EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio – Police have publicly identified the suspect in the deaths of three U.S. women found wrapped in trash bags, and officers have ended hours of searching without finding more bodies. Police do not plan to continue searching Monday.
East Cleveland Police Chief Ralph Spotts says 35-year-old registered sex offender Michael Madison is in custody and expected to be formally charged Monday.
Sunday’s search looked at about 40 abandoned houses and other areas, but it turned up no more bodies in the neighbourhood where three were found Friday and Saturday.
A medical examiner says the bodies were in advanced stages of decomposition, and it will take days to identify the women and determine how they died
The first body was found Friday in a garage. Two others were found Saturday – one in a backyard and the other in the basement of a vacant house. The bodies, believed to be female, were found about 100 to 200 yards (90 to 180 metres) apart, and authorities say the victims were killed in the last six to 10 days.
The bodies were each in the fetal position, wrapped in several layers of trash bags, Norton said. He said detectives continue to interview the suspect, who used his mother’s address in Cleveland in registering as a sex offender, the mayor said.
“The person in custody, some of the things he said to investigators made us go back today,” the mayor said.
The police chief told volunteers, including community anti-crime activists, to watch for missing floor boards as they looked inside houses.
“The MO of each body we’ve found so far was wrapped up in a lot of garbage bags, so if you see anything … and it might not look like it’s a body, but it could be – because each bag, the way he had each person was in a fetal position,” Spotts told searchers. “It didn’t look like a person could actually fit in the bag.”
One neighbour, Nathenia Crosby, said she was familiar with the suspect and had seen him walking through the neighbourhood. She said she had told him to stop talking to her daughter and warned him after seeing him talk to her cousin.
“It’s very scary, especially when he used to be talking to my daughter,” said Crosby, 48. “But I told him he was too old to be talking to my daughter because she was only 19. When I found out how old he was, I said, ‘You need to move on, she’s too young.”‘
The police, FBI, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department went through yards and abandoned houses over about three blocks Saturday and used dogs trained to find cadavers. They planned to expand the search Sunday.
The neighbourhood in East Cleveland, which has some 17,000 residents, has many abandoned houses and authorities want to be thorough, the mayor said.
It’s the third recent high-profile case in the Cleveland area that involves attacks on women.
In May, three women who separately vanished a decade ago were found captive in a run-down house. Ariel Castro, a former school bus driver, has been charged with nearly 1,000 counts of kidnap, rape and other crimes. He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
Castro is accused of repeatedly restraining the women, sometimes chaining them to a pole in a basement, to a bedroom heater or inside a van. The charges say one of the women tried to escape and he assaulted her with a vacuum cord around her neck. He also fathered a daughter with one captive, authorities said.
In 2009, Sowell was arrested after a woman escaped from his house and said she had been raped there. Police found the mostly nude bodies of 11 women throughout the home.
Sowell’s victims ranged in age from 24 to 52, all were recovering or current drug addicts and most died of strangulation; some had been decapitated, and others were so badly decomposed that coroners couldn’t say with certainty how they died. The bodies were disposed of in garbage bags and plastic sheets.
Prosecutors described Sowell in court papers as “the worst offender in the history of Cuyahoga County and arguably the State of Ohio.”
He was found guilty in 2011 and sentenced to death.
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Associated Press writers Andrew Welsh-Huggins in East Cleveland and Peggy Harris in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
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