Some time around 4:30 on the morning of December 31, 1999, as the press reported the trial (the federal appeals court later put it early on December 30), Tommy Lynn Sells let himself into a mobile home west of Del Rio, Texas, that belonged to Terry and Crystal Harris. He knew the family: they had met him and his wife at Grace Community Church, and he had been to the house several times asking Terry Harris for advice about his marriage. He carried a butcher knife into the bedroom where their thirteen-year-old daughter Kaylene was asleep with a friend who was staying the night, ten-year-old Krystal Surles. He sexually assaulted Kaylene, stabbed her sixteen times and cut her throat. Then he cut Krystal's throat and left. Krystal, her windpipe severed, got herself a quarter of a mile to the neighbors' house. The sketch drawn from what she told investigators led to Sells's arrest on January 2, 2000, and she lived to testify against him.
By then Sells had spent more than twenty years on the move. He was born in Oakland, California, on June 28, 1964, one of five children of an unwed mother; the man presumed to be his father, Joe Lovins, died when he was eleven. He and his twin sister Tammy Jean caught meningitis at eighteen months and she died of it. He was sent to an aunt, Bonnie Walpole, in Holcomb, Missouri, and taken back at five when his mother learned the aunt wanted to adopt him. At seven he was drinking from his grandfather's supply. Within a year, he said, a grown man named Willis Clark was molesting him, with his mother's encouragement, and he said later that he relived it when he killed. He was using narcotics at ten. At thirteen he climbed naked into his sleeping grandmother's bed and was banned from the house, and soon afterward his mother and siblings left town without him. From 1978, when he was fourteen, he had no home. His mother threw him out of her house in Little Rock in May 1981 after he tried to molest her in the shower, and his first arrest, for public intoxication, came the next year.
From 1978 to 1999 he hitchhiked and rode freight trains around the country, worked a few weeks at a time as a laborer, a carnival hand or a barber, drank, used drugs and went in and out of jail. In 1990 he stole a truck in Wyoming and got sixteen months. On May 13, 1992, in Charleston, West Virginia, a nineteen-year-old named Fabienne Witherspoon saw him panhandling under an overpass with a sign reading "I will work for food" and took him home to give him something to eat. He got inside, took a knife from her kitchen, trapped her in the bathroom and tried to rape her. She beat him about the head with a ceramic duck, got the knife from him and stabbed him, nicking his kidney and liver, and he hit her over the head with a piano stool before trying to run. His wounds put him in intensive care and in custody. He took a plea to malicious wounding and served five years, during which he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and married Nora Price. He was released in 1997, moved with her to Tennessee, left her the same year and went back on the road.
The killings investigators came to attribute to him show no pattern except the road itself. In July 1985, working a carnival at Forsyth, Missouri, he met Ena Cordt and her four-year-old son Rory; her age is given as twenty-eight in one account and thirty-five in another. She invited him home to Springfield. By his account he woke to find her going through his backpack, beat her to death with her son's baseball bat, and then killed the boy because he was a witness; the bodies were found three days later. In October 1987 he picked up Stefanie Stroh, twenty-one, hitchhiking out of Wells, Nevada, and, he said, strangled her at Lovelock after they took LSD together; her body has never been found. In December 1988 Kent Alan Lauten, fifty-one, was stabbed and buried near a homeless camp in Tucson, over drugs Sells said he refused to pay for. In December 1991 Teresa Hall and her five-year-old daughter Tiffany were beaten to death with a table leg in Marianna, Florida, a case first put down to Ángel Maturino Reséndiz until Sells confessed to it. In 1997 thirteen-year-old Stephanie Mahaney, by his account taken from her bed, was found near Springfield in a farm pond, and in 2004 he confessed to having murdered Suzanne Korcz, who had vanished after leaving a Lockport, New York, nightclub in 1987.
In his last year of freedom, by his own confessions and what investigators found, the pace quickened. On April 4, 1999, in Gibson, Tennessee, he broke into the house of Debra Harris, thirty-one, raped her in her bed and stabbed her with her own kitchen knife, and stabbed her eight-year-old daughter Ambria Halliburton, who had seen it. On April 18 he took nine-year-old Mary Beatrice Perez from the Fiesta celebrations in San Antonio, raped her and strangled her with her own T-shirt; she was found in Alazan Creek ten days later. On May 23 he raped and strangled thirteen-year-old Haley McHone in Lexington, Kentucky, and was picked up in the area for public intoxication and let go the next day. On July 5 he took fourteen-year-old Bobbie Lynn Wofford from a Love's convenience store in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, assaulted her, struck her with a hatchet and shot her in the head when she tried to run, and kept two of her earrings. Six months later he walked into the Harris trailer outside Del Rio.
His trial for the murder of Kaylene Harris opened in Val Verde County in September 2000. Before it began he pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the attack on Krystal Surles. After three days of testimony, a jury of seven men and five women deliberated for about seventy minutes and on September 18 found him guilty of capital murder; on September 20 he was sentenced to death. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice received him on November 8, 2000, and he was held on death row at the Polunsky Unit near Livingston. In 2003 a Bexar County jury, in a case prosecuted by District Attorney Susan Reed, gave him life for the murder of Mary Beatrice Perez.
From death row he talked to investigators from state after state, and told the psychiatrist Michael Stone, on camera, that he had killed more than seventy people. The retired Texas Ranger John Allen said of the count, "We did confirm 22 ... I know there's more." Much of the rest never checked out, and investigators came to suspect him of working the system by confessing to killings he had not committed: a woman he said he had dumped in a quarry lake near Little Rock in 1982, a man supposedly left in a Chicago dumpster at an intersection where no such killing was ever found. The best-known test case went the other way. In November 1987 Keith Dardeen, his three-year-old son Peter and the newborn daughter his wife Elaine delivered while being beaten were all killed near Ina, Illinois, and Sells confessed to the killings. The Jefferson County state's attorney declined to charge him, because his account, though broadly consistent with what had been in the papers, was wrong on details never made public, and he changed his story of how he met the family three times. Illinois wanted to question him further; Texas law kept death-row prisoners in the state.
One confession did hold, and it freed a woman. On October 13, 1997, ten-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick was stabbed to death in his bed in Lawrenceville, Illinois. His mother, Julie Rea, said she had run to his room, found a man in a ski mask and fought him off before fleeing; the knife, from her own kitchen, lay outside the door. She was convicted of her son's murder. In 2004 Sells described breaking into a house on that date, taking a knife from a butcher block, stabbing a little boy and struggling with a woman, details that matched her account, and at a retrial in 2006 she was acquitted. Other families were left with doubt instead. In 1982 JoAnne Tate was murdered in her St. Louis home, and her daughter Melissa DeBoer, who was seven and was herself attacked, gave testimony that helped convict Rodney Lincoln. After watching a television program about Sells in 2015, she came to believe Sells had killed her mother, and in 2018 Governor Eric Greitens commuted Lincoln's sentence to time served.
On January 3, 2014, a Del Rio judge set his execution for April 3. On April 2 a judge halted it and ordered the state to tell his lawyers where its new supply of pentobarbital had come from, but the execution went ahead the next evening at the Huntsville Unit, the first in Texas using the newly obtained drug. Asked whether he wanted to make a final statement, Sells said, "No." He took a few breaths, closed his eyes and began to snore, and was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m., thirteen minutes after the drug began to flow. He was forty-nine. Krystal Surles watched, with members of the Harris and Perez families. Kaylene's father, Terry Harris, said afterward that the injection was "way more gentle than what he gave out."