Between 2007 and 2009, at least eleven black women were raped and murdered on Cleveland's East Side by a man named Anthony Sowell, their bodies hidden in and around his house for months while police failed to act on repeated complaints. Journalist Wilbert L. Cooper, who grew up in Cleveland, returns to the city to ask how Sowell got away with it for two years. He interviews survivors including Lori Frazier, who escaped her relationship with Sowell and got into recovery while other women did not, along with family members of the dead and the police officers who eventually built the case that sent Sowell to death row. The film treats the killings as more than the work of one man, tracing how poverty, addiction, race, and the East Side's low priority with law enforcement let the disappearances go unexamined for years. It stays close to the neighborhood and the people who lived through it rather than reconstructing the crimes themselves.