Tommy Lynn Sells was executed by the State of Texas on April 3, 2014, for the murder of Kaylene Harris, a 13-year-old girl he stabbed in her bedroom outside Del Rio in the early hours of December 31, 1999. Her friend, an 11-year-old girl who was sleeping in the bunk above her, was attacked in the same room and survived. Her description of the man led to his arrest two days later. In 2003 he also pleaded guilty to the 1999 murder of 9-year-old Mary Bea Perez, who was taken from a Fiesta celebration in San Antonio.
Those are the two killings for which he was convicted. Over the years he confessed to many more, in several states, and told interviewers the total might be 50 or as high as 70. Investigators accepted some of his accounts, found others impossible, and were left unsure about the rest. He was indicted for the killings of two other 13-year-old girls, in Kentucky and Missouri, but was never tried for either. In one Illinois case his confession helped a mother who had been convicted of killing her son win an acquittal at a retrial.
Sells was born on June 28, 1964, in Oakland, California, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The Dallas Observer, reporting from his trial in 2000, said his family later moved to Utah and to St. Louis. He had a twin sister, who died at about the age of 2 of spinal meningitis. He had the same fever and survived, possibly with lasting brain damage, the Observer reported.
His schooling ended after the eighth grade, the highest grade TDCJ records for him, and he left home at about 13 or 14. At his trial a defense psychologist testified that Sells refused to talk about a man in his neighborhood who befriended boys, and Sells hinted at sexual abuse in childhood without giving details. In later federal habeas proceedings, his lawyers filed records and affidavits describing him as a slow learner and discipline problem who was picked on as a child; his mother's affidavit reportedly said that a local man had sexually abused him. The Fifth Circuit noted that other abuse he alleged was confirmed by no one. The same filings said he had used drugs and alcohol from the age of seven, and raised the possibility of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
In a 2010 jailhouse interview with ABC News, Sells blamed an abusive childhood in St. Louis for his rage. A 2003 encyclopedia entry on him, in the Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime edited by Eric Hickey, said his family moved often, that he was passed among relatives, and that he worked as a carnival hand, handyman and day laborer while abusing drugs and alcohol.
TDCJ's record of his earlier sentences lists a two-year Missouri sentence for felony theft, from which he was paroled on December 18, 1985, and then returned as a parole violator after a conviction for driving under the influence, being discharged after 16 months. It lists a two-year Wyoming sentence for vehicle theft, also discharged after 16 months, and a sentence of 2 to 10 years for malicious wounding, which TDCJ also places in Wyoming. Other sources put the malicious wounding case in West Virginia.
That case arose in Charleston, West Virginia, on May 13, 1992. Sells attacked a young woman who had offered him food and clothing, ABC News reported in 2021. She fought him off and escaped, though she was seriously hurt. He accepted a plea deal on a charge of malicious wounding and served five years. Police later described the underlying attack to the Dallas Observer as an attempted rape and murder.
He was released from the West Virginia prison in 1997, the Washington Times reported. Over the years his work included jobs as a barber, mechanic, laborer and carnival roustabout, according to TDCJ and the Associated Press.
Most of what is known about Sells's earlier crimes comes from his own statements after his arrest in 2000, checked by investigators in the states concerned. The Dallas Observer reported in 2000 that police then believed he had committed at least 10 killings and regarded about half of his claims as credible. Among the cases investigators found credible at that time, the paper listed these.
Ena Cordt and her 5-year-old son, Rory, were killed in 1985 in Missouri; the Observer gave the place as Forsyth. No report says Sells was charged with their deaths.
Kent Alan Lauten was killed in Tucson, Arizona, in 1988. Sells confessed; no charge has ever been reported.
In New York, Sells confessed in 2005 to a killing in 1987, the Associated Press reported in 2014. He was not tried because he was already on death row in Texas.
In November 1987 deputies in Jefferson County, Illinois, were sent to a mobile home in Ina after Keith Dardeen, 29, failed to show up for work at a local water plant. Inside they found his wife, Elaine Dardeen, 30, their 3-year-old son, and a newborn baby, all dead. Keith Dardeen was found dead the next day in a field about a mile from the home. He sang lead at a small Baptist church where his wife played the piano, the Associated Press reported. The Southern Illinoisan gave the date the three were found as November 18, 1987; an Associated Press report gave November 17 as the day police were sent to the home.
Sells confessed to the Dardeen killings, but he was never charged. Gary Duncan, who was the county's top prosecutor for 17 years until 2008, told the Associated Press in 2014 that some of the details Sells gave were accurate, though some might have come from news reports. Sells said Keith Dardeen had picked him up at a gas station and invited him home, an account Keith Dardeen's mother rejected. He said he had shot Keith Dardeen in a particular car seat, which the evidence contradicted. Asked how Elaine Dardeen's body had been found, he first answered wrongly and then gave the right answer, which Duncan thought he might have worked out. Sells offered to show investigators where he had hidden evidence in Illinois, but Texas would not let him leave the state.
Duncan said there was "a lot of ambiguity" in the claims but nothing that made Sells's guilt "completely discountable." With a questionable confession and no physical evidence, prosecutors could not charge him, and Duncan said there was "a fair possibility that the actual killer may still be out there." Keith Dardeen's mother, then 76, told the AP she did not believe Sells had done it. The case was still unsolved when the AP wrote about it in April 2014.
On October 13, 1997, Joel Kirkpatrick, 10, was stabbed to death as he slept in the Lawrenceville, Illinois, home of his mother, J.R., where he was staying for a weekend visit. She said she woke to screams, ran to his room and fought an intruder through the house and into the yard before he ran off. Lawrence County authorities did not believe her account. A grand jury indicted her on October 12, 2000, and on March 4, 2002, a jury convicted her of her son's murder. Judge Robert M. Hopkins sentenced her to 65 years in prison, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Sells's link to the case began with the writer Diane Fanning, who was in correspondence with him; ABC News reported that he wrote back about a killing "Maybe on a 13th?" and that she then contacted a Texas Ranger who knew him well. Sells described breaking into a house, taking a knife from a kitchen butcher block, stabbing a young boy and struggling with a woman. The National Registry dates the confession to 2004; ABC News said he gave police a detailed confession in 2003; and the Illinois Times, writing in September 2003, said he had "voluntarily confessed" in a book published in April 2003.
The Downstate Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois at Springfield investigated from July 2003. Its investigator, Bill Clutter, presented taped witness interviews at a statehouse press conference in September 2003. One man said he had met a disoriented "drifter with problems" at a Lawrenceville drive-in on October 11, 1997, and had reported the encounter to the sheriff's office, which did not follow up. A Greyhound worker in Princeton, Indiana, said a man resembling the intruder bought a ticket to Winnemucca, Nevada, on October 14. Texas Rangers said Sells surfaced in Winnemucca about two months after the killing, the Illinois Times reported. Clutter told ABC News that Sells recalled details he could only have known if he had been there.
An Illinois appellate court reversed J.R.'s conviction on a point of state law about the appointment of special prosecutors. At her retrial in 2006, in Clinton County, the jury heard the taped Sells confession, which the prosecution maintained was false, and found her not guilty. She received a certificate of innocence on November 29, 2010. Sells was never charged with Joel Kirkpatrick's death.
In September 2003 Sells was charged in the 1997 killing of Stephanie Mahaney, a 13-year-old girl from Springfield, Missouri; he was accused of strangling her, Missourinet reported. Her body had been found in a pond about a month after she disappeared. About three years earlier, Sells had told Texas Rangers that he had killed a girl somewhere between Rolla and Joplin. He described the clothes she had been wearing, and when he was shown her photograph he said she was the girl he killed. The Associated Press reported in 2014 that he had been indicted for her death in 2003 but was never tried.
Sells came to Del Rio, about 150 miles west of San Antonio, as a carnival worker in early 1998 and stayed after the show moved on, the Dallas Observer reported. He married a local widow, the Washington Times said, and lived with her and her four children. He worked as a mechanic and later sold cars. He went to church regularly, and it was at Grace Community Church that he came to know the Harris family, who lived in a trailer west of town near Amistad Reservoir.
The facts of the attack are set out in the opinion of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, drawn from the trial evidence and Sells's own statements. On December 30, 1999, Sells spoke with Kaylene's father at a convenience store. According to Sells, the father said he would repay a 5,000 dollar drug debt when he came back from Kansas. The Dallas Observer reported that police found no basis for the debt claim and that Kaylene's father denied it.
Sells then spent about four hours at a bar, from about 10 p.m. until about 2:15 a.m. A waitress testified that he drank four beers and repeatedly asked her for sex, offering to pay, and kept pressing after she refused. She said he did not seem drunk when he left. He drank more beer at a flea market and decided, he said, that Kaylene's father had been "messing with" him about the money. He collected more beer and a knife from his house and drove to the Harris home, which stood in a fairly remote spot, and parked down the street.
The family dog barked until Sells, who had befriended it on earlier visits, came up and petted it. He tried the back door and a locked window and then found an open window and climbed in. Kaylene's mother and four other children were asleep elsewhere in the home, the Associated Press reported from the trial. In one bedroom two girls were asleep in bunk beds: Kaylene on the bottom and her 11-year-old friend, who was staying over, on the top. Sells attacked Kaylene. When she tried to get out of bed he blocked the door and stabbed her, and she died of her wounds. He then attacked her friend with the knife. The friend lay still and pretended to be dead until he had gone, the Fifth Circuit later recounted.
Before he left Sells wiped a doorknob to remove his fingerprints and took two window screens that carried his prints. He threw the screens and the knife away on the way home. The telephone line to the house had been cut. Kaylene's father told police that Sells had been to the home several times and had learned where the line ran when he helped fix a leaking pipe.
The surviving girl walked about a quarter of a mile to a neighbor's house. A neighbor let her in shortly after 5 a.m., the Dallas Observer reported. She was taken to a hospital in San Antonio. She helped police draw a composite sketch, which resembled Sells, and later picked him out of a photo lineup.
Sells was arrested on Sunday, January 2, 2000, at the mobile home he shared with his wife and her children. He did not resist. Lieutenant Larry Pope of the Val Verde County Sheriff's Office said Sells had been planning to leave town.
He gave four confessions about the Harris case, the Dallas Observer reported, and he also walked investigators through the trailer on videotape, describing what he had done. Scientific tests on clothing taken from him and the medical examiner's evidence about Kaylene's wounds matched his statements, the appeals court said. In one statement he said he had thought about killing everyone in the trailer. His defense was that he had gone in without any plan to commit a sexual assault, and that everything happened on impulse.
He soon began telling investigators about killings elsewhere. By April 2000, Pope said, Sells had "remembered" more than 20 cases. Investigators were checking them "a little piece at a time," using a timeline of his movements that had already ruled him out of many inquiries, the Washington Times reported. The officers had in mind the Henry Lee Lucas case of the early 1980s, in which many of a drifter's confessions were later shown to be false. "We don't want to get in to a Henry Lee Lucas situation here," Pope said. He added: "We're not saying he did any of this stuff," but said Sells was a strong suspect if he could identify places and details.
One claim had already fallen apart. Sells said he had shot a man during a burglary in Little Rock in the early 1980s. Police found no reported killing, and the man turned up alive; he said he had survived by playing dead. "So in this case he really didn't kill anybody, but he thought he had," Pope said. Sells told investigators that he had found religious faith and that this was why he was confessing. The Val Verde County sheriff, D'Wayne Jernigan, said he hoped that was true but was "suspicious of jail-house conversions."
By the time of the trial, inconsistencies in Sells's accounts had persuaded investigators that he was making up some crimes, the Dallas Observer reported. His trial lawyer, Victor Garcia, said Sells had told him he was inventing confessions to avoid execution, copying Lucas. "He's a con and a half," Pope said. Texas Ranger Johnny Allen, who worked the confessions, proceeded with the Lucas case in mind, the paper said.
The capital murder trial was held in Del Rio in September 2000. Jury selection took 14 days, and about 500 people were called, the Dallas Observer reported. Garcia, appointed by the court, focused on sentencing; he called the guilt phase "a speed bump on the way to sentencing." His goal was a life sentence.
Under Texas law the jury could convict Sells of capital murder only if it found he had committed another felony, such as burglary or sexual assault, in the course of the killing. Sells pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Kaylene's friend and not guilty to capital murder. Garcia argued there was no evidence that Sells had entered the home intending a sexual assault and suggested he had been pressured into his statements.
Over three days of testimony the jurors heard Sells's written and videotaped confessions. The surviving girl, by then 11, testified. The Associated Press described her as "a poised but tearful" witness who at times cried and at times looked Sells in the eye. Deliberations lasted about an hour. On September 18, 2000, the jury found him guilty of capital murder.
"It's going to put closure to a lot of things. He took my baby," Kaylene's father said after the verdict. "It's hard to explain the rage." The surviving girl said, "I think that's what he deserved." Garcia said the verdict was no surprise: "In this case, we have a victim who testified and it's hard for the jury to get past that."
At the punishment phase the state called a fellow inmate who said Sells had threatened him, a psychologist who testified that Sells was highly likely to be violent in the future, and records of his out-of-state crimes. The defense called a jail administrator and a psychologist, Windell Dickerson, who described suspected abuse, substance abuse from the age of seven, brain abnormalities and borderline personality disorder. The judge refused to let the defense show a 57-minute video of a prison administrative segregation unit. The jury took about three hours, the Dallas Observer reported, and its answers to the special issues required a sentence of death. TDCJ received him on November 8, 2000.
The appeal went automatically to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, where Sells raised 36 points of error. On March 12, 2003, the court affirmed the conviction and death sentence in an opinion by Presiding Judge Keller. Judge Johnson dissented on the points about questioning jurors on parole and otherwise agreed.
The court held that the jury could rationally find that Sells had entered the home intending to commit aggravated sexual assault, the point on which capital murder depended. It said the jury could infer that intent from his fixation on sex at the bar, his fetching of a knife, his knowledge of the household and the way he got in, and that his own claim of acting on impulse did not make the verdict clearly wrong. It rejected his claim that a deputy had coerced his second written statement by promising him the death penalty after he said he would rather die than spend his life in prison; the trial judge had found the statements voluntary. It held that the exclusion of the segregation video was proper, because the tape showed one part of prison life and had no specific connection to Sells. It also rejected his challenges to the questioning of jurors, to the denial of challenges for cause and to the Texas death penalty statute. The United States Supreme Court declined to review the case in 2003.
Mary Bea Perez was 9. On Sunday, April 18, 1999, she was at Market Square in San Antonio with her family during the city's Fiesta celebrations when she disappeared. A large search followed, and the city's police searched without finding answers, KSAT reported. Her body was found about a week later along Alazan Creek, near an underpass at Interstate 35 and Laredo. She had been strangled. Her death was ruled a homicide, but no suspect was found until Sells confessed after his arrest in Del Rio.
In 2003 Sells pleaded guilty to capital murder in her death, and prosecutors dropped the death penalty in return, the Associated Press reported. Senior Judge Brent Richardson sentenced him to life in prison, KSAT reported. Some later reports gave other years for the sentence; the 2003 plea date is the one given by the AP and the Austin Chronicle.
Her mother has spoken of her for years. "It's never going to go away," she said in 2014, as the family gathered with candles and balloons at the place where her daughter was found. "Take care of your kids. Do not let them go, because they can get lost in a second." The family has returned every year on the anniversary, KSAT reported, and decorates the girl's grave and lays flowers on All Souls Day. "It's never going to go away, because, every year Fiesta comes, we remember my daughter," her mother said in 2019.
Sells's first state habeas application, which claimed that his trial lawyer had a conflict of interest over book and publicity rights and had failed to present mitigating evidence, was denied in June 2005. He filed a federal petition in August 2006, which was put on hold while he brought a second state application claiming intellectual disability. That application was dismissed in 2007 for failure to make a threshold showing, and the claim was not pursued in federal court. A third state application, filed in September 2010, raised new claims that his trial lawyers had failed to investigate his childhood and possible fetal alcohol syndrome and that his first habeas lawyer had been ineffective. The Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed it as an abuse of the writ.
The federal district court then held that the new claims were barred because they had not been properly raised in state court, and in the alternative that they had no merit. On July 22, 2013, the Fifth Circuit refused to allow an appeal. It found that much of the new evidence was duplicative, irrelevant or damaging, that the fetal alcohol evidence was "double-edged," and that the excluded prison video had nothing to say about whether Sells himself was dangerous. It also upheld the refusal of about 60,650 dollars in further investigative funding.
In December 2013 State District Judge Enrique Fernandez of Val Verde County set Sells's execution for April 3, 2014, the Associated Press reported in January. His lead appeals lawyer, Alan Futrell, called the date "premature, we think," and said, "We're not through in the courts." The lawyers planned to ask the Supreme Court to examine whether Sells's trial and appellate lawyers had been deficient.
In the last days, his lawyers joined a challenge to Texas's refusal to say where it had obtained a new supply of pentobarbital, the drug used for executions. The state's earlier supply had expired, and the compounding pharmacy that had provided it stopped selling to the state after its name became public and it received threats, the Associated Press reported. Travis County Judge Suzanne Covington ordered the state to give the supplier's name to the inmates' lawyers under a protective order. On April 2, 2014, in Houston, United States District Judge Vanessa Gilmore issued an injunction halting the execution. "Until Plaintiffs have full disclosure of the product with which Texas will cause their death, they cannot fully develop a challenge to its process," she wrote.
The Fifth Circuit vacated the stay the same day, in Sells v. Livingston. It found that Sells was unlikely to succeed, because the state had disclosed batch testing of the drug and was using an established procedure. "Speculation is not enough," the court said. About an hour before the scheduled time on April 3, the Supreme Court refused to stop the execution, rejecting both the drug challenge and his claim of poor representation at trial without giving reasons.
Sells was executed at the prison in Huntsville on the evening of April 3, 2014. He was 49, and he was the first Texas prisoner to receive pentobarbital from the new supply. It was the fifth execution in Texas that year. Asked whether he wanted to make a final statement, he said, "No." The drug was injected at 6:14 p.m. He took a few breaths, closed his eyes and began to snore, and stopped moving in less than a minute. He was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m. Two of his friends and his spiritual adviser were present, according to the San Antonio Express-News, as reported by NBC News.
Kaylene's father watched. He said the injection was "way more gentle than what he gave out," and afterward, "What a great day!" Kaylene's brother said, "My sister didn't get the constitutional pain and suffering." Mary Bea Perez's mother also witnessed the execution. "I don't think there's no closure," she said. TDCJ lists Sells as execution number 513, with Val Verde as the county of conviction, and records that he declined to make a last statement.
Proven by final judgment: the capital murder of Kaylene Harris and the attempted murder of her friend (Val Verde County, 2000), and the capital murder of Mary Bea Perez (San Antonio, guilty plea, 2003). His earlier convictions in Missouri (theft), Wyoming (vehicle theft) and West Virginia (malicious wounding) are recorded by TDCJ and the press.
Charged but never tried: the May 1999 killing of a 13-year-old girl in Lexington, Kentucky, for which the Associated Press reported in 2000 that he had been charged and the Dallas Observer reported that he had been indicted; no outcome has been reported. The 1997 killing of Stephanie Mahaney in Missouri, for which he was indicted in 2003.
Confessed and treated as credible by investigators, never charged: Ena and Rory Cordt (1985) and Kent Alan Lauten (1988). Confessed and not tried: a 1987 killing in New York. Confessed and doubted: the Dardeen killings in Illinois, which remained unsolved in 2014.
The Kirkpatrick case: Sells's confession was played at J.R.'s retrial and she was acquitted and later certified innocent, but Sells was never charged and the prosecution maintained his confession was false.
The St. Louis case: JoAnn Tate was killed in her St. Louis apartment in April 1982 and her two young daughters were attacked with a knife and survived. A man, R.L., was convicted on the identification of one daughter, then 7, and sentenced to 15 years plus two consecutive life terms. Years later that daughter came to believe that Sells had killed her mother, after watching a television program about the case; St. Louis Public Radio reported in 2022 that the theory remained unconfirmed. She recanted her identification. Governor Eric Greitens commuted R.L.'s sentence in 2018, and he left prison after more than 36 years. His lawyer said he was free but had not been exonerated.
Numbers: Sells claimed as many as 70 killings, according to court records cited by the Associated Press, and suggested to the journalist Martin Bashir a figure as high as 50. The AP said in January 2014 that he had been linked to more than a dozen killings, and in April 2014 to nearly two dozen; ABC News said at least 17 besides Kaylene Harris; KSAT said at least 20. None of these figures comes from a published official list.
June 28, 1964: Tommy Lynn Sells is born in Oakland, California.
December 18, 1985: paroled from a Missouri theft sentence; later returned as a parole violator.
1985: Ena Cordt and her son Rory are killed in Missouri; Sells later confesses.
1987: the Dardeen family is killed in Ina, Illinois (found November 1987); Sells's later confession is doubted and he is never charged.
1987: a killing in New York, to which Sells confesses in 2005.
1988: Kent Alan Lauten is killed in Tucson; Sells later confesses.
May 13, 1992: attacks a woman in Charleston, West Virginia; later pleads to malicious wounding and serves five years.
1997: released from prison in West Virginia.
1997: Stephanie Mahaney, 13, is killed in Missouri.
October 13, 1997: Joel Kirkpatrick, 10, is killed in Lawrenceville, Illinois.
Early 1998: Sells arrives in Del Rio with a carnival.
April 18, 1999: Mary Bea Perez, 9, disappears from Market Square, San Antonio.
May 1999: a 13-year-old girl is killed in Lexington, Kentucky; Sells is later charged.
December 31, 1999: Kaylene Harris, 13, is killed near Del Rio; her 11-year-old friend survives.
January 2, 2000: Sells is arrested in Del Rio.
April 2000: investigators say he has described more than 20 cases.
September 2000: pleads guilty to attempted murder at his trial.
September 18, 2000: convicted of capital murder; the jury's punishment answers lead to a death sentence.
November 8, 2000: received on death row by TDCJ.
March 4, 2002: J.R. is convicted of her son's murder in Illinois.
March 12, 2003: the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the conviction and death sentence.
2003: pleads guilty to the capital murder of Mary Bea Perez; sentenced to life.
September 2003: indicted in Missouri for the killing of Stephanie Mahaney; never tried.
June 2005: first state habeas application denied.
2006: J.R. is acquitted at a retrial.
November 29, 2010: J.R. receives a certificate of innocence.
July 22, 2013: the Fifth Circuit denies a certificate of appealability.
December 2013: execution date set for April 3, 2014.
April 2, 2014: a federal judge in Houston halts the execution; the Fifth Circuit vacates the stay.
April 3, 2014: the Supreme Court declines to intervene; Sells is executed at Huntsville, pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m.
2018: R.L.'s sentence in the St. Louis case is commuted.