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Texas Executes Tommy Lynn Sells for the 1999 Murder of Kaylene Harris After a Fight Over Its Secret Drug Supply

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the execution about an hour before it began. Sells, 49, declined to make a final statement.

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Illustration of empty wooden pews and a plain cross in a small, sunlit chapel. Not the actual prison chapel.

Tommy Lynn Sells claimed to have killed as many as 70 people. Texas put him to death for one of them: 13-year-old Kaylene Harris, killed in her family's home near Del Rio on New Year's Eve 1999. He was executed on April 3, 2014, with drugs from a supplier the state refused to name.

Sells, 49, was pronounced dead in Huntsville at 6:27 p.m., 13 minutes after the lethal dose began. Asked whether he wished to make a last statement, he said no. The execution came about an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a final appeal to postpone it until Texas told his lawyers where it had obtained a fresh supply of pentobarbital; the state's previous batch had expired the month before. On April 2, a federal district judge had halted the execution and ordered the prison system to disclose more about its supplier, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed her within hours. State officials said the source had to stay secret to protect the pharmacy from threats. "Without transparency about lethal injections, particularly the source and purity of the drugs to be used, it is impossible to ensure that executions are humane and constitutional," his lawyers, Maurie Levin and Jonathan Ross, said in a statement. He was the fifth person executed in Texas that year.

Kaylene's father, Terry Harris, watched from the witness room and said afterward that the injection was "way more gentle than what he gave out."

Sells had entered the Harris home while Kaylene and a 10-year-old friend slept in a bunk bed, killed Kaylene and slashed the throat of her friend, who survived, pretended to be dead and later helped police identify him. A Val Verde County jury convicted him of capital murder in September 2000. He later pleaded guilty in Bexar County to killing 9-year-old Mary Beatrice Perez, who disappeared from a San Antonio festival in 1999, and received a life sentence in exchange for the plea.

Sells's own count ran as high as 70 killings across the country; the Houston Chronicle described him as linked to the deaths of more than a dozen people, and Texas Rangers said some of his confessions were never confirmed.

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