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  Families of the missing seek answers amid carnage in Cleveland |
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Lack of concern by authorities prompts anger from family members of those who have gone missingOver the road from 2205 Imperial Avenue, the unassuming white clapperboard house of Anthony Sowell in which 11 bodies in various stages of decomposition have been found this week, there is a wooden board bearing the names and pictures of 15 people.
It is lined with Teddy bears and soft toys and candles, placed there by neighbours and well-wishers.
The offerings provide a small antidote to the stomach-churning pervasive stench of rotting flesh that wafts across the road with every gust of wind.The people named on the board are all missing, and their details have been put up in the hope it might lead to resolution.
Three of them are men, a couple are white and others are children, which reduces their relevance to the location as the recovered bodies have all been of black adult women.Then there's Michelle Mason.
The flier for her has a picture of her smiling and dancing.
She looks thin but vivaciously happy.
Mason was last seen on 8 October, aged 46, outside the boarding house where she lived just a couple of blocks away from Sowell's home.
That day she left her room wearing jeans and a fur-lined tan jumper to go to the local shops.
Her bed was ruffled as though she were coming back to make it, but she never did.Her family reported her missing three days later and began a frantic search of their own.
They organised search parties of friends to scour the many boarded up and vacant houses in the neighbourhood.
They looked in the woods and held rallies to publicise Michelle's plight.
They stuck fliers all over the neighbourhood, and even carried out their own background checks on her final mobile phone calls."We called the police chief, the homicide team, the commander of the district, the mayor's office, the FBI, the department of justice, any place we could think of," says Mary Mason, Michelle's sister.
"But they just weren't interested.
'Ma'am we are doing our best.
Ma'am calm down.' They would make me feel bad, as though I was asking the unreasonable."The Mason family believes that the apparent insouciance of the Cleveland authorities to Michelle's disappearance was due to assumptions that were being made about the kind of woman she was.
Michelle had a record of crack cocaine addiction for which she had been in jail.
Yet she had been through Narcotics Anonymous and had been clean for more than 10 years.Mary Mason was livid when she heard the local police chief Michael McGrath say this week that detectives would have to look into the "backgrounds" of Sowell's victims."That's the easy way out.
They say there are so many Michelles in this city, with their 'lifestyles', and that way they don't have to write reports or investigate cases."Over the months she says her tears for her missing sister have dried up and given way to anger, prompted by what she sees as the authorities' lack of urgency.
Meanwhile she has watched the cases of missing white adults from salubrious areas of the city receive priority billing.
"If my sister had been a white girl and had a little money, this would never have happened this way."The Mason family are not the only ones to think that.
There is an evident and growing sense of anger in this poor, largely black area of Cleveland.
How could it be that the smell of death that even now hangs over the Sowell house was not properly investigated for years? There is a sausage factory next door, which was blamed as the source, but after hygiene checks were carried out the stench continued unabated.How can it be that Sowell, a registered sex offender who served 15 years in jail until his release in 2005 for attempted rape, was monitored by police and probation officers who never detected anything wrong? Even the manner in which Sowell was caught appears bafflingly random.
On 22 September a woman escaped from Sowell's home.
She said she had been invited back by him for drinks.
She said he then became angry, punching and choking her with an extension cord then raped her.
She managed to flee after she promised to fetch him $50 and return.
Yet when she told the police, it took a further 37 days for them to arrest Sowell.Above all, how can it now have emerged that District 4, the police zone that covers 2205 Imperial Avenue, had 14 missing persons reports filed within it and yet nobody joined the dots and perceived a problem.
"We never knew that so many people were missing, we never knew," says Mary Mason.
"We always thought we were on our own."That is a question that is now exercising Judy Martin, an anti-violence campaigner.
Her son was murdered in 1994 and since then she has worked voluntarily with other bereaved families, including those of missing people.
It was her who put up the plywood board with Michelle Mason's name on it over the road from Sowell's house.On Monday she also arranged for a candlelit vigil on the street corner.
Many families fearful that their loved ones might be among Sowell's victims turned up, including the Masons.
Relatives of Nancy Cobbs, who went missing this April a few blocks away, were also there, as were the family of Gloria Walker who disappeared in April 2007.In each of these cases, Martin has worked with the families to keep their hopes alive that one day they will find their loved ones.
She advises them how to engage the police and how to drum up media interest.
But in each case she says they have been met by a wall of indifference.Martin says that when all these families convened together on one street corner on Monday night the nature of the crisis suddenly became visible.
"Do we have to wait until we find 11 bodies in one spot before anything is done about this?" she says.In her view the problem is partly institutional.
There is no centralised missing person's unit in Cleveland, and so cases fall between the cracks of police districts, departments and institutions.
But it is also a product of attitudes, of which the fact that all Sowell's victims were poor, female and African-American tells its own story."Race has a lot to do with it.
People have the perception about this area - they assume it's a bad area, that the women here were bad.
But its not and they weren't.
This is a working-class area with lots of wonderful families who love each other and who are hurting."The case that most shocked Martin was that of Gloria Walker.
After she disappeared on 20 May 2007, Martin worked with the family to arrange searches and rallies.
She met with the usual reaction - a sluggish police response and an only mildly interested local media.
Three weeks later a pregnant white woman called Jessie Davis went missing.
The response was instant and massive: national TV coverage, huge police sweep, help pouring in from all over the US.
Davis's body was found nine days after she went missing.
Gloria Walker is still missing."She was a good person," says Sandy Drain, Gloria Walker's aunt.
"She provided for her children, kept a roof over their head, kept them clothed and fed." But Gloria Walker was also an alcoholic, well known to police."We had no help whatsoever.
The feeling I got was, 'She's a black woman and a drunk - oh well, we don't have to bother with that one.' That's what I felt the attitude was."Police chief McGrath was asked this week about the extraordinary confluence of cases in a relatively small area around Sowell's house that were never linked together.
He said that officers "did not see a pattern.
If they did, they would have followed up on it."Sandy Drain has come to terms with the fact that Gloria is dead and now talks about her in the past tense.Mary Mason cannot be so clear-headed about her sister Michelle.
She has donated a DNA sample and now sits waiting for a call from the coroner's office.
"It's twisted, conflicted.
I'm feeling every emotion - up, down, sideways.
Any moment I expect my sister to walk into the room.
Every time I drive past a small woman I slow down.
I think we are going to see her again."
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