Tommy Lynn Sells

What the record shows

Tommy Lynn Sells was an American drifter who was convicted of two murders in Texas and claimed responsibility for many more across the country. A Val Verde County jury convicted him in September 2000 of the capital murder of 13-year-old Kaylene Harris, who was stabbed to death in her family's trailer home outside Del Rio at the end of 1999, and he was sentenced to death. In 2003 he pleaded guilty to the 1999 killing of 9-year-old Mary Bea Perez in San Antonio and accepted a life sentence. Texas executed him by lethal injection at Huntsville on April 3, 2014.

Sells was born on June 28, 1964, in Oakland, California, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records. The department lists his prior occupations as barber, mechanic and laborer, and records earlier prison terms in Missouri and Wyoming for theft, a drunk-driving conviction and malicious wounding, with at least one return to prison as a parole violator. The Associated Press described him as a former carnival roustabout who hopped trains around the country.

The facts of the Harris case are set out in a July 2013 opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Sells knew Kaylene's father, Terry Harris, and had visited the family's home; news reports said they had met through a church. In the early hours, armed with a butcher knife, he entered the trailer while the father was away and five people were asleep inside. He assaulted Kaylene in the lower bunk of a bunk bed, and when she woke and called to her friend for help he stabbed her 16 times and cut her throat repeatedly. He then cut the throat of her friend, Krystal Surles, in the top bunk, wiped a doorknob and took two window screens he feared held his fingerprints. The appeals court dates the attack to early on December 30, 1999; prison records and most news reports give December 31, New Year's Eve. The court gives Surles's age as 11, while Associated Press reports said 10.

Surles, whose windpipe had been cut, pretended to be dead until the attacker left, then walked to a neighbor's house and wrote a note asking for help. From her description a composite sketch was made, and Sells was identified and arrested two days later; the Wikipedia article gives the arrest date as January 2, 2000. According to the Fifth Circuit, he confessed immediately in a videotaped statement, then accompanied police to the trailer and walked them through a recorded re-enactment. Forensic tests found his blood and clothing fibers on Kaylene and her blood and fibers on him.

At trial, Sells pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Surles and presented no evidence on guilt in the murder count. Surles testified, and the jury convicted him of capital murder on September 18, 2000, after deliberating less than two hours. At the punishment phase the jury answered the special issues in favor of death, and the Texas prison system received him on death row on November 8, 2000. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in 2003, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined review. Three state habeas applications failed, as did a federal petition; in July 2013 the Fifth Circuit refused a certificate of appealability and additional funding to investigate mitigating evidence.

Sells's claims about other killings were broad and largely uncorroborated. Court records cited by the Associated Press show he claimed as many as 70 killings,. The AP reported in January 2014 that he had been linked to more than a dozen slayings, that investigators said some of his admissions had not checked out, and that he had been investigated for killings in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arizona and Nevada. He confessed in 2005 to the 1987 killing of Suzanne Korcz, 27, a hairdresser from Amherst, New York, but was not tried there because he was already on death row. He was indicted in Missouri in 2003 for the death of 13-year-old Stephanie Mahaney but never tried, and he confessed to the 1987 killings of the Dardeen family in Ina, Illinois. ABC News reported that Illinois investigators said they would have arrested him in that case had he not already been condemned. None of these cases produced a conviction.

A Val Verde County district judge, Enrique Fernandez, set the execution date. In the final week, Sells's lawyers challenged Texas's refusal to identify the supplier of its newly obtained pentobarbital; a federal district court stay was lifted by the Fifth Circuit, and the Supreme Court denied a stay about an hour before the scheduled time. Sells made no final statement and was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m. on April 3, 2014, 13 minutes after the drug was administered. He was 49. Terry Harris watched the execution.