Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Broad daylight in East Cleveland. An ordinary day until one
moment something out of the ordinary.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
What happens on October twentieth, two thousand and nine is
about to change everything. This nine one one dispatcher gets
a call. The man the caller is frantic.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
She fell out the window up there, took a book.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Okay, he's just watched this woman come flying out of
the second story window and he's he's saying, she's on
the ground here.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
They're saying, is she alive? Is she breathing?
Speaker 5 (00:42):
Right now?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I'm right here, right now.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
She just came flying out of this window.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
He doesn't know if she was thrown, if she jumped,
if she fell.
Speaker 4 (00:52):
He just knows there's something wrong here.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
There's a man inside the house, his name Anthony so Well,
you know.
Speaker 6 (01:00):
He told the police or we were just using drugs
together and she accidentally fell out of the window.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Soell has already enticed eleven women to use drugs inside
twelve two oh five Imperial eleven.
Speaker 7 (01:11):
He selected his victims from a group of people in
a community that would be hesitant to step forward and
be witnesses of life.
Speaker 8 (01:22):
Costomol COVID detectives gather evidence until a picture of a
suspect emerges, Which piece of the puzzle will reveal Anthony
Soell as guilty of murder?
Speaker 1 (01:35):
What would be the killer's mistake?
Speaker 9 (02:11):
Nobody should die that way.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
I've never seen anything that herm of the duties of
a pathologist is to determine the cause of death.
Speaker 10 (02:18):
Watch on mobile devices or the big screen, all for free,
no subscription required.
Speaker 11 (02:24):
Download Bee Lee now.
Speaker 10 (02:28):
Like and subscribe.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
There is a gap between buildings in East Cleveland where
once stood number twelve two oh five Imperial Avenue. As
long as Anthony Soel could hide what is inside twelve
to two oh five, he would remain a free man,
because inside he's hiding grim secrets in one room, the
(03:01):
decomposing bodies of two women in another, a further three,
and outside in his yard yet more, What is known
about the man who had frightened a woman so much
that she threw herself from the second story of twelve
two five Imperial rather than stay a second longer. A
(03:22):
man who would spend hours being interrogated by police, and
who seemed at ease throughout as he proudly discussed his
four grandchildren.
Speaker 12 (03:31):
Yeah four yet four, Grandpa, Yeah, you love.
Speaker 13 (03:41):
That now, it's okay now, But that's everybody, Parker. That's
the love for him.
Speaker 12 (03:51):
He'd probably grilled.
Speaker 9 (03:54):
You'll be grinning when they be coming up to taking.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Anthony. Soel seemed happy and believes company happy in the
company of everyone.
Speaker 7 (04:04):
Many times when somebody is arrested, you hear their neighbors
say they were so quiet. I never knew there was
anything wrong. I didn't think that they were capable of
such a crime. I can't believe that that is my
neighbor that did that. And that's what makes them so
effective is that they can blend in.
Speaker 6 (04:24):
He really had this kind of outward appearance to the
neighborhood where he would hold barbecues and chat with people, and.
Speaker 11 (04:30):
They didn't really suspect him of doing anything like this.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
He could snap, people had seen him lose his temper.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
So it's kind of these two personalities that people would
describe seeing. You know, he had at least one or
two girlfriends at the time that we were able to
hear from afterwards, who talked about, you know, the long
conversations they would have and how you know, kind and
introspective he could be, but then he could also be
very violent if someone disagreed with him or didn't you know,
(05:01):
didn't say the right things.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
But a killer, not Tony Sowell, the party guy.
Speaker 7 (05:06):
There is no sign, no neon sign on anybody that
says I'm a serial killer. I kill for a living.
There is no sign at the intersection that you often
see people hold I will work for food. They're not
holding signs. Let's say I will kill for pleasure.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Anthony so L's killing story begins to be uncovered with
a nine to one one call. She looked about forty
All right, she has.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
She turned it up though. I she is away right, still,
very incredible. Now my t shirts will all issue awake.
She's kind of w gord here they're not reading. Yeah,
which window does she fall out of?
Speaker 6 (05:49):
Person?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
It's like, oh no, sec spear Well, all.
Speaker 11 (05:55):
Right, here we go and it happens just now correct.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
The call had been made in a neighborhood of East Cleveland,
where violence was not uncommon. In fact, a year ago,
another woman had fled from twelve too oh.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Five December two thousand and eight, a woman in the
neighborhood named Gladys Wade frantically flags down a police car.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
She tells the officers that she was attacked.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
She's got scratches on her neck, she's got a deep
gash in her right thumb, and she says, what happened
is Anthony's soul asked her if she wanted to go
and drink beers with him, and when she said no,
he punched her in the face, knocked her out, and
dragged her into his house, where he proceeded to choke
her and tried to rip off her clothes.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
She said he had just this evil look in his face.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
She said it was like the eyes of the devil
were glowing. And she said she fought back and tried
to scratch his eyeballs out.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Police visit the owner of twelve to two oh five Imperial,
where the attack had taken place, and hear a different
story from Anthony. Soell Gladys had hit him, he said.
The officers decide this is a domestic They don't want
to get involved, and they want to quickly get out
of the house. It is littered with trash and smells
(07:15):
very badly.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
They smell this horrible stench, but they see trash everywhere.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
It's just a pit.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
They wanted to get away from the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Too Mount Pleasant. The name Mount Pleasant at that time,
it was almost cruelly ironic, because the neighborhood by then
had really.
Speaker 4 (07:34):
Hit the skids. There was a lot of poverty.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
One in five houses was up for foreclosure.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
There was a lot of crime. This was a rough neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
A lot of the residents of the area had fallen
victim to the crack epidemic of the time, and a
lot of those people were women, and so they would
roam the streets searching for their next hit, and that
made them easy prey for ruthless predators like Anthony sol.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Not that he was considered a predator as likable as
he appeared to be to some. Not many did actually
know much about Anthony Soell.
Speaker 6 (08:14):
You know, he wasn't a person that everybody immediately had
a specific memory of, But he was kind of always
in the background, maybe a little bit socially awkward.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Soell was an ex serviceman. He'd been a model marine.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
Maybe the stringent rules in the military were good for
him for a while. I know that he was able to,
you know, cope in the military, do his job. He listened,
he followed orders, directions, never really got in a lot
of trouble.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
He would later tell probing detectives of his pride at
his record, Hollo.
Speaker 12 (08:49):
Are you sirs?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Years?
Speaker 12 (08:51):
Seven years?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
He'd done a seven year tour of duty and from
everything that we know, he did well.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
He was a good serviceman.
Speaker 12 (09:03):
In the Marine Corps.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
In nineteen eighty nine, four years after leaving the military.
It all begins to go wrong.
Speaker 4 (09:14):
When it gets out.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
He starts having problems, He breaks up with his girlfriend,
he stops going to work, and he loses his job,
and then he turns to drinking pretty heavily.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
He's pretty much drinking all day. Beer was his vice.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
And things are kind of falling apart for Anthony Soul.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
The junk soel would target vulnerable women and entice them
back to his place, and then things would get ugly.
Speaker 6 (09:45):
It wasn't long that he was home before he was
actually accused of harming several women, and actually two and
kind of close proximity.
Speaker 11 (09:54):
There was two women, both of whom were pregnant.
Speaker 6 (09:57):
But also you know, either abusing drug or hanging out
with people who are drinking.
Speaker 11 (10:02):
That Anthony Sowell was accused of raping.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
His accuser, a pregnant woman claims that he wouldn't let
her go after she agreed to spend time with him.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
A woman goes to police and she tells them that
Anthony Soul attacked her inside his home, that he bound
and gagged her and raped her.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Soel avoids jail, but not for long.
Speaker 6 (10:26):
He was never prosecuted for that case because he was
actually arrested for another case, another rape, within the same year,
and he was prosecuted in that case. He ended up
pleading guilty to attempted rape and was given a sentence
of up to fifteen years in prison.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Soel refuses to plead deal to contest what had happened,
and he declines the chance of early release by admitting
his guilt.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
His parole is repeatedly denied when he gets out because
he's served his entire sentence. He's not on parole, so
he's not under police supervision as a sex offender. He
has to register and police have to verify his address, but.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
That's pretty much it. He's pretty much free and clear.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
In two thousand and five, Anthony Soel is released after
a long prison stretch, during which time he'd been a
model prisoner. He's back in twelve two oh five Imperial Avenue,
where police in the East Cleveland neighborhood are dealing with
a drugs epidemic. Because of his offense, He's on the
sex register and dutifully attends the Sheriff's office every ninety
(11:31):
days as ordered. He was not someone they considered a
problem ex com He was Toned, the party guy from Imperial.
Speaker 7 (11:39):
Serial Killers also tend to be very smart, almost sociopathics,
some of them can be. And your sociopaths can also
be very charming. And when somebody is charming, people like them.
They have relationships, they build families and friends, and so
therefore people aren't going to question them. They would never
imagine that Thingy Soel or other serial killers out there
(12:03):
could do the evil that they do.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
By two thousand and seven, Tony Soell was living alone
at twelve two h five Imperial, his parents having passed away.
Drugs had flooded the Mount's pleasant neighborhood.
Speaker 11 (12:33):
The city was kind of getting poorer.
Speaker 6 (12:35):
There was the crack epidemic was really starting to affect
the streets. There was a lot of mothers and fathers
starting to use those drugs.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Soel set about praying on the women made vulnerable by
their dependence on drugs. His own days were dominated by booze.
Speaker 6 (12:55):
He was really really the kind of guy that was
doing a lot of drinking. He'd go to the store
in the morning and get and just kind of continue
that throughout the day.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
A pattern was set. The drunk Soel would home in
on vulnerable women and the entice them back to his place.
Twelve two five Imperial Avenue became quite the party venue.
Speaker 11 (13:17):
You would say, hey, do you want to come in
and have a drink?
Speaker 6 (13:19):
And his house was a place where he would let
people crash if they were using drugs and didn't want
to go home.
Speaker 11 (13:25):
The house, you could tell it was.
Speaker 6 (13:27):
It was definitely used for a place where people could
just crash and could just party.
Speaker 11 (13:32):
You know, those beer bottles and or beer cans all around.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
The run down quarter of East Cleveland offered perfect conditions
for the predator. Soel drug confused women, a place of
his own to take them, and a meeting venue where
he could also get beers.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
There was a little corner store right there that was
kind of the hub of activity on Imperial Avenue. They
were really familiar with Anthony Sowell. He would come in
and buy you know, tall beer king Kobra beers, which
he would drink often. People would come over to the
store when they would come to his house by a
beer party, kind of back and forth.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
When partying with Soel, the menu was easy to predict.
He might help cook up some drugs and he might
follow it up with a six pack of beers. Then
it would be time for sex, whether the women wanted
it or not.
Speaker 14 (14:25):
Every female that you have brought to the house, you
every one of the news drugs or using drugs like
crack or whatever. Is that one of the reasons why
they come to your house so they can smoke from
okay from them.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
And you're telling me that you don't do that.
Speaker 9 (14:49):
I used used to, but you don't do that.
Speaker 13 (14:51):
Sometimes.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
On May seventeenth, two thousand and seven, Crystal Dozia was
wandering the streets of Mount Pleasantine's bought it by Tony Soel.
She fitted then all too familiar East Cleveland profile. And
I'm trying to get.
Speaker 13 (15:08):
The type of woman backed up to your house.
Speaker 15 (15:11):
This is the type of women that come out, argue
are one.
Speaker 14 (15:15):
Drug users first? I mean I don't write drug use
very short looks.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Crystal Dosher was the mother of seven children. Her own
family remembers that Crystal when she was a little girl,
she was the responsible one.
Speaker 4 (15:30):
She's the one you could always count on.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
And she she loved helping around the house and learning
how to cook, and she really liked pretending she was
a grown up, and she loved getting dressed up.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
But drugs changed everything.
Speaker 9 (15:45):
Does you like them, though?
Speaker 13 (15:47):
Did you like them when you're meddle o?
Speaker 9 (15:50):
So you weren't mad at him when you met him?
Speaker 12 (15:52):
You kind of like them all right? Yes?
Speaker 2 (15:55):
And by the time she was in her early teens,
her life was just basically spinning out of control.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
She never showed her drug habit.
Speaker 6 (16:04):
They were all had these vulnerabilities that Anthony Sowell appeared
to hone in on.
Speaker 13 (16:10):
So I looked at her as she looked at so sad, pitiful.
She is that a rough, rough cap. So I said,
a beer?
Speaker 6 (16:19):
You had a beer?
Speaker 3 (16:20):
I said, close?
Speaker 13 (16:22):
Oh ya opened up, or something like that. So I said,
I'll tell you what, come on with me.
Speaker 12 (16:29):
You get all the beer you want.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
So Well invited her into twelve two oh five. He
has raped before, but he has never killed. Nothing would
be heard about Crystal for two and a half years
her anguished family unable to find her. She had been
raped then strangled.
Speaker 7 (16:49):
The most personal way to kill somebody is to strangle them,
and in Anthony's case, it was personal and close, and
so he was able to watch and literally watch the
breath of life come out of that person.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Her killer buried Crystal by the backyard fence of twelve
to two oh five. She had become victim number one
of Anthony Soel. There was no reported sighting of Crystal
before her murder. Possibly she had been whisked into twelve
to two oh five in darkness. Possibly detectives were not
getting all of the information they could from a community
(17:24):
at times at odds with the police.
Speaker 7 (17:27):
He selected his victims from a group of people in
a community that would be hesitant to step forward and
be witnesses.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Other drug addicted women were lured into twelve to two
oh five around the same.
Speaker 6 (17:42):
Time, and those women had gone to Anthony Sowell's house,
maybe to use drugs or drink or just hang out
with him, and had never left the home.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
As for Soel, he was not suspected of any involvement
in the disappearance of Crystal Dozier. There's even a suggestion
that he may have tried to mend his ways.
Speaker 6 (18:03):
He participated in Alcoholics Anonymous, so he was aware that
he had an alcohol problem.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
AA did not work. There is no indication that Soel
took a day off from his heavy drinking. And when
he was drunk he would want to have sex. He
would head out looking for a sex worker, one like
Tashana Culver, who went missing in June two thousand and eight.
A young woman drifting in and out of family life.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Tashana Culver had tried to get clean. It just never took.
The pull of the drugs was just too strong. But
she had once had hopes and dreams. She'd gotten a
cosmetology license. She'd even trained to be a medical assistant.
But drugs basically consumed her life. She was thirty three
(18:49):
years old, she had six children.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Her family was slow to report her missing. She disappeared
so often she was dead within two hours. Adventuring twelve
two oh five, his killing method of choice were his
bare hands. Soel had perfected strangling.
Speaker 7 (19:10):
By now they will learn they'll do everything the same,
but this time they'll bring a gun. So it also
is a learned behavior. They learned from their mistakes, and
so throughout the years Anthony learned from his mistakes and
kept on trying to protect his craft.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Can you tell me exactly what I did?
Speaker 11 (19:30):
I Mginie, I didn't.
Speaker 12 (19:31):
You know, I didn't.
Speaker 13 (19:33):
That's why I could tell you, Lenno.
Speaker 7 (19:36):
He didn't start out killing. I would bet that he
learned and progressed to that point. And as he was
successful with his first rape, he would do the next
one and the next one and try new things, and
in this particular case, ultimately has a serial killer. He
got the thrill from watching his victims die.
Speaker 12 (20:00):
For something. Maybe what what what do you think? What
cause you to choke them? I mean, just think about
nice find sir, my girl.
Speaker 14 (20:14):
And now I saw it that was punishing them, because
I was for punish I can't stay.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
As for the residents of Mount Pleasant, all they knew
for sure was that something bad was coming from someone
in the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Before long, people in the area start complaining about this
horrible smell in the neighborhood. It is just just a
rotten stench.
Speaker 4 (20:42):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
At least one neighbor calls the city and says, you
got to do something about this.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
This is just horrendous.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
It smells like something dyed something or someone, but it
kind of gets waved off by the authorities.
Speaker 6 (20:57):
Right next to the house where Anthony so lived on
an Imperial Avenue was a place called Race Sausage And
for years, when there had been foul odors that the
neighbors noticed, they would call the city or call the
health department. When people would come out, they would always
attribute the smells to Ray Sausage, And in fact that
people that own this very small family owned sausage company
redid their entire sewer system thinking that somehow the smell
(21:21):
was being attributed to them their sausage making their dumpsters.
You know, we only realized later that it was probably
Anthony Sowell, and in fact, the owners said at one
point that they believed that he may have dumped some
bodies in their dumpsters.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
The upshots after the complaint was that an opportunity to
stop a killer killing was ignored.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
The smell remains, and it just hangs over this neighborhood,
just this rotten stent. The house where Anthony Soul is
living is just filthy, full of garbage, and definitely there's
this horrible smell coming from there. But nobody ever does anything.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
No mistake yet big enough for cops to stop Soel,
who carries on picking up sex workers when drunk and
attacking them, not always successful in his attempts to kill them.
Speaker 6 (22:12):
There was a number of women who actually made it
out of Anthony Sowell's house, and each of them also
described either being choked or strangled by him quite quite aggressively,
sometimes with like a cord or a strap, other times
with his hands.
Speaker 13 (22:28):
I was the punish.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Those who had escaped Soul's punishment had not told police
of their ordeal, fearful that they may be arrested for
drug use and prostitution themselves. One woman would not reveal
what she had seen inside twelve two oh five until
Soel was safely locked up.
Speaker 6 (22:50):
She caught a glimpse of one of the decomposing bodies,
which frightened her and just made her, you know, realize,
I have got to get out of here.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
So what went on behind the door of twelve to
two oh five Imperial remained undetected, uninvestigated. Soul's good fortune
and the fact that he was yet to make the
mistake of attracting the police to his door, meant that
he was still free. Between two thousand and seven and
(23:28):
two thousand and eight, women continued to go missing from
Mount Pleasant.
Speaker 6 (23:34):
You know, their loved ones that they did love would
go missing, but they would always call after a day
or two.
Speaker 11 (23:39):
They would always come back.
Speaker 6 (23:40):
They would never miss important events like birthdays or Christmas,
and so when they went missing for a longer period
of time, it didn't show up. A lot of them
contacted the police and said, you know, this is different,
and we're basically told, you know, hey, they'll come back
when they're done using drugs.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
After all, who cares about women who often go missing
for a living one minute on the streets, the next
selling sex in a location nobody knows on. Sex workers
make perfect targets for serial killers.
Speaker 6 (24:09):
So the police were dismissive of these women for the
same reason that Anthony so A likely targeted them.
Speaker 7 (24:17):
Anthony picked his victims because they were vulnerable.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
All his targets were black, drug addicted, and desperate for cash.
Choosing the same profile of victim is familiar territory for
serial killers and rapists too.
Speaker 7 (24:31):
Like Anthony Soel, the very first time that they're successful,
they will continue to do the crime the same way
every single time. Rapists are no different. If they were
successful with a brunette living in an apartment, all their
victims will be brunettes living in an apartment.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
I think he probably knew that people weren't going to come,
you know, beating down his door looking for these women, and.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
So the killing went on. De Lung's life had never
been easy.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Laschonda Long was the youngest of Anthony Soul's victims. She
was only twenty five. Lashonda's mom had been a crack addict,
her dad had been an alcoholic, and Lashonda's life pretty
much fell into that pattern.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
It was only a matter of time before Soel would
find her. She was simply not able to defend herself.
Her life distorted by drugs and bad choices.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Lashonda had her first child when she was just a
child herself.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
She was fourteen years old.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
At seventeen, she had three children and she had lost
custody of all of them.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
He hated the.
Speaker 6 (25:41):
Fact that they used drugs and would even say things
to them about it, and know he wanted to help them,
but then he would also do it himself. So he
definitely had this strange relationship where he would meet women
who had drug problems. He would kind of entice them
into his home, you know, with the idea of drinking
or using rugs. But then he would also try to
be very caring. Well, let me get you some clothes,
(26:04):
let me feed you.
Speaker 11 (26:05):
You look like you needed to eat.
Speaker 12 (26:08):
I know what.
Speaker 13 (26:10):
I think all was very mad as they had killed
if he was out of the street. Yeah, that's a
big thing.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Lashonda's fate was to be a gruesome.
Speaker 6 (26:21):
One one family. I think it was Leshonda long. The
only thing they really recovered of her body was her head.
It was in a bucket in the basement, which was
very difficult for them. They didn't even have a body
to marry.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
So I would describe his victim as a pitiful but
he himself took no pity on them. The next woman
to be enticed inside Imperial twelve two or five was
Tanya Carmichael.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Tanya Carmichael vanished in November of two thousand and eight.
She was thirty three years old. She was a drug addict,
but she hadn't always been. She was once the protective
mother who would chase away the drug dealers from her
doorstep because she didn't want them to influence her children.
But eventually she fell into drugs.
Speaker 6 (27:06):
Her life kind of intersected with Soel's early on.
Speaker 11 (27:10):
They both grew.
Speaker 6 (27:11):
Up on Page Avenue. You know, she knew him, you know,
probably tangentially. The families kind of knew each other.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
The addiction had led her to crime, to prison, away
from her children, and eventually into the hands of a
serial killer.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
She went looking for a hit under bed for the
night and chose twelve two o five. She was not
long before this world. After taking that decision.
Speaker 6 (27:44):
When she initially went missing, you know, her family went
to police and they were asking for help to find her,
and the police said, you know, well, we know she
has a drug problem.
Speaker 11 (27:54):
She'll come home when she's done using drugs.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
When Tanya went missing, her family says they went police
right away. The police told them just wait.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
And this family really they put up flyers. They were
really searching for her, especially her daughter Anita Carmichael, really
cared for her mom deeply and was searching for her,
and so this was really difficult for her.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
She would never see her mom alive again. One day,
Soell would describe her fate and that of others. His
favorite method of murder was to use an electric chord
or any cable nearby. Before pinning his victims to the ground.
He would act quickly, subduing in seconds, showing no mercy.
Speaker 9 (28:42):
I think.
Speaker 16 (28:44):
Not latern In twenty eighteen, an investigation would begin about
why detectives had failed to arrest so well before he
was eventually hauled in for questioning.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
His killing was relentless. Next to enter the foul stench
of his crackdown was Michelle Mason's.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Michelle Mason was finally getting the life she'd always wanted.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
She had spent so many years in a haze of drugs.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
She was hooked on heroin and crack, but by two
thousand and one, she was really starting to get things
turned around, and her family just remembers this was really
the happiest time of her life. She was living on
her own, she had friends, real friends, and she hadn't
she had kicked her drug habit. She was clean and sober.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
But one day in two thousand and eight, she seems
to have come across Anthony soell.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
On in October morning in two thousand and eight, when
Michelle left the house and said she'd be back, and
she never came back, her family knew something was wrong,
They filed a missing persons report. They put out flyers
all over the neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Fifteen months after claiming his first victim, Anthony Soell has
killed again for the fifth time.
Speaker 6 (30:06):
On October twenty ninth, two thousand and nine, some Cleveland
police officers, some detectives, actually went to Anthony Sowell's home
on Imperial Avenue, and they were looking to arrest him.
Speaker 11 (30:17):
A woman had accused him of rape. When they went
to the house, he was.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Not there, so they went away, figuring the overwhelming smell,
which they could not miss, was from Ray's sausage store
next door. How many more women would Anthony Soell attract
two twelve two oh five. What mistakes would he make
before police would finally arrest him. It was October twentieth,
(30:50):
two thousand and nine, when a man walking on Imperial
saw a woman falling from an upstairs window of twelve
two oh five. He didn't know her, but it was
obvious something very bad had been going.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
On two two zero five Imperial.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
He'd got away with so many rapes and murders. Soel
sets about trying to get away with this latest attack.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
A week later, she does talk. She goes to police,
and she tells them what happened.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
The Cleveland police, who had known about complaints related to
the man who lived inside twelve two oh five, knew
about his past as a convicted rapist. They only now
decided to go inside and take a good look around.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
October twenty ninth, police go to Anthony Soul's home with a.
Speaker 4 (31:39):
Search warrant and an arrest warrant. Soul isn't there. They
go inside. The place is just unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
It's trash everywhere, clothes strewn around. It smells unbelievable.
Speaker 6 (31:54):
They entered the home and they found the bodies of
two women who were basically sitting out in the open,
decomposed thing.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
They're just lying there, rotting, and they're next to a shovel.
And the police don't know what they have on their
hands or but they know they need help, so they
call in other officers to help.
Speaker 6 (32:13):
Once they found that, they called in a lot more
police and some crime scene investigators, and over the course
of maybe a week or more, they found many more bodies.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
There was no immediate sign of Anthony Soel, but it
wouldn't be long before he reappeared in the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
On October thirty first, police find Anthony Soul walking down
the street.
Speaker 4 (32:35):
About a mile from the house. They arrest him.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
They charge him with five counts of murder, but the
bodies keep turning on.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Detectives are stagger to learn that Soel does not know
how many bodies he had hidden around his property.
Speaker 13 (32:50):
All that's all.
Speaker 17 (32:55):
Pull up, love, if you were in my shoes, what
would you want me to top?
Speaker 6 (33:01):
Nine?
Speaker 17 (33:02):
Eight, seven, six.
Speaker 4 (33:07):
The cordon off the house, the cordon off the yard.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
They find three more bodies in the house, two in
a crawl space.
Speaker 6 (33:14):
It turns out that there was eleven women total who
had gone missing since about two thousand and seven.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
So we have eleven women, all of them black, missing
since two thousand and seven, all dead, all here at
the house at twelve too oh five Imperial Avenue.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
The identifications of the women begins Cristialdosia, Deshona Culva, Tonia Carmichael,
l Jon Delonne, Michelle Mason. They hear the stories of
others like Kim Smith.
Speaker 4 (33:53):
Kim Smith loved her father. She and her father took
care of each other.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
He had a spinal injury, had trouble getting around, so
Kim took. She looked after him. She would get his
get him to his doctor's appointments. She would cook for him.
But Kim was hanging out with the wrong crap, and
she was smoking a lot of crack, and she was
little by little not showing up as often. When she disappeared,
(34:19):
her family didn't report her missing.
Speaker 9 (34:23):
You had a body, it was ready.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
You got a body.
Speaker 12 (34:27):
He was over here.
Speaker 17 (34:30):
You had a bag that was a body in there.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Hold on, look, ain't finished. And you got a body
behind the wall.
Speaker 14 (34:42):
Were a lot of dirty back to a lot of
dirt all over her body.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Next was Nancy.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Comp In April of two thousand and nine, Nancy went missing.
Her family filed a missing person's report. They put up
flyers all over the neighborhood, the local businesses, on telephone
poles everywhere.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
They were frantic to find her.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
They never did. They identify Amelda known as Amy Hunter.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Amy Hunter adored books when she was a little girl.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
Or family called her a book warm and.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
They said that she really loved reading the classics. But
Amy's life would not have a storybook ending. By the
time she was fourteen, she was pregnant, recordedly by a
teacher who got her drunk at a party. Her baby
was born death and was cerebral palsy, and Amy was devastated,
(35:35):
and her friend said that she turned to crack cocaine
as a sort of comfort and it really took over her.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
Life, a life which ended inside the Soel House of Horrors.
So well under interrogation affects madness. It was all a dream,
he says. He did not know real from unreal. They
asked him about another woman identified her name Janice Webb.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Janice Webb always loved her East Cleveland neighborhood where she
grew up. It was home to her and she loved
her family. But unfortunately she fell into the same trap
that so many people in the neighborhood had fallen into,
and that was the drugs.
Speaker 14 (36:18):
You got four bodies the top, yeah, one body in
the basement.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
There's no more room in the house for bodies.
Speaker 9 (36:29):
So you got to go outside.
Speaker 14 (36:32):
This would make her most likely the last one.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
Not the last one. Talasia Fortson was Soel's tenth victim,
a mother of three whose drug problems meant that her
children had been taken away from her. Her remains found
buried in.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
The garden in early June of two thousand and nine,
Telosia dropped by her adoptive mom's house to bring us
some groceries, and then she left saying she'd be back,
and she never came back. Her adopted mom reported her missing.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Diane Turner, mother of six, was victim number eleven. Her
body remained unclaimed, unrecognized in the City Morgue family a year.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
She had been sober for almost two full years. Unfortunately,
she never really learned how to be a good mom,
and so the authority said that she was a danger
to her child, and they took her baby away when
her baby was just four days old, and it devastated
her so pretty much. Then is when her family and
friends say that Diane just gave up. Her body was
(37:39):
found in the third floor bedroom of Anthony Soul's home
at twelve two h five Imperial Avenue.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
The interrogation was not a difficult one if the target
was to get a confession. So Al could hardly deny
his guilt, and any pretense of insanity soon disappears. For interrogators,
the priority was to get the truth out of Anthony Soel,
(38:09):
not to show how they were feeling shocked at hearing
of how a serial killer had behaved quite so monstrously.
Speaker 7 (38:16):
As detectives, you have to remove the emotional side as
far as getting looking at that person's life. It's important
to know the facts and who that person is, who
your victims are, and sometimes you get to know the
families very well, and you feel it's a calling, it's
a mission to be able to provide answers to what
(38:37):
happened to their child or their loved one.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Soel had appeared as a party guy with a warm
welcome to the women of Mount Pleasant whose lives had
taken a terrible turn for the worse, and they had
trusted him. The mistake Soel had made in order for
detectives to be led to a macabre mausoleum at twelve
two oh five was simple. He allowed one victim too
many to escape.
Speaker 4 (39:03):
That was Anthony Soul's killer's mistake. He let one of.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
His victims get too close to a window, and she
did what she had to to save her life.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
She jumped out that second story window. She's the one
who got.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Away, and that's what it took to get Anthony Soul
finally arrested, finally stopped from his killing.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Spree campaign has argued in twenty eighteen that it was
a killing spree which could and should have been stopped
after the first report of a woman who had gone missing,
and again after women had lived to tell the tale
of torture inside twelve two oh five.
Speaker 6 (39:54):
It was a sobering moment for Cleveland to realize that
eleven citizens could go missing and nobody could make the
connection that they were all in the same place, had
all been killed by the same man.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
For a while, the house was left standing a reminder
of Sowell's crimes, where artifacts of the women had been abandoned,
clothing and jewry left behind in the upstairs apartment of
his home. The decision was taken in twenty ten to
pull down twelve two oh five.
Speaker 6 (40:38):
People moved quickly to get control of the house so
that they could knock it down. And you know, within
the year the house was bulldozed and made into an
empty lot. And there's been plans in the works for
almost five years now to put some kind of memorial
at that site.
Speaker 11 (41:04):
I think it left the whole community numb. You know,
how could we let this happen? How could we let
this happen?
Speaker 1 (41:11):
How indeed, Soel had killed and raped, raped and killed
over a three year period, at the end of which
time his mistake was to run out of luck when
a survivor convinced police to look under the trash inside
twelve two oh five.
Speaker 6 (41:31):
Essentially, people like Anthony Sowell and other serial rapists that
have since been discovered, they were smarter than the police.
Speaker 11 (41:39):
They were smarter than the community.
Speaker 6 (41:41):
They knew that these women and they, you know, the
women probably knew in some ways too, that nobody would care.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Police had been warned about Soel on a number of occasions,
and even had the right to ask to go inside
the home of the registered sex offender, but they did
not dig too deeply into a man who lived in
a neighborhood that officers did not like to frequent.
Speaker 6 (42:03):
Actually, sheriff's deputies visited his house and he had to
check in regularly as a sex offender, and I think
the same week as these bodies were discovered, they had
checked in on him at his home and they had
just never entered his home because that wasn't part of
what they did. If they did, they probably would have
noticed something amiss or smelled the foul odor that neighbors
had been complaining about for years, but couldn't really pinpoint
(42:27):
you know where it was coming from.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
The detective story which led police to the house of
a serial killer does not reflect well on the Cleveland
police force that they got the final piece of the
puzzle into. The disappearance of women in Mount Pleasant was
more about luck than judgment. Kidnapped women too often and
eventually one will escape to raise an alarm that will
finally be had.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
She fell out, the wants the floor. Okay, are you so?
Speaker 1 (42:55):
I all was given the death penalty in twenty eleven.
The sentence was never to be carried out. He died
of natural causes in twenty twenty one. A world renowned
city of learning one boasting of thriving market in books.
Speaker 18 (43:16):
The first edition market is quite a buoyant one and
in terms of the top level books, they can be
worth a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1 (43:25):
And where there's money, there is crime. Amidst the honey
colored stone and splendor of Oxford, a brutal murder.
Speaker 5 (43:34):
Following the discovery of a man's body in Oxford on Thursday,
the seventh of April, we have launched a murder investigation.
Although he hasn't been formally identified. I'm satisfied with that
person is a man called Adrian Greenwood, who was forty
two years old.
Speaker 17 (43:50):
There was a frenzied attack. Greenwood was stabbed multiple.
Speaker 1 (43:55):
Time and taken from his house a copy of Wind
in the Willows worth fifty pounds. Bizarrely, the killer pauses
as he escapes the scene.
Speaker 15 (44:08):
He takes a photo of himself outside the house with
blood on his face. I don't know what he was thinking.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
He was thinking big and targeting the rich and famous.
Speaker 15 (44:19):
Once they start looking at what's on that laptop, they
find this Excel spreadsheet Hitless, which, besides Adrian Greenwood's name,
they also find several wealthy celebrities names including Kate Moss
and Simon Cowell.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Detectives gather evidence until a picture of a suspect emerges.
Which piece of the puzzle will reveal Michael Danaher as
guilty of murder? What would be a killer's mistake? It's
(45:21):
a story which could have been lifted from one of
the novels of Colin Dexter and the depictions of his
central character Morse in a British TV series, the brutal
murder of an author who was part of a closed
world in Oxford, one where books are a currency which
(45:41):
create wealth, where collectors of all backgrounds will pay what
it takes.
Speaker 18 (45:48):
Sometimes it's with a view to investment, but more commonly
it's the sort of obsessive activity that you often get
with collecting underscover.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
But in family cupboards, garages, on bookshelves and in antique
shops there are rarities worth tens of thousands of pounds
to sell for That much is often about the nu
answers of what a book has to offer.
Speaker 18 (46:14):
Often the value is based on particular attributes. The presence
of a dust jacket, the presence of an author's signature
where the author's signature is uncommon can make a huge
difference to the value, and at tens of thousands of pounds.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
In twenty sixteen, Adrienne Greenwood was an almost stereotypical product
of the Oxford academic world. He had read politics, philosophy
and economics at christ Church College and stayed on in
the city. By his early forties, he was living not
far from where he'd been a student. He was a
(46:50):
twice published author, dealt in classic cars and works of art,
and had become one of a select few trading in
rare books.
Speaker 5 (47:00):
Mister Greenwood is well known in Oxford and we know
that we believe that he was running a number of businesses.
Speaker 9 (47:06):
He was a collector of historical books, antique books, books
of historical interest, first editions, that sort of thing. We're
in Oxford.
Speaker 18 (47:15):
There are only really sort of three, three or four
people at a time in terms of actual dealers with
premises or websites and that sort of actual businesses as such,
so it's quite a close community and with that a
fairly competitive community.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Greenwood had become highly considered in the closed book world,
good at the hard sell and natural at uncovering rarities.
Speaker 18 (47:46):
Dealing in rare books as opposed to general bookselling has
different processes that take a large amount of your time.
There's a lot of research that goes into both finding
the books originally and find out about the books when
you've got them in hand and you need to be
able to catalog them and turn them into something of interest.
(48:09):
A lot of that is storytelling, making the books sound interesting,
because if people are going to part with a large
amount of money, they want to have a real feel
for the book and a sense of value and interest
that they can share once they have it as their
own possession.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
Adrian Greenwood focused on a lucrative speciality.
Speaker 18 (48:32):
He specialized mostly in modern first editions and had a
line in particular authors such JK. Rowling and fine copies
of particularly scarce books with somebody that was able to
find things that other people couldn't, essentially, which is a
large part of the trick.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
A trick that Greenwood had pulled off.
Speaker 9 (48:54):
Adrian Greenwood had a first edition of Harry Potter book.
Speaker 12 (49:00):
With the JK.
Speaker 18 (49:01):
Rowling books, they are phenomenon in the sense of contemporary
authors whose work has almost immediately become collectible in a
very high sort of racket of value. The first book
in particular, can go for tens twenty pounds if it's
in any sort of good condition.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
His discovery of the first edition made the news.
Speaker 9 (49:25):
And this was seized upon by the local media and
the local press, and there was a certain amount of
publicity around it, and he was photographed and seen to
have this valuable and expensive book.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
The first edition was exhibited at a book fair and
then it was stolen. Greenwand warned whoever the thief was
that getting rid of it would not be easy.
Speaker 18 (49:51):
It would be incredibly difficult to resell a book that
had been stolen, because both the community of the book
trade is closely knit enough that would would circulate that
it would make it impossible to sell to the trade,
but also any form of public marketing of the book
(50:13):
would attract attention because the interest in finding those particular
titles is so large. They're not going to go unnoticed,
and obviously you need them not to go unnoticed if
you want to sell them. So the idea that you
could then resell the book for anything like its original
market value just wouldn't be possible.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
Sure enough, the stolen Harry Potter first edition was found
abandoned outside an Oxford store and subsequently returned to Adrian Greenwood.
That was not his only book of value. He had
placed an advert online for a copy of Wind in
the Willows with a sale price of just under fifty pounds.
(50:56):
The word was out Adrian Greenwood had some very valuable books,
and at least one person was following the story with
a self serving interest, a man called Michael Danaher.
Speaker 9 (51:09):
Michael Danaher was known as the Gentle Giant. He was
a large man, very tall, twenty five stones so he'd
worked with his wife at John Lewis in Peterborough and
they had two sons. He then left that job and
went to work as a manager for an engineering firm.
His marriage broke up, but he still maintained contact with
(51:32):
his sons, who were at that time was nine and
fifteen years old, and he saw them at weekends and
tried to play his part as their father as best
he could in the circumstances.
Speaker 1 (51:44):
Michael Danaher mister ordinary, but one with issues.
Speaker 17 (51:48):
Danaher had money problems, serious money problems. He was in debt.
Speaker 9 (51:54):
He wouldn't tell his ex wife or his sons about
it and tried to cope. Tried various means of coping
so that he could make life as normal as possible
for both himself and also for his sons. And one
of the things he did was to look at eBay
and find low value things to buy and then sell
on again and make a little bit of money to
(52:15):
keep his head above the water. But it wasn't really working,
and he was kind of sinking further and further into
a sort of morass of debts.
Speaker 17 (52:24):
He couldn't see any way out of that, apart from crime.
Speaker 1 (52:31):
Not petty crime. Either the gentle giant wanted to score big.
He began researching people to burgle. In early twenty sixteen,
Dana had trawled the web looking for potential targets. A
wealthy donor to a British political party, a GM Beecroft
was one.
Speaker 9 (52:49):
Dana had decided he was a worthy target, and he
went and posed as a delivery driver at Beecroft's house
in Hampstead, but his wife fought him off. Essentially, he
tried to push past her and it was all bungled
and it would have been better for everybody concerned if
(53:10):
danaher had realized at this point this really wasn't his
forte and perhaps his ideas of making money or to
go in a different direction.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
The criminal life of Michael Dana had exposed him as
something of an amateur. Still the attentive father at weekends,
he was not put off assiduously researching ways of getting
rich quick and illegally.
Speaker 9 (53:32):
He effectively found himself a hit list of people that
he felt might be vulnerable, might be good targets to
yield him a better return than he was getting on
buying and selling on eBay. And there were people on
that list who were like hedge fund managers and people
who weren't known, But there were also celebrities on there
(53:56):
who he thought would be vulnerable for some reason to
to him sealing from them.
Speaker 1 (54:03):
TV star and entrepreneur Alan Sugar, model Kate Moss, and
former footballer Rio Ferdinand were all considered by Danaher as
wealthy enough for him to consider breaking into their homes,
but Danaher soon decided on an easier target. He remembered
the story about the man who dealt in rare books.
(54:23):
The two very different worlds of Adrianne Greenwood and Michael
Danaher were about to collide.
Speaker 15 (54:31):
Danaher thinks there's money to be made in second hand books.
Speaker 18 (54:34):
And the potential can be twenty thirty forty and it's
the sort of commodity where if scarcity comes into play
and somebody wants it enough, then you're talking X amounts.
Speaker 9 (54:48):
And one of the people that he clearly discovered during
his research on the internet was Adrian Greenwood.
Speaker 15 (54:57):
The reason Danaher targeted Adrian Greenwood was as Greenwood had
previously appeared in the media talking about the value of
rare first edition books and he thought, I'll get an
all this. When Greenwoods had appeared in the media, obviously,
he hadn't really thought about the fact that that would
mark him out as a victim. He didn't have security
in place. He was just living a normal life in
(55:18):
his house in Oxford.
Speaker 17 (55:20):
Danaherd dug a little deeper. He discovered that Greenwood had
valuable books for sale, in particular a first edition of
Wind in the Willows, for which Greenwood was asking for
fifty thousand pounds.
Speaker 1 (55:36):
Danaher's research also revealed that Adrian Greenwood worked from home.
He uncovered precisely where he lived, the Iffley Road in Oxford.
The more dana had read, the more he could dream
of what treasures lay inside.
Speaker 17 (55:51):
Adrian Greenwood was fairly open about the valuable items that
the owned, like this Wind in the Willow's book. He'd
had publicity, and Danaher had picked up on this. Greenwood
really was a victim waiting to happen.
Speaker 1 (56:09):
Danaher had already demonstrated that he was no criminal mastermind
with his failed attempt at burglary of a family in Hampstead, London.
Speaker 17 (56:20):
The stupidity of Michael Danaher is pretty much off the
Richter scale.
Speaker 1 (56:26):
Undeterred. He now had a new target in mind, the
home of a man happy to boast of the valuable
books that he had for sale, and who had one
in particular on offer, Wind in the Willows, complete with
a much vaunted dust jacket.
Speaker 17 (56:42):
I can steal that and maybe some other kind of
things that would bring about the end of my financial worries.
He hatched a plan.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
He plotted a route from Peterborough in south central England
to Oxford and to the home of Adrian Greenwood. When
detectives investigate a case, they're led not by their instincts,
(57:16):
but by the evidence they discover. Experienced criminals work hard
not to leave a trail. They're wary of digital fingerprints
trackable from their online behavior. Michael Danaher was no criminal mastermind.
By the sixth of April, he had left an array
of evidence reflecting his plans on his laptop. He'd also
(57:37):
made a note next to Greenwood's name in a spreadsheet
detailing the pros and cons of potential actions.
Speaker 9 (57:45):
He even had a reason column and a comment against
atrion Greenwood was simply tosser.
Speaker 1 (57:57):
Amongst other evidence later found at Dana's home was a
phone one which had been adapted to work as a
stun gun, and which Danaher referred to as something he
might use.
Speaker 17 (58:08):
Danaher really hadn't put a lot of thought into this crime.
Speaker 9 (58:19):
On the sixth of April, Danaher drove from Peterborough to Oxford.
Speaker 1 (58:27):
Danaher had his target. He may not have known why
it was so valuable, but he had seen online that
Greenwood was trying to sell a children's book called Wind
in the Willows, and he was trumpeting the small but
vital attributes that made it very valuable, the one which
would tempt collectors into spending big.
Speaker 18 (58:48):
The Wind in the Willows is an example of a
book that does not normally survive with a dusk jacket.
In terms of what it could sell for, we are
talking more like fifty pounds without that. It's you know,
you drop a zero off for the same book. That's
(59:08):
the difference that that thin bit of paper wrapping around
the book can make.
Speaker 1 (59:17):
Danaher drove the two hours from his home in Peterborough
and arrived in Oxford. April sixth began as a sunny day.
Nobody could possibly know that he was on a mission.
He traveled on foot from a City Center car park
to Ifhley Road. As the day went on the weather changed.
(59:41):
Danaher can be seen that day on security footage.
Speaker 17 (59:44):
He was captured on CCTV. A local bus captured Danaher
on CCTV a couple of times.
Speaker 1 (59:55):
As he walks along the Ifley Road, he can be
seen checking inside his bag. It's unlikely that passers by
would have considered him worthy of their attention.
Speaker 9 (01:00:05):
He went to Adrian Greenwood's house.
Speaker 17 (01:00:09):
Greenwood didn't have CCTV, he didn't have a state of
the art alarm system in his house, all of these
things which he very much should have had.
Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
He was disturbed by mister Greenwood in the property and
that's where an altercation or fight took place between them.
Speaker 17 (01:00:28):
There was then a frenzied attack. Greenwood was stabbed multiple times.
In fact, Dana had stabbed him so hard with a
kitchen knife that the handle snapped off the blade. Greenwood
stood very little.
Speaker 9 (01:00:48):
Chance Adrian Greenwood was stabbed.
Speaker 15 (01:00:54):
We do know that he ended up stabbing him several
times and Adrian Greenwood bled to death.
Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
A seasoned killer would know not to use the sort
of knife that Danaher probably picked up from his victim's
kitchen still that seems to be what Danaher took.
Speaker 15 (01:01:13):
The knife is a large kitchen knife. It's not an
ideal murder weapon. It might seem like one, but it's
really it's really not an ideal murder weapon. If you
think about what a kitchen knife is designed for, it's
designed for slicing and cutting. It's not designed for repeatedly
stabbing into somebody. And so if you have a long
knife like that, you might think that bodies are easy
(01:01:34):
to stab, but actually getting a knife through the skin
is quite difficult. And then may it may go into
the body, okay, But then if it hits bone, it's
going to bend again. So if you're repeatedly doing that
with this long knife, it will bend, and if it's
a cheap knife, the blade may snap off.
Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
Michael Danaher's descent from a happily married man and loving
father to killer was complete. What he was about to
do was finish the job that he had come for.
Speaker 9 (01:02:01):
After he'd killed Adrian Greenwood by stabbing him multiple times.
Danaha was said looking around for things to steal.
Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
He took Greenwood's wallet and his phone on his earlier
walk along the iFly road Danaher will have seen the
Greenwood received no visitors. He may well have felt confident
of not being interrupted. He walked throughout the ground and
first floor of the house, stepping in the blood of
(01:02:33):
his victim, and then he left. What he did next
has few parallels and exposed both a bizarre state of
mind and a total absence of understanding how a later
investigation might work. The amateur criminal had already made a
catalog of mistakes. His next one is perhaps the most memorable.
(01:02:56):
In the case of the murder of the Oxford bookseller,
Michael Danaher took out his phone in broad daylight and
captured his image.
Speaker 9 (01:03:09):
When he left after two hours, he took a selfie
outside the property, showing himself there.
Speaker 17 (01:03:17):
Danaher, after he'd murdered Greenwood, even took a selfie at
Greenwood's house.
Speaker 1 (01:03:24):
Well.
Speaker 17 (01:03:24):
Of course, that photograph contains a lot of metadata that
would be able to place Danaher at the house at
that time.
Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
A selfie which displayed the blood of Michael Danaher from
a cut that he seems to have sustained during the attack.
Speaker 15 (01:03:43):
I don't know what Danaher was thinking taking a selfie
of himself with blood on his face. But what he
should have known is that one of the first things
police do these days when they have a suspect is
they seize their mobile phone, they seize their computer records,
and they'll go through and they'll look at those things,
like their photos, the text messag just have sense the
phone calls they've made, and that's all evidence against them.
Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
Danaher did not delete the picture.
Speaker 9 (01:04:08):
He's fresh from killing Greenwood, He's just killed him, he's
got his blood on his face, and he takes his photograph.
Bizarre behavior, having just killed somebody.
Speaker 17 (01:04:18):
What kind of murderer takes a selfie of himself at
the murder scene.
Speaker 1 (01:04:26):
An amateur murderer, perhaps inside the home of Adrian Greenwood,
a bloody scene. Danaher had not tried to cover his tracks.
In fact, he'd stepped in them. He had not considered
the presence of his DNA earlier in the day. He'd
not bothered to consider the presence of security cameras around
(01:04:47):
the city or on buses which regularly traveled up the
iFly Road. There are six million security cameras at work
in Britain at any one time. Experienced criminal know all
about them, not Danaher. It was still daylight when Michael
Danaher left the home of Adrian Greenwood. He had committed
(01:05:10):
only the second crime of his life. The first had
been a failed aggravated burglary and extortion. The second had
been theft and murder. Both had been desperate attempts to
dig himself out of a debt hole and retain face
for his two children. But the amateur was simply not
equipped to be a criminal. In his bag, he now
(01:05:32):
had the rare copy of Wind in the Willows, the
contents of Adrian Greenwood's wallet, and Greenwood's phone still switched on.
He had parked just off the road that he had
earlier been seen walking along, and now returned to his
Citron Picasso.
Speaker 15 (01:05:52):
He then gets in his car, still carrying Greenwood's mobile phone,
and drives back to Peterborough.
Speaker 9 (01:06:01):
We can tell that he's really got no sense of
how he might be caught, what things he might have
to take care of to make sure that the police can't
follow him, because he takes no steps whatsoever to try
to disguise the fact that he has made that journey.
Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
As daily life continued in the busy city of Oxford,
no alarm had been raised. The horrific murder had been
inside a property at a time when neighbors were not
at home. If aging Greenwood had screamed for help, he
hadn't been heard. Danaher was on his way home, and
(01:06:44):
although the killer had left a trail of evidence, one
key mistake would still be needed to alert detectives to
look for that evidence in the right places to consider
Danaher as a suspect.
Speaker 9 (01:06:57):
Because Danaho was a prephys called character, lived one hundred
plus miles away no connections to the area, it might
have been very difficult to find him and connect him
into the murder.
Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
To find the selfie, they'd have to find the phone
it was taken with. To compare the murder weapon with
knives in Danaher's home, they would need good reason to
search his home. Before police could uncover who had killed
Adrian Greenwood, they would need a lead for them to
connect Danaher to that crime. Even if an image of
(01:07:31):
a suspect would emerge from CCTV, there was no match
to Danaher's face on the National Criminal database.
Speaker 17 (01:07:39):
Danaher had no criminal convictions, not even a caution. He
was completely off the police radar.
Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
With no witnesses and no link between Greenwood and Danaher
in the past, why would detectives begin to suspect him?
There was something else. Adrian Greenwood was not always mister popular.
There was a possibility that he had enemies.
Speaker 9 (01:08:05):
By all accounts, he wasn't an easy man to get
on with. He'd made a number of enemies, both in
his personal and in his business life. There's a number
of stories about him, the most interesting of which perhaps
is that he once is meant to have held a
washing machine installer hostage in his house for a number
(01:08:26):
of hours because he wasn't satisfied that the door on
the machine was working properly. He would have somebody whose
life and the way that they perceived were other people
might make you think that there were lots of people
who had reason to do him harm or to do
him down.
Speaker 1 (01:08:43):
Solving the case of the murder of the Oxford Bookworm
may not be straightforward. By four o'clock on April sixth,
twenty sixteen, Adrian Greenwood's death had still not been reported.
Michael Danaher had time to get away from the crime scene.
He hoped his life could now be turned around, no
(01:09:04):
more debts, some spare money to look after the family.
Back in Peterborough, Michael Danaher has returned to the life
that he was trying to escape. His was a lonely
(01:09:24):
world benge eating, binge, drinking, but he had now taken
action and was about to make more mistakes. It was
time to cash in on his stolen booty.
Speaker 17 (01:09:41):
He puts that book on eBay.
Speaker 1 (01:09:50):
April seventh, twenty sixteen, was a day of showers with
extended periods of spring sunshine in Oxford, as throngs of tourists,
students and locals came and went into commuters headed to
and from work. The body of Agan Greenwood still lay
behind closed doors in the hall of his house that afternoon.
Speaker 9 (01:10:13):
It was discovered on the morning of the seventh of April.
Mister Greenwood's young cleaner comes in to clean the house
as usual, and she's confronted with this horrific scene of
her employer lying dead in the hall in a pool
of blood. And she's just completely shocked by this and
(01:10:33):
becomes hysterical, runs into the street, thereby raising the alarm.
Passes by come to see what the commotion is. One
of them a nurse from the local A and E,
and she goes in to try and assist, but of
course Adrian Greenwood is long dead.
Speaker 1 (01:10:49):
In the city of fictional crime stories, a real life
murder mystery had begun.
Speaker 15 (01:10:57):
The police arrive, they already know it's a murdercy. One
of the first things they're going to be doing is
photographing the scene in detail and taking a video to
note the position of all the objects and the body.
They can be taking close up pictures of the body
before they move anything. They're then going to be collecting evidence,
so they'll be looking for signs of a struggle.
Speaker 17 (01:11:19):
Police turn up at Adrian Greenwood's house and they start
a full forensic examination. They discover that Adrian's phone, wallet
and bank cards are missing.
Speaker 1 (01:11:33):
Because Danaher had never committed crimes for which he had
been convicted, there was no immediate match between DNA founded
the scene and on the national database.
Speaker 5 (01:11:44):
My appeal to the public to day is twofold. First
of all, anybody that knows mister Greenwood has seen him
recently or has had any contact with him, either professionally
or personally, and hasn't spoken to the police to make contact,
we will do with all information that we receive sensitively.
(01:12:05):
And secondly you'll see a Clifford CCTV on the screen.
This CCTV was taken in Sainsbury's in Kidlington in the
early evening of Tuesday, the fifth of April, just before
six o'clock. That's the last sighting that we have of
mister Greenwood.
Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
Detectives discover that mister Greenwood has an occasionally prickly personality.
They hear how he locked a delivery man inside his
Ifley Road home when angered with the quality of a
product that the world of rare books in which mister
Greenwood worked saw big money sales. The real reason for
(01:12:44):
the murder soon imagines.
Speaker 9 (01:12:47):
They start looking for a motive, I suppose, and to
see if anything's being stolen and if it actually is
a burglary or robbery. And it becomes apparent that missing
from Adriam over Inwood's house is a very rare one
hundred and eight year old first edition of The Wind
(01:13:07):
in the Willows. And you know this is something which
is of great value to collectors.
Speaker 1 (01:13:15):
As investigators collect and colleid's evidence, no piece of factual
data is too small.
Speaker 5 (01:13:21):
It's important that we're able to build a picture of
mister Greenwood and his lifestyle so that we can carry
out the inquiries that we need to carry out in
order to find out who's responsible for his death.
Speaker 1 (01:13:33):
As they search the property, they discover that mister Greenwood's
credit cards are missing and something else.
Speaker 9 (01:13:39):
It's also discovered that Adrian Greenwood's mobile phone has been
stolen too, and not only has it been stolen, but
it's not been switched off.
Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
Would this prove to be the killer's mistake, the one
which would point detectives in Danna has direction.
Speaker 9 (01:13:58):
So the phone's communicating with the network for a further
three hours after he's murdered, and of course every time
it communicates to the network, it betrays its position and
where it is.
Speaker 15 (01:14:09):
Even though he's not using Greenwood's phone, that phone is
continually signaling to the mobile phone masts that it passes,
and police can track where that phone has been and
where it ends up.
Speaker 17 (01:14:22):
So the police were able to do sell site analysis
that means they can track that phone's movements.
Speaker 9 (01:14:31):
And from that pretty quickly police were able to pluck
well Greenwood's phone has gone from Oxford to Peterborough and
that's a fantastic lead in their investigation because it suddenly
narrows down the field of people who could have committed
this crime to people who were traveling at that time
between Oxford and Peterborough.
Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
Michael Danaher, of course lived in Peterborough, but at that
stage of the inquiry police knew only that someone had
stolen and Adrian Greenwood's phone, that he had probably also
stolen a rare book, that whoever it was was the
key suspect in mister Greenwood's murder, that he had traveled
from Oxford to Peterborough in the hours after the killing.
(01:15:15):
They could still not know that that man was Michael Danaher.
He was at home waiting for someone to buy his
rare copy of Wind in the Willows on eBay, but
the picture was coming together.
Speaker 9 (01:15:30):
The business of not turning off the mobile phone you're
stolen again tells us that Danahoe was a bit of
an amateur at this. Really, I think it's pretty common
knowledge that mobile phones, when switched on on can be
tracked and can be traced.
Speaker 1 (01:15:44):
This was the challenge facing detectives to sift through security
footage featuring multiple thousands of vehicles that had traveled from
Oxford's Ifley Road on April sixth, twenty sixteen, and then
on to Peterborough.
Speaker 9 (01:15:58):
From more than five thousand that this started with, they're
able after a time to narrow it down to just
twenty vehicles. Twenty vehicles that went from Oxford to Peterborough
in the timeframe we're looking at.
Speaker 15 (01:16:12):
Until eventually they found just one car which had followed
that same route as Greenwood's mobile phone. That car was
a blue Citron Picasso and the number plate revealed that
it belongs to Danaher.
Speaker 17 (01:16:25):
The loose around his neck was tightening.
Speaker 1 (01:16:30):
Danaher was oblivious. He was still hoping for a big
sale of Wind in the Willows to make a new stars.
Then came a knock on the door.
Speaker 9 (01:16:40):
All this analysis, which sounds like a mountain of work,
the Thames Valley Major Crime Team achieved in just three days,
and so by the tenth of April they have their
suspect arrested. They've gone Fifty year old Michael Danaher is
arrested on suspicion of the murder of Adrian Greenwood.
Speaker 1 (01:17:00):
It had been around one hundred hours since Michael Danaher
had committed just the second crime of his life. Was
he about to pay for it by spending a life
behind bars. As Oxford had woken to the news of
(01:17:26):
a bloody murder in the shadow of its world famous colleges,
people living in the city may have expected the lengthy
police inquiry would be needed. In fact, just four days
after the murder, the police had a man in their sights,
Michael Danaher.
Speaker 9 (01:17:44):
When he's arrested Danaher rheminly denies allegations. Nothing to me,
don't know anything about it.
Speaker 15 (01:17:51):
Once Danaher has become a murder suspect, police get a
warrant and they go and look in his flat. They
find several things which are really really incriminating. For one thing,
they find a pair of boots with blood still on them.
Speaker 9 (01:18:06):
The first thing that police saw when they entered Danaher's
home was that there were a pair of blooded boots
on the carpet, on the mat. He hadn't even washed
them off, let alone get rid of them.
Speaker 17 (01:18:19):
Those boots had the blood of Adrian Greenwood on them.
Speaker 1 (01:18:24):
Dana has mistakes are coming home to roost.
Speaker 17 (01:18:28):
They find an absolute treasure trove of evidence.
Speaker 9 (01:18:33):
A stun gun which is disguised as an iPhone. You know,
it's not the sort of thing that the law abiding
gentle giant may have in his house, you would think so.
Speaker 15 (01:18:40):
Not only did danaher leave this massive digital footprint, he
then kept hold of the book that he's stolen and
left it sitting around in his flat.
Speaker 9 (01:18:51):
That enabled them to search eBay records, and indeed, Dana
had already listed this first edition of Wind in the
Willows on eBay and they had that record of it.
Speaker 1 (01:19:04):
Yet more evidence is discovered on Danahu's computer.
Speaker 15 (01:19:08):
Once they start looking at what's on that laptop, they
find this Excel spreadsheet hit list, which besides Adrian Greenwood's
name and the expected take rare books and the Modus Any,
they also find several wealthy celebrities names, including Kate Moss
and Simon Cowell.
Speaker 9 (01:19:26):
He had a list, a hit list of his intended
targets on this madcap scheme. He had to go and
rob the wealthy to pay his STPs off.
Speaker 1 (01:19:36):
Detectives are looking for a match to the knife handle
discovered at the crime scene. It doesn't take them long.
Speaker 15 (01:19:43):
They find an envelope containing this broken knife blade which
has Adrian Greenwood's blood still on it, and.
Speaker 9 (01:19:51):
Of course that's been able to be physically matched back
to the pandle that was found at the scene in
Adrian Greenwood's house where he was married. So the evidence
now is mounting up. It's virtually game, set and match.
It's such strong and such persuasive evidence.
Speaker 1 (01:20:09):
There is more to come. The evidence that Danaher himself
had sent from Ifley Road.
Speaker 9 (01:20:15):
The selfie with the blood still on his face.
Speaker 17 (01:20:18):
That photograph contains data which put Danaher at the scene
of the crime at the time of the crime, and
Danaher actually had blood on his face when he took
that photograph. It is stupidity beyond compare.
Speaker 9 (01:20:39):
Danaher made a catalog of errors in his crimes. He
had the hit list at home. It was easily findable
that showed that the amount of premeditation that was He
used his own car. He was completely oblivious to close
circuit television and automatic number plate recognition when he used
that car for that journey.
Speaker 1 (01:21:00):
Search of his flat unearthed amongst the detritus of Danaher's
life the book that he thought would change everything.
Speaker 9 (01:21:06):
They found the first edition winded the Willow's Book, one
hundred and eight year old, fifty thousand pounds, antique book
that Danaher was willing to sell an abay.
Speaker 1 (01:21:16):
The catalog of mistakes that Danaher had made seemed never ending.
Speaker 9 (01:21:21):
It's almost as if he was trying to be caught.
You know, you couldn't really do much more other than
phone the police as soon as you'd finish and say
come and get me. There was a lot of work
in this case for the investigation team, and they did
it very well and very swiftly. But I have to
say it wasn't difficult. Pointen someone was making all the errors,
(01:21:41):
like Michael Danaho was.
Speaker 1 (01:21:43):
Which of the errors proved to be the turning point
which led officers to Danaher's door. Rarely can a murder
inquiry have been so led by one piece of compelling
evidence to complete the picture of the suspected killer.
Speaker 15 (01:21:58):
Danah has really fatal stake was taking Greenwood's phone, because
that enabled police to track the journey that the phone
traveled on and then narrow down the cars that had
similarly traveled that route to pinpoints.
Speaker 9 (01:22:11):
Danaher he kept Adrian greenwood mobile phone switched on for
three out of.
Speaker 17 (01:22:17):
That was like putting a tracker in your pocket. It
put him from Greenwood's house back to his apartment. The
evidence trial was substantial, It was water tight, It was irrefutable.
Speaker 9 (01:22:33):
They never have got to him as a potential suspect
if he hadn't left the phone switched on, so the
knew to look in Peterborough.
Speaker 1 (01:22:42):
The case against Michael Danaher was compelling, and given the
number of mistakes made by the killer, it might be
considered as an easy arrest, not necessarily the case.
Speaker 17 (01:22:53):
Even when you're confronted by a frankly quite dumb murderer
like Michael Danaher, you have to get the evidence right.
You cannot take your foot off the pedal or for
a moment be complacent. As much evidence as you may have,
you still have to present it properly, thoroughly to the court.
(01:23:16):
You don't want them getting away.
Speaker 1 (01:23:20):
But aside from the forensic and physical evidence, Danaher's own
excuses were as weak as the thinking which went into
the crime.
Speaker 9 (01:23:28):
When he was asked to explain this hit list spreadsheet
at court, Danah has said it was put on his
computer by somebody else, a mystery man who he was
unwilling to name. Of course, it was just such a
ridiculous story that it wasn't believed by the jury, and
he was duly convinced of murder, and the aggravating factors
(01:23:51):
of the premeditation and the desire for financial gain from
it meant that he was given a recommendation he should
serve thirty four years before he's eligible to apply for parole.
And not only that, he got another seven year sentence
for possessing the stun gun because that technically is a firearm,
(01:24:12):
and of course it's a firearm that's prohibited and a
serious offense.
Speaker 1 (01:24:19):
The sentences for murder and possession of a stun gun
are to run concurrently. When Adrian Greenwood moved as a
student to Oxford, he soon learned the value of scarcity.
The economic scholar knew how supply and demand worked. If
he could find something hard to come by which others wanted,
(01:24:42):
he would benefit. Greenwood was a natural researcher, good at
separating the commonplace from those books which would command a
high price. He was oblivious to those who would seek
a quick win. Men down on their luck like Michaeldanaher,
(01:25:05):
a phantasist and inept killer who left a trail of
evidence to prove the case against him, but who might
have gone away with his crime but for the rookie
mistake of stealing a phone from the scene of a
murder and leaving it switched on as he drove all
the way home. That was the killer's mistake which led
detectives to the door of Michael Danaher