Through the Window (27 page)

She battled to keep her two boys in her home. After rarely visiting them over the last five years, her ex-husband wanted custody. In court, the judge was blunt. She had to stop all communication and visits with Tommy Sells, or the boys would be taken from her.

She ended all contact with her husband. One by one, his family members did the same—only his Aunt Bonnie continued to write with any regularity. “I received a letter last night from Bonnie and she told me Ma Brown died, my grandmother. Just turned the lights out, put in my ear buds, turned up the volume on the radio and closed my eyes. What hurt really bad, I would think my mother or brother would have told me. Life really sucks sometimes.”

THE
48 Hours
TV program flew Texas Rangers Johnny Allen and Coy Smith to New York to view the first episode of their two-part series on the crimes of Tommy Lynn Sells. On the morning of February 1, 2001, they appeared on
The Early Show
on CBS. Following a clip of Harold Dow talking to Tommy Lynn Sells, Jane Clayson interviewed the two officers. That night’s showing of “Dead Men Tell No Tales” did a better job of alerting the nation’s law enforcement agencies than the Rangers had anticipated. When they returned to their offices, they had more than six hundred emails and nine hundred phone calls to return.

Again and again, they asked the same questions and got the same answers. “Do you have any fingerprints?”

“No.”

“Do you have any DNA evidence?”

“No.”

“Do you have any physical evidence to connect a perpetrator to the crime scene?”

“No.”

It was apparent that all these crimes were not the work of Tommy Lynn Sells, but the volume of cases was frightening. “It would blow your skirt up over your head if you knew how many serial killers are running around the United States at any one time,” said Johnny Allen.

THE same day the
48 Hours
show aired, Susan Reed, district attorney for Bexar County, Texas, took the Mary Bea Perez case to the grand jury in San Antonio. She secured a capital murder indictment against Tommy Lynn Sells.

The documents allege that he choked the 9-year-old girl to death with his hands and then killed her to prevent her from testifying against him.

“It was completely senseless,” Reed stated in her press release. “We now have all the evidence we are ever going to get. It is time to get this matter to trial. Even though Mr. Sells has already been sentenced to death, we could not let this chapter in our history remain open.”

The indictment was based on Sells’ confession, and although items that crime technicians found at the scene were tested, no relevant results were found.

THE night the first “Dead Men Tell No Tales” episode of
48 Hours
aired, the phone rang in Kathleen Cowling’s home in Clinton, Mississippi. It was a friend of hers in Memphis who had watched the show and swore that she’d spotted the murderer of Kathleen’s first husband, John Cade. She told her that Sells had liked to climb into windows to get into people’s homes.

Kathleen assured her friend that she would watch the second part of the show, but thought Sells was an unlikely suspect because he was too young. It may have been more than twenty-one years since the murder of John Cade, but she still thought of him as “the finest man who ever walked the earth.” And she yearned for answers about his death.
In preparation for the second episode, she pulled out her copy of a forensic artist’s sketch of a suspicious man spotted near her home five hours after John was killed.

A woman visited Grand Gulf State Park with her two children at about 8 o’clock on the morning on July 6, 1979. A young man, who appeared to be high on drugs, frightened all three of them. When he ran toward her, she grabbed her kids, pushed them in the car, and slammed down the door locks. All she wanted was to get out of there, but he got in front of her car and prevented her escape for a short but interminable period of time.

She described him as having a dark complexion, acne scars and short, dark hair. He drove off in a white Chevy with a black interior and Mississippi tags. But most frightening of all was his shirt—it was splattered with blood. A forensic artist worked with her to render a likeness of this unknown man. He was sought as a suspect in John Cade’s murder, but was never found.

Kathleen sat down to watch the second episode of “Dead Men Tell No Tales” with the sketch by her side and skepticism in her heart. Soon, the drawing was held in white-knuckled fingers and her heart was in her throat. She compared the man on the screen with the one in the picture in her hand. There were similar curves in the jaw line. The eyebrows of both had the same upward pointed growth in the same places. Sells and the drawing had a distinct line in the chin, an oval-shaped face and wavy hair. And in every photograph flashed on the TV, there were the same tightly closed lips as the ones in the drawing. She’d been begging God for answers to her husband’s murder and, at that moment, Tommy Lynn Sells was starting to look like the answer to her prayers.

She wrote to him and asked if he had been in Mississippi in 1979. He wrote back and said in that year he was in Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and maybe California, too.

Her next letter asked if he had had acne when he was 15, if he was driving that summer and if he remembered
that July Fourth holiday weekend. He admitted that his face had had severe eruptions at that age, and not only was he driving cars, he was also stealing them. But he could not remember where he was on that particular weekend.

She picked up her pen and wrote again, wanting to know if he remembered any of the cars he had stolen and driven around for a while. And she enclosed a copy of the forensic sketch, asking if he thought that resembled him when he was fifteen. His response mentioned a white Chevrolet that summer.

An intermediary visited Kathleen and told her that Tommy said he had committed that murder in Mississippi. Kathleen was jubilant, but not foolish. She wanted to believe, but first Tommy had to provide her with unpublished details about the crime scene and the events of that night. She wanted to visit Sells with Mississippi lawmen at her side to record and confirm his confession. She did not want any charges filed, she assured him. She only wanted closure.

Sells agreed to talk to her—he agreed to tell her every-thing—but she could not bring any law enforcement with her. Kathleen’s vestigial skepticism was in revival. Without a definitive piece of information, she could not be certain. She didn’t want revenge. All she wanted was the truth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

TOMMY Lynn Sells left death row for the Bexar County Correction Center in San Antonio on February 22, 2001, to await trial there for the capital murder of Mary Bea Perez.

There were those who criticized the district attorney for being politically motivated in her pursuit of the death penalty. Since he was already on death row, the practicality of devoting strained law enforcement resources to this case was questioned. Some thought the expenditure of $200,000– $300,000 for a capital case was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Sells’ attorneys made Susan Reed an offer: he would plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. She consulted with the family of Mary Bea Perez. One half of them wanted her to accept the plea bargain. The other half did not. She turned down the agreement and the preparations for trial resumed.

SELLS welcomed the positive changes resulting from his incarceration in Bexar County. He could use the telephone every day. Some of his pen pals sent their phone numbers and eagerly awaited his calls. A woman in the group turned each one into a steamy session of phone sex. After thirty days, he was allowed a television in his cell.

But there was a downside, too. “Everyone on death row knows what they are faced with. Everyone is charged with capital murder. Every one of us has a date someplace down the line for Texas to kill us,” Sells said. “In San Antonio, you have some in there for jaywalking to capital
murder. You have some young-ass kids think they are Mexican mafia, when all they are is a rat pack of punks.”

LAW enforcement agencies continued to hound Sells for more information about old confessions and new possibilities. He told investigators in Illinois that he could take them to the gun he’d used to kill Keith Dardeen. But, in Texas, there is a law that prohibits unindicted inmates under a death sentence from leaving the state. Illinois fought that battle in court and lost.

Their effort was not ignored by the state legislature. State Representative Pete Gallego, a Democrat from Alpine in far West Texas, introduced House Bill 1472 to overturn the law. His bill was specifically designed with Tommy Lynn Sells in mind. The bill failed, mainly because of lack of support from the governor’s office. The governor’s policy office insisted it was necessary to keep the existing law to protect the public and the will of the State of Texas. Often, other jurisdictions want to bring prisoners to their location to testify in the trials of other defendants, or to help find evidence in open cases. The original law had been written to protect the state from the possibility that a state that does not have a death penalty would not return the inmate. Texas feared that an unindicted prisoner in one of those states could be set free or placed in a low security facility where an escape was a possibility. But, they stated, if the inmate is indicted in any other state, the governor of Texas would honor extradition papers signed by any other governor in the Union.

MORE suspicions popped up across the country. Investigators in St. Louis, Missouri, looked at Sells for three murders there in 1983. In addition to the blunt trauma deaths of 33-year-old Colleen Gill and her 4-year-old daughter, Tiffany, they also hoped he could provide details of the sexual assault and murder of an 8- to 10-year-old African-American girl. Her body was found in an abandoned building, just blocks from the Gill home on February 28. Her
head was never found and her name is still not known. Sells told Texas Rangers that he’d killed a mother and child and a black female in St. Louis in two separate instances, but provided no further details. Investigators from Missouri still hoped to get something more concrete.

Outside of Houston, a woman went jogging one morning and never returned. Days later, a man driving a tractor down the road found her, her throat cut. The Texas Ranger working in that area can find no reason for the crime and has no suspects—except one possibility, Tommy Lynn Sells. Sells has vaguely alluded to committing two murders in the Houston area, but was not willing to speak to that Ranger or to provide any details about bodies resting on Texas soil.

Sergeant Buddy Cooper, with the Missouri Highway Patrol, questioned Sells about a double homicide in Portageville, a small town in the boot-heel section of the state. On March 28, 1998, Tony Scherer was out working in the fields of his farm. His wife Sherry Ann and his 12-year-old daughter, Megan, were at home. When Tony opened the door of his house, he was tempted by the tantalizing aroma of ribs being cooked for dinner. But his appetite vanished in the next moment. He saw his wife. She was naked, her belly resting on a footstool, her hands tied behind her back. Nearby, her daughter lay sprawled on the floor. Both were dead from gunshot wounds. Two hours later, investigators believed, the same man responsible for the double murder asked a Dyersburg, Tennessee, woman for directions. Then, he shot her with the same gun he’d used in Portageville. This woman later identified Tommy Lynn Sells as the man who shot her.

Sells admitted to committing these crimes. According to him, he’d knocked on the door of the farmhouse to ask for some water. The woman who answered the door was rude and disrespectful to him. He flew into a rage, killing Sherry Ann and sexually assaulting her, then murdering Megan.

Sergeant Cooper said that this case had Tommy Lynn
Sells written all over it. Sells even described a spilled antifreeze stain on the driveway. There is just one thing that does not add up. DNA was recovered at the scene. It was not a match for Sells.

IN Lawrenceville, Illinois, three years after the death of Joel Kirkpatrick, prosecutors charged Julie Rea with the murder of her son. From the start, her ex-husband, Len Kirkpatrick, reeling in grief over the loss of his son and still festering from an ugly divorce and custody battle, insisted to all who would listen that Julie was responsible.

Investigators and prosecutors were not convinced of her version of the events. Their doubts were born on many fronts. No fingerprints, DNA or other physical evidence of an intruder was recovered from the scene. From this lack, they postulated that the intruder did not exist. But Tommy Lynn Sells and others like him often walk away from a murder scene without leaving any proof of their presence behind.

Prosecutors believed that a stranger coming off the street with killing in his heart would bring a weapon. They could not accept that he could pull a knife from the kitchen drawer to use in commission of the crime. Sells did sometimes bring a weapon—sometimes he used what was at hand. Roaming the streets in October 1997 were others just like him.

Finally, prosecutors were convinced that the violence of the attack and the rage it displayed was proof that the perpetrator knew the victim. Sells demonstrated the fallacy of that logic on November 18, 1987, in Ina, Illinois.

In another major blow for the defense, Lesa Bridgett, the neighbor Julie had run to after her son’s murder, testified that something indefinable about the defendant’s story and demeanor was not credible.

On March 4, 2002, a jury deliberated for nearly five hours before finding Julie guilty of stabbing her son to death. On May 10, the judge sentenced her to sixty-five
years in prison. Julie Rea continued to protest her innocence.

In mid-June, 2002, Tommy Lynn Sells received a letter that read: “The other night, I was watching a story on TV about a woman who was in jail for killing her son. She claims someone broke into her house and killed him. You could say, ‘Yeah right, lady. We’ve heard that story before.’ But then you listen to the law enforcement guys and the prosecuting attorney and they are so full of stupid opinions.” The writer summarized the reasoning of the officials and concluded, “After hearing that garbage, I believe it is very possible that woman is telling the truth.”