Through the Window (4 page)

While Nina and the family attended the funeral, Nina’s aunt, Bonnie Walpole, cared for little Tommy. She placed an urgent call. “Nina, Tommy’s got an awfully high fever. I’m leaving right now. Meet me at the hospital.”

Once again, the same doctor gave the same diagnosis— pneumonia. Nina grabbed Tommy Lynn and said, “You’re not going to kill another one of my babies.” She ran out of the hospital into a cold and blustering wind. It tore at the blankets wrapped around her son, exposing his body to the elements. The frantic mother barely managed to hang on to the covers but, no matter how she struggled, she could not wrap them around her child. She left the hospital and drove ninety miles to the next one. Halfway there, the feverish child suddenly sat up. Soon he was chattering away and rolling around in the seat as if nothing had happened. When they reached the hospital, a nurse confirmed that Tommy’s fever had broken. He remained in the facility for five days, romping in his bed. There was no recurrence of his fever.

SOON after his recovery, Nina decided to rent a home owned by her Aunt Bonnie. When she checked the place out with a sniffling Tommy Lynn in tow, Bonnie offered to keep the toddler until the Sells family settled into their new home.

For two-and-a-half years, the boy lived with Aunt Bonnie. He claimed it was the one bright spot in his childhood. According to his aunt, his favorite pastime was repeatedly riding a tricycle up and down the sidewalk. When he grew up, he wanted to be a fireman.

He received all the attention a toddler could desire from Bonnie’s two daughters, 12-year-old Sandy and 8-
year-old Kathie. Every school day, he walked toward the school to meet the girls as they were coming home. The threesome frolicked and giggled through dinner and up to bedtime.

Bonnie and the girls loved the “precious boy” as if he were their own. So much so that Bonnie wanted to make the relationship permanent and legally binding. After all, she said, Nina did not visit her son, she did not inquire about him; in truth, she acted as if she did not know of his existence. But, the moment Bonnie asked to adopt him, everything changed. Nina was furious. She jerked Tommy Lynn out of the only home he could remember and brought him back to hers.

Repeatedly, Bonnie attempted to visit her former charge, but Nina rebuffed her attempts, refusing to allow even one brief hug. Hindsight gave Bonnie Walpole a heavy burden of guilt and regret to carry for not having hired a lawyer and fighting to keep the little boy.

AT the age of seven, Tommy began abusing alcohol with the liquor his maternal grandfather, Pa Brown, kept hidden under the seat of his truck. Around this time, Tommy’s attendance at school became sporadic—skipping school started as a challenge and soon became a way of life. “He was the kind of child that, whatever you wanted him to do, he was going to make sure he did not do it. Going to school was one of those things,” his mother Nina remembered.

When he was 8, Tommy met a man from the nearby town of Frisbee, Missouri. Frisbee was a small place. “They said the population was ninety-seven, but I think they counted some of the people twice,” Sells recalled.

The man began a systematic seduction of the young boy. He took him on trips to Kennett, taught him to shoot pool and spent money on him freely. At first, Tommy’s visits to the man’s house only lasted a couple of days at a time. Then, they got longer. Every time Nina insisted that Tommy come home, he would have a fit and would not stop begging until she allowed him to return. She let his
visits get longer and longer and eventually he was living with the man full time.

Tommy reveled in always having a pocketful of spending money provided by the man; but there was a price tag attached to this newfound bounty. According to Tommy, his mother, his Aunt Bonnie and a psychiatrist who later worked with Sells, the man was a pedophile who sexually abused Tommy and others for years. He never was married, but always had a bevy of boys clamoring around his house.

After the first time the man made Tommy have sex with him, the young boy curled up in a tight ball, alone and lonely. All he’d wanted was to talk to someone—any-one—but no one was there. When questioned by a Missouri Highway Patrol officer in 2000, the man denied these allegations.

Tommy started experimenting with marijuana at the age of ten. Joe Lovins, his presumed biological father, died when Tommy was eleven. The last opportunity to speak to his deceased father brought a rush of emotions.

With tears welling in his eyes, he stood by the coffin. He spoke from his heart. “There’s a whole lot in my life that’s really messed up, Dad. I’m ready to talk to you now. I wish you didn’t have to leave me so soon. I’m really going to miss you.”

But his words were cut short. A slap on his rump jerked him from his communion with his deceased father. Ma Brown, his maternal grandmother said, “Stop it. Stop right now and go sit down.”

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD Tommy was staying at Ma Brown’s one night. She was sound asleep when she felt a movement on her bed. Her eyes popped open and there was her naked grandson slipping under the covers with her.

“You’d better get your ass out of this bed and stop this shit.”

Tommy did as he was told without delay. He never tried to climb into her bed again.

LATER that year, Tommy walked from Clark’s house to his family’s trailer to visit his mother and brother. He pulled on the doorknob, but it was locked. When he knocked, he got no response. He pulled himself up on the ledge of the windowsill and peered inside. The usual trail of playthings, discarded clothing and crumpled school papers were nowhere to be seen. “No one was there. Nothing was there besides the trailer. They moved—she met a man from Michigan and they got married. Everyone moved to Michigan. No ‘I’ll see you later.’ No ‘Bye.’ No nothing,” Sells recalled. The young man trudged back up the street alone. None of Sells’ family members corroborated this story.

A few days later, he pistol-whipped a woman who’d stirred his anger.

CHAPTER SEVEN

TOMMY Lynn Sells left home to live life on his own terms when he was 14 years old. He had vivid memories of the places he’d been, the sights he’d seen: the magnificence of the Grand Canyon, the splendor of Niagara Falls, the shouting strips of light in Las Vegas.

But his memory of his first murder was very vague. He was not even sure which one was first and what state he was in at the time. He does remember that in one of his first homicides, he killed a man “in self-preservation” in Mississippi.

ON July 5, 1979, just outside of the small town of Port Gibson, Mississippi, Kathleen Cade called her husband at his John Deere dealership and arranged to rendezvous at 5:30 at a T-ball game that their 5-year-old son Richard was playing that night. She then loaded him and John, Jr., their 10-year-old son, in the car and left the house.

Soon after midnight, Richard was asleep in his own bed, John and John, Jr., had drifted off watching TV in the master bedroom and Kathleen stirred awake on the easy chair in the living room. She padded down the hall to her room and wriggled under the sheets, putting John, Jr., between his two parents.

At some point that night, an acne-scarred young man got a stool from the patio and placed it beneath a window on the front of the house. He removed the screen, climbed in the open window and lowered himself to the floor without a sound. He was carrying a .32-caliber Saturday night special.

He scurried into hiding to listen and make sure everyone was deep in sleep. Sometime later, he emerged and went into the kitchen. He pulled a jug of milk out of the refrigerator. He popped the cap and dropped it on the kitchen counter. He swigged from the container as he explored the house. He set the milk down on the floor in the family den, a room in the pathway from the kitchen to the bedrooms. When deputies arrived after 3 A.M., the milk was still cold.

Kathleen heard some rustling and scuffling sounds, but she could not pull herself up out of her deep sleep. Then, she was aware of noises that sounded like popcorn popping in the kitchen or the very distant crack of thunder. Still, she could not reach the surface to wakefulness. But when she heard her husband shout, “What’s going on here?” she broke through the fog. Her eyes opened. The first sight she saw was the digital alarm clock on her nightstand. The time was 3:01. She turned to her husband. He turned on the light. “I’m bleeding,” he said as he looked down at his hands.

He went into the bathroom. His terrified wife and son were fast on his heels. He bent over the sink to rinse off his hands. He toppled back onto the floor, dead. Kathleen and John, Jr., could only stare in disbelief.

Investigators were baffled. There were no fingerprints, and nothing was missing from the home. The first natural suspect, his wife Kathleen, was given a polygraph test and was cleared of any complicity in the crime. They could find no reasonable explanation for why anyone would want to kill this 39-year-old chairman of the church board, who didn’t seem to have an enemy in the world.

IN 1980 in Los Angeles, near a Chinese restaurant, Tommy Lynn Sells killed a man with an ice pick. In Oakland, he tangled in a gang-related fight. Wounded himself, Sells didn’t stick around to be sure the other man was dead. When asked later by Lieutenant Larry Pope if he’d killed the man, Tommy said, “I ought to, I stabbed him a bunch of times.” Sells was seriously injured. The ice-pick stab he
took in the back “missed his spine by a pencil lead.”

In the hospital after the skirmish, the nurse came in, lifted the sheet and prepared to insert a urinary catheter. Tommy was outraged. She insisted it was necessary because of bleeding in his kidneys. He still refused. She assumed he objected to a woman performing the procedure, so she sent in a male doctor. He lifted the sheet and he, too, was sworn out of the room. Sells would not have his dignity assaulted by the insertion of a catheter—not even to save his life. He left the hospital against medical advice and hitchhiked to St. Louis where his mother lived once again after leaving her husband in Michigan. It took him forty-nine hours to reach her home. She nursed him back to health.

IN the early eighties, Sells spent time in the Little Rock area in Arkansas. He had a brief stint in the now-defunct youth home behind McClellan High School. Then he and a girlfriend took up residence in Southeast Little Rock in an apartment at 6 Portsmouth Drive. She was one of a long string of conquests. His promiscuity was so rampant, his mother took to calling him her “little whore.” “He has the gift of gab. He can make any woman believe him. He had more women than Carter had liver pills,” she said.

IN May of 1981, Nina Sells and the rest of her boys were living in Arkansas, too. She was tired all the time, working two jobs to support her family since her husband died. She was taking a shower one morning before going to work when she heard the bathroom door creak open. Then the shower curtain pulled back and her son, Tommy, joined her in the stall. Nina yelled at him to get out. She kicked his shins. She pummeled his shoulders with her fists. At that moment, she wanted to kill her son and have him out of her life for good. Tommy jumped out of the shower, put on his clothes and fled the house.

He was admitted as an outpatient to the Community Mental Health Clinic in Jonesboro, Arkansas, for the attempted
sexual assault of his mother. He was prompt for his first appointment, but obviously confused.

“I don’t know who I am,” he admitted. His tortured hazel eyes looked briefly at the counselor, then flashed away, concentrating on the floor.

“Do you know why you attacked your mother, Tommy?”

He shook his head. “I feel like a fool for trying to attack Mom. I don’t understand why I did it. I don’t understand anything anymore.”

“Were you angry?”

“Yes.” His eyes flared with brilliance as he remembered the heat of his emotion.

“Why, Tommy? What did your mother do?”

“She tries to run my life. I’m going to run my own life, and I don’t care who I have to hurt to do it.”

The clinician observed his facial expressions, general body movements and the amplitude and quality of his speaking voice, and knew with a certainty that Tommy was an angry, volatile young man.

In testing, a more complete picture of the troubled adolescent was revealed. He felt unwanted and unloved. He thought he was the cause of all the problems in the home. He was sad, in pain and unhappy about his current situation. He wanted to strike out and hurt someone else to relieve his own feelings of pain.

His diagnosis found him to be engaged in alcohol and cannabis abuse. It also said he suffered from conduct disorder, under-socialization and aggression. It was recommended that he attend regular therapy sessions to explore his feelings and anger and “[ . . . ] to find alternative methods of ventilation of his emotions in a safe, non-threatening environment and non-damaging manner.” Sells attended five therapy sessions. On June 18, he called in and cancelled his sixth appointment. He never returned to the clinic again.

On March 27, 1982, Tommy Lynn Sells was arrested in Little Rock for public intoxication after a disturbance at
an apartment complex on Geyer Springs Road. At the time, he was working at the Kinney Shoe Store on that same street.