The Cross Country Killer – Life of Serial Killer Tommy Lynn Sells –14.The Conviction

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The Conviction
The trial to convict Tommy Lynn Sells was not long or drawn out. It was a pretty open and shut case. After all, there was an eyewitness to the murder of Katy Harris. It wasn't difficult for the jury to come to the conclusion that Sells should be put to death, and so he landed on death row forthwith. What followed was not so simple. There would be many years of heartache relived and old cases closed.

On November 8, 2000, Tommy Sells was admitted to death row in the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas. He was given the number 999367. He found the accommodations and regulations more confining than his time at Val Verde Corrections Center. He didn't have a television to watch, couldn't call people, and wasn't allowed to smoke.

He was held in a section of a pod that had fourteen prisoners overall, and he had to spend twenty-three hours a day in his cell. It was a six-foot wide space that had a toilet, sink, and bed. Sometimes he'd sleep on the floor and use his bed as a desk for writing or drawing desk.

At one point he became part of a small protest on death row. The inmates refused to eat dinner on the nights Texas executed one of their number, and they wouldn't speak between six and seven that day. Of the eighty-four prisoners, only seven received a meal tray.

Sells was allowed to shower every three days. Before he was able to leave his cell, he had to put his hands behind his back and stick them through a hole while cuffs were put on. The shower room was seven feet long by two feet wide. After he stepped inside, he would stick his hands through another hole, and the guard would release the cuffs. On a good day, a guard would return to take him back to his cell within ten to fifteen minutes. On bad days, he had to wait in there as much as an hour.

However, Sells quickly adapted to the lifestyle of men who were living on borrowed time. In one of his statements, he said prison was his home. It was the one thing in his life that never changed. He could rely on prison to offer the same routine day in and day out, and he knew exactly what his relationship was with everyone inside.

There were no unknowns for Sells when he was in prison.

Sells had been physically removed from his wife, but even in his absence, he made problems for her. Her children were teased and isolated at school by their teachers and peers alike. She herself suffered as a powerless witness to the incessant bullying.

She fought to keep her boys in her home. After rarely visiting them for the past five years, her ex-husband now wanted custody of them. In court, the judge was very upfront. She needed to stop all communication and visits to Tommy Sells, or the boys were going to be taken from her.

Jessica ended all contact with her husband. One by one, his family members stopped sending letters or calling. Only his Aunt Bonnie kept writing him with regularity. One of her letters let him know that his grandmother had passed away.

~

The television show 48 Hours flew Texas Rangers Coy Smith and Johnny Allen to New York to view the first episode of a two-part series on the crimes of Tommy Sells. On February 1, 2001, they appeared on The Early Show on CBS.

Following a clip of Harold Dow talking to Sells, Jane Clayson interviewed the officers. That night's showing of 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' interested more of the nation's law enforcement agencies than the Rangers had anticipated. When they returned to their offices, they had more than nine hundred phone calls and six hundred emails to return.

They asked the same questions over and over again – did anyone have any fingerprints, DNA evidence, or physical evidence to connect their perp to the other crime?

It was obvious that not all of these crimes were the work of Tommy Sells, but the volume of cases still frightened them.

The same day the 48 Hours show aired, the district attorney for Bexar County, Texas, Susan Reed, took the Mary Bea Perez case to a grand jury in San Antonio. She secured a capital murder indictment against Tommy Sells. The documents alleged that he choked the nine-year-old girl to death with his hands to keep her from testifying against him.

The indictment was based purely on Sells' confession. While forensic technicians had tested items found at the crime scene, they hadn't come up with anything, and they had all the evidence they were ever going to find.

That same night, the phone rang in Kathleen Cowling's home in Clinton, Mississippi. It was a friend of hers who had watched the show and believed she had identified the murderer of Kathleen's first husband, John Cade. She told her that Sells had liked to climb into windows to get into people's homes.

Kathleen told her friend she'd watch the second part of the show, but she thought Sells was an unlikely suspect because he would have been too young. It had been more than twenty-one years since the murder of her husband, but she still thought of him. She wanted answers about his death, so in preparation for watching the second episode, she pulled out a forensic artist's sketch of a suspicious man who'd been spotted near the home five hours after John had been killed.

A woman who had been visiting Grand Gulf State Park with her two children around eight in the morning on July 6, 1979, had been frightened by a young man who appeared to be on drugs. When he ran at her, she grabbed her children and put them into the car. She slammed down the door locks and had to wait for the young man to get out of her way before she could leave.

She described this young man as having acne scars, a dark complexion, and short, dark hair. He drove away in a white Chevrolet with a black interior and Mississippi tags. However, the most frightening thing was his shirt. It had been splattered with blood. The forensic artist had worked with her to render a likeness of the unknown man. He was a suspect in Cade's murder, but he'd never been found.

Kathleen made herself comfortable to watch the second episode of 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' with the sketch at her side and skepticism in her heart. But as she compared the man on the screen to the picture in her hand, her heart leapt to her throat and she clutched the drawing with white-knuckled fingers. There were similar curves in the jaw line. The eyebrows had the same pointed growth in the same places. Sells and the drawing both had a distinct line on the chin, and the same oval-shaped face and wavy hair. In every photograph that flashed on the television, there were the same tightly closed lips as those in the drawing.

Kathleen had been hoping for an answer to her husband's murder, and it looked like Tommy Sells was it.

She wrote Tommy Sells in prison and asked him if he'd been in Mississippi in 1979. He wrote back that he had been in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and perhaps California, too.

Her next letter asked if he had acne when he was fifteen, if he was driving that summer and if he remembered the July Fourth holiday weekend. He admitted that his face had had pretty bad eruptions at that age, and that not only was he driving cars by then, but he was also stealing them. He couldn't remember where he was on that particular weekend, though.

She wrote him again, wanting to know if he remembered any of the cars he'd stolen and driven for a bit. She enclosed a copy of the forensic sketch, asking if he thought that resembled him when he was fifteen. His response mentioned a white Chevrolet that summer.

An investigator visited Kathleen and told her that Sells said he'd committed a murder in Mississippi. She was excited, but she wasn't foolish. She wanted to believe she'd found her husband's killer, but first Sells needed to provide her with unpublished details about the crime scene and the events that took place that night. She wanted to visit him with a lawman at her side to record and confirm the confession. She didn't want any charges filed, she assured Sells, she just wanted closure.

Sells agreed to talk to her and tell her everything, but stipulated that she couldn't bring law enforcement with her. Her skepticism was great, but she decided to go anyway.

Over the years, Sells admitted to many murders. When someone came forward to ask if he had been involved in an abduction or murder, he would tell them whether he had been or not. When he was asked why he was so forthright, he said it was because he believed these people deserved closure. However, he was never charged with all the murders he admitted to, and some bodies still have not been found.

On reason for this is that Texas does not allow death row inmates to leave the state to participate in further investigations.

Tommy Lynn Sells was executed by lethal injection on April 3, 2014.