. Well, they couldn't get
Speaker 8: anybody to do that because the community was afraid that
Speaker 8: their DNA samples were going to be used to tie
Speaker 8: them to previous crimes or even future crimes. So it
Speaker 8: took a while. Even though we had DNA, it took
Speaker 8: several months to get to get everybody id'd. They all
Speaker 8: shared the same common characteristics, black females with criminal histories
Speaker 8: drug abuse, who had a tendency to disappear for weeks
Speaker 8: at a time. So I don't know that he necessarily
Speaker 8: picked that profile to prey on, but that's who he
Speaker 8: matched up with. And because eleven bodies were found at
Speaker 8: one time, we'll actually ten bodies and one victim skull.
Speaker 8: They never found the Torso yeah, there was quite a
Speaker 8: bit of anger, resemblement, frustration voiced towards the city and
Speaker 8: the police department. And that did nothing, of course to
Speaker 8: close that trust gap that it existed for decades. But
Speaker 8: looking back on it again, where we didn't have a
Speaker 8: community that was really forthcoming with information, now you.
Speaker 6: Talk about somewhat cauplicated as well. The identification of the
Speaker 6: bodies because they had to use mitochondrial DNA because of
Speaker 6: the decomposition, smaller sample made it more difficult. In the end,
Speaker 6: they did do identification, but tell us about the other
Speaker 6: areas where they did do the search and did find bodies.
Speaker 6: You did mention a little bit, but.
Speaker 8: They yeah, they found well, when the swat came in,
Speaker 8: they found two bodies upstairs. Then they found a disturbed
Speaker 8: ay of dirt in the basement. He had a dirt basement,
Speaker 8: so they suspected body was down there. They were correct.
Speaker 8: They brought in dogs, They brought in cadaver dogs, and
Speaker 8: the dogs got hits on the walls, so they pulled
Speaker 8: drywall down. They found bodies in there, just concealed bodies.
Speaker 8: They found shallow graves with bodies there. Clearly he had
Speaker 8: taken pains to cover up his work, which when he
Speaker 8: tried to defense of sanity, that knocked it right out
Speaker 8: of the ballpark, of course, because you could he was
Speaker 8: obviously in his right mind if he was trying to
Speaker 8: cover up his work. They did a painstaking grid search.
Speaker 8: It looked like an archaeological site in the backyard. And
Speaker 8: this is a very big case in Cleveland and actually
Speaker 8: nationally too, so there was quite a bit of There
Speaker 8: was helicopters, there were reporters camped out in neighbors houses
Speaker 8: on the roofs, shooting, shooting photographs, video down at the scene.
Speaker 8: So it was a big case, and ultimately they brought
Speaker 8: in infrared heats detectors to search in the walls, the
Speaker 8: wall cavities to see if there were other bodies, and
Speaker 8: they're pretty sure they got all of them. So of
Speaker 8: the eleven victims, moving forward a little bit here, If
Speaker 8: you want me to back up, I will. But ten
Speaker 8: of the families request I said that the prosecutor did
Speaker 8: not take not seek the death penalty. They didn't want
Speaker 8: to go to trial, they didn't want to relive this.
Speaker 8: They wanted him to accept a plea bargain of life
Speaker 8: without parole. But big case, high profile, ended up spending
Speaker 8: a million dollars taking him to trial to get a conviction.
Speaker 6: Let's go back to the police interview. You say that
Speaker 6: he's never really said much, but he did. We had
Speaker 6: a litany of excuses at some point, So tell us
Speaker 6: about the police interview. Obviously asked for a lawyer at
Speaker 6: some point, but tell us what he does say in
Speaker 6: the police interview.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Well, the tapes, the police tapes about eight hours of
Speaker 8: interviews are interesting because you see an ultran narcissist at work.
Speaker 8: I mean, here's a guy who was so narcissistic. He
Speaker 8: wanted the world to see him the way he saw himself.
Speaker 8: It was never his fault. There was always somebody else's fault.
Speaker 8: Even in the interviews he's accusing you know, the women
Speaker 8: of lying or their families of lying. I mean, it's
Speaker 8: anybody's fault but his own. And then when they finally
Speaker 8: pin him down and put him in a position where
Speaker 8: he has to admit that he was there, he creates
Speaker 8: his alter ego, this fake persona called Arnie. Ronie talked
Speaker 8: to him. Arnie made him do this. So even then,
Speaker 8: like any narcissist, I guess, he couldn't take accountability, He
Speaker 8: couldn't turn a spotlight on himself. So also interesting from
Speaker 8: those tapes because it went on for so long, the
Speaker 8: teams of detectives were taking turns, and you can see
Speaker 8: the different the different how the different approaches worked on him,
Speaker 8: you know, the bullying, making friends with him, which really
Speaker 8: seemed to work best, because this is a guy that
Speaker 8: wanted to be loved. Never very cagey. I think he
Speaker 8: almost enjoyed. He thought he was leading him on a
Speaker 8: cat and mouse chase. I think never really came out
Speaker 8: and said he did it. But if he did it,
Speaker 8: they deserved it. Interestingly, there really was no direct evidence
Speaker 8: that Anthony Soul did this crime. It was all circumstantial.
Speaker 8: That was a little bit of a challenge for the
Speaker 8: prosecutor to prove that only he had keys to the
Speaker 8: house and only he had access to the house, because
Speaker 8: one of their defenses was, how do you know Anthony
Speaker 8: did it? Maybe someone just dragged these bodies over and
Speaker 8: buried him in his yard.
Speaker 6: Now part of the reason to sway the to sway
Speaker 6: the jury, influenced the jury and tell the jury the
Speaker 6: actual truth. The prosecution brought a witness name last name
Speaker 6: Gay one victim that got away, and I believe Sean
Speaker 6: Morris as well. So tell us what was gained by
Speaker 6: despite again the issue with that people have, courts have
Speaker 6: and this bears out initially in this story about credibility.
Speaker 6: So tell us what the witnesses that the prosecution chose
Speaker 6: to put on the witness stand and what was the
Speaker 6: gist of what they had to say. For the prosecution.
Speaker 8: Well, you know, of course, with the States, we have
Speaker 8: an adversarial system of courtroom procedure, and that really came
Speaker 8: out very clearly in this trial. Sean Morris, good example,
Speaker 8: they brought her up. She had cases, she had some
Speaker 8: some other criminal cases. So in trading away those cases
Speaker 8: for testimony, a lot of them did. Defense attorney had
Speaker 8: the same approach with every woman in that testified against Anthony.
Speaker 8: They'd say, how do you did you? Were you hearing
Speaker 8: voices at this time? Were you hallucinating? Maybe you were
Speaker 8: hallucinating this all happened, well, of course the woman would
Speaker 8: get mad. Sean Morris got very angry, uttered of vulgarity,
Speaker 8: wanted to leave the stand because the women knew where
Speaker 8: they were going with this line of questioning, this, this
Speaker 8: counter they were because every one of the women had
Speaker 8: applied for Social Security disability ink of it one time,
Speaker 8: and they all their grounds forgetting what was all that
Speaker 8: there were either schizophrenic or bipolar, manic, depressive rather because
Speaker 8: you can't really it's very hard to prove that somebody
Speaker 8: doesn't have those conditions. So and some of the symptoms,
Speaker 8: of course, are auditory and visual hallucinations. So the defense
Speaker 8: attorney was just using their own words against them, and
Speaker 8: I don't think he thought that was going to hold up,
Speaker 8: but it was just a way of he had to
Speaker 8: do something right. So the trial, those are some of
Speaker 8: the more dramatic moments. Now, Vanessa Gay, very well spoken,
Speaker 8: very attractive, a very very compelling witness, partied with Anthony
Speaker 8: a long period of time. He raped her at some
Speaker 8: point in time. He liked her. I think he personally
Speaker 8: liked her though, from what I can tell. He let
Speaker 8: her go to the bathroom. She's walking down the bathroom
Speaker 8: on the second floor of his house and she looks
Speaker 8: into an empty room and she's his a headless body.
Speaker 8: We think that was the body that belong to the
Speaker 8: skull in the basement. But anyhow, she somehow manages to
Speaker 8: maintain her cool not to panic. He loses interest in
Speaker 8: killing her instead decides he wants her as a girlfriend,
Speaker 8: so he lets her go. Now, you know, her story
Speaker 8: gets a little complicated here. She said she contacted the police,
Speaker 8: and maybe she did. They don't have a record of it.
Speaker 8: She says she got the around so she didn't follow
Speaker 8: up on it. That's possible too. But after she didn't
Speaker 8: go to the police, another six women died. But in
Speaker 8: any event, she finally came forward.
Speaker 6: And she.
Speaker 8: I mean, I don't know, I maybe she did. I'm
Speaker 8: not saying she did or she didn't. But the facts
Speaker 8: are six women died after she was attacked. So she
Speaker 8: again very very well spoken, very compelling. The jury was
Speaker 8: very moved by her testimony. She left and I'm sorry,
Speaker 8: I don't even know where I was going with that.
Speaker 8: I apologize. I go ahead, no, so go ahead. That
Speaker 8: was probably the testimony that really sealed it for the
Speaker 8: jury because she was so so able to articulate the
Speaker 8: terror that she felt and the victimization that she felt.
Speaker 8: And she was a lady who had a job, she
Speaker 8: had an education, and she just succumbed to crack and
Speaker 8: she was living on the streets. I mean, she abandoned
Speaker 8: her children to live on the streets in the same clothes,
Speaker 8: with no toilet facility and no definite place to sleep
Speaker 8: every night, at the prey of miscreants. I mean, that
Speaker 8: really brought her story, really brought it home to me,
Speaker 8: the just the utter addictive quality of crack cocaine. I mean,
Speaker 8: what mother would leave her kids, you know, to live
Speaker 8: on the streets.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, you do talk. We just want to backtrack a
Speaker 6: little bit because you did throw this monkey wrench in
Speaker 6: there a little bit, and that you talked about the
Speaker 6: media sort of discrediting the police, account that she had
Speaker 6: not made a police report, and in the media. In
Speaker 6: your book, you say that the media did discover a
Speaker 6: police report. So tell us.
Speaker 8: Explain that for me. I, well, the police were on
Speaker 8: the defense of almost immediately.
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 8: One of one of the things that was interesting is
Speaker 8: the police chief at the time made an announcement that, hey,
Speaker 8: you know, only two families of the eleven filed missing
Speaker 8: person reports. Well that's true, chief, but that's because you
Speaker 8: wouldn't let uh six other ones file a report. You
Speaker 8: wouldn't take the report. So you know that the story
Speaker 8: was getting spun quite a bit. I don't know, excuse me.
Speaker 8: I don't know what transpired between Vanessa. I know she's
Speaker 8: a very caring person and she wouldn't want anybody to
Speaker 8: go through what she went through. And it's possible that
Speaker 8: she was so trying commatized by this experience that she
Speaker 8: just didn't want to recount it for the police. Maybe
Speaker 8: she thought it was a one off, Maybe she didn't
Speaker 8: know that he was praying on other people. But in
Speaker 8: any event, she says she called the police. The police
Speaker 8: say she did, The media said she did. I don't
Speaker 8: know that that one's up for discussion. She knows.
Speaker 6: Tell us about tell us about the DNA sample that
Speaker 6: was taken. And as you talk about in the book,
Speaker 6: this could have been determined in seven to ten days.
Speaker 6: Instead it took tell us about how long it took.
Speaker 6: What happened with the DNA the snaffhoo, the DNA snaffhoo.
Speaker 8: A woman came forward. She lived in a neighboring community
Speaker 8: called Cleveland Heights, and when the story broke about Anthony Sowel,
Speaker 8: she came forward and said, this is exactly what happened
Speaker 8: to me. Everything he did to these women, he did
Speaker 8: to me. She gave a rape is a rape kid actually,
Speaker 8: I think we're talking about a rape kit here. Gave
Speaker 8: the rape kit, which would have contained his DNA, you know,
Speaker 8: from a sperm sample, to the Cliven Heights police. They
Speaker 8: never forwarded it to the crime lab. It sat in
Speaker 8: somebody's desk drawer for two years.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 8: Anthony sols DNA was on file because he was a prisoner.
Speaker 8: He would it would have been sample taken from him
Speaker 8: when he entered the prison system. So if the police
Speaker 8: department would have forwarded it that rape kid to the lab,
Speaker 8: they would have found the DNA presumably and this wouldn't
Speaker 8: have happened. But that never happened, and instead of saying yeah,
Speaker 8: we grooped up, we didn't transfer it the police. This
Speaker 8: is maybe the part of the story that I personally
Speaker 8: maybe felt a little passionate about, was the police chief
Speaker 8: of that community went into deny mode and said, well,
Speaker 8: you know, we will forward all evidence from a sex crime. Well,
Speaker 8: clearly on the folder it was marked sex crime. So
Speaker 8: he didn't do that, tried to blame it on the
Speaker 8: crime lab. The crime lab director said, nope, we didn't
Speaker 8: get it. He didn't. He did the right thing to,
Speaker 8: you know, to not to be monotonous here, but he
Speaker 8: did the right thing. He just denied what the police
Speaker 8: chief said. So, I mean, this probably, like a lot
Speaker 8: of crimes like this, there's a confluence of factors of errors,
Speaker 8: of missed opportunities that come together to allow something like
Speaker 8: this to happen. And in Anthony's case, there were a
Speaker 8: lot of those factors. When he got out of prison
Speaker 8: in two thousand and five in Ohio, he had to
Speaker 8: take he had to be interviewed to determine if he
Speaker 8: was a sexual predator, to be classified. If he was,
Speaker 8: there was some very strict requirements he had to abide by. Well,
Speaker 8: the interview was just him talking to a psychologist. There
Speaker 8: was no background check, there was no confirmation of anything
Speaker 8: Anthony told him. Well, he lied his way through that
Speaker 8: whole interview. Consequently, he was putting the lowest sexual offender tear.
Speaker 8: He only had to report self report once a year,
Speaker 8: and he didn't have to notify his neighbors that he
Speaker 8: was a violent sex offender. So there was a lot
Speaker 8: of just a lot of errors, a lot of little
Speaker 8: red possibilities that led to the conditions that were conducive
Speaker 8: for him to perpetuate his crime.
Speaker 6: One of the more horrific aspects in the story is
Speaker 6: again that the psychological tech head and the psychologists and
Speaker 6: psych I addressed determined he was only a six percent
Speaker 6: risk of reoffending sexually.
Speaker 8: I thought that was good, Yeah, that's I had a
Speaker 8: psychologist actually kind of discount that. The significance of that.
Speaker 8: He kind of spun it in terms of six percent
Speaker 8: as compared to the universe of sex offenders. So I
Speaker 8: see what he was saying. But in any event, they
Speaker 8: didn't They had no idea. They missed the boat, completely
Speaker 8: missed the boat on what this guy was up to.
Speaker 8: Maybe he was a budgetary thing. If he says he's
Speaker 8: not looking at porn, if he's not using computers for
Speaker 8: sexual purposes, if he's not drinking and going to strip clubs,
Speaker 8: maybe they don't have the money to send an investigator
Speaker 8: determine if that's true. But all those things were true,
Speaker 8: and if he would have admitted it, or if they
Speaker 8: would have discovered it, it would have kicked him into
Speaker 8: a higher classification, a higher tier of sex offender.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and things would have been much different. We will
Speaker 6: skip through the trial a little bit because we've alluded
Speaker 6: to it. Obviously he was sentenced. Obviously the defense went
Speaker 6: through the motions of vigorous defense, but they didn't in
Speaker 6: the end call any witnesses. So they just did a
Speaker 6: vigorous cross examination of a lot of people, including sadly,
Speaker 6: some of the near victims that were brave enough and
Speaker 6: have to go up and on the stand and be
Speaker 6: subjected to that cross examination. So let's get to your
Speaker 6: interview with Anthony Soul. How you came to be able
Speaker 6: to interview him, and what tell us about that.
Speaker 8: I think I got to him because I was possibly
Speaker 8: the first person who tried his narcissism. I believe actually
Speaker 8: helped me because he wanted to you want to straight
Speaker 8: something out. He wanted to straight straighten out some information
Speaker 8: that as you know, when newspapers reporters are writing stories,
Speaker 8: they generally tend to pull boiler plate background and insert
Speaker 8: it in the story in future stories. And some of
Speaker 8: that boiler play material was the fact that he had
Speaker 8: gotten he had gotten two commendations in the Marine Corps.
Speaker 8: So he said, you know, everybody's got you know, got
Speaker 8: my story screwed up. I want to get straightened out.
Speaker 8: When he finally talked to me, I goes, sure, what
Speaker 8: do you want to straighten out? He goes, I got
Speaker 8: three commendations, not two commendations. That's what he That was
Speaker 8: his big concern at that time. Now, as we talked,
Speaker 8: he was very engaging, very amiable. Had to talk for
Speaker 8: he guarded. Had to talk for a while, you know,
Speaker 8: to to really get any for him to drop any
Speaker 8: clues or any indicators of who he really was. But
Speaker 8: what I got out of it was he had a
Speaker 8: very difficult relationship with his mother. He had very difficult
Speaker 8: relationship with women in general. He was no threat to men.
Speaker 8: He seemed to get along with men for the most part.
Speaker 8: He just had a love hate affair with women that
Speaker 8: was very extreme. He showed no remorse. Even when I said, well,
Speaker 8: let's say you didn't do it. How do you feel
Speaker 8: about these women that died? He audibly shrug. I think
Speaker 8: the fact that they weren't at home with their kids
Speaker 8: and they were doing drugs made them undesirable in his mind.
Speaker 8: And then in the end, when he realized that, you know,
Speaker 8: I was kind of a broken record. I just wanted
Speaker 8: him to own up to something. He you know, the
Speaker 8: things started dying down for me. He was he's trying
Speaker 8: to scam. He's a hustler, he's a narcissist. He gets
Speaker 8: pleasure out of manipulating people. That wasn't working with me.
Speaker 8: I couldn't possibly put money on his account. I looked
Speaker 8: like a group being, you know, insensitive. So finally, when
Speaker 8: it came down to what I thought would be our
Speaker 8: last conversation, I said it, you know, Anthony, if you
Speaker 8: did this, why what would you tell readers about why
Speaker 8: you did it? And he said, very quickly, abused children
Speaker 8: grow up. I tend to think he was being you know,
Speaker 8: somewhat genuine there. I think he maybe he wasn't applying
Speaker 8: that to his case, but he believes that to be true.
Speaker 6: Go ahead.
Speaker 8: I was also interested in how a guy on death
Speaker 8: row spends his days because you're you're isolated, just segregated
Speaker 8: from main population and in solitary confinement, and he hits
Speaker 8: a lot of letters. Told me he was getting at
Speaker 8: that time, he was getting about a hunting letters a month,
Speaker 8: which he called fan mail from them. And he was
Speaker 8: also upset because he said they took away his supplies,
Speaker 8: and that wasn't quite sure what he meant by supplies,
Speaker 8: and these conversations they tend to be rushed, so you know,
Speaker 8: I didn't want to get I had to keep moving.
Speaker 8: But what I found out was he meant his art supplies.
Speaker 8: There's sites on the internet murder Abelia sites that will
Speaker 8: sell our work from notorious criminals and memorabilia from them too,
Speaker 8: And he was doing drawings and artwork and shipping it
Speaker 8: out and they were selling it for him on websites.
Speaker 8: So that's he was upset about that that he couldn't
Speaker 8: continue that enterprise.
Speaker 6: What we didn't mention too, is that you had asked
Speaker 6: you had asked this question about le Chandra, I believe
Speaker 6: his body, and he said, well, you're going to have
Speaker 6: to put that. I've got some items for you to
Speaker 6: buy first before we talk about that.
Speaker 8: The chenre right, the chenre was they Andre's skull and
Speaker 8: a bus bucket in the basement. Talked to her parents
Speaker 8: quite a while, real nice people, real broken up. They
Speaker 8: wanted to give her a proper funeral. He Anthony, tell
Speaker 8: me where the Chandra's remains are, and he said, sure,
Speaker 8: for three hundred dollars. There was a list of items
Speaker 8: that he wanted to buy for me MP three players
Speaker 8: art supplies that I was supposed to buy for him
Speaker 8: and put on his account. And you know, everything's recorded
Speaker 8: in prison, the calls and transactions, so of course I
Speaker 8: couldn't do that. And that was well, that was not
Speaker 8: the last call conversation. Actually had a couple more after that.
Speaker 8: The calls started getting very interesting. I don't know how
Speaker 8: much time we have, but I aired in judgment once
Speaker 8: and told one of his defense attorneys that I talked
Speaker 8: to Anthony and he just stared at me, and I thought, oh,
Speaker 8: that wasn't good. Sure enough, ten minutes later, Anthony got
Speaker 8: a call from his new appeals attorneys telling him not
Speaker 8: to talk to me. Well, Anthony turned around and called
Speaker 8: me and he said he was laughing. He said, you
Speaker 8: know attorneys, attorneys who's laughing? He said, what's up with them?
Speaker 8: And they told him, don't talk to this writer. We
Speaker 8: got an appeal going. And then they said, however, we
Speaker 8: do have a writer on the staff that we'd like
Speaker 8: to talk to you when it's time to write a book.
Speaker 8: So he found that humorous. I had another story, Cameron,
Speaker 8: what it was, but one.
Speaker 6: Of the most profound. One of the most profound stories
Speaker 6: was one of the victims, Kim Yvette Smith, and her
Speaker 6: father was in a wheelchair, made it to the trial,
Speaker 6: made an impact statement and tell us about this. This
Speaker 6: has got to be one of the more profound moments.
Speaker 6: What did he say and what did happen a few
Speaker 6: weeks later?
Speaker 8: You know, I think one of the real tragedies of
Speaker 8: the story was the family members left behind, not just
Speaker 8: left behind, but the family who of their family while
Speaker 8: they were while they were in the throes of their addiction.
Speaker 8: These women were loved, but at a certain point in
Speaker 8: time the family just couldn't have them around. They were stealing,
Speaker 8: they were disorderly, there were a bad influence. They had
Speaker 8: to let him go. Well, Donald Smith was one of
Speaker 8: those guys. He just couldn't He just couldn't have his
Speaker 8: daughter around. He was in a wheelchair, he had a
Speaker 8: stroke and he gave a victim impact statement to the
Speaker 8: court and he looked at Anthony he said, you know
Speaker 8: you killed me when you killed my daughter. You killed me.
Speaker 8: Very compelling, And two weeks later Donald Smith died of
Speaker 8: a heart attack. And that way, he wasn't the only
Speaker 8: family member to die shortly. Tanya Carmichael, her sister, died
Speaker 8: two weeks later. Mom says, of a broken heart.
Speaker 6: What's fun you've included again to me, there's still aesthetic
Speaker 6: stories in terms of the victims had such sad lives.
Speaker 6: You have a couple of the victims, the victims that
Speaker 6: were raped had already had bad expuse with reporting these rapes. Please,
Speaker 6: So when they were attacked by Anthony Saul, he said,
Speaker 6: you know, they were hesitant.
Speaker 8: And Tanya Dows have been raped. Her rapist got out
Speaker 8: of jail before she got out of the hospital. So
Speaker 8: what's the point. They're not gonna believe me. They're either
Speaker 8: not gonna believe me, they're going to use my criminal
Speaker 8: history against me, or I'm now I'm just gonna be
Speaker 8: targeted for victimization by the guy that me because I
Speaker 8: because I filed the police report, they were disincentivized from
Speaker 8: reporting the violence against them.
Speaker 6: It's though Anthony's Soul, though, pick the perfect victims, so
Speaker 6: he really did pick some of the saddest stories, the
Speaker 6: saddest cases that he could find. It's an incredible story
Speaker 6: that some of these girls that were impregnated at thirteen
Speaker 6: years of age and then just a litany of bad
Speaker 6: experiences before they met Anthony Soul and afterwards.
Speaker 8: Crystal Dozer thirteen years old, they had a boyfriend who's
Speaker 8: twenty one. He would go pick her up at middle school,
Speaker 8: take her to housing projects where he would pimper for
Speaker 8: drug money, and then beat her lesslie. Mom tried to
Speaker 8: do something about it. The brothers tried to do something
Speaker 8: about it, but she kept going back to the guy
Speaker 8: she meets, Anthony Souel. Anthony could be very much a gentleman.
Speaker 8: I mean, the in that community. He was a former marine,
Speaker 8: he played chess, he was a cook. They liked him.
Speaker 8: I mean, not a bad looking guy. He couldn't you know,
Speaker 8: met a woman and had a conventional relationship. But she
Speaker 8: met him. He seemed nice. For a while, the family
Speaker 8: was happy because it seemed like she wasn't on drugs.
Speaker 8: But in the end, I mean, she just became one
Speaker 8: of his victims. She had again, another woman who had
Speaker 8: a horrible life and then a horrible death. Go ahead,
Speaker 8: I'm sorry.
Speaker 6: No, I'm sorry to go ahead.
Speaker 8: Eleven. I believe the eleven women left behind sixty five
Speaker 8: children of various ages. She left behind two kids, really
Speaker 8: really nice kids. Really my one daughter who was a nurse,
Speaker 8: a son who was a police officer. They were very
Speaker 8: empathetic and understanding of their mom's addiction, of her illness,
Speaker 8: but they had to even they had to cut off
Speaker 8: contact with her at a certain point. These women, when
Speaker 8: they would go to get rehabilitation treatment, they'd go for
Speaker 8: twenty eight days, get cleaned up, they'd leave, they'd go
Speaker 8: right back to the same neighborhood. In a lot of cases,
Speaker 8: Sean Morris, I go to interview Sean Morris. We're sitting
Speaker 8: in her garage with me, her and her husband, Doug,
Speaker 8: big guy, a nice guy. Big I'm not.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 8: She told me she had a crack habit that cost
Speaker 8: her two hundred dollars a day, So I said, how
Speaker 8: old could you possibly afford that? Well? What a need
Speaker 8: naive question, right. She looked at me like I was dumb,
Speaker 8: and then I got it. I mean she was prostituting herself.
Speaker 8: So I had, you know, I had to get a
Speaker 8: confirmation on that. I said, what were you? And she goes,
Speaker 8: you know, she used you know, I canna say what
Speaker 8: she said, but yeah, she was prosting herself. And I
Speaker 8: kept looking at the husband, thinking, Wow, maybe I'm going
Speaker 8: a little too far here. But then I realized that's
Speaker 8: who put her out there. That's who sent her out
Speaker 8: on the street, because that's the only thing left to
Speaker 8: barter her to get the drugs that he wanted too.
Speaker 8: So in a lot of cases, these women, the men
Speaker 8: in their life let them down.
Speaker 6: One other sad aspect, and its hammered home in this
Speaker 6: book was his sister, Anthony's sister Tressa, trying to defend
Speaker 6: him at trial and really working in the prosecutor say,
Speaker 6: before we wrap this up, tell us just about.
Speaker 8: That classic case of somebody talking too much. Comedy of errors.
Speaker 8: They were the prosecutors were not allowed to bring in
Speaker 8: Anthony's previous acts they thought would prejudiced the jury. Of
Speaker 8: course clean flate. So they bring her in. And when
Speaker 8: Melvet Sockwell in nineteen eighty nine escaped under the third
Speaker 8: floor out of that window under the roof, keep that
Speaker 8: in mind. Tresta was talking about Anthony and the defense
Speaker 8: attorney prosecutor was saying, well, why do you think Anthony's innocent?
Speaker 8: You know, she goes, all these women are lying. She said,
Speaker 8: even that, even at woman Malvett that trailed out the window,
Speaker 8: she was just there to steal his drugs. She opened
Speaker 8: up the door. Now for the prosecutor to ask about
Speaker 8: that situation. Now, they didn't bulldozer on it. They played
Speaker 8: it very smart. They said, oh, drugs, yeah, he was
Speaker 8: selling marijuana right, well they knew it was crack probably,
Speaker 8: And she goes, no, it was crack. Well, now now
Speaker 8: you have the fact that he's involved with crack, the
Speaker 8: fact that he really did bind and a woman in
Speaker 8: the past, that he was a sexual offender. I mean,
Speaker 8: it all came out and literally I glanced at the
Speaker 8: defense one of the defense attorneys, he threw his pencil
Speaker 8: up in the air. I mean it was over. There
Speaker 8: was one other situation. One of the things she said
Speaker 8: that unintentionally really hurt him. She was trying to help him.
Speaker 8: She was trying to she came up in the mitigation
Speaker 8: phase to show that he was a good brother. She
Speaker 8: was trying to lend some form of worth and humanity
Speaker 8: to him. And they said, give us an example. She
Speaker 8: said that when she was, you know, junior high or
Speaker 8: high school, a girl was getting smart with her. Anthony
Speaker 8: walked right up to her, stuck up for her sister,
Speaker 8: and he punched that girl in the face. Well, Tresa
Speaker 8: then looked at Anthony and said, I love my brother,
Speaker 8: and a plain dealer. Photographer caught a little tear coming
Speaker 8: down from Anthony's eye at that point, the only emotion
Speaker 8: he really showed. But now we have her saying Anthony
Speaker 8: exhibited violence towards towards women at a young age. So
Speaker 8: she didn't help at all. But as many times as
Speaker 8: I talked to her, I really enjoyed talking to her.
Speaker 8: She is very entertaining and very bright. Right lady. I
Speaker 8: think she had eight nine kids of her own. They
Speaker 8: those kids in that house. One of the reasons I
Speaker 8: think they were having the girls were trying to have
Speaker 8: kids is they wanted to get out of that house.
Speaker 8: They wanted to get away from that madhouse, and there
Speaker 8: weren't There are only a couple of ways to get out,
Speaker 8: either run away, and they were just going to be
Speaker 8: brought back or get pregnant, hopefully go live with somebody.
Speaker 8: So I think that was her approach.
Speaker 6: Now, just to wrap this up, where is he's on
Speaker 6: death row? Tell us where he is imprisoned, and.
Speaker 8: Ohio's death row is in Chili Coothe Ohio runs on
Speaker 8: average about thirteen years between conviction and actual execution of
Speaker 8: a sentence, so he's going through his automatic appeals. It'll
Speaker 8: be a while before he is executed. He says, he
Speaker 8: reads the Bible. He contacted me several months ago. He
Speaker 8: wanted to write a book. But I mean, unless he's
Speaker 8: going to admit to what he did, what what? I
Speaker 8: didn't see much value in that. But he keeps busy.
Speaker 8: He says, he reads the Bible, does his artwork, and
Speaker 8: he answers letters. He still gets letters, still gets letters
Speaker 8: from women. Says they either want to marry him or
Speaker 8: save him.
Speaker 6: Does he know of your book and what has he
Speaker 6: said about the writing of it or has he seen
Speaker 6: the finished product or heard about it.
Speaker 8: His attorney. His attorney sent him a copy. Actually, I
Speaker 8: think his attorney brought a copy. I don't think he's
Speaker 8: allowed to have the book. They're not allowed to have
Speaker 8: these kind of books in prison. He brought the book
Speaker 8: and then he read some of the passages to him
Speaker 8: And I talked to Anthony after that, and he didn't.
Speaker 8: He didn't seem to upset. In fact, I would have
Speaker 8: thought he would have been, but he was okay with it.
Speaker 8: He didn't feel like I sandbagged them. He enjoyed the publicity.
Speaker 6: That's what I was gonna says, fit in with his
Speaker 6: narcissistic behavior traits. Why not? It's maybe it's not exactly
Speaker 6: what he wanted, but hey, somebody's writing about him. Yeah.
Speaker 8: Well I came away. My takeaway from this whole thing
Speaker 8: was don't do crack number one, and secondly, stay away
Speaker 8: from narcissists. They can rationalize their behavior anyway they want to.
Speaker 6: Absolutely, I want to thank you for coming on and
Speaker 6: talking about House of Horrors, the shocking true story of
Speaker 6: Anthony Soul for those that might want to find out more.
Speaker 6: Do you have a website? Do you do Facebook? How
Speaker 6: people learn more or contact you.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Both. Website is my name, it's www. Robert Sperna dot com. Facebook,
Speaker 8: same way, S B E R N A. And I
Speaker 8: do enjoy discussing the case. So I thank you very much,
Speaker 8: very enjoyable talking with you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Well, Thank you very much, and you have a great evening.
Speaker 8: Thank you, Dan, you too.
Speaker 6: Good night.