The Cross Country Killer – Life of Serial Killer Tommy Lynn Sells –11.Pure Evil

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Pure Evil
1998 was an awful year for Susan Wofford and her family in Oklahoma. Susan and her husband Fred had been living in the rural area for twelve years after moving there from the southern outskirts of the city of Norman, where all three of their children had been born.

Ricky was seventeen, Michael was fourteen, and Bobbie Lynn – their daughter – was thirteen when their troubles started. A phone call from the hospital brought bad news. Ricky had been sitting in the back seat of a vehicle driven by his friend when they were in a car accident. The entire seat had flown forward through the windshield on impact, and the broken glass had ripped Ricky's face to shreds, permanently altering his features.

He'd healed enough two months later to go out to a basketball game with Michael. Fred dropped them off at the high school gym – and then he disappeared. For two weeks, Susan wondered and worried about her husband. She didn't know if he was dead or alive. Her mind went over every scenario. Then the police found his car on a dead-end street close to their home. His body was behind the steering wheel with a gunshot wound to his head. He'd committed suicide.

A month later, Michael was sitting in the passenger seat of a van while it drove down the highway. The driver lost control, and the van rolled over the median strip and slid to a stop upside down. The roof was smashed down to the tops of the seats. Michael survived only because he'd been thrown out before the van rolled over. Nevertheless, he sustained some serious injuries – a fractured collarbone, broken ribs, and punctured lungs. He was barely able to breathe when the paramedics arrived, and he was rushed to the hospital in critical condition.

Throughout this turmoil, Bobbie Lynn was the bright spot in Susan's life. She was creative, joyful, and a straight-A student. She played the trumpet and baritone in the school band and was on the basketball team.

At home, she liked to play with her cats and read. There were many semi-feral cats prowling around the neighborhood, and Bobbie Lynn knew each one by name. She was more than willing to nurse kittens back to health when the mother disappeared, feeding them from a bottle until they were ready for solid foods.

After the misery in 1998, Susan deserved a break. She wasn't going to get one in 1999.

Bobbie Lynn hit puberty in the spring of that year, and her relationship with her mother changed. Susan was used to her daughter following her around the house and talking about everything in her life the second it crossed her mind. To Susan, it seemed the change in her daughter happened overnight. She was quiet and wanted to spend more time alone in her room. Socializing with her friends was suddenly much more important than hanging around her family and caring for the cats.

On July 2, fourteen-year-old Bobbie Lynn told her mother she was going with friends to Canton Lake in Blaine County over the weekend. Susan gave her daughter ten dollars in spending money for the trip, even though she hated the thought of her get into an automobile after what had happened to her sons.

Bobbie Lynn didn't make it to the lake. As planned beforehand, she and her friends embarked on a reckless adventure they knew wouldn't have received their parents' approval.

~

That same weekend, Tommy Sells arrived at Kingfisher. As he was driving up from Del Rio, he was drinking heavily and taking cocaine throughout the day and night. Despite his altered state of mind, he remembered the details of that night vividly. His memory matched the evidence investigators had found.

Sells drove up Route 81 north of Oklahoma City and into the town of Waukomis, where he abruptly turned around and began heading south. During the early hours of July 5, he pulled into a convenience store to inflate a leaky tire on his '79 Dodge. He also wanted to take a look under the hood. The truck was a wedding present from his bride, and it was one of his most valued treasures, an impressive vehicle by Oklahoma standards.

At four in the morning, after he sold some cocaine to an older couple in the parking lot, he saw a young woman. She was about five-foot-five, with blonde hair and blue eyes and many earrings. She was using the telephone and complaining that she wasn't able to reach anyone.

He saw his opportunity and approached the seventh grader. He asked her why such a pretty woman was making such a fuss, and she told him she needed a ride home and couldn't get one. He told her he'd give her a ride and, dropping his tools to the floor, invited her into his truck. Bobbie Lynn made herself comfortable on the passenger seat. Her relief at going home was tinged with the guilt of where she'd been all weekend. She hoped her mother wouldn't find out.

Sells smiled at her and asked her if she wanted some coke. She told him she didn't have any money, and he told her she had something worth much more than money. When she told him to take her back to the convenience store, he backhanded her and told her to shut up.

Intimidated by his brutality, Bobbie Lynn didn't dare move or make a sound. She stared straight ahead as Sells drove northwest of Kingfisher and pulled over onto a dark and isolated road. There, he forced her to perform oral sex, fondled her, and began trying to rape her. Before he could penetrate her, her desperation overcame her fear. She slapped and scratched at him, and then she aimed a kick at his genitals.

That's when his rage took over. He grabbed a ratchet from the floor and rammed it inside of her.

Bobbie Lynn opened the truck door and tried to flee, but Sells had a gun. He shot her in the head, and she fell to the ground dead.

It was time to clean up the mess he'd made, so Sells grabbed her purse and duffle bag from his truck and threw them as far as he could. The pair of earrings she was wearing caught his eye, so he plucked them from her earlobes and slid them into his pocket.

He removed the ratchet and pulled her clothing back into place before he lifted her lifeless body. He lost her tennis shoe in the weeds before disposing of her body in an inconspicuous location further off the road. Although she was disheveled, she was still dressed in the clothes she'd been wearing at the convenience store.

With his rage satisfied and the evidence well hidden, he began driving back toward Texas.

~

At first, Bobbie Lynn's mother was angry her daughter had violated her trust and not returned home when she was expected to. In the beginning, the authorities treated her disappearance as a runaway case. The community gathered around the distraught mother and helped her search for her daughter, passing out fliers and reassuring her that everything was going to be okay.

When Bobbie Lynn was listed as a missing person, her mother's hope all but disappeared, to be replaced by an unending anxiety. The waiting game began. July went by too slowly, with too many false alarms. Susan's phone would ring with people letting her know Bobbie Lynn had been seen riding with someone in a truck. There were reports that her body had been found at Canton Lake. None of it had any basis in the facts.

Susan did whatever she could to distract herself from her worries about her missing daughter. She paced from one end of her house to another, wearing a path in her carpet.

Unconfirmed sightings of Bobbie Lynn continued to pour into the Kingfisher County Sheriff's Department. The months passed by, and finally, a witness came forward saying he'd seen a man talking to a girl who looked like Bobbie Lynn. It had been in a convenience store parking lot. Forensic artists drew a sketch of the suspect.

The following day, hunters stumbled across a library card and some lipstick. The library card bore the name Bobbie Lynn Wofford. They ended the hunting trip early and reported their findings to the authorities.

Bobbie Lynn had never been to that location, but it was known as a spot where teenagers commonly gathered to drink and party after dark.

Her yellow duffle bag, tennis shoe, and her black purse were all found, and the police kept searching until they found her decomposed body. It wasn't held together with much other than her clothes. The advanced decomposition made it difficult to tell, but head trauma led them to suspect that she'd died of a gunshot wound to the head.

~

Susan's phone rang again, and someone else was on the other end to tell her what had happened to her daughter. This time the information was accurate, but it wasn't the news she wanted to hear.

Once the body was found, girls in Bobbie Lynn's age group were afraid. They wouldn't walk to school anymore, and their parents didn't even try to make them. They were terrified their children would be next, so they were extra-vigilant about where their children were and what they were doing.

It was December before DNA tests verified that the bones belonged to Bobbie Lynn. No one knew how Susan would continue to function after the fourth tragedy in her family. Local churches were too small to hold the large number of people who wanted to stand by her as she mourned for her daughter. Ultimately, the funeral was held in the school gymnasium to accommodate the large crowd.

An anonymous tip led investigators to focus their attention on Deb's Sports bar, a tavern in Kingfisher. They interviewed the co-managers and confiscated drugs, hair samples, ammunition, and adult videos, but it was a fruitless effort.

Bobbie Lynn's killer was long gone.

~

Sells had returned to Del Rio, and after two rounds of interviews, the charge that he'd molested Jessica's daughter was dismissed as unfounded. Jessica and her children moved back in with Tommy Sells, and he stuck around for a few months while he worked for Amigo Auto Sales.

Bill Hughes, his employer, invited Sells and Jessica to go to Grace Community Church services with him. Crystal and Terry Harris and their children Katy and Lori were at those services, too.

When Terry Harris needed a new vehicle, he wanted to go somewhere he could trust. He chose Amigo Auto Sales because a fellow church member owned the establishment. The salesman that assisted him was Tommy Lynn Sells.

One evening, Sells showed up at Terry's home, and he invited Sells inside. Crystal took a single look at Sells' appearance – scraggly hair, beard, and tattoos – and was immediately uneasy. Chiding herself for her judgmental nature, she joined the men in the living room to listen to their conversation.

Sells admitted to having been in prison. He also admitted to having an alcohol problem that was tearing his marriage to shreds. He confessed he didn't know what he could do to save his relationship with Jessica, and then he told Terry how lucky he was to have a wife who was nice and children that listened to him.

Down the hall from the adults, Katy confided to Lori that she didn't like the way Sells looked at her. Lori told her sister that she ought to tell their father, but Katy argued that her father would get into a fight with the man, and she didn't want her father to get in trouble.

While Crystal sat with the men in the living room, she developed a fascination with Sells' tattoos. She knew that prison tattoos usually mean something, so during a lull in the conversation, she asked him what his represented. Sells told her she didn't want to know.

~

Route 44 goes through Joplin, Missouri, and across the state line into Oklahoma. State Route 59 goes west to the small town of Welch just ten miles from the border.

Down a long driveway off a country road, less than five miles north of Welch, was the modest trailer of Daniel and Kathy Freeman. They lived in this trailer with their daughter, Ashley. Daniel had built an addition that had doubled the size of the original trailer, and a rock foundation and a walkway dressed up the home's appearance. They had electricity and telephone service, but they didn't have running water, and they used a wood stove for heat.

Christmas of 1999 was a somber affair for the Freeman family. It was the first one they were celebrating since the death of their son, Shane. Earlier that year, their seventeen-year-old son had been shot to death in a confrontation with a Craig County deputy.

Ashley turned sixteen on December 29. That night, Jeremy Hurst, her boyfriend, delivered a present to her and stayed for a short visit. Her best friend, Lauria Bible, was spending the night.

While the four occupants were sleeping, Tommy Sells crept up to the trailer. He dodged between the animal pens on their property, moving closer to the home. When he was inside, he found a gun easily. Ashley and her father had been hunting since she was a child, and there were more than fourteen guns in the home. Sells picked one of them.

He stalked into the adults' bedroom, where they were sleeping, and rammed the butt of Daniel's own shotgun into his collarbone to get his attention. Sells wanted him awake when he died. When Daniel opened his eyes the barrel was pointed at his head, and the gunshot that followed a split second later blasted his body from the bed. The second shot, to Kathy's head, killed her where she lay. Sells slid a knife across her nude abdomen, disemboweling her. He did the same happened to Daniel, and he still wasn't finished. He cut off Daniel's arms and his right leg with an ax.

In the other bedroom, the first shot had awakened Lauria and Ashley. When the second shot blasted down the hall, Ashley recognized the sound. They huddled together, too afraid to move from where they were. They struggled to silence their gasps and tried to hear every sound to identify the noises they heard, but none of them made sense.

In the kitchen, Sells was pouring gasoline in a puddle on the floor in front of the wood stove. He splashed some of it on the heater itself, and smoke rose from the surface instantly. The flames followed within seconds.

Just as the girls smelled the first faint whiffs of the fire, a figure appeared in the doorway. He lunged at them with his hands clutching the shotgun, which he aimed at their heads. He ordered them out of the room and into the cold night. Shoving, cursing, and hitting, he herded them into the van. They took off into the darkness before dawn arrived.

Barreling down Route 44, Sells tortured both girls and then ended their lives. He claimed that he brought the van to a halt somewhere near the Red River and dumped the two girls in an isolated area before he kept heading south. Their bodies were never recovered.

On December 30, a neighbor on his way to work at six thirty in the morning noticed the fire at the trailer and called the police. The fire department raced to the scene, but the home was a complete loss. The only portion still intact was the floor of the master bedroom. There, the waterbed had doused some of the flames.

When the home was searched, only a single body was found – Kathy Freeman's. She was lying on the remains of the waterbed. In addition to the absence of bodies, two other items were missing. Daniel had a collection of arrowheads and Indian tools he'd been amassing since he was a child, and his rarest pieces were framed in glass boxes. The more common ones were stored in plastic buckets. Of the thousands of items in his collection, only a handful were ever found.

The second item never recovered was Ashley's savings. She'd been working at a Roscoe convenience store and saving every penny she could. She'd had between $1,100 and $4,000. That cash had been wrapped in foil and stored in a Tupperware container tucked in the freezer amongst packages of frozen meat. Lauria's purse with her $200 worth of Christmas money was found at the scene.

All day, the family's neighbors searched every inch of the forty-acre lot on foot and on horseback. They found no signs of Daniel, Lauria, or Ashley.

At 5:30 in the afternoon, the home was released to Daniel's half-brother. At the time, the theory was that Daniel had murdered his wife, torched his home, and abducted the two children. Amid the confusion, there was one detail that caused doubt, though. All the vehicles, including Lauria's, were still on the premises.

Lauria's parents, Lorene and Jay, were not satisfied with the search of the home, and they were determined to find out what had happened to their daughter. As they trudged through the ashes and rubble early the following morning, it took them only five minutes to make a shocking discovery. Ashley's Rottweiler was lying on the blackened floor next to the waterbed. When she stood to greet Lauria's parents, they saw that she'd been lying on the remains of Daniel's shattered head. When Lorene pulled back the carpet at that spot, they saw the outline of a second body.

When the sheriff's department returned, they ordered Lorene and Jay off the scene. However, they refused to leave until every piece of debris had been sifted through.

Daniel Freeman was removed from the list of suspects. Investigators even entertained the idea that the two girls were the perps they were looking for; however, the families disagreed with this theory. After all, Lauria's purse, car, money, and identification were all at the scene. Interviews of those who knew the girls and an investigation into their histories further diminished the credibility of the idea that they were involved.

Speculation now centered on three different approaches. The relatives of the Freemans were convinced that the crime was connected to Shane's death and Daniel's threatened civil suit against the Craig County Sheriff's Department. Even after the deputy and his brother passed a polygraph test, the family's remained suspicious.

Jay and Lorene believed that the tragedy had been tied to drug trafficking in some way. However, while Daniel was known to have smoked marijuana, and it was suspected he'd grown some for his personal use, he didn't have a record of drug offenses, and law enforcement had no evidence he'd sold drugs.

The investigators finally settled on Steven Ray Thacker, a known killer who'd been on the run. He was caught in early January and put on death row in Tennessee for stabbing someone in Dyersburg. He was charged with other murders in Missouri and Oklahoma as well. However, they couldn't connect him to the murders in Welch.

No matter how much they searched, none of their leads came up with a good explanation as to what had happened to the Freeman family and Lauria Bible.