The Cross Country Killer – Life of Serial Killer Tommy Lynn Sells –3.The Murder Spree Begins

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The Murder Spree Begins
On July 5, 1979, just outside Port Gibson, Mississippi, Kathleen Cade phoned her husband and arranged for him to meet her at their son's tee-ball game at 5:30 that evening. She loaded her two sons, Richard and John Jr., into the car and left their home.

The game went late, and Kathleen fell asleep in an easy chair in the living room when the family returned home. When she woke after midnight, Richard had fallen asleep in his own bed, and John and John Jr. were watching television in the master bedroom. Kathleen walked down the hall to her room and snuggled into bed.

Sometime during the wee hours of the morning, a young man put a stool from the patio beneath a window at the front of their house. He quietly removed the screen, climbed through the open window, and lowered himself down to the floor without making a sound. In his possession was a .32-caliber gun.

He hid, listening to be sure the residents were asleep. A little while later, he moved into the kitchen. He got a gallon jug of milk from the refrigerator and drank from it as he moved around the family home. He set the milk down on the floor in the den.

Kathleen heard rustling and some scuffling noises, but she couldn't quite wake up. She heard something that sounded like popping popcorn or the sound of a car backfiring, and then her husband shouted. She came fully awake, and the first thing she saw was her digital clock on her nightstand. It read 3:01 AM. Then she saw her husband, who turned on the light and told her he was bleeding.

He stumbled into the bathroom, where his terrified wife and son watched him as he tried to wash his hands in the sink. Then he toppled backward, dead.

Investigators were flabbergasted. Nothing was missing from the home, they couldn't find any fingerprints, and Kathleen passed a polygraph test and was cleared. They found no reasonable explanation as to why someone would kill 39-year-old John Cade, who was the chairman of the church board and didn't appear to have any enemies.


In Oakland, California, in 1980, Tommy killed a man with an ice pick. He didn't stick around to be sure his opponent was dead, but he got picked up by the police anyway. When he was asked by one Lieutenant Pope if he'd killed the man, Tommy said he sure should have, because he'd stabbed him so many times.

He himself had been seriously injured during the fight. The ice pick had narrowly missed his spine, and he had bleeding in his kidneys. While he was lying in a hospital bed, a nurse came in and lifted the sheet to insert a catheter. Tommy wasn't having it, and a fight ensued. Against medical advice, he left the hospital and hitchhiked to St. Louis, where his mother was living. It took forty-nine hours for him to reach her home. She let him in and nursed him back to health.

~

In the early 80s, he lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he spent some time at a youth home behind McClellan High School. He and his girlfriend then rented an apartment at 6 Portsmouth Drive, but the relationship didn't last. Tommy had a string of women who would come and go, so many that his mother took to calling him her 'little whore'.

In May of 1981, Nina and her remaining boys were living in Arkansas too. While she was taking a shower in the morning before she went to work, she heard the bathroom door open. The shower curtain pulled back, and Tommy joined her in the shower stall. Nina told him to get out. She kicked his shins, hit his shoulders with her fists, and finally convinced him to leave. He put on his clothes and fled the house.

He was admitted to the Community Mental Health Clinic in Jonesboro for the attempted sexual assault of his mother. He attended his first appointment even though he was confused about why he was there. He didn't know why he'd attacked his mother.

It became obvious to the counselor that he was a volatile young man, and as they progressed in the sessions, it also became evident that Tommy had had a troubled childhood. He felt unloved and unwanted. He believed himself to be the cause of all the problems in the household, and he was unhappy about his current life. He wanted to hurt someone else in order to relieve his pain.

During the diagnosis process, it was revealed that he was involved in cannabis and alcohol abuse, and that he suffered from aggression, conduct disorder, and under-socialization. He was advised to attend regular therapy sessions to help him explore his anger and his emotions. He attended five of those sessions, and then on June 18, he called and canceled the sixth appointment. He never returned.

~

March 27, 1982, Tommy was arrested in Little Rock for public intoxication after a disturbance on Geyer Spring Road. At the time, he worked at the Kinney Shoe Store on that same street.

Later that year he became the father of a boy with Cindy Hanna. Cindy had been his first love, but her father strongly disapproved of Tommy. Considering that Tommy had robbed the church the family attended, it would be hard to blame him.

He later confessed to committing two different murders in the area during this time. One incident has been confirmed, although it had a slightly different outcome than what Tommy believed and confessed to.

Tommy snuck up to a home in a wooded area just south of the Pulaski-Saline county line at 14715 Chicot Road. He hadn't planned on hurting anyone; he just wanted to break in and steal what he could find. Unfortunately, Hal Akins was home when Tommy broke in. When he was caught in the act, Tommy ran from the scene, and Hal followed him. Without warning, Tommy turned and shot Hal. Hal fell to the ground and held his breath, pretending he was dead, and it worked. Tommy believed he'd killed the man and left.

Tommy claimed that the second, unconfirmed, murder took place when he and an accomplice kidnapped a woman seven miles southwest of Little Rock. They took her down a dirt road to a hundred-foot bluff that overlooked an old quarry. They tormented her, raped her, and killed her. Then they threw her into the water-filled quarry.

~

In 1983, Sells was pretty stationary. He lived near St. Louis, Missouri, in Breckenridge Hills, and received three traffic tickets in the area that year.

Colleen and Thomas Gill lived with their two children in the West End of St. Louis. They were the owners of Colette & Thomas on Hair, Ltd., a beauty salon in Des Peres. They had bought a fixer-up home at Washington Terrace in January of 1983.

On July 31, Thomas Gill was pulling into the driveway when he saw a man matching Sells' description leaving the home. When Gill went inside, he discovered the bloody bodies of his wife and four-year-old daughter. He ran upstairs to check on his one-year-old son, Sean, who was unharmed and still sleeping peacefully in his crib.

At first, Thomas believed it to be a robbery gone wrong. The neighborhood had been plagued with break-ins, but his wife was still wearing her diamond ring. For their part, the police were suspicious of Thomas, who'd purchased a $600,000 life insurance policy on Colleen three weeks prior to her murder. However, no evidence of his guilt was ever found, so Thomas Gill was never arrested.

On May 8, 1984, Sells was arrested by the Scott County Sheriff's Department in Benton, Missouri, on charges of stealing a Ford Mustang. He pled guilty to the crime and was sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary by a judge who happened to be the father of one of Sell's grade school classmates. While he served his sentence, his daughter was born to Nicole Snow.

He entered Jefferson City Correctional Center on September 18, 1984. The convicts referred to the place as 'God's bloodiest forty acres on earth'. Minor infractions landed him at Algoa Correctional Center, then Booneville, and then back to Algoa. From Algoa, he was paroled on February 18, 1985.

In July of that year, he stole another vehicle and drove to Rolla, Missouri, where he abandoned it at a doughnut shop. On July 19, he checked into the New Horizons Rehabilitation Center in Vichy, Missouri, fifteen miles north of where he'd left the vehicle. Three days later, his mother told the police where he was, and an officer interviewed him about the car theft.

Worried he would have to go back to prison, he fled the rehab center. Just days later, a woman and her five-year-old boy were killed when Tommy flew into a violent rage.