The Cross Country Killer – Life of Serial Killer Tommy Lynn Sells –4.Killings without Discrimination

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Killings without Discrimination
July 26, 1985, was a Friday, and Rory Cordt was going to be turning five in eight days. He was over the moon excited about going to kindergarten in the fall, but he was even more excited because he was going to the fair with his mother, Ena, that day. Ena was a small, pretty woman with dark hair and dark eyes.

Life can get lonely for a divorced woman in a small town. After years as a janitor at Skaggs Hospital in Branson, Ena now worked at a car wash in Forsyth throughout the day and cared for her son in the evenings. At the county fair, she flirted with a man by the Ferris wheel. She probably thought it was harmless, but the man would turn out to be the last person she saw on earth.

Ena's yard was littered with toys that night. Inside, the rooms were clean but a little disorganized. When Sells arrived, Rory was in bed. According to Sells, the visit was pleasant enough. Until, that is, he went to the bathroom and returned to find Ena looking through his bag.

Whether it was fear that she might find and steal his cocaine, or just anger about her rummaging through his things, no one will ever really know. After all, serial killers are notorious for lying. However, the story of Ena's death is not a fabrication.

When Tommy came out of the bathroom, he spotted her bent over his bag. He immediately flew into a blind rage, grabbed Rory's baseball bat from the hall, and lifted it high in the air. He beat Ena viciously over the head, on the arms she raised to defend herself, across her back, and on her head again. She screamed, begged, and prayed for someone to hear, but no one did. Not anyone who could help her, anyway.

Little Rory stood in the doorway, watching Tommy beat his mother to death. Not satisfied with beating her with the bat, he grabbed one of her kitchen knives and slit her throat, ending it once and for all for Ena Cordt. And because Joe Lovins had told Tommy Sells that no witnesses could ever be left alive, he grabbed little Rory and dragged him into the living room, beating him over the head with the baseball bat the entire time. He then slit Rory's throat just like he'd slit Ena's, and then he proceeded to wipe away all the fingerprints and evidence left behind.

Once he was done cleaning up after his rampage, he gathered his belongings and took Rory's bat with him. He forced his way out through a rarely used door and fled into the night. Carnies tend to disappear on a whim, so his absence from the fair he'd been working at that night didn't raise suspicions.

Ena and Rory's bodies lay cold in their home for three days before someone found them. On July 30, 1985, at seven in the evening, Ena's parents made the gruesome discovery of their daughter and grandson. Her red car had been parked out front all this time, but when they knocked, no one answered. They pushed the door open, and the smell of the decaying bodies hit them immediately.

The day Rory should have been celebrating his fifth birthday, he was buried in the ground beside his mother at Snapp's Cemetery in Taney County. Ena's other child, eight-year-old Peggy, was still alive. She'd been spending her summer vacation visiting with her father.

Law enforcement had no motive, no suspects, and no solution for the double homicide. Tommy Sells had gotten away with it, so far.

~

It became obvious that Sells' stint in rehab was not a success. On September 4, 1985, on drugs and drunk, he was driving down the road with two underage girls in his vehicle. He lost control of it, flipped it, and rolled it three times. All three occupants walked away with only minor injuries, but Sells was arrested for driving under the influence and charges related to the girls. Thirty days later, the court dropped all charges for the girls and sentenced him to time served.

However, on October 15, his parole was revoked, and he returned to Missouri State Penitentiary. On October 29, he went back to Boonville Correctional Center. His violations in prison were infrequent and minor – self-mutilation and making a disturbance. He was released on May 16, 1986, with his full sentence served.

After leaving prison, he worked for Atlas Towing in St. Louis for a short time. He hauled vehicles and made emergency roadside repairs. While so employed, he met and married a woman named Sandy, who has since died of breast cancer.

One night he was repairing a vehicle around five minutes from the Arch off Broadway in downtown St. Louis. Without provocation, Sells claimed, the owner kicked him. Sells pulled out his gun and shot the man, leaving him for dead. Before he could get out of the area, he was arrested in Pagedale Township for stealing the light bar from a tow truck. But the charges were dropped, and he continued to cross the country nomadically.

~

Sells wandered south until he landed at Aransas Pass, Texas, a tiny fishing town separated from the Gulf of Mexico by Mustang Island. There, he found a job with Gulf Team Shrimp. Their boats went out to sea for thirty days at a time. On one of these trips, Sells overdosed on heroin. He turned blue and passed out before he was able to inject all the heroin. He was found with the needle still stuck in his arm.

When the rig man found him, his breathing was labored. Since the boat was two and a half days out, Sells' survival was questionable. The captain called the Coast Guard, but Sells regained consciousness before they arrived.

After the bad experience at sea, he never went back. Instead, he wandered across the nation, going wherever he wanted. There were violent encounters along this journey. Sells may be the one who murdered nineteen-year-old Michelle Xavier and twenty-year-old Jennifer Duey in Fremont, California in 1986. Their bodies were found off Mill Creek Road. One had been shot in the head while the other had had her throat slit.

~

In April of 1987, Sells hopped onto a freight train and rode as far north as possible. He got off in Lockport, New York, close to Niagara Falls.

On May Day, Susan Korcz was at a local bar fighting with her boyfriend, Michael Mandell. She left the bar angry, heading in a direction that wouldn't take her home. She was never seen again after that, and was listed as a missing person.

Leads were followed up and suspects were questioned without result. Susan didn't show up or call the hair salon where she worked, and there wasn't any activity on her credit cards or her bank account. She never contacted her family. Within weeks, she was presumed dead. The police conducted a search of the waterways and canal, but they never found her body.

In the center of the town is the Niagara escarpment. Some of the hillsides off this escarpment take a fifty-to-sixty-foot drop. Near there is a canal with locks that gives the town its name. More than seven years after Susan disappeared, a worker was sent up onto the hill to clear off some debris. He saw what he first thought was a piece of trash, but when he picked it up, he realized it was a human skull.

Susan's body was finally found eight hundred feet from the canal near a railroad trestle. She'd been buried in a shallow grave that had been covered with debris. Due to the advanced state of the body's decomposition, the cause of death wasn't determinable.

~

On May 3, 1987, two days after Susan disappeared and two states away, Tommy Sells woke up with blood all over his clothes.

He wandered aimlessly toward the southwest until he stopped in Humboldt County, Nevada. Humboldt County is a desolate area where the largest employers are in the mining industry. From the early 1800s on, they have mined copper, silver, molybdenum, iron, tungsten, clay, bauxite, and mercury. The countryside is spotted with hot springs and abandoned mines. To the south is the small town of Winnemucca. The population in 1987 was close to thirteen thousand.

Upon arrival, Sells landed a job for Raymond Lavoie Roofing Company. However, his expenses were greater than his paycheck. He passed a bad check on October 28, and then on the 30th he stole a bank bag and a handgun from one of his company's trucks and used Raymond Lavoie's credit card to rent a hotel room for a woman.

Twenty-year-old Stefanie Stroh was a college student at Reed College in Oregon, but she was a long-time resident of San Francisco. She'd just returned from a ten-month trip to Europe and Asia, and when she arrived in New York, she decided to fulfill her lifelong dream of hitchhiking across the United States with a friend. They traveled as far as Salt Lake City together. She called home almost daily to speak to her mother, who was tracking her trip across the country. She wasn't worried, because Stefanie had never told her that she was hitchhiking.

On October 15, Stefanie Stroh went to a payphone to call her parents. After she had described the sights she'd seen since her last call, she told them where she was and assured them it would only be a few days until she arrived home.

The following day, she was at the Motel 6 in Winnemucca. There were no rooms available, and she asked whether there might be any in Reno, farther down Route 80.

Tommy Sells later told the Texas Rangers that he found the young woman alongside the road. She looked like a knockout as he drove closer. She was five-foot-five, well-endowed, and had sun-bleached brown hair. She was wearing hippy clothing and carried an orange sleeping bag roll with a gray backpack. She stuck out her thumb as Sells drove up, presenting him with an opportunity he just couldn't resist. Coming to a stop, he pushed the passenger door open, and she ran over to his pickup truck.

She asked him where he was going, but it didn't really matter. Sells would have told her he was going anywhere she wanted. She got into the vehicle.

Stefanie was relieved she had found a ride, so when Sells told her he had some acid and asked her to drop it with him, she didn't think twice. After all, she was hitchhiking across the country. What better time to experiment with drugs?

High on LSD in the desert, Sells choked her to death. In the stolen truck he was driving were a washtub and a bag of concrete. Sells put Stefanie's feet in the tub, mixed up some concrete, and left her hanging off the tailgate of the truck overnight as the concrete hardened.

In the morning, he dragged her body and belongings to a thirty-foot wide hot spring. It wasn't a tame body of water, and anyone who stuck their feet in would regret it. He dropped her in feet first, and then he drove out of the desert.

Three days after Stefanie was killed, when she hadn't arrived home and hadn't called, her mother and stepfather called the Winnemucca Police Department and filed a missing person report. When they found out she'd been hitchhiking across the country, it was easy to assume she'd been abducted and transported across states lines, and so the FBI was put on the case in November.

Stefanie's biological father rushed to the scene with nine family members and friends. They went straight from the airport to the Chrysler dealership. Stroh purchased eight jeeps and set out to find his missing daughter. Because they had received the last call from Wells in Elko County, they began there. Word traveled that she'd been spotted in Winnemucca, so they turned their attention to Humboldt County.

Amazed by the emptiness of Nevada, they drove for days – through the desert and down Route 80 to Reno. Along the way, they put up posters and asked questions at hotels, restaurants, and everywhere else they stopped. They finally began to focus on Reno, asking low and moderately priced hotels if Stefanie had made it that far.

The fliers were posted everywhere in Winnemucca and Reno, as well as up the interstate. The Motel 6 where Stefanie had stopped and asked for a room provided the names and addresses of everyone who'd stayed there on October 16, in the hopes that someone had seen her after she'd left. They asked questions everywhere else they thought Stefanie might have stopped. Her stepfather made a television appearance pleading for information about his stepdaughter.

Finding no answers, they returned to the dealership and sold the jeeps back. Then they flew back to the West Coast.

However, law enforcement agencies were still on the case, and their task was nearly impossible. Between thirty-two thousand and thirty-six thousand vehicles traveled Route 80 every day. The desolate terrain complicated the search even further.

San Francisco offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to Stefanie, or to the person or persons responsible for her disappearance.

The Strohs hired a psychic to aid them in their search. They were told they could find her body at the bottom of a mine or a well in eastern Nevada near a town with four syllables in the name. Battle Mountain and Winnemucca fit that description. There would be a white building and a strip mine nearby. Finally, the psychic told them that she saw Stefanie's feet in concrete.

Authorities scouted that area. They found an old roadhouse that matched the profile from the psychic, and an abandoned dry well. Mike Curti, the chief of police, called in the city's fire rescue truck to shine powerful lights down into the well. He looked down with binoculars, but the light couldn't penetrate all the way down.

Curti then called the sheriff's department, and they brought over a video camera. They lowered it down the old well and recorded images sharp enough to identify junk that had been thrown down there, but there wasn't any sign of Stefanie's body.

The family then requested an aerial search of the area. A pilot on his way to pick up a prisoner in California was willing to do the job. With the camera rolling, low and slow, he scanned the area between Lovelock and Winnemucca on the chance that Stefanie's body might have been thrown off the highway somewhere.

In November, a female resident of Winnemucca reported an incident that had taken place around the same time Stefanie had disappeared. The resident was traveling along the frontage road when she spotted a young woman matching Stefanie's description. She was scuffling with a man driving a truck alongside the highway. The resident stopped and asked if the woman needed help, but the woman never responded. The man jumped into his truck, and the woman walked westward on the highway.

A few days later, another woman said she'd seen the same event. She claimed the man had been walking along the highway and the woman had been driving the rig. The new witness had gotten the name of the truck company, making it possible for the police to track the identity of the driver. Soon, the FBI had a name from the Arkansas-based trucking company. However, the man was no longer employed at that business, and his location wasn't known.

The residents of Winnemucca couldn't stop talking about the case, even though none of them knew the girl who had disappeared. On several occasions, people had come across unidentified remains in the desert. The buzz would pick up again and, every time, Stefanie's family would come out to see if it was her. But the remains were never hers, and she was never found. Some law enforcement officials believe Sells' confession that he murdered Stefanie, but others don't.

Neither his employers nor his friends knew of his plans to leave Winnemucca, but on November 3, he was heading out of town. In a matter of days, he made it to Illinois.