In the US, authorities say they have confirmed a total of at least 11 victims whose remains were found in the Cleveland home of a registered sex offender.

The Cuyahoga County coroner's office said that a skull found in a bucket in Anthony Sowell's basement belonged to a body they have not yet found.

Authorities also say they have identified one of the victims as 53-year-old Tonia Carmichael, who disappeared a year ago.

Police Chief Michael McGrath said her remains were buried in the backyard and had marks indicating she was strangled.

Carmichael's daughter Markiesha Carmichael-Jacobs said her mother struggled with drug addiction and frequented Sowell's neighbourhood.

Police were searching for more bodies on Wednesday 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.

This comes as Sowell was ordered held without bond on Wednesday.

He appeared in court under tight security, wearing a blue paper jumpsuit typically used when an inmate might be a suicide risk.

His wrists and ankles were manacled, and he walked into court staggering slightly.

Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Brian Murphy called Sowell "an incredibly dangerous threat to the public" and said he could face the death penalty.

He faces five aggravated murder counts for victims whose cause of death has been ruled strangling.

In addition, he is accused of rape, felonious assault and kidnapping, relating to a September 22 attack on a woman at his home.

Public defender Kathleen DeMetz told the judge that Sowell has medical problems, including a heart pacemaker and cardiac medication.

He was laid off two years ago and receives unemployment compensation.

Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller said six bodies were found inside the house and five were recovered from the yard.

"Because of the level of decomposition and decay in the bodies, fingerprints and visual recognition will not be possible," Miller said.

It could take days or weeks to identify the bodies using dental records or DNA mouth-swab samples from relatives.

Cleveland City Councilman Zack Reed expressed "astonishment" at the crime on Tuesday, noting that it took place "in the most residential ward in the entire city of Cleveland".

Many local residents have begun to question how police could have missed the warning signs, including a gag-inducing stench that hung over the area for years.

"Knowing that my office actually called the health department in 2007 to say that one of my residents called in and said there is a foul odour across the street and it smells like a dead body...  And to know that from 2007 to this present day, that we still have this tragedy going and we are still taking bodies, it makes you angry," Reed said.

For the past few years, Sowell's neighbours thought the foul smell enveloping their street corner had been coming from a brick building where workers churned out sausage and cheese.

It got so bad that the owners of Ray's Sausage replaced their sewer line and grease traps.

The case now goes before the county grand jury.