As a registered sex offender, Anthony Sowell checked in regularly with law-enforcement authorities, who also monitored him by making home visits. But since Sowell wasn’t on parole or probation, they didn’t have the right to enter — until Thursday when they had search and arrest warrants after a woman said he had raped her there. That is when they discovered badly decomposed bodies in the house.

By Sunday, authorities had determined there were six bodies, all of them women, and each was the victim of a homicide.

Officers had last visited Sowell at home as part of his sex-offender monitoring on September 22, just hours before the woman reported being raped there.

The three-storey house with neat white siding is in a crowded inner-city neighbourhood of mostly older houses and small corner stores. The windows on the third floor, where the first two bodies were found, were wide open on Sunday. Some neighbours said a bad smell came from the house several months ago, but they thought then that it might be natural gas.

At least five of the women apparently had been strangled, said Powell Caesar, a spokesman for the Cuyahoga County coroner. Decomposition made it difficult to determine how the sixth died, he said.

The bodies “could have been there anywhere from weeks to months to years”, Caesar said. None of the victims has been identified. Two were Black, but the race of the others hadn’t been determined, Caesar said.

Sowell, 50, previously spent 15 years in prison for choking and raping a 21-year-old woman who was lured to his bedroom in 1989, police said. He was arrested on Saturday.

... contd.