Through the Window (18 page)

But Lieutenant Larry Pope still wondered. “There’s a lot to indicate he did that one. He said a lot of things that really matched up. But he said he doesn’t want to tell about it ‘cause they [the State of Texas] ‘ll give you the death penalty.”

In pursuit of corroborating evidence for some of the others, it was time for Tommy Lynn Sells to take his confessional on the road. In March, Rangers Allen and Smith made the arrangements for a visit to Arkansas, Idaho and Nevada.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THE Rangers, Sells and two pilots flew off in the Department of Public Safety’s aircraft. Before they could go to any crime scenes, though, there was one additional stop to make. A small oil leak had been found in the plane during its annual check-up. The pilots needed to make a stop in Oklahoma City, the closest location where they could find mechanics capable of repairing that plane.

The Rangers and their prisoner sat in the lounge of the repair shop. Two men with guns and a man in handcuffs created an uncomfortable time for all involved. Any distraction was a welcome diversion. They watched the coffee supply truck pull into the lot with uncommon interest. The woman driving the truck maintained their attention as she performed the mundane task of unloading supplies. They watched as she waved to the men who had helped her and jumped into the truck. All eyes were on her when she backed her vehicle up and ran into their plane. She hit one wing, bending up the tip so that it pointed straight to the sky. In that small fender-bender, she did a total of $25,000 to $30,000 worth of damage. They were now stranded before their trip had really begun.

The pilots booked flights with Southwest Airlines and headed back to Austin. It wasn’t quite as simple for the Rangers. As Coy Smith put it, “To get a prisoner on a commercial flight and wear a gun, I’d rather nearly walk back to Texas.”

Johnny Allen negotiated with the coffee company. Their insurance policies would cover most of the cost of the remainder of the Rangers’ exploratory trip; the company
would cover the rest. Oklahoma Executive Jet Charters was hired, and they flew to Arkansas.

THE stop in Little Rock started out looking like a waste of time. Local authorities had no record of a homicide in 1982 at the house Sells pointed out. But when Lieutenant Terry Ward of the Little Rock Police Department contacted the homeowner to see if he had any recollection of any unusual event, he did. It had happened to his tenant, only he did not die. He fell to the ground and played dead as Sells pulled the trigger.

Sells then led investigators and the crew of
48 Hours
down tiny country roads to the blue hole where he claimed to have left a woman’s body after he raped her. Local authorities, though, did not want to expend the funds necessary for an expensive underwater search to locate her body. That was where the mystery ended. Her name unknown. Her death uncertain.

THE next stop was Twin Falls, Idaho. There, Sells led investigators to the site of a 1997 murder. He confessed to raping and killing a long-haired blonde woman, chopping her body up with an axe and burying her on the banks of the Snake River.

The Snake River winds as sinuously as its namesake through the canyon it has carved over eons. It is a place of excruciating, yet forbidding, beauty. The crevice it has etched is so deep, cameramen had to lean close to the edge to glimpse the descent down to the canyon floor. Without hesitation, Sells led them to a well-hidden path that led down the canyon wall.

He remarked that everything looked a lot different than it did before. When he pointed out the spot where he buried his victim, there was one problem. Two years before, a massive landslide had occurred in that spot pushing the burial site into the river itself. Any attempt at recovery would be difficult, if not impossible.

Sells’ recollection of the woman who died there was
so clear that a forensic artist was brought into the case. Shirley Timmons, the same woman who’d worked with Krystal Surles when she described her attacker, worked with Sells to create a likeness of the blonde.

When Sells and Timmons met, he leaned across the table close to her, looked her in the eye and asked, “You was the one that drew that picture that got me caught, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I didn’t think it was all that good.”

For a moment, Timmons did not respond. Then she mirrored Sells’ body language and said, “It was good enough to get you caught, wasn’t it?”

When the sketch aired on
America’s Most Wanted
, Lisa Mueller recognized her daughter, Yvette. In 1997, Yvette had gone to a convenience store to make a phone call. She never returned.

There was one glitch in this identification, though. Yvette Mueller was kidnapped in Las Vegas. Sells’ recollection placed the victim at a convenience store in Twin Falls, where he had also stolen a brown station wagon. He also thought the woman had been hitchhiking from Canada to Salt Lake City. Authorities could verify that a vehicle matching that description was stolen in the area at that time. They just didn’t know how to fit Yvette into the puzzle.

All agreed it was possible that she had been kidnapped and killed in the Las Vegas area by Sells, and that another woman was killed outside of Twin Falls. It was also possible that the two were the same woman.

“He’s been off by a few cities and by two or three years on homicides. But he’s never been off by states before,” said Ranger Smith. Still, he admitted, with the number of murders Sells had committed, and the amount of drugs he’d abused, anything was possible.

THE traveling investigation team then flew to Winnemucca, Nevada. In the police department’s interview room, Sells sat with his back to a window wall. Across the table from
him, the Rangers had a clear view of the room behind the glass. It was filled with members of the Winnemucca Police Department, the county sheriff’s department and the FBI.

They listened as Sells described Stefanie Stroh’s jewelry, her clothing, the bag she carried, where she had been and where she was going. Eyes bulged and grins spread with each revelation. Occasionally, high fives erupted in celebration. They had Sells dead to rights, and they knew it.

They made preparations for him to lead them to the body. Before departure, it was necessary to frisk the prisoner. Sells, already irate at the lack of respect shown to him by the FBI, blew up when the jailer accidentally—or purposely—pulled his hair. Sells lunged at him, hands on his throat. Tall, muscular Texas Ranger Smith was on Sells in a heartbeat, roughly subduing the smaller man.

When tempers cooled, the search for Stefanie’s body began anew. They drove past an abandoned building, unrecognizable in its state of total dilapidation. Sells correctly described it as a former truck stop. He led the crew to a desolate spot in the desert. Sells said that, because he was angry about his treatment in Winnemucca, he had intentionally taken them to the wrong spot. The Rangers thought it was possible that Sells had deliberately misled them, but were dismayed that a thorough search of the area never occurred.

Four bodies were sought on this road trip—only one was found, and that one was still alive.

A sullen Sells returned to Del Rio. On the eighth of June in Fayette County Circuit Court in Kentucky, Reba and Michael McHone filed suit against Tommy Lynn Sells on behalf of the estate of their daughter, Haley. She was described in the complaint as “[ . . . ] a vibrant teenager, full of life and spirit with shoulder-length blonde hair and beautiful green eyes.”

Count one alleged that she was innocently playing on the swings when she was abducted, seized, kidnapped,
falsely imprisoned, assaulted, tortured, maimed, mutilated, raped and killed by Tommy Lynn Sells. “The Young Teenager was thereafter humiliated, ridiculed, held up to scorn, embarrassed, placed in a false light and slandered by the Defendant.”

They requested punitive damages for her pain and suffering, lost earnings potential and funeral costs. In addition, they sought damages to the parents for loss of love and affection of a child. They cited that Sells had hidden the body knowing it would create panic and cause suffering to her parents and others. “The deranged Defendant, on information and belief, had previously killed 13 men and women going back to 1981 and was thereby well aware of actions or inactions which would aid and abet him in continuing the course of conduct which he had in this matter, and evidenced a cruel callous heart and inhuman characteristics which animals themselves do not evidence among their various species.” No amount of damages was specified.

Thomas C. Chupak, the court-appointed Guardian Ad Litem for Sells, responded with a request that the plaintiff be denied and the complainant dismissed because of his incarceration and impending trial in Texas and because the complainant had failed to state a case upon which relief could be granted. Sells submitted a hand-written response to the court. In it, he said he could not be in Lexington, Kentucky, to defend himself because of his situation in Texas. He also complained that he could not read the name of his guardian on the document sent and did not know how to contact him.

IN the Val Verde Correctional Center on June 25, 2000, Sells and Danny Calderon in the adjoining cell talked about religion and forgiveness through the bean holes in their doors.

“I’m depressed about being in jail,” Danny confessed.

“Then you should just hang yourself,” Sells said.

“If I did that, Tommy, God would not forgive me.”

“Once you give your life to God, he forgives you. Period.”

“I don’t think so. You have to ask forgiveness for everything you do wrong,” Calderon countered.

“You stupid sack of shit, where did you get that fucking idea?”

“It says so in the Bible. And when you kill yourself, you’re dead. You can’t ask for forgiveness for that anymore,” Danny answered.

“You’re a punk. Get in your bunk,” Sells ordered.

“You can’t tell me what to do in my own cell.”

“Oh, yeah? I’m gonna make you my punk. And then I’m going to kill you.”

“You won’t kill me, Tommy. But you should ask God for forgiveness for saying that.”

“I’m gonna poke out your eyes and kill you slowly. Just wait till they open this door.”

No matter what Calderon said after this point, Sells continued to rage, “I’m gonna kill you.”

Calderon filed an incident report about these threats. He was moved to another cell away from Sells. But no charges were filed and no disciplinary action was taken.

ALLEN and Smith continued to be amazed by their prisoner after months of interviews. “In Tommy, you’ve got a petty thief and a burglar,” Smith explained. “You’ve got some of the traits of Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas. And to cap it all off, you’ve got the artistic ability of some of the nation’s top con artists who swindle companies and people out of billions of dollars every year. You’ve got all that clumped up in one guy, one person.

“He can completely cripple an investigator in a small town trying to investigate a fifteen-year-old murder, and the guy goes out the door shaking his head. And he’ll do it all because, ‘I ain’t got nothing better to do.’

“One day, he can be stealing $30 out of the kitty. The next day he can be beating a whole family to death. And
the next day, he can be sitting down here in Del Rio fixing the air conditioner of your car.

“It’s every criminal in one neat human package. He represents a small part of society that [ . . . ] I don’t think many in law enforcement have ever recognized. He is a terrorist in society. He preys, hit and run, devoted to self-gratification, self-preservation.”

Throughout these months, the Texas Rangers were faced with a dilemma. They desperately wanted to close as many cases as possible to bring closure to families. First of all, they wanted to track down the nameless victims of Tommy Lynn Sells. Their experience in Texas gave them a logical answer: When he confesses to one of these murders, contact the central missing persons clearinghouse for that state and match the victim to the crime. To their dismay, they discovered that not every state had one. Even if they narrowed the search to a particular area, and called the most probable county, it didn’t always work. If a body were found just one hundred feet on the wrong side of the county line, the agency they contacted would not be aware of it.

Second, they wanted to alert all law enforcement agencies across the country about the serial killer in their possession. ViCAP seemed a simple solution, but it was far from ideal for a killer who operated like Sells.

“It wants to put everybody in a category,” said Coy Smith.

Johnny Allen added, “And you won’t get a hit unless you put in that.”

“In other words,” Smith explained, “you’ve got one killer who cuts all the women with an eight-inch-blade hunting knife in the throat—it’s a chain—it’ll give you something. But if you’ve got a guy like Sells who goes and beats this one, cuts this one’s throat, shoots this one, then there’s no connection, so you don’t know.”

There seemed to be only one viable alternative to their problem, the national media. They would not have a problem finding a willing outlet—their phones had been ringing
with media calls since Sells’ arrest. But they did not want to do anything that would compromise the upcoming trial in Del Rio. So they chose to work with
48 Hours
, the only group who agreed not to air anything until after the trial.

The long hours of confession, negotiation and coordination took an emotional and physical toll on the Rangers. But they were about to get a break. It was show time for Tommy Lynn Sells in the Val Verde County Courthouse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

JURY selection began on August 22, 2000, in the 63rd Judicial District Courtroom of the Val Verde Justice Center in Del Rio. The court summoned five hundred county residents—more than double their usual number—to jury duty.

Thomas F. Lee, District Attorney, entered the courtroom bearing the mantle of an anointed angel of justice. Assistant District Attorney Fred Hernandez was at his side, equally determined to bring the wrath of the State down on the head of Tommy Lynn Sells. The outcome of this case mattered a great deal to both these men. Lee was running in an election for county judge. Hernandez sought Lee’s current job as D.A. A result of death by lethal injection would guarantee life for their political futures.