Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times
Relatives of Shirellda Helen Terry, a missing 18-year-old, comforted each other Tuesday. Later that day, she was identified as one of three women found dead in East Cleveland. More Photos »
CLEVELAND — On the blocks where the slain women were found, their bodies wrapped in plastic, nearly one in three homes is boarded up, some stripped of copper pipes and electrical wiring by scavengers that a Cleveland councilman compared to locusts.
Once again, a chilling crime has drawn national attention to Cleveland, exposing how violence festers in semi-abandoned neighborhoods where social bonds have weakened and women seem especially targeted as victims.
The police on Monday charged a registered sex offender with murdering three women and dumping their bodies in a garage, an overgrown field and the basement of a boarded-up house. The killings, in the suburb of East Cleveland, came two months after the escape of three women held captive for a decade by an unemployed bus driver in a boarded-up house in West Cleveland, an episode that plunged the city into introspection about how well people know their neighbors.
"This is what happens when you have poverty," Gov. John R. Kasich, who was in Cleveland on Monday, told reporters. "It's what happens when you have individuals who are very dangerous inside the community and somehow lose track of them."
The crimes also exposed how a city that is proud of its downtown business revival and world-class cultural and medical institutions continues to harbor pockets of despair and social breakdown.
The governor, a Republican, happened to be in town to announce financing for a new road to move traffic through East Cleveland to the thriving University Circle neighborhood, which is home to the Cleveland Clinic, other hospitals and arts institutions.
Supporters of the $324 million project, known as Opportunity Corridor, including Mayor Frank G. Jackson, a Democrat, believe it will help the poor neighborhoods it transects. But Jeffrey Johnson, a City Council member whose ward is in the path of the project, said it was really a way to speed suburbanites to jobs and shopping while bypassing poverty. "Instead of restoring the streets, they go around them," he said. "It's a slap in the face."
"It's symbolic of the problem," he added.
Cleveland was hit especially hard by the foreclosure crisis, and its legacy of abandoned homes has frayed neighborhoods, leaving behind those who cannot afford to get out, while providing shelter to people on the social margins. Areas with many vacant and abandoned homes are breeding grounds for crime, local officials said.
Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County receive nearly 20 percent of the population leaving state prisons, with many returning to the neighborhoods on the East side, said Ronnie A. Dunn, an associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University and a member of the criminal justice task force within Cleveland's N.A.A.C.P., which has proposed a City Hall forum on women's safety.
"Unfortunately a lot of these crime victims, they tend to be African-American women or minority women," he said.
They included 11 black women murdered by the city's most notorious serial killer, Anthony Sowell, whose killings came to light in 2009. Professor Dunn called the case "Cleveland's Hurricane Katrina" for exposing neighborhoods of poverty and social collapse.
Mr. Johnson, the councilman for Ward 8 on the East Side, said: "Most people living in inner cities are great people. But they're afraid. They won't talk about the crazy guy down the street who talks aggressively to women."
The suburb of East Cleveland, once the home of John D. Rockefeller, has been in decline for much of the century since. It lost 40 percent of its population from 1990 to 2011, as those who could afford to moved out, said Robert L. Fischer of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University.
Mayor Gary Norton of East Cleveland said serial killers could be found anywhere. The suspect charged this week in the three recent murders, Michael Madison, 35, pleaded guilty to attempted rape in 2002 and was registered as a sex offender at an address in Cleveland.
But residents of the neighborhood where the bodies were found said he was living in a nearby apartment on Shaw Avenue, where he was well known as a marijuana dealer.
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