Gladys Wade is the one who survived.
This month, it will be a decade since Anthony Sowell was arrested for raping and strangling 11 women in Cleveland. He committed six of those murders after police botched an investigation into Gladys Wade’s 2008 allegation that Sowell had attacked her.
The detective in that case failed to tell prosecutors that Sowell was a convicted rapist. She later admitted that she had failed even to review evidence gathered by patrol officers.
Sowell walked out of jail two days after his arrest. Just under a year later, police searched his home on Imperial Avenue and found ten bodies and one human skull. Had Wade’s case been seriously investigated, many of those women presumably would be alive today.
Even before the Sowell murders, The Plain Dealer had reported for decades on persistent problems within the city’s sex crimes unit, mostly concerning inadequate staffing. Afterward, The Plain Dealer discovered that detectives had failed to send thousands of rape kits in for DNA testing, leaving hundreds of serial rapists free to attack again.
This is a story of Gladys Wade and how Cleveland Police botched up her case back in 2008. This is sad that women, especially Black women, have their rape case dismissed as unfounded, their reputations attacked by the very same law enforcement people who were sworn to protect.
Gladys Wade, like all of the other victims, is a recovering drug addict. She testified today that Sowell attacked her at his home in December 2008. She said Sowell punched her in the face and choked her.
According to court documents, Gladys Wade had never seen Anthony Sowell before he wished her a Merry Christmas and asked her to share a beer nearly 10 years ago. She said no thank you. He wouldn't let her pass.
When she tried to push by him, he punched her in the face and dragged her toward the back of his house. He choked her and she blacked out. She awoke on the third floor.
"B****, take off your clothes," he demanded. Wade clawed at his eyes. She kicked and screamed. At some point, she reached between his legs, grabbed and twisted. She careered down some steps, smashing her hand through glass in a door.
Shivering in a thermal shirt and jeans and bleeding from a gash in her thumb, Wade flagged down a police cruiser.
Officers called EMS - she would need stitches - and noted the red marks on her throat. They arrested Sowell and took shots of the blood on the walls and stairs of his house, and of Wade's black and white sweater, shoved into a trash can.
Detective Georgia Hussein caught the case but never talked to the arresting officers in an investigation which a defense expert said was best described "as shoddy, incomplete, and biased."
When asked at that same deposition if police brass ever questioned her work in the Wade investigation, Hussein said that then police chief Michael McGrath assured her that "he felt I had done my job," she said . . . "Basically commending me, saying the mayor's office felt I did my job."
Under Ohio law, cities and their employees are not responsible for harm they cause because of negligence. However, they are liable if their employees were reckless, defined as "a perverse disregard of a known risk."
Based on a review of the evidence, a three-judge panel in the Eighth District Court of Appeals found that "reasonable minds" could conclude that "Det. Hussein acted in a reckless manner."
Now it's up to a jury to decide. Also under Ohio law, the city has to cover any damages Hussein is assessed.
Hussein retired in 2010. And Moore? She and the other women have hung together through years of motions and setbacks and settlement conferences that go nowhere.
She can't help but feel the city is trying to wear them down. Tire them out. But they won't give up.
For that they deserve our thanks.
A big verdict against the city might motivate change, says Wade's lawyer Blake Dickson.
If city officials are having such a hard time admitting the Wade investigation was so deficient that it could hardly be called an investigation at all, how can any of us expect current and future rape cases to be handled any better?
The city owes us something too - a place to feel safe.
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