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At 4 a.m. on December 31, 1999, 20 hours before the turn of the millennium, a car rolled to a muted stop in the Guajia Bay subdivision, west of Del Rio , Texas .
A bearded man with a mullet haircut got out and padded quietly toward a double-wide trailer, home of Terry and Crystal Harris and their kids. He whispered reassurance to a caged pet Rottweiler in the backyard and approached the pen to allow the animal a whiff of his scent.
The man used the blade he was carrying, a 12-inch boning knife, to try to trip the lock on the back door. That failed, and so did an attempt to enter the home through a rear window that held an air conditioner.
He walked around to an open window on the front of the house. He tipped over a metal tub to use as a step, removed a screen and hoisted himself up and in.
The man found himself in the bedroom of Justin Harris, 14, who was blind. The boy was roused awake, but he thought the noise was his siblings horsing around.
Justin called out, "Will y'all stop coming into my room!"
The man moved out of Justin's room to the next bedroom. He opened the door and flicked a flame to his cigarette lighter. There slept a Harris family friend, Marque Surles, 7. In the master bedroom, he flicked his lighter again and found Crystal Harris asleep with her daughter Lori, 12.
Finally, in the fourth bedroom he found what he was looking for.
In the bottom rack of a bunk bed lay Kaylene "Katy" Harris, 13.
The man lay down beside the girl and nudged her awake.
She looked at him sleepily and said, "What are you doing here?"
The man held a hand over her mouth and menaced Katy with the knife.
He drew the blade down her body and deftly sliced off her shorts, panties and bra, as if he'd done that sort of thing before.
When the man began fondling her, Katy wiggled free, stood up and screamed, "Go get mama!"
Only then did the intruder realize that a second girl, Krystal Surles, 10 years old and 80 pounds, was asleep on the top bunk.
The man poked his knife at Katy and turned on the bedroom light. Seeing blood, the girl said, "You cut me!"
The intruder moved in behind Katy.
"He had his hand over her mouth," Krystal Surles would later say. "She was struggling. She told me with her eyes to stay there and not move, and so I didn't."
As Krystal watched, the man dragged the blade of his knife across Katy's throat once, and then repeated the motion a second time.
"She just fell," said Krystal. "And then she started making really bad noises, like she was gagging for air but couldn't get any because of the blood."
The man continued his knife work after Katy collapsed. A coroner would catalogue 16 stab wounds, three of which went all the way through her body, in addition to the two gashes to the throat.
The intruder moved toward Krystal Surles.
"I told him, 'I'll be quiet. I promise. I won't say anything. It's Katy making the noise,'" she would later say.
But the intruder showed no mercy.
"He reached over and cut my throat," she said. "I just lay there and pretended I was dead. If he knew I was alive, he would come back and kill me for sure."
The assailant switched off the light and walked out, leaving through the front door. After a minute, Krystal heard a car start and drive off. She put a hand to her throat and ran outdoors. Assuming that everyone in the house had been killed, she made her way to a neighbor's house a quarter-mile away.
There, retiree Herb Betz was up early to watch TV coverage of the arrival of the millennium in Australia . He heard a door knock and peered through the peephole. There stood Krystal Surles in a T-shirt, boxer shorts and socks. She was awash in blood.
The child was unable to speak. The knife had severed her windpipe and grazed the sheathing of her carotid artery. She had come within a millimeter of Katy Harris' fate.
"Her little eyes were saying to me, 'Help me,'" Betz told Texas journalist John MacCormack.
Betz dialed 911. As she lay waiting for help, Krystal asked for writing instruments, and she penned three brief notes:
- "The Harrises are hurt."
- "Tell them to hurry."
- "Will I live?"
Betz said, "I kissed her on the forehead and told her several times she'd be all right. I didn't believe it. I thought she'd die on my kitchen floor."
Medical rescuers found the girl in shock, her body convulsing.
She was raced to a Del Rio hospital, and then flown by helicopter to University Hospital in San Antonio , where surgeons worked for hours to repair the damage done by the five-inch cut across her throat.
Back at the Guajia Bay subdivision, rescuers found Katy Harris dead, although the others in the house were unharmed.
Krystal Surles awoke groggy on New Year's Day, her throat heavily bandaged. Texas rangers and county sheriff's investigators were anxious to debrief the girl about her attacker, but they were careful to allow her time to recover.
But soon after regaining consciousness, Krystal was ready to get to work. She used gestures to demand a pen and paper and began writing descriptions of her assailant.
Authorities called in Shirley Timmons, a forensic artist, from her home in Midland to work with Krystal from her San Antonio hospital bed.
The first sketch showed a dark-eyed, round-faced man with long brown hair and a full beard. The image resembled a swarthy Chuck Norris.
Cops quickly distributed the description and image, and they pressed the Harris family to mull over friends and acquaintances for a match.
Nothing was missing from the home. Law enforcers assumed the murder was motivated by sexual deviance, not robbery. And they suspected the killer was acquainted with the Harrises before climbing in the window-and that Katy Harris had been his intended target.
The two Surles girls were staying with the Harrises while her mother, Pam, was moving from Kansas to Del Rio over the holiday. The families had been friends in Kansas before the Harrises moved to Texas in 1995, and Pam Surles and her daughters were now joining them there.
A group left Del Rio at 6 p.m. December 30 for the 13-hour drive north to collect Surles' belongings. Those on the trip included Terry Harris, adoptive father of the murder victim, Pam Surles and her boyfriend, Doug Luker.
They turned around and rushed back to Texas when they were informed of the murder and assault.
When Luker heard the description and saw the sketch, it reminded him of a man the moving group had seen at a Del Rio gas station just before they left for Kansas .
He remembered the man's name as Tom or Tommy. He seemed to be a friend of Terry Harris, Luker said, and he worked as a salesman at Amigo Auto Sales.
Luker shared his recollections with Texas Ranger John Allen, who tracked down the owner of the car lot by phone. The man was uncooperative with Allen, but he quickly reconsidered.
He phoned the Val Verde County Sheriff's Office and gave a friend there the name of the employee. Rangers searched state crime files and came up with a picture of the man-beardless, but it was the best they could do.
They went to Krystal Surles' hospital room and showed her a photo array of six men. She studied the pictures purposefully, and then pointed at one as the intruder.
It was the used-car salesman from Del Rio . His name was Tommy Lynn Sells.
Investigators prepared an arrest warrant and paid a visit early on January 2 to the trailer Sells shared with his wife, Jessica Levrie, and her four children.
He went along without rancor. He didn't ask why he was being taken in, and investigators didn't offer to tell him.
But during the ride to the sheriff's office, Sells turned to Val Verde County Sheriff's Lt. Larry Pope and said, "Well, I guess we've got a lot to talk about."
Over the next few months, Sells talked and talked about a singular life of killing.
The lifelong transient admitted the murder of Katy Harris and the throat-slashing of her friend. He said he killed an entire family in Illinois , a mother and daughter in Missouri , a teenage girl in Lexington , Ky. , a drifter in Arizona , a child in San Antonio . And there were many more-a string of perhaps 20 murders across America that spanned three decades, by Sells' account.
Sells began using the nickname "Coast to Coast," the geographic spread of his carnage.
"He wants to clean the slate and get everything behind him," Ranger Allen told reporters. "He's told us he wants closure for himself and for the families of the victims he's killed. Closure was his word."
Sells' court-appointed attorney, Victor Garcia, said he advised his client to stop talking.
"I said, 'Well, I understand you've already confessed to everything but the kitchen sink,' and he said, 'Yeah. I want this over,'" Garcia told journalist MacCormack. "I suggested to him that he not talk anymore, and he said, 'I'm not going to stop. I don't need a lawyer.'"
The country has had more prolific--perhaps even more depraved--serial killers.
But several features of his work make Tommy Lynn Sells standout in the pantheon of American murderers.
Sells, nearly illiterate with an eighth-grade education, spent his life as a boozy, doped-up drifter. Yet he managed to fly beneath the radar of law enforcement for 20 years-particularly unusual in that most of his victims were not hobos and hookers, who typically occupy the lowest-priority slot at the back of the homicide-investigation file drawer.
He spent time in prisons for a number of other offenses, and that crime pedigree was readily available to law enforcers. But he was never even a suspect in a murder until he failed in his attempt to kill Krystal Surles.
His pattern, to the extent that he had one, was simple: kill and move on.
Bud Cooper, a Missouri police investigator, explained to a San Antonio reporter why Sells escaped detection: "If you or I drove across the United States , we'd be fairly easy to follow. We use credit cards and telephones. But this guy takes trains, uses no credit cards, doesn't use checks. It's kind of like chasing a ghost."
The American fascination with crimes and criminals often centers on the workings of the criminal mind. But Sells exhibited none of the evil genius of a Ted Bundy or a Charles Manson.
"He wasn't some strange, far-out-type person," said Sgt. Terry Ward of the Pulaski County Sheriff's Department in Little Rock , Ark. , told the Arkansas Democrat . "He was just a normal person who loved to kill. If you made him mad, he'd kill."
Motivation has been a muddy issue as investigators have reconstructed Sells' life of crime. Some investigators termed him an "opportunist" criminal who would strike when a likely victim appeared.
True-crime author Diane Fanning, who wrote about Sells in "Through the Window," claimed that he killed "with no apparent motive and no common pattern."
Yet the evidence shows that Sells was a sexual predator. Many of his crimes included rape and sexual mutilation, and most of his murders began as deviant assaults, including the murder of Katy Harris.
It is true that Sells killed with many implements, including knives, guns, a baseball bat and various garrotes. And it may be true that some of his crimes were spontaneous rather than calculated.
But his sexual predatory urges became more acute over time, as adolescent girls and petite women-often lonely single mothers-became his victims of choice. His body of criminal work makes one pattern, one motive all too clear: Tommy Lynn Sells was a sexual psychopath who stalked, raped and murdered women and girls.
Sells was born with a twin sister, Tammy Jean, in Oakland on June 28, 1964.
His mother, Nina, had two sons before the twins were born, and three more boys would soon follow.
The children had a non-traditional upbringing, including fundamental questions about parentage. Officially, an insurance agent named William Sells was their father.
But author Fanning said the biological father was Joe Lovins, a used-car salesman. Fanning wrote that Lovins had bailed Williams Sells out of a financial hole, and Sells agreed to claim the children as his own in an insurance scam. Sells' job provided health insurance benefit to the children.
(Much later in life, Tommy Sells would credit Joe Lovins for the fatherly adage that helped him kill so many for so long: "Dead men tell no tales.")
When twins Tommy and Tammy were 18 months old, Nina Sells moved her troupe to St. Louis , where she had kin.
There Tammy contracted meningitis and died. Tommy exhibited the same high fever as his sister, but he survived.
Nina Sells sent her son away to live with her aunt, Bonnie Walpole, from ages 2 to 5. The woman told Fanning that the mother never visited, so she inquired about adopting Tommy. The mother was furious. She took possession of the boy and refused to allow him to visit Walpole .
Tommy Sells became a chronic truant at the extraordinarily early age of 7-an indication of his mother's indifference.
She defended herself to Fanning by saying, "He was the kind of child that, whatever you wanted him to do, he was going to make sure he did not do it. Going to school was one of those things."
At age 8, young Sells was allowed to spend time with a man from a nearby town who had befriended him. He would take the boy on day trips, and the man would lavish gifts and cash on the child. Sells began to sleep at his home with increasing frequency.
The man would later be identified as a pedophile who molested boys, including Sells, for years before he was caught, according to Fanning.
Every aspect of Sells' upbringing seemed tainted by his mother's neglect. Harbingers of behavioral pathologies appeared frequently.
He was allowed to sample alcohol with his grandpa at age 7. He began smoking ditch-weed marijuana at age 10. He crawled into bed naked with his grandma at age 13, and he would later undergo mental examination when he tried to rape his own mother. By age 14 he was off on his own, a boy posing as a man, hopping trains, stealing, and doing what he had to do to survive.
From 1978 to 1999, Sells crisscrossed the country by hopping freights, hitching rides or stealing cars. He spent time in half the states in the union, begging or working as a carny, barber, mechanic and laborer.
A precise accounting of his felonies is impossible; Sells didn't keep a crime diary.
But a murder he committed in July 1985 serves as a prototype.
He was working with a carnival that had set up in Forsyth , Mo. , a town of 1,000 on Table Rock Lake near Branson, then a burgeoning country music center.
Among the visitors to the fair was Ena Cordt, 35, a petite divorcee who scraped by working at a car wash. She was treating her 4-year-old son, Rory, to a night out.
By Sells' account, he met Cordt at the fair, and she invited him back to her home late that night. The authorities found the bludgeoned bodies of the woman and her child three days later.
The way Sells tells the story, he had consensual sex with Cordt, then found her stealing from his backpack. He picked up her son's wooden baseball bat and beat her to death, then killed the child, a potential witness.
There is no telling what really happened. Perhaps he ogled her at the fair, stalked her home, raped and murdered her.
Dead men tell no tales, as Lovins said. Nor do women and innocent children.
After his arrest in Texas , Rangers and FBI agents led Sells on a series of out-of-state field trips to try to confirm his recollections of homicides, some of which were vague, owing perhaps to the passage of time and a haze of substance abuse.
But the rangers used caution in accepting Sells' accounts.
The agency was stung with embarrassment over its handling of serial confessor Henry Lee Lucas. Arrested in 1983, he claimed to have committed hundreds of homicides, and detectives from across the country rushed to Texas in a case-clearing frenzy.
In 1995, the Dallas Times-Herald charged that the Lucas confessions amounted to a hoax abetted by overzealous law enforcers.
With Sells, the rangers were more persnickety about confirming his claims.
For example, Sells told author Fanning that he killed a man with a pistol in Mississippi during a home break-in just weeks after his 16 th birthday, and he claimed an ice-pick murder in Los Angeles the following year. Police discount those claims as unconfirmed.
In March 2000, Sells took a homicide-investigation field trip to Little Rock , Ark. He had lived there in the early 1980s, and he claimed he raped and murdered a woman near Little Rock and pitched her body into a bauxite mine pit. He also claimed he shot a man during a burglary there.
He led police to the mine pit and to the burgled house. It turned out his shot had missed the man, who was alive and well. The mine-pit murder remains unresolved.
Evidence indicates that Sells went on a murderous rampage in the late 1980s. He claims to have killed a dozen people in seven states from 1987 to 1989, literally coast to coast.
The investigative technique for fleshing out details of these cases would go something like this: Sells would say he killed a family in the Midwest or a woman hitchhiking in the southwestern desert on an approximate date, and detectives would set out to find matches. They would then press Sells for details of the crimes, the victims and the settings for comparison to cold cases.
In the fall of 1987, Stephanie Stroh, a 20-year-old free spirit, was hitchhiking across America back home to San Francisco after a year-long trek to Europe and Asia . On October 15, she was standing beside a road with her thumb out in Winnemucca , Nev. , when a roofer driving a stolen truck pulled over to offer a ride.
The roofer, who had drifted into town that summer, was Tommy Sells. By his account, he drove the young woman toward Reno on I-80, pulled off at some point, choked her to death, then dropped her body down a hot spring. Two weeks later, Sells failed to show up at work. He was on the road again. Despite a massive search, Stroh's body was never found.
Some law enforcers believe Sells' account. Others doubt he killed the woman.
But everyone agrees he was responsible for one particularly depraved multiple homicide in Illinois in the fall of 1987.
A few days before Thanksgiving, hunters walking a field near Ina , Ill. (pop. 500), 80 miles east of St. Louis , found the body of Keith Dardeen. He had been shot in the head, and his genitals were mutilated.
In the trailer where he lived, police found tucked in bed the bodies of Dardeen's wife, Elaine and their son, Pete, 3. Each had been bludgeoned to death, and Elaine had been raped and sexually assaulted with the baseball bat the killer used as a murder weapon.
Also in the bed authorities found the body of a newborn daughter, born prematurely during or after the beating administered to Elaine. The infant, too, was beaten to death. The case had been unsolved for 12 years, until the arrest of Sells, who claimed responsibility.
The Ina murders are examples of the frustrations law enforcers and survivors have had in debriefing Sells. They are certain that he killed the Dardeen family, but they are not certain of why-or what touched off the violence.
Sells claims he met Keith Dardeen at a truck stop, and the man invited him home. He also claims Dardeen made sexual advances. Relatives say that it is unlikely that Dardeen, who was fearful of crime to the point of paranoia, would have invited a stranger home, and they say the sex come-on allegation is absurd.
Criminals who commit heinous acts frequently concoct circumstances to explain or even mitigate their own blame, of course. How else can someone with even a shadow of conscience rationalize the pummeling of a newborn child?
Perhaps even Sells doesn't know the truth of his carnage. By 1987 he was a heavy drinker and drug-user. He preferred heroin but settled for just about any drug he could ingest or inhale-crank, coke, acid, meth.
He would work a few days or steal something of value, then use his earnings to buy drugs and get high. He was often in a haze.
Sells told investigators that his bloody binge continued in 1988 and '89. The list is numbing. He said his victims included an adolescent girl in New Hampshire; a woman and her 3-year-old son killed at a bridge overlook near Twin Falls, ID; a transient named Kent Lauten, 51, knifed to death in a fight over a marijuana debt in a hobo camp near Tucson; a prostitute in Truckee, Calif., and a young woman hitchhiker in Oregon.
By Christmas 1989, Tommy Sells was a doped-out shell. He stumbled into Rawlings , Wyo. , and on January 12, 1990, crossed paths with a young couple who needed tires for their truck. Sells accommodated them by stealing a truck, removing the tires and selling them at a deep discount.
He scored with his profit, then hid out near railroad tracks, planning to jump a freight. A cop happened to see his wobbly run toward a train and arrested Sells for public intoxication. He was carrying incidental items from the stolen truck, so cops brought theft charges that led to a 16-month prison term.
But Sells had a difficult time going cold turkey off narcotics while in jail. He was having anxiety attacks and hallucinations. (Among other things, he was carrying on conversations with his awful collection of splotchy, self-inflicted tattoos, according to author Fanning.)
A jail shrink ordered mental tests, and Sells was diagnosed with a psychiatry textbook's worth of personality disorders, addictions, depressions and psychoses. Medications stabilized Sells, and he did his time without incident.
A free man a year after he was arrested, Sells hit the road again, returning to his bloody work.
In September 1991, Sells told authorities, he killed Margaret McClain and her daughter, Pamela, in Charleston , W. Va. Eight months later in the same city, he attacked a 20-year-old woman who took him home and offered him bags of food and clothing after she found Sells on a street corner begging. He raped and stabbed the woman, but she managed to wrest the knife from Sells and slash him repeatedly, inflicting 23 wounds on her assailant.
Sells picked up a piano stool and beat the woman into submission, leaving her for dead. But she survived.
The woman helped identify Sells, who had become a familiar face around downtown Charleston , often holding a sign that read, "Hungry. Will Work for Food."
Sells pleaded guilty to malicious wounding, and a rape charge was dropped. He was sentenced in June 1993 to two to 10 years in West Virginia state prison. Two things happened during his four years behind bars: He got married, and he was diagnosed as bipolar.
Released in May 1997, Sells moved to Tennessee with his new bride, Nora Price. But the marriage was not blissful. Sells abandoned the woman again and again, as the peripatetic murderer set off on more cross-country travels. For example, he has claimed blame for the October 1997 strangulation death of Stephanie Mahaney, 13, whose remains were found in a pond west of Springfield , Mo.
In the latter months of 1997, Sells hooked up with the Heart of America carnival. He operated the Ferris wheel and drove the truck that hauled it from town to town.
In late February 1998, the carnival put down stakes for an eight-day stop in Del Rio , Texas , a border town of 35,000 on the Rio Grande just below the Amistad Reservoir dam. There he met a lonely local woman, Jessica Levrie, 28, the mother of four young children.
She was enraptured. Sells went away with the carnival, but she lured him back just days later. He moved into her trailer on March 31, just a few days before his wife, Nora, was giving birth to his son in Jonesboro , Ark. (She gave the child up for adoption.)
Sells took a job maintaining and selling used cars at Amigo Auto Sales in Del Rio . He and Levrie married in October 1998, although the license was invalid because he had never bothered to divorce Nora. No matter. Sells cut his beard, trimmed his mullet and wore a rented tux for the big event in Del Rio .
She gave him a used pickup truck as a wedding gift. He gave her a lifetime of nightmares.
Beyond the polygamy, their union was a mismatch in many ways. Levrie was a born-again Christian, and Sells was indifferent to religion. The woman was sincere, and Sells was a con man. Sells posed as an abiding husband, but he secretly caroused at night, maintaining his well-worn habit of drug and alcohol abuse.
As always, Sells would disappear periodically. His road trips came frequently in 1999. He would lie to Levrie that he had business out of town or that he had to see a relative. In fact, Tommy Sells made Del Rio his home base for a furious endgame series of murders in 1999.
On April 4, he apparently broke into the trailer home of a 32-year-old woman in Gibson County , Tenn. , 75 miles northeast of Memphis . He raped and stabbed the woman to death, then stabbed to death her 8-year-old daughter.
He hightailed back to Texas , landing in San Antonio two weeks later with another carnival troupe for the city's huge Fiesta. At 10 p.m. on April 18, Mary Bea Perez, 9, disappeared from her family's table at the El Mercado music fest downtown. Ten days later, the girl's body turned up in a San Antonio creek. She had been molested and slain.
The case was unsolved until Sells was arrested and accepted responsibility.
Sells hurried out of San Antonio and headed back east to Lexington , Ky. , where he bedded down at a homeless shelter and worked as a day laborer.
On May 13, he saw Haley McHone, 13, enjoying a solitary springtime ride on a swing in a Lexington Park . He accosted her and forced her to a wooded section, where he stripped, raped and choked the girl to death. He rode off on the girl's bicycle and sold it for $20 in a housing project, then used the proceeds to get falling-down drunk.
He was arrested late that night for public intoxication. He was released from jail the next morning, then scooted west back to Del Rio -gone long before the girl's body turned up.
There may have been other murder excursions before the turn of the millennium. Sells told investigators he traveled to Kingfisher, Okla. , in July, where he raped and shot Bobby Lynn Wofford, 14.
In Del Rio Sells and Levrie began attending Grace Community Church at the invitation of Sells' boss at Amigo Auto Sales.
At the church Sells met Terry and Crystal Harris and their children, including Katy, a girl of the proper age for the sexual predator.
Sells insinuated himself into their lives. He visited their double-wide several times, pretending to seek Terry Harris' counseling about his marital difficulties. In fact, he was ogling Katy, her 12-year-old sister, Lori, and their slender mother, Crystal.
The opportunity for the crime opened up when Sells happened to cross paths with Terry Harris on December 31 as he gassed up his truck for his trip to Kansas .
Harris was a rugged man-a former cop and nightclub bouncer. Sells' MO was to attack women and children, with only a few exceptions. He likely would not have gone to the Harris home that night had he not known that Terry Harris would be away.
Sells faced trial for murder in Del Rio in September 2000. He wore a blue suit that covered his tattoos. His hair was closely trimmed, and he wore studious spectacles.
Testimony revealed that Katy Harris may not have been his first choice for sexual deviance on the night of her murder. He spent that evening at Larry's Lakeside Tavern. The first witness, bartender Noell Houchin, said Sells harassed her all night long.
"He was obsessed with having sex with me. That's all we talked about all night long," she testified.
At the 2 a.m. closing, Sells was shooed away by another man, a customer looking out for Houchin.
Crystal Harris took the stand to testify that her family met Sells in church, then bought a used truck from him because they felt sorry for him.
But the star witness was Krystal Surles, the child whose throat he slashed. As the trial began, Sells pleaded guilty to that assault-a well-considered legal maneuver.
"He's attempting to save his life," his lawyer, Victor Garcia, told reporters. "He's trying to show the jury that he is accepting responsibility."
But the trial belonged to young Krystal, who mounted the witness stand with a jagged pink scar across her neck. She bravely recounted the murder of her friend and the slashing of her own throat. She looked Sells in the eye as she testified, and she calmly pointed him out as her assailant.
The girl's mother, Pam Surles, told reporters, "She wants him to die. That's exactly what she said."
Sells did not testify, but he did appear in a videotaped walk-through of the crime scene that was played for jurors. During the tour, he told investigators that he had "nothing intentional on my mind" when he went to the Harris home at 4 a.m.
Attorney Garcia allowed that the murder was "a hellish, brutal crime," but he argued it was not capital murder, a verdict required for condemnation.
The jury disagreed. It took just an hour to convict on that charge after a brief, three-day trial. The jury then voted for execution.
Sells joined more than 450 others on Death Row in Livingston , Texas , whose execution total of nearly 300 since 1982 leads the nation. No execution date for Sells has been set. The average stay on Texas Death Row is 10 years, at a cost to taxpayers of $55 per day, state officials said.
When his time comes, Sells will be given a dose of three drugs (cost: $86)--a deadly dose of the sedative sodium thiopental, a form of bromide muscle relaxant to collapse his lungs, and potassium chloride to stop his heart beat.
Katy Harris' adoptive father says he looks forward to that day. Terry Harris says the family has saved a bottle of champagne they had intended to use to toast the new millennium. It will be uncorked the minute Tommy Lynn Sells is executed, Harris says.
In 2001, the Harris family sat for an interview with the Kansas City Star. They had moved back to Kansas , unable to live in the place where Katy was murdered.
"It took just 10 minutes for Sells to uproot our family," Harris told the paper. "He stole our daughter's accomplishments, every birthday, every holiday...For a whole year, everything snowballed downhill. He stole our lifestyle. We may have to file bankruptcy. I'm not allowed to work - I have too many anger issues. The drugs we're on for depression are really expensive. I don't feel like a man. Forget about sex. There's no way you can plan for something like this."
He continued, "It eats me up that I tried to help Tommy. I talked with him. He was a guy down on his luck that I tried to help. He repaid me by killing my daughter."
While the survivors of his murders try to cope, Sells grouses about his treatment in letters posted on the Internet. He complains about denial of "basic hygiene," a paucity of food and a lack of sleep.
Like a number of other condemned inmates, Sells has become a Death Row Picasso. His kindergarten-quality art shows up on the Internet, including manacled praying hands and a Texas flag with the message, "Gov. George Bush Killed 135, Still Going."
Sells wrote a letter to author Fanning that was included at the end of her book "Through the Window."
The content of the letter was self-pitying, self-serving and anti-Semitic. It showed precious little reflection and managed to blame everyone but himself for his predicament-including, inexplicably, Jews.
He waxed sanctimonious about the value of human life, particularly his own. Among other things, he expressed outrage that the prosecutor in the Katy Harris murder had had the temerity to show jurors an autopsy picture of the girl. His take on this issue perhaps best exemplifies his disconnection from the reality of what he has done.
Tommy Sells wrote, "That is what got me the guilty verdict, not evidence. I still do not get it to this day. That picture had nothing to do with what happened at the Harris home."
Sells had a falling out with the Texas rangers, and he stopped cooperating.
As he put it in a letter posted on the Internet, "I'm taking some time off from working so close with the Rangers. As a matter of fact, I've stopped, for one or two reasons. Too much too fast. They are getting on my nerves as I was getting on theirs. Them Rangers want to rip my guts out because I've wanted a break."
Investigators said Sells was using his cooperation shrewdly, parsing out details that might lead to additional field trips. He also knows that should he start talking again down the line, it might be reason enough to prompt delays of his execution.
An accurate accounting of the murders committed by Tommy Lynn Sells may never be possible. Although he is unlikely to face trial again, his name continues to crop up in court documents across the country.
In 2003 Sells pleaded guilty to capital murder for slaying 9-year-old Mary Bea Perez at the San Antonio Fiesta. In exchange for the plea, prosecutors waived the death penalty, and Sells automatically received a sentence of life in prison.
Also that year he was indicated in Missouri in the 1997 strangulation death of Stephanie Mahaney, 13, near Springfield .
In April 2004, police in Lockport , N.Y. , officially notified survivors of a murder victim there that Sells likely was responsible.
Suzanne Korcz, 28, disappeared in May 1987 after she stormed out of a Lockport bar following a quarrel with her boyfriend. Her skeletal remains were found eight years later at the base of an escarpment in Lockport , near Niagara Falls .
The details of the homicide are unclear, but Sells confessed in 2002 that he was responsible for the long-unsolved murder. Authorities said he gave details that lead them to believe he was telling the truth, including a description of the victim.
He is being scrutinized in the murders of a woman and her daughter in St. Louis is 1983 and the rape and gunshot slayings of a farm wife and daughter in Portageville , Mo. , in 1998.
And Sells is at the center of a wrongful-conviction allegation in Illinois .
Julie Rea-Harper was sentenced to 65 years in prison in 2002 following conviction by a jury for the 1997 stabbing death of her son, Joel Kirkpatrick, 10.
Prosecutors alleged that Rea-Harper killed the boy in her home in Lawrenceville, in downstate Illinois , after she lost custody of him to his father as a result of a contentious divorce.
In May 2004, the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School took up the cause, saying courts should grant a new trial because Sells wrote two coy letters indicating he may know something about the case. Others have joined in the call for a new trial for the woman, who has continued to proclaim her innocence.
Young Kirkpatrick was killed just two days before Stephanie Mahaney, and the murder scenes were less than 100 miles apart.
The issue is whether Sells can be trusted. If his victims were able, they might advise: Don't bet your life on it.
All text that appears in this section was provided by www.crimelibrary.com (the very best source for serial killer information on the internet). Serialkillercalendar.com thanks the crime library for their tireless efforts in recording our dark past commends them on the amazing job they have done thus far).
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