Through the Window (10 page)

He told Sells about his sister, Nora. She was 26 years old, a bit slow and childlike—a product of special education
classes in the public school system. Most importantly, she got an SSI check every month. She often visited her brother and he introduced her to Sells.

TERRY and Crystal Harris packed up their belongings, loaded up their four kids and moved to the Del Rio area in 1995. Just two days after their arrival in West Texas, the couple was married in a quiet ceremony.

As soon as the vows were spoken and sealed with a kiss, Terry set the wheels in motion to keep his promise to Katy. He filed adoption papers for all three of Crystal’s children. The paperwork culminated in a family trip to the courthouse. When they emerged, Terry Harris was the legal father of all of them. The children formed a ring around their parents and burst into song: “We are the Harrises! We are the Harrises! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! We are the Harrises! We are the Harrises! Forever more today!”

DURING her first visits with Sells, Nora Price sat on her side of the glass with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear. The cold barrier, the stale smell and the close proximity of other visitors did not create a very romantic ambiance. But romance sprung from this infertile ground nonetheless and wound its way around this simple woman’s heart. Later, contact visits enriched the encounters and sealed Nora’s fate.

Sells took advantage of the pretty girl’s intellectual deficiency. He sweet-talked Nora into falling in love with him. She was an easy mark. She’d had a rough, unhappy life and could not recall anyone ever being so nice to her. They talked and wrote about the day he would get out of jail and about all of the things they could do together. He conned her out of small amounts of cash for months. Then he moved in for the kill.

He informally proposed to her by letter. Then came the big day. Mt. Olive Prison had an annual event where visitors can have a whole day with the prisoners.

Out on the prison lawn, on a lovely spring day with
the sun caressing their skin, Tommy asked, “You want to get married?”

The warmth of the mellow sun competed with the warmth in Nora’s heart. She thought this was the most wonderful moment of her life. While still in prison, in April of 1996, Tommy Lynn Sells married Nora Price. From that day on, three-quarters of Nora’s SSI checks poured into Sells’ coffers at prison.

In her honor, Sells got two tattoos with “Nora” written into their design. One was a rose on his neck. The other was a Harley-Davidson with a dragon on his right upper arm. Nora was delighted.

In his time at this facility, mental health professionals diagnosed Sells as bi-polar. His illness went untreated. He was released into an unsuspecting world in May of 1997.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

WITHIN days of his release, Tommy Sells left Nora behind in West Virginia. On June 1, he called her from Michigan and told her he wanted to get back together. She agreed, and he returned to West Virginia. Together they hit the road, hitchhiking and riding trains to Tennessee. They settled in the town of Cleveland at #2 Sunset Trail. Sells got a job at a car wash. On July 29, local police gave him a ticket for driving without a license.

Sells abandoned Nora in Tennessee on August 18 and headed west. Nora, unable or unwilling to cope on her own, dragged her empty, broken heart back to her home state, West Virginia.

On September 5, from Oregon Sells called his mother in St. Louis and Nora’s mother in Spurlockville, West Virginia. He traveled back east, retrieved Nora from the Mountain State and took her to his mother’s home in Missouri. By this time, Nora was pregnant.

In October, Sells got a mechanic’s job at 360 Degree Auto. He stayed off drugs for three weeks. The family had high hopes that Tommy was going to settle down at last. But neither one of the women nor his job could keep Sells drug-free. “He came home one night higher than Georgia pine,” his mother said. In no time, tracks covered his arms.

Nothing could keep Sells tied to home. By mid-October, he was stalking fresh prey.

SELLS privately admitted to the murder of Joel Kirkpatrick. He has never confessed to authorities and no one has undertaken an investigation into his possible involvement.
The following is a combination of the facts of the crime and the details provided by Tommy Lynn Sells.

Sells traveled east of St. Louis on Interstate 64. An exit onto Route 50 sent him straight across Illinois to Lawr-enceville near the Indiana border. Near this small town, October 13, 1997, felt like any other uneventful fall night. But it would soon brand itself into the community’s collective memory.

Sells first met Julie Rea at a convenience store where, he said, she had treated him rudely. From that moment on, Sells was consumed with a desire for revenge.

Anger drove him, fed him, led him straight to the front door of a house he’d never entered before. With great care, he broke the window, making no more noise than if he had crumpled up a sheet of cellophane. He slid toward the kitchen—such a wonderful place for a predator; always a weapon in easy reach. He picked up a knife and weighed its balance in his hand. He headed straight for the first bedroom door. There, 10-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick dreamed his last dream.

Sells plunged the knife into Joel’s body, oblivious to the blood that splattered in his face and on his clothes. A scream pierced the quiet of Julie Rea’s home. It slapped her awake and lifted her out of bed.

The killer left his victim lying at the foot of the bed and slipped from the boy’s room and away from the approaching woman. She raced up the hall to her son. “Joel? Joel?”

She looked through the doorway of the dark room and saw an empty bed. She turned from the room, frantic. That is when she spotted him. The hood of his sweatshirt was pulled up and the drawstring tightened across his face concealing his features.

She ran toward him, her personal safety irrelevant in the face of her fear for her son. She grappled with him briefly until he pushed her off and headed toward the back of the house. She chased him through the glass doors and into the backyard, screaming inarticulate pleas for help.

Outside, Julie tripped over an insignificant obstruction,
invisible in the night, and fell face first on the ground. The intruder doubled back, hitting her in the head, hoping to delay her pursuit.

She was too dazed to move—or even to think for a brief moment. Then, she raised herself on her arms and saw the fleeing man again. He pulled the hood down, revealing his face under a streetlight.

She jumped to her feet, torn between chasing after him and running for help. She chose the latter and rushed to Lesa Bridgett’s house on the other side of the street and pounded on the door. Once inside, she called the police and reported her son’s abduction.

In minutes, officers were on the scene. They found 10-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick in his bedroom. His small body was crumpled like a discarded tissue used to stanch a bloody nose. He was clothed in a blood-drenched tee shirt. The shirt was marred by a multitude of angry stab wounds.

His mother, Julie, was taken to the emergency room with a black eye, scratches and abrasions on the tops of her feet, her knees and inside her legs, wounds on both shoulders, internal bruising and a laceration on her right arm requiring five sutures.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TOMMY Lynn Sells was on the move, headed for Springfield, Missouri.

As he haunted its streets, a young brown-haired woman captured his attention. He followed her, watching and waiting—waiting for the moment he could lure her from her safe world and into his. Unfruitful stalking drove Sells’ to a fever pitch.

From his vantage point in his parked van, he sought a more vulnerable target. He saw a man and three children enter an apartment. The oldest child was 13 years old, with auburn hair, a freckled nose and a toothy grin. Her name was Stephanie Mahaney. Sells turned his focus and his fantasies to the potential victim in that apartment.

Suzette Carlisle, the mother of these children, was not at home. She had been admitted to the hospital with a life-threatening bout of pneumonia. Her fiance, Rob Martin, had brought the children to the hospital to visit her that night. Upon returning home, he played video games with them and stayed in the apartment on North Robberson until all the children were asleep. Stephanie was so tired, she collapsed on the bed fully clothed in a gray tee shirt with a full-length Bugs Bunny on the front, a pair of jeans and her shoes.

At 11 o’clock, Sells saw the man leave by the back door, locking it behind him before returning to sit by Su-zette’s side. Rob had assumed the front door was locked, since it was rarely used.

Sells crept through the night as silent as an alley cat intent on its hunt for an unsuspecting mouse. He slipped
through the front door into the quiet home. He went room to room seeking his next victim. He looked in on the 8-year-old and the 9-year-old. Then he found Stephanie.

Stephanie’s eyes flew open as a wide piece of tape slapped across her mouth, partially blocking her nose and making it difficult to breathe. Sells jerked her out of bed, dragging her to the front door. With her glasses abandoned on the nightstand, her world was a blur.

She struggled to free herself from his tight grip. She merely made her abductor angrier and the intensity of his hold more painful. He tossed her into the front seat of the van. Whimpering, she lurched toward the door to try to escape.

“Shut up,” he said, smashing the back of his hand across her face.

They drove into the countryside. Stephanie was afraid to make another attempt at escape. Afraid to leap from a moving van. Afraid to stay where she was. But every time she mounted the courage to make a move to freedom, she was smacked back into the seat.

Finally, Sells parked just off of Missouri 266 on Greene County Farm Road 99. To make her more malleable, he injected her with a large dose of cocaine. He forced off her shoes and jeans, hitting her in the face whenever she struggled. She cringed when his hand moved toward her face again. He grabbed the edge of the tape and ripped it off her face in one swift movement, bringing tears to her eyes. Putting his hand behind her head, he pushed her down to penetrate her mouth. Then, he raped her. When he was through, he pressed down on her, his hands enclosed around her throat. He squeezed tightly, his arms shaking with the effort. Beneath him, her arms and legs twitched, her torso bucked. His fingers turned white as he applied the pressure for five long minutes. First, Stephanie lost consciousness— and then she lost her life.

He gathered up the girl’s discarded clothing and her abused body and walked toward a field that pastured cows. He juggled his burden as he unlatched the gate. He moved
farther from the road, dropping her jeans and a shoe along the way. When he reached the farm pond, he dropped her body into the water like unwanted trash into a garbage chute. He sluiced the cleansing wetness over his sweaty face, shook his head and drove away.

ROB Martin returned to the apartment at 5:30 the next morning. He’d planned to make breakfast for the three children and make sure they got to school on time. He unlocked the back door and heard the sound of an alarm clock. He went into Stephanie’s room to shut it off and coax her out of bed. She was not there. He checked on the other two children. They were both sound asleep. He looked in every room. He called out her name. He woke the other two and questioned them. Stephanie was nowhere to be found.

Within hours, Suzette filed a missing persons report. She did not believe her daughter had run away. Stephanie was a real homebody. She took care of her younger siblings like a mother hen—her developing maternal instincts at an all-time high in the face of her mother’s serious illness. Instead of running around with her friends, she was more likely to sit with them on the front porch engaged in hours of conversation. For a thirteen-year-old, she was very responsible. At the time, though, Stephanie was one of twenty-six runaway or missing girls reported in the area.

In the weeks that followed her disappearance, investigators talked to more than thirty people and searched six homes. They were unable to confirm any of the reported sightings of the young girl.

Thirty-four days passed with no word of Stephanie. Then, on Tuesday, November 18, 1997, a group of hunters wandering through a field discovered the partially clothed body of a young teenaged girl submerged in the pond. When investigators arrived at the scene, they found a pair of jeans and one shoe nearby.

The body was too decomposed to make visual identification possible. Greene County Sheriff’s Department detectives called all twenty-six families of missing girls to
inform them of their discovery, and to obtain dental records and refine any descriptions they had on file.

LATE Wednesday, November 19, 1997, the unknown body had a name—Stephanie Mahaney. The Greene County Medical Examiner, James Spindler, identified her through her dental records and a birthmark on her right ear.

Information about her disappearance was sparse. Investigators received only fifteen calls reporting tips after the body was found—an all-time low. Twenty members of the Green County Sheriff’s Department and volunteer high school Explorer Scouts returned to the scene for a grid-by-grid search.

Wrapped up warmly against the cold and wind, they marched in a determined line, halting the moment someone shouted, “Stop!” Once the found item was bagged as possible evidence, the line moved forward.

On Christmas Eve, the results of the autopsy were made public. The decompression of the tissues in her throat showed that Stephanie had died of strangulation. Additionally, signs of trauma were noted on the face. Decomposition was too far advanced to determine whether or not a sexual assault had occurred.

A picture of Stephanie became a permanent fixture on the bulletin board of one detective, Jim Arnott. It was the only unsolved murder in twenty years or more in Greene County. He also carried a picture of her in his notebook and another in his car. He never stopped thinking about what had happened to Stephanie Mahaney.