Gruesome US serial killer trial opens today

An accused serial killer who kept the bodies of 11 women in and around his Ohio home for more than two years and blamed the stench on a nearby sausage factory goes on trial today.

The gruesome case that unravelled on October 29, 2009 had officials scrambling to explain why the crimes weren’t discovered sooner.

The women allegedly killed by Anthony Sowell were exclusively poor, black and hampered by lifestyles that took them on and off the streets. Because of that, they weren’t always reported as missing immediately. Nor did police pay much attention to cries for help that could have saved the lives of six of his victims.

One bloodied woman flagged down police in December 2008, telling them of her desperate escape from the registered sex offender’s house. But police found she wasn’t a “credible” witness and declined to press charges even though they found blood and signs of a struggle in Mr Sowell’s home.

A second woman was also ignored after she told police in April 2009 that Mr Sowell had raped her repeatedly over a three-day period at his home after telling her that she needed to be “trained like an animal.”

Then, in September 2009, a third woman went to police and told them Mr Sowell lured her to his house, raped and strangled her with a cord, then let her go when she regained consciousness.

It wasn’t until police knocked on the door of the yellow house a month later with an arrest warrant that the bodies were discovered. The officers went inside when Mr Sowell didn’t answer their knock and followed the unbearable stench to two rotting corpses laying on a bed on the third floor.

On the skeletal hand of one body, gone since November 10, 2008, were three junk jewellery rings.

A weeks-long search of the house and yard found eight more bodies and a human skull in a bucket.

Mr Sowell, 51, was arrested as he walked down the street two days after the first bodies were found. He faces the death penalty if convicted of nearly 100 charges, including kidnapping, rape, molesting a human corpse, robbery and attempted murder.

Mr Sowell moved back to Cleveland after leaving the Marines in 1985, but was there just five years before he was sent to prison for the violent rape of a pregnant woman.

When he got out in 2005, he again returned to his old home and was soon living with a girlfriend, Lori Frazier, niece of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson. “I just wondered why, why would he do this,” Ms Frazier told WOIO TV shortly after his arrest.

“He took care of me, good care of me, and I never thought no bodies were in the house.”

Ms Frazier said she’d often asked Mr Sowell about the smell in the house.

At first, Mr Sowell said it was the poor housekeeping habits of his stepmother, who lived on the ground floor. Later, he said the smell emanated from the nearby meat factory, Ray’s Sausage.

Ms Frazier moved out in 2008 because she wanted to get away from their habit of doing a lot of drugs together. She didn’t realise she was also escaping a mass murderer.