The Cross Country Killer – Life of Serial Killer Tommy Lynn Sells –7.Going Back to Prison

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Going Back to Prison
At the age of twenty, Fabienne Witherspoon thought she could take care of herself. At five-foot-eight, with a solid, athletic body, she had physical prowess many women lacked. She looked tough, too: She had an attractive face, but her dark brown eyes held just enough of an edge that no one accused her of being cute. She had thick, curly brown hair that fell below her shoulders, and her uninhibited style tended to suggest a streak of wildness that lay just beneath the surface.

On May 13, she was house-sitting at 906 Grove Avenue in Charleston, West Virginia. It was an ordinary neighborhood where bad things didn't tend to happen, although she was nervous that day as she walked to the women's health clinic for a pregnancy test.

On her way back to the house, though, she felt at peace with the world. She was relieved that the test had been negative.

Then she saw a man in his mid-twenties with unkempt, matted hair and intriguing eyes. He was standing on the corner of Washington Street and Pennsylvania Ave. He held a sign that read 'Hungry, will work for food.'

He told Fabienne a tale of misery and woe in a soft voice with a hint of a southern accent. He told her his name was Tommy Sells, and that he and his wife were living under a bridge. His children were very hungry.

Fabienne felt a wave of compassion for the man, and she felt a bit of sexual attraction to him, too. She brought him to her house to find some food he could take back with him. She grabbed two trash bags and filled them both with food and clothing for him to take back. She smiled and asked if he needed anything else.

Sells told her his wife really needed some underwear, so she went back to her bedroom to find some clean ones. When she turned around, he was standing behind her with a knife from the kitchen in his hand. Sells immediately brought the knife to her throat and told her to take off her clothes.

Fabienne hesitated, but with the knife under her chin, she really had no choice. She removed her shirt and unfastened her bra, kicked off her shoes and pushed off her socks, and reached for the waistband of her pants. Then she froze.

Sells had the knife clenched between his teeth. He pushed her hands away and pulled down her pants. As soon as he began to remove his clothes, she looked away and stared at the floor. Then he smacked, shoved, and threatened her into the bathroom and down onto her knees, where he forced her to perform oral sex.

Sells then pushed her back onto the floor and spread her legs, raping her. She lay there, praying he would finish and leave.

He stopped, rose to his feet and ordered her to get into the shower. There, he raped her again. Then he pulled her from the shower and shoved her onto her knees, once more demanding she give him oral sex.

Still not sated, he jerked her over to the toilet and bent her over it. Just as he was about to sodomize her, she grabbed a ceramic duck from the back of the toilet. She grabbed it and smashed it over his head, and shards of the duck flew around the room. She kept hitting him over and over again with the remains of the figurine.

As they struggled, she was able to get the knife out of his hands. She stumbled from the bathroom to the front door, but he grabbed her and tried to manhandle her back into the bedroom. She stabbed him, and he grabbed her wrist and regained possession of the knife. He stabbed at her, but she jumped back and received only a deep slice across her skin. She also got control of the knife again.

They wrestled around the room, trading blows until he finally got her down on the floor with him on top of her. He strapped her ankles and wrists together with tape and secured the bindings with strips of sheets from the bed.

He raised a piano stool over his head and beat her bloody until the seat broke loose from the base. Then he tried to slit her throat – but this time, he panicked. The cut he made would only require a few stitches.

He grabbed a boom-box and a VCR and escaped from the home. He left behind the gifts she had stuffed into the bags.

As soon as Fabienne became conscious again, she fought her way out of the bonds. She wrapped herself up in a blanket, picked up her cordless phone, and hurried outside to call the police. Her descent down her front steps left a trail of blood and tape.

Before Fabienne left in the ambulance, she informed the investigators that the man who had assaulted her was Tommy Sells, and that he was sleeping by the river.

Sergeant Westfall and Detective H.S. Walker processed the crime scene as Detective Rollins and Lieutenant Epperhart searched the riverbank for their suspect. Sells wasn't unknown to the investigation division. He'd been observed for a few weeks holding up signs at the corner of Clendenin and Quarrier Streets. It didn't take long for one Detective Hammons to obtain an address for Sells, and then he and Westfall went to an apartment on Bigley Avenue and questioned Sells' former roommates – Rebecca Gibson, Curtis Sizemore, and Karin Pamela Young.

When the officers started the interview, they believed they were talking to two women and one man. They were wrong. Karin Young wasn't a woman. By the end of the interview, they were aware that Karin was a transvestite whose transformation was so complete that she'd fooled two men with extensive investigative experience.

When Sells had first met Karin, he'd been deceived too. So much so, that the first time he was intimate with Gina, Karin's sister, he'd had a moment of doubt about her. He threatened to kill her if he found out she was really a man, and she'd laughed it off as a joke at the time.

Rebecca, Curtis, and Karin told the investigators that Sells had come to the apartment around five in the afternoon. He told them he'd been in a fight and was bleeding, but he wasn't going to the hospital. While he was there, he'd removed his shirt and stuffed it into a garbage bag. Westfall found the shirt and bagged it as evidence.

When they were asked if they knew where Sells had gone, Curtis told them to try a place where Sells had been living for the past week. It was Gina Young's apartment.

~

After Sells arrived at Gina's place, he called his mother to ask her how he could butterfly bandage a cut. She asked him what kind of cut and how many, and he told her around twenty-three, but some of those were superficial. His mother told him how to bandage the cuts, and then told him he had to get to a hospital. Rather than seeking medical attention, he told his girlfriend to purchase some dope and a fifth of Jim Beam.

When she came back, he told her that if he died, he wanted his body to go back to Missouri.

An hour later, Hammons and Westfall arrived at the apartment door. Gina stepped back and let the officers in. They found Sells lying on the living room floor in serious pain, with multiple stab wounds to his abdomen. His external bleeding had slowed, but his internal bleeding was profuse. His kidney and spleen had been nicked, his lung had partially collapsed, and his testicles had been sliced. The detectives called for an ambulance and rushed him to the hospital, where he received immediate trauma surgery and then spent a week in recovery.

In the beginning, it looked like the case against Sells would be cut and dried, but when the prosecutors were preparing for trial, they found a few issues. It hadn't been long since Fabienne had filed another sexual assault charge that wasn't prosecuted. To the jury, the questionable nature of that charge might cast doubt on her current claim. To make everything worse, the defense uncovered some psychological reports that reflected poorly on Fabienne. They threatened to use the newfound information in court in defense of Tommy Sells.

In light of the revelations, the prosecution wasn't confident it could find Sells guilty and put him in prison. They were ready to deal. They felt that some jail time was better than the chance of none. The two sides agreed to a plea bargain. The sexual assault charges were dropped, and on June 25, 1993, Sells was sentenced to an indeterminate term of not less than two years but not more than ten years for malicious wounding. The judge gave him credit for four hundred and two days of time served. He was placed in the Northern Correctional Facility just south of Wheeling.

~

Sells had a friend waiting for him behind bars. Gina's heterosexual brother, Billy Young, watched Sells' back from the moment he arrived to the moment he left the jail.

Sells started out as a model prisoner who did nothing wrong. He earned the designation of trustee, but he soon abused that position. Sells and another inmate, Gregory Carter, found a .357 pistol inside the prison. They planned to trade the gun for marijuana, but for safe keeping, Sells hid the weapon in the warden's office. Another trustee caught him and reported him. Charges were filed but then dropped when Sells was moved to maximum security at Mt. Olive Prison.

During this prison stint, he taught himself to read with the help of the Bible. He hadn't been able to read anything when he'd dropped out of ninth grade at the age of sixteen. He worked very hard at his self-education, pushing himself to reach his goal, and sent his first letter of his life from prison.

In 1994, he struck up a friendship with a new inmate by the name of John Price. John was a nurse who'd been working for a home health service company in Logan, West Virginia. Three of his friends were found deceased after they'd injected themselves with a narcotic drug that was ten to a hundred times more powerful than heroin. John had undoubtedly been the source of the drug, but evidence of a more active role in their deaths was pretty weak. Facing the possibility of going to prison for life for the deaths of his friends, he pled guilty to providing the drugs but denied having administered the injections.

He told Sells about his sister, Nora, who was twenty-six years old and a bit slow. She was the product of special education classes in the public school system. She received a social security income check every month and visited her brother often. John introduced her to Tommy Sells.

~

Nora Price sat on the other side of the glass with the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. It was her first visit with Tommy Sells. The cold barrier didn't provide much of a romantic ambiance, but romance blossomed anyway. Later on, they were allowed contact visits that sealed Nora's fate. Sells took advantage of her intellectual deficiency and sweet-talked her into falling in love. She was easy for him to manipulate. She'd had a rough childhood and couldn't recall anyone being nice to her like Sells was. They wrote and talked about the day he'd get out and all of the things they could do then. He conned her out of small amounts of cash while she was there, and then he moved in for the prize.

He informally proposed to her through a letter, and then came the big day. Mt. Olive's prison had an annual event where visitors were able to spend an entire day with a prisoner. On the prison lawn, on a spring day, Sells asked Nora if she would marry him.

While Sells was still in prison in April of 1996, they were married. From that day on, seventy-five percent of Nora's checks went to Sells. As a sign of his gratitude, he had two tattoos done with her name written on them. One was a rose on his neck, and the other was a motorcycle with a dragon on his right upper arm. She was infatuated with him.

During his time at the prison, mental health professionals diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, but his illness wasn't treated. He was released in May of 1997.

~

Within days of being released, he left West Virginia and Nora behind. On June 1, though, he called her from Michigan and told her he wanted to get back together with her. She agreed, and he returned. Together, they hitchhiked and rode trains to Tennessee. They settled down in the town of Cleveland, and Sells got a job at a car wash. On July 29, local police gave him a ticket for driving without a license.

Sells abandoned Nora again on August 18 and went west. Nora, unable to cope on her own, went back to her home state of West Virginia.

On September 5, Sells called his mother from Oregon, and then he called Nora's mother. He traveled east again, picked up Nora in West Virginia, and took her to his mother's home in Missouri. By that time, Nora was pregnant.

In October, Sells got a job as a mechanic. He managed to stay off drugs for three weeks, and the family had high hopes he would finally be able to settle down. However, neither Nora nor his job could keep him drug-free for long. He came home one night high, and in no time, there were tracks up his arms.

Nothing could keep him tied to his home, and by mid-October, he was stalking his next victim.

~

Sells admitted to the murder of Joel Kirkpatrick in private conversations, but he never confessed to the authorities, and there was no investigation into his possible involvement. The following account was obtained by interviewers who spoke to Tommy Sells, but none of it has ever been proven.

Sells stated that he traveled east from St. Louis on Interstate 64. When he arrived at Lawrenceville on October 13, 1997, it felt like it would be an uneventful evening. However, it turned out to be one of the community's most memorable nights.

Sells first met Julie Rea at a convenience store, where she treated him rudely, according to Sells. From that moment, he wanted revenge.

Anger drove him to the front door of a house he'd never been in before. He carefully broke a window, making no more noise than he had to in order to get inside. He went directly to the kitchen, where he picked up a knife. He went to the first bedroom and found ten-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick asleep.

Sells plunged the knife into Joel, who managed to scream and wake up his mother. He left the boy lying at the foot of his bed and slipped from the room and away from the approaching mother. She raced to the room yelling her son's name.

She looked through the doorway and didn't see her son at the foot of his bed, so she turned, and that's when she saw Sells. He had the hood of his sweatshirt drawn up around his face, the drawstring pulled tight to conceal his features. She ran toward him, confronting the monster who'd stabbed her son. She chased him through the glass doors and into the backyard, screaming for help.

Outside, she tripped over something in the yard, and the intruder took the opportunity to turn around and hit her in the head.

She was too dazed to move or think for a moment. When she finally raised herself up on her arms she saw the man fleeing again. He pulled the hood down and revealed his face to her under a streetlight. She came to her feet again and rushed to a neighbor's house on the other side of the street. Once inside, she called the police to report her son's abduction.

In minutes, officers arrived at the scene and found Joel Kirkpatrick in his bedroom, deceased. He had suffered multiple stab wounds. Julie was taken to the emergency room to be treated for a black eye, scratches, and abrasions on the tops of her feet, as well as inside her legs and her knees, wounds on her shoulders, internal bruising, and a laceration on her right arm that required five stitches.

While Tommy Lynn Sells never told authorities he committed the heinous crime against Joel Kirkpatrick and his mother, he admitted it in private to several people.