Tommy Lynn Sells was born in Oakland, California, on June 28, 1964, one of twins; his sister died of meningitis in infancy. He was sent to live with an aunt, taken back, and by his own account was being abused by a family friend from the age of eight. He left home at fourteen and spent the next twenty years riding freight trains and moving between carnivals, oil rigs, ranches and labouring jobs across the United States, drinking heavily and using whatever was available.
That itinerancy is the case. He killed in Texas, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Nevada and Arizona, mostly people he had no connection to at all: a woman he met at a bar, a family in their beds, children asleep in their own houses. He used knives, guns, a baseball bat, a length of pipe. There was no signature to link the deaths and no reason to link a body in one state to a body in another, and he moved on within days. American reporting called him the Coast to Coast Killer and the Cross Country Killer.
It ended in Del Rio, Texas, on the last night of 1999. He went into a trailer and attacked thirteen-year-old Kaylene Harris in her bed, and cut the throat of her friend Krystal Surles, who was ten and staying the night. Krystal held her hand over the wound, waited until she was sure he had gone, crossed a field in the dark to a neighbour's house, and could not speak, so she wrote down what had happened. She survived, and the description she gave produced an arrest within days.
He was convicted in September 2000 of Kaylene Harris's murder and sentenced to death. He then talked, for years, to investigators from a dozen states, and around twenty-two of the killings he described were corroborated. He gave figures for himself as high as seventy, and no one has ever been able to test most of them.
One of his confessions undid a miscarriage of justice. In 1997 ten-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick was stabbed to death in Lawrenceville, Illinois, and his mother Julie Rea, who said an intruder had done it and had fought with her, was convicted of his murder in 2002. Sells described the killing in detail. Rea's conviction was overturned and she was acquitted at retrial in 2006 and later granted a certificate of innocence.
He was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on April 3, 2014, aged forty-nine, after a last legal argument about the undisclosed source of the pentobarbital used. He made no final statement.