Police were searching for more bodies yesterday after finding the remains of at least eleven people at the home of a convicted rapist, including a skull in a bucket.

As officers began to demolish the house brick by brick and widened the search to abandoned homes in a run-down area of Cleveland, Ohio, Anthony Sowell appeared in court charged with murder, rape and kidnap. A prosecutor described him as“incredibly dangerous”. Mr Sowell, who spent 15 years in prison for choking and raping a woman, was remanded in custody.

The authorities unearthed the four latest bodies in the back garden this week. They found the skull wrapped in a paper bag in a bucket in the basement. After using DNA to try to identify the remains, police established that the skull belonged to an eleventh victim, only one of whom has been identified so far: Tonia Carmichael, a 53-year old drug addict who disappeared a year ago. “It appears that this man had an insatiable appetite that he had to fill,” Michael McGrath, the chief of the local police, said.

Last night police said they had finished digging in the back garden and were about to start tearing down the walls. “We’re going to go bit by bit, piece by piece,” Ed Tomba, the deputy chief of Cleveland Police, said.

Mr Sowell, a former US Marine who has struggled with drug and alcohol misuse for years, moved into the apartment in the crime-ridden district of East Cleveland after his release from jail in 2005. He had been convicted of the rape in 1989 of a woman who was three months pregnant. She had gone to Mr Sowell’s home voluntarily, she later told police. But when she tried to leave he bound her hands and feet with a tie and a belt and gagged her with a rag. The victim told police: “He choked me real hard because my body started tingling. I thought I was going to die.”

Mr Sowell is said to have lived on unemployment benefits after being laid off from a factory job two years ago. He was often seen asking for money or collecting scrap metal from the area to sell. Neighbours had complained of the foul smell around his rented home.

Zack Reed, a local councillor whose mother lives a block away, said that he called the city health department in 2007 after a resident complained of an odour that “smelt like a dead body”. He said: “We don’t want to point fingers but clearly, something could have been done differently.”

Mr Sowell, as a registered sex offender, was required to report regularly to the sheriff’s department, but officers did not have the power to enter his house. They visited it on September 22, hours before a woman reported being raped and choked with an electrical extension cord.

The woman, who knew Mr Sowell, said that he offered to share four bottles of cheap malt liquor with her at his home. She went upstairs to a room that contained only a chair, a blanket and the extension cord, she said.

After drinking for some time Mr Sowell became angry, punched her in the face and began choking her with the cord. As she passed out, he raped her, she told police.

Officers went to his home last Thursday night with an arrest warrant for the alleged rape. Mr Sowell was not there but the officers found two bodies on the living room floor. Two more bodies were found in a crawl space inside the house, another in a shallow grave in the basement and a sixth in a freshly dug grave in the back garden.

All the women were black and at least five had been strangled. Some of the bodies were so decomposed that an expert from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History was called in to help to establish the time of death.

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