Finding Ray’s Sausage in East Cleveland on Google Earth
Lucky gave me the idea: searching for aerial photographs
of Alice Sebold’s path post-rape—from a friend’s house, through
the Thornden Park Amphitheatre—before she somehow got back to her dorm.
I could read no more after zooming to each location.
Days later: the news of Anthony Sowell, who requested help in prison
and got nothing, before the almost-snuff-film reports, his bipolar
rapes and abuse. The stories that followed seemed unreal: coercion with King
Cobra malt liquor, unknown smells from his house
next door to Ray’s Sausage, while the cops ignored every call for years.
Finally, after one woman’s report, the cops entered, found eleven
bodies in crawl spaces, under the porch, skull in a bucket on the third floor.
Anthologies exist of artifacts: sad clowns painted by Gacy,
Fish’s letter to Gracie Budd’s parents, and the horned, cartoon
demons of Richard Ramirez. But what will remain of Sowell
in the future? Talks of the wrong side of town, racism, the constant
beating of women? Now I can’t stop: aerial views from films,
headlines of tragedies, property lines and their clusters of houses—
as if we could tear off roofs with our hands, never able to look inside. 