Don't be too surprised. Look up Anthony Sowell. He was a serial killer in Cleveland. LE once was called due to a woman jumping out of a second floor window to get away from him. He told LE she was his girlfriend and they had had an argument. LE believed him, not her. LE left. That was a few years and I believe a couple of women before he finally got caught. The only way he got caught was because of the overwhelming smell in the neighborhood that caught the attention of a couple of LE who were serving an unrelated warrant on him.
Same general area. So it wouldn't surprise me.
Wow. that sounds eerily like Jeffery Dahmer
It just floors me that this could happen in an area so densely populated and go totally unnoticed.
I live in a more rural area where there is areas where houses are completely hidden by the trees- I could understand how something could go unseen here.(even though it is a small community where pretty much everyone knows someone who knows someone else- kind of a 6 degrees thing.
In the mid 90's, my second home (as an adult woman) was on West 107th, just a few blocks north of where the girls disappeared from. I lived there for 2 years and never knew ANY of my neighbors. I briefly met the next door neighbors when they had a yard sale. They were friendly, but that was the end of the interaction. When I was outside, they wouldn't even look my way. No hi, nod, acknowledgement or anything. I never seen a person on the other side. I would see neighbors out on the porch regularly and some knew eachother, but it was few. I likely would have never known if something strange was going on, since there was always something strange and a lot of suspicion. This area was getting pretty rough back then.
I was waiting for a family member in front of a building one day. I was propositioned 3 times in 5 minutes, because everyone thought I was a prostitute. I was standing in a doorway of a storefront, wearing a regular pair of modest shorts and a t-shirt. No make-up, hair undone, at 4pm in the afternoon.
I once walked through my neighborhood after dark. I was approached by every unsavory character in my path, assuming that I was "looking for something". This is definitely an area where is is best to be very street wise.
The further you move east toward downtown, the longer these areas have been impoverished. Going up Lorain Road from where these girls were from, to where they were found, it just gets worse. The east side (where Anthony Sowell lived) is another story. Most of the east side of Cleveland has been impoverished for generations.
It doesn't surprise me at all that this went undetected. It is really sad that people can turn a blind eye. Maybe they are just desensitized to the unusual things going on around them?
I also think that people tend to "mind their own business", since doing otherwise may get them in trouble. (Being known as a snitch)
I am really sad about this. I loved living in Cleveland and have great memories of growing up there. We ran the neighborhood without much of a care. We knew most of the neighbors. There was a time when people watched over eachother in these tight knit communities. I think that my age group was the last to see the tight knit communities that this city had. The neighborhoods have changed a lot over the years. People who had been in areas for generations have started moving on and others move in and they don't know eachother anymore.