Tishana Culver

CLEVELAND - Tishana Culver, 31, lived with her family on Imperial Avenue, just houses away from Anthony Sowell’s house.

Her family said they did not report her as a missing person because they thought she was staying with her boyfriend in Akron. Her family had not spoken to her in almost a year.

"I thought she was with her boyfriend... Because he lived in Akron, and she was going back and forth between Cleveland and Akron," Culver's mother Yvonne Williams-McNeil said. "I thought that's where she was all the time."

"I didn't know where she was, but I just prayed about it. Wherever she was, she was in God's hands," Williams said. After the findings on Imperial Avenue, Williams was told by detectives "she was one of the ladies found in the house down the street. She lived five doors down."

Culver struggled with crack cocaine and marijuana, and even spent time in a treatment facility, which her mother did not feel was working. At the age of 17, her fiancé was shot and killer. Culver also struggled with mental health problems.

According to assistant prosecutor Rick Bombik, her body was found in a crawl space off of a third-floor room. Her wrists were bound with rope.

"Imperial Avenue was all I knew… when I found out, I was shocked," Culver’s sister Latanya Irby said during the trial, about finding out about the bodies on Imperial Avenue. Irby said she thought her sister would call to talk about the discovery on the street they knew so well, but that call never came.

Her family did not give the medical examiner’s office a DNA sample because she was already in the CODIS system, a database of convicted offenders.

"We're all hanging in the best way we can and we have a long task ahead of us. We're going to achieve it and I just want to say at last we got some closure,” Culver’s step-father John Walker told NewsChannel5, following her funeral.

Culver was the mother of five children, three now live with their grandmother and the other two live with their aunt. She was remembered as a good person who was loved by her family.