HOUSE OF HORRORS-Rob Sberna

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decomposed bodies as his third floor living room. Eight more bodies were hidden throughout the house and burned in the backyard. In the smith that discovered a human skull. All of the bodies were female and all appeared to have been bound. Two days later, police captured Soul, sexual sadist, who had served a fifteen year prison sentence for kidnapping, raping, and

torturing a twenty one year old pre woman. House of Horrors exposes the shocking, detailed Soles to pray of crimes and twisted ski He preyed on neighborhood women, luring them to his home with alcohol and drugs. Soul then murdered the women and lived among their corpses. Five other women were attacked by Soul, but managed to escape. After a dramatic trial in the summer of twenty eleven, Seul was

convicted sentenced to death. In House of Horrors, readers are given a rare glimpse inside the mind of a serial killer through interviews with souls neighbors and relatives, the surviving victims, and exclusive interviews with Soul himself. The book they were in his House of Horrors, the shock looking choosy Soul The Cleveland with my special guest journalist and author Rob Spyrna, welcome to the program, and thank you for a Greenedness interview. Rob Spyrna, thank you for having me.

And as I stood on the sidewalk across the street from the crime scene, watching the corners assistance work and law enforcement work, I started talking to some of the people and some of the women were crying, and they were crying because they suspected or had reason to believe their loved ones were in that house, either daughters, mothers, sisters. And in speaking with the women and learning about some of these ladies who kind could have possibly been in there,

I just became interested in their lives. For the most part, there were women who had jobs, they had families, and there was one common denominator and that was drugs. They all had drug problems, had a history of drug abuse, So I want to know more about those women and how that occurred. And then my inspiration writing the book was fueled when the media because when the bodies were found, there was a long, fairly long period of time between the murders and the discovery, so they were in various,

varying states of decomposition. So the media really didn't have much to go on because the women weren't identified yet. But once they started finding out who they were, even the mainstream media kind of started branding and labeling them as by their past. So in other words, they were

all women who had criminal histories, prostitution, drug abusers. So ultimately, what I wanted to do is give some sense of humanity back to the women, to show them as people who god hooked on drugs, lived basically a terrible life, and then endured a terrible death.

social services started contracting. Into the seventies, Cleveland saw a lot of racial problems, a lot of a lot of racial strife. In the sixties, there was always a mistrust. It seemed to be quite quite a long history of mistrust between the black community and Cleveland police department. And there were two notable riots, Glenville and Huff where there's three three police officers were killed in the Huff riots.

So there was a lot of tension, a lot of antagonism, and that mistrust carried through into two thousand and nine. Actually when the bodies were discovered I'll get to that in a second, but within when the population went away, what it left was a lot of poverty. Drugs came in. We had a big influx of drugs in the seventies. In fact, nineteen seventy two, Cleveland had three hundred and

thirty three murders. That was, let's right on par with Chicago and New York, and the population was quite significantly less than them, so you know, there were some problems in Cleveland. Now. The neighborhood that Anthony Soul moved into was actually a one time a very affluent, so to speak, black community. If you were African American and you lived on Imperial Avenue in the fifties, that was a sign

of prestige. Jim Brown, the NFL player lived there. Don King boxing Fromoter live there, Doctors, attorneys, so that was a nice street at one time. And as we saw the population decline and you know, housing values deteriorate, a lot of the big houses on Imperial got cut up into multi family apartments and became rental units. So of course there generally there's you know, less upkeep, and then the drugs moved in, so it was kind of a rough area. Now actually where the East Cleveland is actually

an inner ring suburb of Cleveland. It's just east of the Cleveland city limits where this, uh, these crimes happened. It was actually in Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood called Mount Pleasant, which is a hot spot for crime, and the FBI charts it's one of the that's one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation. So that was the environment that that we were looking at for these crimes. Very high crime, drug plagued, poverty stricken neighborhood.

male role model in that house. It was just his mother and his grandmother. His mother was very demanding, very strict. She worked a lot of hours. There was a big house actually, this house was in East Cliff and a very nice house. And she was a very stern disciplinarian and her if she expected certain shores to be done and things to be done a certain way, and if they weren't or if they weren't done to her satisfaction, she would use physical, physical discipline. And one of her

favorite methods was to strip the kid's naked. And her favorite targets for this were two girls. They were twins, Ramona and Leona. They were about eleven twelve years old, just going through puberty, and she would come home if they hadn't done their chores, strip them naked, tie him to a banister with an electrical extension chord, and then beat them with another cord until they either bled or cried enough to make her relent. Now she do this

with all the other kids gathered around. So here you have these two young girls going through puberty naked, and the other kids associating whatever those sexual feelings, they were those confusing feelings with violence. So it's a very twisted atmosphere that she endured. And then just jumping ahead real quick to tie that in later on. Anthony's eleven victims, all of them were found with some form of an extension chord, either wrapped around there, binding their hands or

wrapped around their neck. So going back, he grew up in this environment. I did not cover this too much in my book, but there was incest, there were sexual violence against the younger girls, just not a real healthy atmosphere. Now, Anthony seemed to be one of her favorites. He didn't get disciplined as much as the other ones did, but there were a few stories which I felt was important

to his development. One of those one anecdote was he was in the front yard playing, he might have been about twelve thirteen, and his mom pulled in the driveway after work and he ran up to say, you know hi, mom, and she reached out of the car and punched him in the nose. She actually broke his nose, according to his siblings, And he just stood there and said, Mom, why'd you do that? She said, well, that'll teach you not to clean your room when I tell you too.

So just a remarkably dysfunctional childhood.

the nineties, I'm sorry. And so Anthony's stepmother lived in that house but rented out the second and third floors. She gained some rental income from that. But that house was situated rate next right adjacent to a sausage factory, and then next door of this, just up the streets of the sausage factory was kind of a deli where a lot of the neighborhood people went to buy groceries and beer cigarettes. So there was some traffic on impurely because of Imperial. Because of that deli.

the family in there. Now, Patricia had some serious health problems and she had seven children, and after about the third, third or fourth child, doctors told her, if you keep having children, you're putting your life in danger. Well, she kept having children, and in fact she did die. Tresa. Perhaps, you know, I think Anthony was closest to Tresa. Very sharp, very intuitive, very street smart woman, kind of a lengthy

criminal history. She was a little bit of a hustler and a scammer, and perhaps you know, maybe they had that in common that that seems to be Yet who he was closest with, In fact, I think that's the only sibling that he kept in touch with after everybody moved out of that house. In East Cleveland.

in any great direction to get good grades. He like the other kids, were left to their own devices, and eventually I think they all dropped out of school at some point.

we have to look at first is this. He was very obsessive, compulsive, very organized, very orderly, and those qualities served him very well in the Marines, in the job market, and then of course in prison. So he went into the Marines, and he was orderly, he was organized, he was punctual to a fault. He followed orders. I mean, he was an interesting guy. He was not a rebel. I mean he was really looking to be loved and

really wanted a leadership force in his life. So he could be persuaded, he could be influenced depending on who that person was. So he really thrived in the Marine Corps. He was in fact, he was named the honor Marine of his platoon. So out of seventy seventy Marines in his boot camp, he was the one that was picked that best exemplified the Marine attributes of integrity, leadership, honor. And he did well, I mean he did well in

a very structured environment. In fact, during the trial, to jump ahead a little bit, an officer came to testify as to his record and said that he would have stayed in the Marines. He could have really made a nice career out of it.

his drinking, so she kept him straight. But he at one point in time, was deployed to Okinawa, and in talking to some of his associates, while he was in Okinaw, he'd go out sometimes on weekends and he would exhibit some of his dev and behavior there. He would go meet bar girls, prostitutes in the red light district, take him back to a motel. He'd tie him up to a chair and then abuse him. Now, I don't there's no evidence that he would have killed a woman but

over there, but of course we really wouldn't know that. Now, the women didn't report him, probably for a couple of reasons. He was an officer in the Marine Corps. They would have gotten in trouble. So he seemed to have been able to get away with that quite a bit while he was over there. He eventually, though, he did re enlist. One time, he had an a accident in a car or something splashed into his eyes, and I think maybe he decided at that point in time to get out

of the Marines. The day that he left the Marines, his wife at the time divorced him.

He enjoyed binding women. He wanted to control women. That became kind of interesting from talking to women to escape from him, because it seems in a sense his mother was never there. Whenever he saw his mother, she was leaving, She had three jobs. Is it possible that he was binding women as a way to hold them there? It

seems realistic as far as hurting the women. Don't know what he did in Okanawa, but forensic psychiatrists say that generally a person's pattern is pretty consistent, So if he was sexually abusing women here and even killing women here as possibly he was doing it there.

to Cleveland in nineteen eighty five. He served eight years and really at loose ends, didn't really need to work because he he had places to stay.

were naked with electrical cords wrapped around them. Of course, very similar to what his his actions were later on. But anyhow, in nineteen eighty nine, when Anthony's soul got arrested and went to prison, those Strawberry murders ended. Now I know the authorities tried to look into that to try to tie him to those, but the East Cleveland Police Department records were shambles, were either not existed or destroyed. They didn't have the records, so then they were never

able to pin those murders on him. But some think that possibly that's how he occupied himself when he came home from the Marines. For that four year period. We know he was drinking heavily, so he was not productive when he came home, and makes sense he did not have the structure environment that he had with the Marines. So take an OCD person out of a structured environment, and they become very anxie. They don't know, they don't

know how to handle themselves. They almost become a victim of their own idleness, their own desires, whatever those might be. And in his case, they were evil. Of course.

think they were part of a pattern. And that's we saw that in Cleveland too. Nobody put together these eleven women in this locus, in this hub, disappearing at the same time. So I think the connection between those four women's deaths seemed to have occurred afterwards, after a period of time, and spurred by Anthony Soule's murders, and somebody finally said, well, wait a minute, these four cases all seem like those cases, and then they became collectively the

Strawberry murders. But I don't know that there was any real formal investigation into a suspected serial killer at the time. And if I may back up real quick, that was one of the confusing things about Anthony Soul's case. In a conventional serial killing, of course, you know there's a body a period of time, maybe we find another body in a different location a period of time. You know, when you think about you know, the that cliche trucker

serial killer, where there's bodies in different areas. Well, we didn't have that in Anthony's case. What we had was a situation where the victims, the crime scene, and the suspect we're all find found at the same time. So in a sense, it was more like a mass murder than a serial killing nobody really put together.

Nobody really took too much time to pinpoint it. They blamed it on the sausage factory which is next door to Anthony's house, and in fact, they forced them to put about twenty twenty five thousand dollars of work in sores and grease pits and traps to try to remedy that problem, and it never did. In fact, the sausage factor, the smell was so bad that the sausage factory kept their windows closed to keep the smell out. But the inspectors that came out, which is very perfunctory about it,

and Sam. Now the reason why it might have bothered Sam so much is. The theory is that Anthony Anthony will just jump ahead real quick. Here. He had no way to get rid of bodies. He didn't have a car, he had a small backyard. So the thinking is that he might have thrown a body into the Sam's dumpster or the sausage factory's dumpster, and that could have been

why the smell was so bad. If I can backtrack a little bit, So Anthony gets out of the Marines in nineteen eighty five, we think there's a possibility that he was committing some murders at that time. In nineteen eighty nine, he kidnapped a woman named Melvett Sockwell, and he took her back to the house in East Clevel where he was living. After he got out of the Marines, he went back to that house in East Cleveland, the

big house for his mom raised thirteen kids. He got Melved up to the third floor, stripped her, took her clothes off, duck taped her, raped her over a twenty four hour period, then told her he was going to kill her. He goes, she goes, I'm gonna kill you, but first I'm gonna take a nap. While he was sleeping, she somehow managed to wiggle her way out of the window and sit on the roof and get the attention of neighbors. It was early in the morning, who were

going to work, and she was rescued. She did the right thing. She went to the police. She put the time in to file the report and follow it through, and because she was persistent enough to get the police to investigate and believe her. He went away for fifteen years. Now he did do the whole fifthteen years. He could have done less time. He went away for a tempted rape. That's what he pleaded down to. He could have got out early if he would have taken sex offender classes.

But in Ohio at that time, you had to self identify as a sex offender in a prison to have access to the classes. Well, of course, you know, the lowest person that tot him poll is a sex offender. So for him to have identified himself as a sex offender would have not only put himself at risk, but him being a marine and knowing how to kill and hand hand combat, it might have created a situation where he might have had to kill somebody in prison to

protect himself. So he didn't, so he served the whole fifteen years. He came out of prison in two thousand and five, he moved into that house. His stepmother moved into a nursing home. So now Anthony's got a third, three story house to himself. He was living in an eight by eight cell up to that point. He's got crack dealers on the street. He's got a beverage store up the street that has a constant supply of women

walking back and forth. So he was in pretty good shape if he wanted to exercise his predatory desires in that neighborhood, which he did, but before he did, he met a woman named Laurie Frazier. He met her shortly after he got out of prison. Now, Laurie was the niece of Cleveland's mayor, Frank Jackson, very well African American mayor, very well respected in the community. And Anthony, an individual with very low self esteem that needed to be accepted,

didn't really have an identity of sorts. He would tell women that he met that he was a chef. Well, his cooking training came from prison, and he was a cook in prison. So now he met a woman he was very enthralled to be going out with the mayor's niece. She was a very she had, by her own admission, she had a raging drug addiction. It was very good for Anthony because now he had to go to work. He had to work a lot of hours to support

her drug addiction, which suited his obsessive compulsive disorder. He worked piece work at a rubber factory. I talked to the HR person. He was one of the most productive employees they had. He worked a lot over time. So Anthony his relationship with women, he was literally at their feet. I mean he would serve Lori Fraser breakfast in bed or at their throats if he felt they betrayed him. So a strong woman could have her way with him.

So that was a good thing for him. That kept him, you know, that kept him busy for a couple of years. Lorie Fraser left him in the spring of two thousand and seven. What happened is Anthony had a heart attack. He had shoveled some neighbor's driveway. He was always trying to be helpful. Again, he wanted to be liked, he wanted to be respected, so he'd help his neighbors. He was shovling a neighbor's driveway with snow. He had a

heart attack, had a pacemaker. Put In tried to go back to work but couldn't, so over that springtime he was of no use to her anymore. He couldn't work, he couldn't support her habit. She left, well, he was devastated. She left in April of two thousand and seven. In May of two thousand and seven, the first of his eleven victims went missing, Crystal Doser. So now his serial killing spree as we know it started shortly after Crystal

when missing in May. That's when the neighbors first discovered or first noticed the horrific smell in their neighborhood.

is track of course five ten dollars. You know, it's very affordable, as it was designed to be. He gets a reputation for giving away free drugs and being a cool guy to party with. Okay, so he did. Yes, he did get addicted to crack himself when Laurie left him not to be redundant, but again he had no structure, left his own devices. He he really didn't do well at all. So he didn't have to lure anybody, he

didn't have to track anybody. He didn't have to course girls to come to his house when they found out he was giving away free drugs. There's literally literally a line outside his door. In fact, he told me that

he had to disconnect his doorbell. There were so many women, women that wanted to get in the house to party, so he had, uh, you know, he had a supply of women coming over, and uh, we are fortunate that some women, through their instincts and their bravery, were able to escape from him and when he tried to kill them, and through their stories we find out how his mind works.

And generally what he would do is he'd have a woman come over and he would leave something of value on his desk, he you know, his watch or a couple of dollars. He'd leave the room. He'd want to come back, You'd want to see if that was still there, if it wasn't there. In his mind, he had been betrayed, let down, just like his mom had done to him, and now he gave him the license to trigger his rage. And he would go into a rant about how these we have kids at home, and why aren't you home

with your kids? Why are you out on the street partying, never mind the irony that he invited them to party, but anyhow, you should be with your kids. He'd go into this whole thing. He'd get in his crazy mode, his heating up mode, and then he would start strangling them. He was strong. They were under the influence of drugs. They weren't expecting it, you know. Unfortunately, in most cases he was successful. He didn't have any way of getting

getting rid of bodies. He just started. He stashed them in walls, in the basement, in the backyard, and then at some point in time, I mean, he had so many bodies he had to shut off the third floor and move down to the second floor. He never went to the first floor. When the police went to the first floor, when they finally got in the house, it was as spotless as there was when his stepmother left it. So he continued unabated for over two years. Over two

years he was killing women. Now he eventually after a certain period of time, you know, the women talked on the street, and he did get her reputation as being rough than a person that couldn't be trusted, and you know, maybe even dangerous. But it did not stop women from coming over to the house. In fact, one woman, Tany, a woman named Tany, he tried choked her and then he finally lost interest in her. Because if a woman didn't show fear, he lost interest. He let her go.

She left. She had marks in her next she told her friend Nancy Cobbs, look what that psycho did to me. Well, Nancy never indicated that she even knew to Anthony Souel. The next day, though, Nancy went to the house to party, and she was never seen again. So the lure of the drug, the craving for crack, dictated these women's actions. At one point in time, there was probably six dead bodies in that house and women were still going in the house to party. In fact, I was you know,

I asked the women. Didn't She ask him about the smell, and he would make up a story that he his mother, his stepmother was there and she was cooking, and she was a bad cook. But they really didn't care. They were there for the drugs. They knew what they were going into when they got in there, and some of them came out.

family's home, so they weren't strangers. And then at night they went in he suck watching football game, I believe, and he showed her something he had bought Laurie again, say he was off and on with Laurie, but something innocent, and he flipped out and said things like I could I could kill any crackhead bitch and uh and no one would give a give a damn basically, you know. And then yet the next day like he acted like nothing had happened.

they were all proxies for his mother. He hated his mother, Tanya. The women I talked to, they're very interesting though. To be able to survive on the street neighborhood at the mercy of pimps and drug dealers and the felons that they associate with, they had to be smart. They had to be very instinctive. And you know, when you talk to these women, I was very impressed by them. They know they don't have that platform of education. They don't have that, you know, that core of upbringing maybe that

other people have. But their street smarts were incredible, and the smart ones intuited that this guy was nuts. The ones who survived, don't give in, don't show fear. He'll let you go, and he did. And Tanya was one of those people. So she got away.

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go back to being normal, and nobody knew. I mean at some point, I mean, I mean, this is a very important part of this book. I think too. The community was very angry after these serial killings, and they criticized the police, mostly in the city, for not doing something about it. But realistically, you know, and they said, the suburbs, if this would have if eleven women went missing in a suburb, affluent suburb, the police would have

been on it. Well, of course they would have, But in that neighborhood, nobody was relating to the police what was going on. There were women running from his house screaming, there were naked women falling out of windows. The word on the street was he was a killer. No, they were telling each other, They weren't telling the police. Without that front line of defense of the community's eyes and ears,

the police just didn't have much to go on. And that was a huge missing link in this in this story that the community because they were afraid of being a snitch. And honestly, he was giving drugs away people. I don't know whether people were bird dogging women for him. That probably wasn't necessary, but he was giving drugs away to some of the neighbors around him, so they certainly

didn't want to see that supply drugs go. So that was a very important component in this case that the a the neighborhood wasn't telling the police what was going on. And then secondly, when some of the family members did try to go report their loved ones missing, the police were reluctant to take those missing reperson reports. Technically, an adult can't go missing. We can disappear anytime we want.

So in a cash strapped city with somewhat jaded police department, they're going to allocate their resources towards looking for missing children, not looking for missing adults who have a history of disappearing on the streets for a couple of weeks at a time. And that was an another factor in how this crime speed went on for so long.

caring mother, and got hooked up on crack. Got hooked on crack. So she's partying with Anthony. Everything's going well, and all of a sudden he gets crazy. He wraps the cord around her, and he prolongs it. He prolongs the agony. He keeps choking her until the brink of unconsciousness. Releasing the cord doing it again. So he really tortured the poor woman. So at one point in time she was blacking out and she just felt this is it. Her last thoughts before she Presumablelio was dying, was of

herth children. She thought of her children. A couple hours later, she wakes up. I mean, she's surprised that she's alive. She looks up and he's sitting in a chair next to her, smoking a cigarette. He was surprised she was alive. Now she wasn't afraid because she sensed that he wasn't angry anymore. He'd already got off, he already got his gratification.

So he took her down to the basement, gave her a shirt to wear home, asked her if she's going to come back, and you know, of course, she's, yeah, sure I'll come back. But what she did, she did the right thing. She contacted the police. She was a crack addict. The last thing she wanted to do was go down to the police headquarters, sit there for five hours amongst police to make a report. She probably had warrants. She didn't want to do that, but it took a month,

but she did that. She did the right thing, and because of her that crime speed was eventually stopped. The city for some reason, took a month to get a search warrant. In that period of time, Anthony was still operating, he got a woman named Sean Morris up to his house. They partied. She was naked, real street smart, like Litundra. It was a hot day. She was recognized. She here's some shutting windows and locking windows in the house. She thought,

this can't be good. She kicks out the screen. She's gonna jump out the second floor window. He runs in, he sees or He tries to pull her in. He can't. He starts banging on her fingers to break her fingers, wanting her to drop hard because there is concrete between his house and the sausage factory. She falls, She fractures her skull, breaks some ribs. She's laying their naked. She's a bigger woman. He runs downstairs. She tries to half carry, half drag her back into the house. A guy who

owns some rental property in the neighborhood's driving by. He sees people gathered in that little alleyway with her cellphones taking pictures, so he stops, Well, what everybody was taking pictures of was this naked wounded woman being dragged by a naked man into a house? So he calls nine. He yields the kids to get out of there. He calls nine one one. She goes to the hospital. She's in a calma for a week. She wakes up. She goes, I gotta call my husband. She was married. The nurse says,

your husband wrote in the ambulance with you. Well, that was Anthony's soul.

There's towels under the door, clearly to keep smelling or out. Push the door open. There's two bodies. They seal off the premises to preserve the evidence called homicide in the meantime, the neighbor, Debbie Madison, hears right away that there's two dead bodies in the house. Well, she liked Anthony, he had fixed her sing first several times. Well, she assumed that one of the bodies was his. So she gets in the car and she drives to Tressa Garrison's house

to give her the bad news. For years about it on the news, that your brother's dead. Well, she knocks on the door and there's Anthony sitting on the couch playing video games. She's thinking, there's two dead bodies in your house. You're here playing video games. Something's not right. So Trissa had talks. She doesn't voice this, but Tressa talks her into driving Anthony back to the house because Anthony is going to clear this up, as he says.

So we get to the house and Anthony, of course jumps out of the car and we don't see him again. It took two days to capture him. Halloween Day and nine police picked him up, and even then he almost talked his way out of being arrested. He said he was somebody else, but when confronted with a little bit of evidence, he said, this is as close as he came to confessing, he said, yeah, I'm the guy you're looking for, and he never really said anything more incriminating

than that. He did apologize at one time during the trial, but he never said what he was apologizing for. So that's finally I think because of La Tundra we the crime spree was stopped.

them to previous crimes or even future crimes. So it took a while. Even though we had DNA, it took several months to get to get everybody id'd. They all shared the same common characteristics, black females with criminal histories drug abuse, who had a tendency to disappear for weeks at a time. So I don't know that he necessarily picked that profile to prey on, but that's who he matched up with. And because eleven bodies were found at one time, we'll actually ten bodies and one victim skull.

They never found the Torso yeah, there was quite a bit of anger, resemblement, frustration voiced towards the city and the police department. And that did nothing, of course to close that trust gap that it existed for decades. But looking back on it again, where we didn't have a community that was really forthcoming with information, now you.

They found shallow graves with bodies there. Clearly he had taken pains to cover up his work, which when he tried to defense of sanity, that knocked it right out of the ballpark, of course, because you could he was obviously in his right mind if he was trying to cover up his work. They did a painstaking grid search.

It looked like an archaeological site in the backyard. And this is a very big case in Cleveland and actually nationally too, so there was quite a bit of There was helicopters, there were reporters camped out in neighbors houses on the roofs, shooting, shooting photographs, video down at the scene. So it was a big case, and ultimately they brought in infrared heats detectors to search in the walls, the wall cavities to see if there were other bodies, and

they're pretty sure they got all of them. So of the eleven victims, moving forward a little bit here, If you want me to back up, I will. But ten of the families request I said that the prosecutor did not take not seek the death penalty. They didn't want to go to trial, they didn't want to relive this. They wanted him to accept a plea bargain of life without parole. But big case, high profile, ended up spending a million dollars taking him to trial to get a conviction.

anybody's fault but his own. And then when they finally pin him down and put him in a position where he has to admit that he was there, he creates his alter ego, this fake persona called Arnie. Ronie talked to him. Arnie made him do this. So even then, like any narcissist, I guess, he couldn't take accountability, He

couldn't turn a spotlight on himself. So also interesting from those tapes because it went on for so long, the teams of detectives were taking turns, and you can see the different the different how the different approaches worked on him, you know, the bullying, making friends with him, which really seemed to work best, because this is a guy that wanted to be loved. Never very cagey. I think he almost enjoyed. He thought he was leading him on a cat and mouse chase. I think never really came out

and said he did it. But if he did it, they deserved it. Interestingly, there really was no direct evidence that Anthony Soul did this crime. It was all circumstantial. That was a little bit of a challenge for the prosecutor to prove that only he had keys to the house and only he had access to the house, because one of their defenses was, how do you know Anthony did it? Maybe someone just dragged these bodies over and buried him in his yard.

gist of what they had to say. For the prosecution.

voices at this time? Were you hallucinating? Maybe you were hallucinating this all happened, well, of course the woman would

get mad. Sean Morris got very angry, uttered of vulgarity, wanted to leave the stand because the women knew where they were going with this line of questioning, this, this counter they were because every one of the women had applied for Social Security disability ink of it one time, and they all their grounds forgetting what was all that there were either schizophrenic or bipolar, manic, depressive rather because you can't really it's very hard to prove that somebody

doesn't have those conditions. So and some of the symptoms, of course, are auditory and visual hallucinations. So the defense attorney was just using their own words against them, and I don't think he thought that was going to hold up, but it was just a way of he had to do something right. So the trial, those are some of the more dramatic moments. Now, Vanessa Gay, very well spoken, very attractive, a very very compelling witness, partied with Anthony a long period of time. He raped her at some

point in time. He liked her. I think he personally liked her though, from what I can tell. He let her go to the bathroom. She's walking down the bathroom on the second floor of his house and she looks into an empty room and she's his a headless body. We think that was the body that belong to the skull in the basement. But anyhow, she somehow manages to maintain her cool not to panic. He loses interest in killing her instead decides he wants her as a girlfriend,

so he lets her go. Now, you know, her story gets a little complicated here. She said she contacted the police, and maybe she did. They don't have a record of it. She says she got the around so she didn't follow up on it. That's possible too. But after she didn't go to the police, another six women died. But in any event, she finally came forward.

I apologize. I go ahead, no, so go ahead. That was probably the testimony that really sealed it for the jury because she was so so able to articulate the terror that she felt and the victimization that she felt. And she was a lady who had a job, she had an education, and she just succumbed to crack and she was living on the streets. I mean, she abandoned her children to live on the streets in the same clothes, with no toilet facility and no definite place to sleep

every night, at the prey of miscreants. I mean, that really brought her story, really brought it home to me, the just the utter addictive quality of crack cocaine. I mean, what mother would leave her kids, you know, to live on the streets.

go through what she went through. And it's possible that she was so trying commatized by this experience that she just didn't want to recount it for the police. Maybe she thought it was a one off, Maybe she didn't know that he was praying on other people. But in any event, she says she called the police. The police say she did, The media said she did. I don't know that that one's up for discussion. She knows.

never forwarded it to the crime lab. It sat in somebody's desk drawer for two years.

we grooped up, we didn't transfer it the police. This is maybe the part of the story that I personally maybe felt a little passionate about, was the police chief of that community went into deny mode and said, well, you know, we will forward all evidence from a sex crime. Well, clearly on the folder it was marked sex crime. So he didn't do that, tried to blame it on the crime lab. The crime lab director said, nope, we didn't

get it. He didn't. He did the right thing to, you know, to not to be monotonous here, but he did the right thing. He just denied what the police chief said. So, I mean, this probably, like a lot of crimes like this, there's a confluence of factors of errors, of missed opportunities that come together to allow something like this to happen. And in Anthony's case, there were a

lot of those factors. When he got out of prison in two thousand and five in Ohio, he had to take he had to be interviewed to determine if he was a sexual predator, to be classified. If he was, there was some very strict requirements he had to abide by. Well, the interview was just him talking to a psychologist. There was no background check, there was no confirmation of anything Anthony told him. Well, he lied his way through that

whole interview. Consequently, he was putting the lowest sexual offender tear. He only had to report self report once a year, and he didn't have to notify his neighbors that he was a violent sex offender. So there was a lot of just a lot of errors, a lot of little red possibilities that led to the conditions that were conducive for him to perpetuate his crime.

Maybe he was a budgetary thing. If he says he's not looking at porn, if he's not using computers for sexual purposes, if he's not drinking and going to strip clubs, maybe they don't have the money to send an investigator determine if that's true. But all those things were true, and if he would have admitted it, or if they would have discovered it, it would have kicked him into a higher classification, a higher tier of sex offender.

interview with Anthony Soul. How you came to be able to interview him, and what tell us about that.

it in the story in future stories. And some of that boiler play material was the fact that he had gotten he had gotten two commendations in the Marine Corps. So he said, you know, everybody's got you know, got my story screwed up. I want to get straightened out. When he finally talked to me, I goes, sure, what do you want to straighten out? He goes, I got three commendations, not two commendations. That's what he That was his big concern at that time. Now, as we talked,

he was very engaging, very amiable. Had to talk for he guarded. Had to talk for a while, you know, to to really get any for him to drop any clues or any indicators of who he really was. But what I got out of it was he had a very difficult relationship with his mother. He had very difficult relationship with women in general. He was no threat to men. He seemed to get along with men for the most part. He just had a love hate affair with women that

was very extreme. He showed no remorse. Even when I said, well, let's say you didn't do it. How do you feel about these women that died? He audibly shrug. I think the fact that they weren't at home with their kids and they were doing drugs made them undesirable in his mind. And then in the end, when he realized that, you know, I was kind of a broken record. I just wanted him to own up to something. He you know, the things started dying down for me. He was he's trying

to scam. He's a hustler, he's a narcissist. He gets pleasure out of manipulating people. That wasn't working with me. I couldn't possibly put money on his account. I looked like a group being, you know, insensitive. So finally, when it came down to what I thought would be our last conversation, I said it, you know, Anthony, if you did this, why what would you tell readers about why you did it? And he said, very quickly, abused children grow up. I tend to think he was being you know,

somewhat genuine there. I think he maybe he wasn't applying that to his case, but he believes that to be true.

which he called fan mail from them. And he was also upset because he said they took away his supplies, and that wasn't quite sure what he meant by supplies, and these conversations they tend to be rushed, so you know, I didn't want to get I had to keep moving. But what I found out was he meant his art supplies.

There's sites on the internet murder Abelia sites that will sell our work from notorious criminals and memorabilia from them too, And he was doing drawings and artwork and shipping it out and they were selling it for him on websites. So that's he was upset about that that he couldn't continue that enterprise.

and put on his account. And you know, everything's recorded in prison, the calls and transactions, so of course I couldn't do that. And that was well, that was not the last call conversation. Actually had a couple more after that. The calls started getting very interesting. I don't know how much time we have, but I aired in judgment once and told one of his defense attorneys that I talked to Anthony and he just stared at me, and I thought, oh,

that wasn't good. Sure enough, ten minutes later, Anthony got a call from his new appeals attorneys telling him not to talk to me. Well, Anthony turned around and called me and he said he was laughing. He said, you know attorneys, attorneys who's laughing? He said, what's up with them? And they told him, don't talk to this writer. We got an appeal going. And then they said, however, we do have a writer on the staff that we'd like to talk to you when it's time to write a book.

So he found that humorous. I had another story, Cameron, what it was, but one.

daughter around. He was in a wheelchair, he had a stroke and he gave a victim impact statement to the court and he looked at Anthony he said, you know you killed me when you killed my daughter. You killed me. Very compelling, And two weeks later Donald Smith died of a heart attack. And that way, he wasn't the only family member to die shortly. Tanya Carmichael, her sister, died two weeks later. Mom says, of a broken heart.

I mean, not a bad looking guy. He couldn't you know, met a woman and had a conventional relationship. But she met him. He seemed nice. For a while, the family was happy because it seemed like she wasn't on drugs. But in the end, I mean, she just became one of his victims. She had again, another woman who had a horrible life and then a horrible death. Go ahead, I'm sorry.

contact with her at a certain point. These women, when they would go to get rehabilitation treatment, they'd go for twenty eight days, get cleaned up, they'd leave, they'd go right back to the same neighborhood. In a lot of cases, Sean Morris, I go to interview Sean Morris. We're sitting in her garage with me, her and her husband, Doug, big guy, a nice guy. Big I'm not.

she said, but yeah, she was prosting herself. And I kept looking at the husband, thinking, Wow, maybe I'm going a little too far here. But then I realized that's who put her out there. That's who sent her out on the street, because that's the only thing left to barter her to get the drugs that he wanted too. So in a lot of cases, these women, the men in their life let them down.

You know, she goes, all these women are lying. She said, even that, even at woman Malvett that trailed out the window, she was just there to steal his drugs. She opened up the door. Now for the prosecutor to ask about that situation. Now, they didn't bulldozer on it. They played it very smart. They said, oh, drugs, yeah, he was selling marijuana right, well they knew it was crack probably,

And she goes, no, it was crack. Well, now now you have the fact that he's involved with crack, the fact that he really did bind and a woman in the past, that he was a sexual offender. I mean, it all came out and literally I glanced at the defense one of the defense attorneys, he threw his pencil up in the air. I mean it was over. There was one other situation. One of the things she said that unintentionally really hurt him. She was trying to help him.

She was trying to she came up in the mitigation phase to show that he was a good brother. She was trying to lend some form of worth and humanity to him. And they said, give us an example. She said that when she was, you know, junior high or high school, a girl was getting smart with her. Anthony walked right up to her, stuck up for her sister, and he punched that girl in the face. Well, Tresa then looked at Anthony and said, I love my brother,

and a plain dealer. Photographer caught a little tear coming down from Anthony's eye at that point, the only emotion he really showed. But now we have her saying Anthony exhibited violence towards towards women at a young age. So she didn't help at all. But as many times as I talked to her, I really enjoyed talking to her. She is very entertaining and very bright. Right lady. I think she had eight nine kids of her own. They

those kids in that house. One of the reasons I think they were having the girls were trying to have kids is they wanted to get out of that house. They wanted to get away from that madhouse, and there weren't There are only a couple of ways to get out, either run away, and they were just going to be brought back or get pregnant, hopefully go live with somebody. So I think that was her approach.

he answers letters. He still gets letters, still gets letters from women. Says they either want to marry him or save him.