Tommy Lynn Sells was an American serial killer. He was convicted of one murder, for which he received the death penalty and was eventually executed. Authorities believe he committed a total of 22 murders.
Early life
Sells and his twin sister, Tammy Jean, contracted meningitis when they were 18 months old; Tammy died from the illness. Shortly thereafter, Sells was sent to live with his aunt, Bonnie Walpole, in Holcomb, Missouri. When he was five years old, he was returned to his mother after she found out his aunt wanted to adopt him. Sells claimed that when he was eight, he began spending time with a man named Willis Clark, who began to molest him with the consent of his mother. Sells stated that this abuse affected him greatly, and he would relive his experiences while committing his crimes. The homeless Sells hitchhiked and train-hopped across the United States from 1978 to 1999, committing various crimes along the way. He held several very short-term manual-labor and barber jobs. He drank heavily, abused drugs, and was imprisonedseveral times.
In 1990, Sells stole a truck in Wyoming and was sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment. He was diagnosed with a personality disorderconsisting ofantisocial, borderline, and schizoid features, substance use disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and psychosis. On May 13, 1992, a 19-year-old woman in Charleston, West Virginia, was driving when she saw Sells panhandling under an overpass with a sign that said, "I will work for food." She felt sorry for him and took him to her home, asking him to wait outside. She went into her home to get some food for him, and by the time she got back to her front door, he was inside. When she walked away to get something else, he got a knife from her kitchen and trapped her in a bedroom, and raped her repeatedly. The woman fought back by hitting him in the head with a ceramic duck; in retaliation, Sells beat her with a piano stool. He also stabbed her 18 times. He was indicted on five counts of rape and felony assault in September 1992, but took a plea deal and pleaded guilty to malicious wounding. On June 25, 1993, he was sentenced to 2–10 years' imprisonment; the rape charges were dropped. While serving this sentence, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and married Nora Price. He was released in 1997 and moved to Tennessee with his wife. He left her and resumed his cross-country travels.
Murders
Sells is believed by police to have murdered at least 22 people. Retired Texas Ranger John Allen said, "We did confirm 22... I know there's more. I know there's a lot more. Obviously, we won't ever know." Sells said he committed his first murder at age 15, after breaking into a house. While in the house, Sells claimed to have discovered a man performing fellatio on a boy and killed the man in a fit of rage. In July 1985, 21-year-old Sells worked at a Forsyth, Missouri, carnival, where he met 28-year-old Ena Cordt and her 4-year-old son Rory. Cordt invited Sells to her home that evening. According to Sells, he had sex with her, fell asleep, and awoke to find her stealing from his backpack. He proceeded to beat Cordt to death with her son's baseball bat. He then murdered her son because the child was a potential witness. The bludgeoned bodies were found 3 days later, by which time Sells had left town. Sells is linked to these crimes:
December 31, 1999, sexual assault and murder of Kaylene Jo "Katy" Harris
After watching an episode of Crime Watch Daily in November 2015, Melissa DeBoer née Tate, whose mother JoAnne Tate was murdered in 1982 and whose testimony as a 7 year old helped identify Rodney Lincoln as the killer, contacted authorities stating that she is now certain it was Sells, not Lincoln, who murdered her mother in 1982.
Arrests and confessions
On December 31, 1999, in the Guajia Bay subdivision, west of Del Rio, Texas, Sells sexually assaulted, stabbed, and slit the throat of 13-year-old Kaylene "Katy" Harris, and slit the throat of 10-year-old Krystal Surles. Surles survived and received help from the neighbors after traveling a quarter-mile to their home with a severed trachea. Sells was apprehended after being identified from a sketch made from the victim's description. Police over time came to suspect him of "working the system" by confessing to murders he had not committed. The state's attorney in Jefferson County, Illinois, declined to charge Sells with the Dardeen family homicides in 1987 because his confession to the quadruple killing, while generally consistent with the facts of the case as reported in the media, was inaccurate with concern to some details that had not been made public. He also changed his account three times regarding how he had met the family. Investigators wanted to bring Sells to southern Illinois to resolve their doubts, but Texas refused, due to its law forbidding death-row prisoners from leaving the state. Sells was housed on death row in the Allan B. Polunsky Unit near Livingston, Texas. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice received him on November 8, 2000. In 2004, Sells confessed that on October 13, 1997, he broke into a home, took a knife from a butcher block in the kitchen, stabbed a little boy to death, and scuffled with a woman. Those details corroborated the account of Julie Rea Harper, who was initially convicted for the murder of her son, and then acquitted in 2006.
Execution
On January 3, 2014, a Del Rio judge set Sells' execution date for April 3, 2014. Sells' death sentence was carried out at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville. When asked if he would like to make a final statement, Sells replied, "No." As a lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered, he took a few deep breaths, closed his eyes, and began to snore. Less than a minute later, he stopped moving. Thirteen minutes later, at 6:27 pm, he was pronounced dead. Krystal Surles and members of both the Harris and Perez families attended the execution.
In media
Eight years before his execution, Sells was one of the featured interviewees on episode two of season one on the Investigation Discovery documentary series, Most Evil. The interview was done by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone. In the interview, Sells claimed to have killed more than 70 people. ABC News created a 10-minute mini-documentary 'Tommy Lynn Sells - The Mind of a Psychopath'.
