Through the Window (13 page)

BY the time Mary Bea’s body was found and her family’s grieving could begin, Sells had returned his truck to Del Rio and shifted his hunting grounds to Lexington, Kentucky.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

RIDING the rails, Sells traveled to Lexington and signed up at Labor Ready. He lived on the streets for a couple of weeks, occasionally renting a room for a day from a woman who worked at a fast-food chicken restaurant on the next street over from the Labor Ready office. He got day jobs at Excel Building Services and the Lexington recycling center. On May 13, he clocked in at Transylvania University.

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD Haley McHone was a troubled young girl. Outside of her home, she was known as a sunny child who had never met a stranger and was always willing to lend a hand. She approached life with a boundless energy. She seemed to get along with everyone, except her immediate family. There, she felt like a cowbird in a cardinal’s nest. Her family’s authoritarian dynamic was alien to her.

Her incompatibility with her immediate family often left her feeling hurt, isolated and alone. Luckily, she had a refuge nearby. She’d zip up the road to the house where her grandmother, Anna Walker, lived. In fact, Haley wanted to move in with her. Anna told her she could when school was out for the summer.

According to her grandmother, “She rebelled against direct orders, but if you asked her to do something, she would do it.”

To make a little spending money, Haley would babysit, walk dogs and pull weeds all over her neighborhood near the University of Kentucky. When her grandmother
was in the hospital, Haley pedaled miles on her bicycle to visit her. If anything at all was in bloom, she always picked a bouquet of flowers to bring to her grandmother wherever she was.

Haley’s real problems at home started, her grandmother said, after her stay at Charter Ridge, an adolescent psychiatric facility. Since then, she had been under the care of a psychiatrist and taking the anti-depressant drug Zoloft. Authorities reported that her stay at the facility was prompted by the emotional damage done by an incident of sexual abuse.

On May 13, she was not in school because she had an appointment with her psychiatrist. First thing in the morning, she went up to her grandmother’s house for breakfast. Afterwards, she stopped by her home to play a few video games. Then she mounted her silver-gray mountain bike with Day-Glo orange spray-painted grips and headed for Elizabeth Street Park.

As she rode to the park, she kept a sharp eye out for stray dogs. Haley had become very wary of them since she was bitten nearly a month earlier. She was nearing the end of the series of painful shots she needed to guard against the possibility of rabies.

She propped her bike against the end of a set of swings. She pushed off in the dirt beneath a swing, pumping her legs harder and harder to achieve the greatest height possible. Lost in the sensation of the ride, the cooling breeze racing through her hair, she was unprepared for what happened next.

SELLS’ predatory instincts ignited when he saw the girl all alone on the swing. He scanned the park—no one was there. His eyes drifted over to the overgrown, wooded section behind the park. Another opportunity presented itself, and he snatched it up.

He shoved her off the swing. One rough hand slapped over her mouth and held on tight. The other arm squeezed her tightly to his side as she struggled. He dragged her
kicking and squirming out of the park and out of sight. He dumped her in the undergrowth and debris. Demanding oral sex, he told her if she did what he said, she would not be hurt. Fearful, she obeyed.

Sells then removed her shirt and, sitting behind her, pulled her to his chest. When he heard the sound of voices coming their way, his hand flew back over her mouth. He gripped her securely, keeping her silent and still until a man and woman strolled by on their walk through the park. Haley did not struggle to escape. She thought she would be safer if she didn’t put up a fight. She’d already learned that she could survive unpleasant experiences like this one. She just had to do what she was told and she would be okay.

Once the couple was out of hearing distance, Sells yanked off Haley’s remaining clothing, pushed her down into a bed of dried leaves and discarded beer cans and raped her. The cans crushed beneath her naked back. The edges of their rims dug into her skin. She fought to hold in the tears, to hold her emotions in check until he was finished and would leave her alone. But her previous experience had not prepared her for what would happen next.

This molester did not use her and then simply walk away. He snatched her shirt off of the ground and wrapped it around her throat. He twisted it tight, exerting pressure to cut off her supply of air. Her hands clawed at the fabric tourniquet around her neck, trying to loosen its grip. He pulled the shirt tighter. Her ragged little fingernails scraped across the back of his hands, but barely left a mark. She reached up, stretching as far as she could, aiming for his eyes. Before her fingers could reach their target, though, Haley passed out. Her hands fell limp as wilted flowers to the ground. Sells maintained his choke hold on her neck without letting up. He knew it would take a few more minutes before the job was done. Long after the last breath of life whispered out of her body, he released his grip.

He pushed her into an indented contour in the ground and shoveled debris over her with his hands. Brushing the leaves off his clothing and running his fingers through his
hair, he emerged from the woods. He jumped on Haley’s mountain bike and pedaled his way to the projects. There, he sold her bicycle to a Hispanic man for twenty dollars without a second thought.

IT was time for Haley’s appointment with her psychiatrist, but her mother, Reba McHone, could not find her anywhere. Reba went to her mother’s house, but Anna had not seen Haley since breakfast. The rest of that day, Reba, Haley’s father, Michael, and the three older children in the home scoured the neighborhood in search of the young girl. They roamed the streets until well after dark.

AT 11:52 that night, a Lexington police officer found Sells, passed out and drunk, lying in a heap at the foot of a lamppost. He prodded him awake and arrested him for public intoxication. He was released the next morning. Without picking up his last paycheck, he hopped a freight train and disembarked near the Indiana border. He stole a truck near the tracks and drove off. When it broke down, he broke into a small business office, stole some cash, ripped off another truck and headed north.

FOR ten interminable days, Haley’s family and the police department stuck up posters about the missing child in an ever-widening circle from her home. Sightings of Haley were reported, but could never be confirmed. Every one ushered in a swell of hope. Each disappointment laid another brick of despair on their chests.

Then, a dog walking with his owner in Elizabeth Street Park picked up a scent. He pulled his owner into the woods. The poor man did not know what had gotten into his pet. He was normally a well-behaved animal, but no amount of tugging or scolding could keep him from this quest. By the time they reached the source of the dog’s concern, the smell was overwhelming. The man rushed home and called police. Haley’s body had been found.

Soon, the neighborhood was swirling with red and blue
lights, police on bicycles and on foot. After hearing the tragic news, Anna Walker approached one of the officers and said, “It’s a little late to be policing the park, isn’t it?”

ONCE the yellow crime-scene tape came down, it was replaced with flower bouquets, potted blooming plants and heartfelt notes as a memorial to the slain child. On the evening of May 27, a crowd of 200 teenagers, neighbors, college students and faculty, family and friends gathered in somber reverence for a candlelight vigil.

Haley’s body had been found just a hundred yards from the spot on the railroad tracks where another body was found twenty-one months earlier. Christopher Maier, a 21-year-old University of Kentucky student, was beaten to death and left on the tracks. His girlfriend was raped, beaten, cut across her neck and discarded by his side. But she survived. At the time of Haley’s death, that case was still unsolved. Then, in June, the murderer of the student was identified as Angel Maturino Resendiz, the man the media had dubbed “the Railway Killer.”

Speculation that Resendiz was also guilty of Haley’s murder bubbled through Lexington. The Lexington Police Department pursued that possibility, but found it groundless.

In the coming weeks, the community joined hands to landscape the park, clean up the overgrown woods and erect a fence. They also banded together to form a neighborhood watch—vigilance replacing their previous illusions of safety.

Anna Walker grieved deeply at the loss of her grand-child—the girl she called “the soul of my life.” From the day the body was found, she continued to spend a part of each day talking to Haley. In an irony unnoticed at the time, a photo of a distraught Anna in Elizabeth Street Park was published in the
Lexington Herald-Leader
seven weeks after Haley’s body was discovered. In it, Anna wore a tee shirt that bore two words: “Tommy Girl.”

BEFORE the body was found, Tommy Lynn Sells was under arrest again. He was picked up this time in Madison, Wisconsin, for being drunk and waving around a box-cutter in a threatening manner. The weapon earned him more than his typical overnight stay in the drunk tank. In custody, he assaulted another inmate at the Dade County jail. He slammed the man’s face into a table and ground it into the surface until guards restrained him. Sells had not liked what the man had to say.

By June 10, he had come down from the frenzy that consumed him when he attacked his fellow prisoner. In the aftermath, he swam in the depths of despondency. He gave the jailer a handmade hangman’s noose and told him, “I want to kill myself.”

Released from the county jail on June 24, he raced home to Del Rio. His arrival was greeted with discord. He could not get his job back at Ram Country. He and Jessica fought so ferociously over one of her girls that law enforcement was called to their home. Lieutenant Larry Pope of the Val Verde Sheriff’s Department arrived there with a woman from the Texas Department of Protective Services. The allegation had been made that Tommy had molested Jessica’s daughter, Samantha. The social worker made it clear: Jessica and her four children could not stay in the trailer with him.

Jessica took her family to her mother’s home. On July 3, Sells drove north—next stop, Oklahoma.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

1998 had been a harrowing year for Susan Wofford and her family in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. Fred and Susan had been living in the rural area, thirty miles northwest of Oklahoma City, for twelve years. Before that, they’d lived in the southern outskirts of the city in the town of Norman, where all three of their children had been born.

Ricky was 17, Michael, 14, and their daughter, Bobbie Lynn, had just turned 13 when their troubles began. A phone call from the hospital heralded a season of tragic events. Ricky had been admitted with severe injuries from an automobile accident. He had been sitting in the back seat of a car driven by a friend. That entire seat flew forward through the windshield on impact. The broken glass ripped Ricky’s face to shreds, permanently altering his features.

Ricky had healed enough two months later to go out to a basketball game with his brother, Michael. Their father Fred dropped them off at the high school, then disappeared. For two confusing weeks, Susan wondered and worried. She did not know whether Fred was dead or alive. Her mind toyed with every possible scenario. Then law enforcement located his vehicle on a dead-end street very close to their home. His body was sprawled behind the steering wheel with a gunshot wound to his head. Fred had committed suicide.

Only a month later, Susan’s son, Michael, was sitting in the passenger seat of a van as it rolled down the highway. The vehicle went out of control. It rolled over in the median strip, sliding to a stop upside down. The roof was smashed
down into the tops of the seats. Michael survived only because he had been thrown clear of the van before it rolled onto its roof. But he had sustained serious injuries—broken ribs, a fractured collarbone and punctured lungs. He was barely able to breathe when paramedics arrived. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition.

Throughout all this turmoil, Bobbie Lynn was the bright spot in Susan’s life. She was a joyful, creative girl who was a straight-A student and the comedian of her class. She played baritone sax and trumpet in the school band and competed on the basketball team.

At home, she loved to read and play with her cats. Like many homes out in the country, they had more felines prowling around than would be considered normal in an urban or suburban setting. But Bobbie Lynn knew every single one of them by name. She was more than willing to play mother to a kitten when its real mother disappeared from the scene—nursing it with a bottle until it was ready for solid food.

After all the misery of 1998, Susan Wofford deserved a break. She was not going to get one in 1999.