Cleveland Murders Raise Questions Around the WorldOver the past few weeks, Cleveland police have dug up 11 African-American women's bodies at the home of a convicted sexual predator named Anthony Sowell. Thousands of miles away, during a visit to Hong Kong, young Chinese women asked me the same question over and over: How could these women be missing for so long and nobody knew? How could a woman's family tolerate even one day without knowing where she was? How could this happen? Women ask such questions around the world. All of these young women are graduate students at Hong Kong's Baptist University, where I was a visiting lecturer. For one miraculous year, they are allowed to leave mainland China to study the principles of a free press. Two months into their stay, they were reeling from sensory overload — so many Web sites, so much unfettered access to international news — when the gruesome details of the Cleveland murders started creeping across TV and computer screens and into our daily conversations. These women are the generation of China's one-child policy; all of them are only children. They are their parents' greatest hope, and they cannot imagine a woman — particularly an American woman — being anything else to her own family. We can lay claim to no such naiveté. In America, we know better. On Friday, I drove to Sowell's house, which now wears the obligatory stripe of yellow police tape. Institutional signs along the way read like empty promises: Second Hope Baptist Church and More Light Missionary Baptist Church, Jesse Owens Academy and Alexander Graham Bell School. A handful of residents, all black, hovered near the inevitable makeshift shrine of stuffed animals and handwritten notes. Small golden frames displayed blurry Internet images of nine of the 11 victims. We call these the Anthony Sowell murders because all the bodies of the women most of us can't name were found at his home. The gruesome details of their deaths have made him famous around the world. Let us name them, please: Leshanda Long, 25; Tonia Carmichael, 52; Nancy Cobbs, 45; Tishana Culver, 31; Crystal Dozier, 38; Telacia Fortson, 31; Amelda Hunter, 47; Michelle Mason, 45; Kim Yvette Smith, 44; and Janice Webb, 49. Police say the murderer trolled for women who looked like him because they were more likely to trust him. In different ways, they were broken already. All of the identified women had criminal records, were estranged from their families and apparently were lured easily with promises of shelter and intoxication. They had no cell phones with GPS, no Internet search history that parents could scour for clues.
Of all the horrific details I have read, the most chilling came in Plain Dealer reporter Tony Brown's interview with an expert on sadistic serial killers. Such murderers prefer strangulation for a reason, we are told. "They like putting hands on the victim," criminologist Stephen Holmes told Brown. "Rope or cords are often used to kill, but also to control, so they can force the victim to have eye contact." We want to blame one thing, one institution, one giant mistake for these horrific deaths. Then we have a cause, a potential fix. It's human nature to want to calm ourselves, to ease back into our lives a little more ruffled, perhaps, but reassured that these things just happen sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. Straighten the collar and order a drink, and maybe we can forget that there is an entire population of women we treat as discardable as crumpled Dixie cups. There are many unanswered questions right now, but one of them is not how so many people could have ignored the smell of rotting human flesh in a house next to a sausage factory. In all my years of reporting, including numerous encounters with the dead, I never have smelled a decomposing human, nor have dozens of other reporters or police officers I've talked to in recent days. Murders are fresh; the embalmed are preserved. A rotting body smells for days, maybe weeks, but not months. There are, however, many other questions that further investigation will answer. But here's the question that haunts: Why do we continue to allow sexual predators to terrorize women? There always will be some men who hate women. Not most men, but too many. They do their damage. They beat women they're supposed to love, abuse women they're supposed to supervise and raise daughters who end up hating themselves so much they marry someone just like Dad. For all our activism, all our vows to Take Back The Night and End Domestic Violence Now, we are still the weaker sex, and too many of our sisters pay the price. It takes less dope to drug us, less booze to intoxicate us, less physical force to overcome us. And it takes our silence to keep it so. Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House, "Life Happens" and "... and His Lovely Wife." She is a featured contributor in a recently released book by Bloomsbury, "The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's 'A More Perfect Union.'" To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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