CLEVELAND -- Police have started Monday searching abandoned and vacant homes in a 6-mile radius of an Imperial Avenue home where six badly decomposing bodies were found.

Additionally, police said they will search all the former homes of Anthony Sowell and seek a warrant to get DNA as part of the investigation after finding six badly decomposed bodies in a home on Imperial Avenue.

Anthony Sowell, 50, was arrested Saturday.

The Cuyahoga County Coroner's Office said all of the victims were female and five of the six were strangled. The decomposition has made it difficult to determine how one victim died, spokesman Powell Caesar said.

None of the victims has been identified but the coroner said they are all African American.

Their decomposing bodies could have by lying at the Imperial Avenue home for weeks, if not months or years, Caesar said.

Meanwhile, forensic teams will search the home with cadaver dogs.

Bodies In Home

On Thursday, Cleveland police discovered two badly decomposed bodies on the third floor of the house after they tried to serve an arrest and search warrant for Sowell.

On Friday, a third body was found in a freshly dug grave under the stairs in the basement of the home.

A further search of the house and property Friday found two more bodies in a crawl space, and a sixth body was found in a shallow grave outside the home, Caesar said.

Police said they would have never known how serious a criminal Sowell was if it wasn't for a recent complaint from a Cleveland woman. She told police he tried to rape her.

"A citizen came into the Fourth District Police Station and stated that they saw the suspect on a street called Manor. A zone car responded to the area and located the suspect," said Cleveland Police Chief Michael McGrath.

Police said that shortly after Sowell was arrested walking down Mount Auburn Avenue, he admitted to the killings. Mayor Frank Jackson said the police couldn't have made the arrest without some help.

"I was confident the public would help. Anytime there is an incident of this sort, some kind of heinous crime or event, the public steps up," Jackson said.

Police said Sowell is a registered sex offender and had served 15 years for rape. He got out of prison in 2005.

Sowell has not formally been charged with a crime related to the bodies.