Through the Window (14 page)

IN the spring of that year, Bobbie Lynn hit that difficult stage that all parents dread. As her body underwent its natural metamorphosis, her relationship with her mother transformed as well. Susan was used to her daughter trailing her around the house chattering non-stop about everything in her life and every thought that crossed her mind. To Susan, it seemed as if the change in her daughter happened overnight. She became quiet and wanted to spend more time alone in her room. Socializing with friends became far more important than hanging with her family and her passel of cats.

On July 2, 1999, the 14-year-old told her Mom she was going with friends to Canton Lake in Blaine County for the weekend. Susan gave Bobbie Lynn ten dollars spending money for the trip. She watched as her daughter got into their car. She hated to see her going anywhere in
an automobile—last year’s accidents were still so vivid in her mind. She knew, though that if she stifled the girl, she would surely lose her. So she held her peace while Bobbie Lynn drove away.

Bobbie Lynn never made it to the lake. As planned beforehand, she left that bunch of friends and embarked on a reckless adventure with a group of kids she knew could not gain her mother’s approval. It was just another chapter in the common lying game played by teenagers in families across the country. But for Bobbie Lynn Wofford, it was a fatal deceit.

TOMMY Lynn Sells arrived in Kingfisher that same weekend. While he drove up from Del Rio, he drank heavily and injected cocaine throughout the day and into the night. Despite his altered state of consciousness, Sells remembered the details of this night. And his memory marches to the cadence of the evidence uncovered by investigators. North of Oklahoma City, he drove up Route 81, to the town of Waukomis. There, he abruptly turned around and headed south. In the early hours of July 5, he pulled into the first convenience store he saw, Love’s in Kingfisher, to inflate a troublesome leaking tire on his ‘79 Dodge L’il Red Express and to take a look under the hood. The truck, a wedding present from his bride, was his pride and joy. It was an impressive pick-up, even by Oklahoma standards, sporting the shiny chrome stacks one normally sees only on a semi.

At 4 A.M., after selling some cocaine to an older couple in the parking lot, he spotted a slender young woman about 5’5” with blonde hair and blue eyes and multiple earrings. She was using the phone and complaining bitterly about not being able to reach anyone.

Sells saw his opportunity and approached the seventh-grade student. “Why’s a pretty woman such as yourself bitching so much?”

She explained she needed a ride home and could not find one.

Sells replied, “Cool. I’ll give you a ride. Hop in my
truck.” Sells closed the hood and dropped his tools on the truck floor. Bobbie Lynn settled in the passenger seat. Her relief at going home was tinged by guilt about where she had been. She hoped her mother would never find out.

Sells smiled at the girl and pulled out of the parking lot. “Want some coke? I’ve got some.”

“I don’t have any money,” Bobbie Lynn stalled.

“You have something worth a lot more than money,” he said.

Second thoughts wrapped around Bobbie Lynn’s throat like a boa constrictor. “I better not go. Take me back to Love’s.”

Sells’ hand flashed across the seat, back-handing the girl in the face with shocking force. “Shut the fuck up!”

Intimidated by the pain and fear, Bobbie Lynn did not move. She stared straight ahead as her mind raced down avenues of regret. Sells drove northwest of Kingfisher and pulled over on a dark, isolated road, near a creek and cemetery. He pulled off her clothes and forced her to perform oral sex while she whimpered and protested. He fondled her young body, intent on raping her. Before he could penetrate her, Bobbie Lynn’s desperation overcame her fear. She slapped and scratched her assailant, then aimed a kick at his genitals. Sells’ blood-red rage erupted. He grabbed a ratchet off the floor of the truck and rammed it inside her.

Bobbie Lynn still fought back, jerking open the door of the truck, determined to escape into the night. But Sells had a gun. He shot her in the head and she fell from the truck into the dirt on the side of the lonely road.

Now, it was time to clean up the scene before daybreak revealed his crime. He’d been here before. He knew what he had to do. He grabbed her yellow duffle bag and black purse and threw them as far as he could. In flight, the purse disgorged cosmetics and a public library card. The pair of earrings she wore caught his eye. He plucked them from her earlobes and slid them in his pocket.

He also removed the ratchet—too valuable a tool for a car mechanic to leave behind—pulled her clothing back
in place and lifted Bobbie Lynn’s lifeless body. At 115 pounds, she was an easy burden. Along the way, he lost her tennis shoes in the undergrowth. He disposed of her body in a less conspicuous spot well off the road. Although disheveled, Bobbie’s body was again clad in the green khaki pants and white tank top she’d worn when she met him at Love’s.

His rage satisfied, the evidence hidden, he pointed his truck toward Texas and drove off into the first glow of dawn.

AT first, Susan Wofford was angry. Bobbie Lynn had violated her trust by not returning home when she was expected. Initially, the authorities treated the disappearance as a runaway. But the community gathered around Susan, searching for her daughter, passing out fliers and assuring her that everything would turn out okay.

When the police listed her daughter as a missing person, her ire had long ago been set aside, leaving a heavy lump of anxiety in its stead. The waiting game began in earnest. July crawled by. Susan’s phone rang frequently with callers informing her that Bobbie Lynn had been seen riding with someone in a pick-up truck, with reports that her body had been found at Canton Lake. They were all mind-numbing calls without any basis in fact.

Susan did anything she could to try to distract herself— she played solitaire till the cards turned limp from overuse. She paced from one end of the house to the other, wearing a visible path in the carpet. She tried to lie down and sleep or relax, but she could never get any rest. Toward the end of the month, Bobbie Lynn was added to the case files of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Unconfirmed sightings poured into the Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department. Susan’s agony continued unabated through August, through September, through October. In November, a witness came forward with a description of the man he’d seen talking to Bobbie Lynn in the parking lot of Love’s. With the witness’ help, Harvey
Pratt, a forensic artist with Oklahoma’s State Bureau of Investigation, drew a sketch of the suspect.

The next day, hunters stumbled across a crushed tube of lipstick and a library card bearing the name “Bobbie Lynn Wofford.” They ended their hunting trip with this discovery so they could report what they found to the authorities.

Sheriff Danny Graham arrived on the scene. It was a remote spot where teenagers commonly gathered after dark to drink and party. Bobbie Lynn had never been known to frequent this location.

Graham found a tennis shoe, a yellow duffle bag and a black purse. He kept searching, his dread building. Finally, he uncovered a decomposed body that was not much more than a skeleton held together by stained green khaki pants and a dingy white tank top covered with dried blood. The decomposition was so advanced, it was not possible to be certain at the scene, but the massive trauma to the head indicated that she had died of a gunshot wound.

SUSAN Wofford’s phone finally rang. It was not the call she wanted. Once the body was found, girls in Bobbie Lynn’s age group were rocked with fear. They would not walk to school anymore—not even two or three blocks. Parents, every bit as anxious as their daughters, provided rides to and from school with a smile.

The community was flooded with high anxiety and mothers and fathers restricted freedoms with impunity. Previously flexible parents now demanded to know exactly where their children were every moment of the day. No longer confident of their children’s honesty or safety, they called often to check on their whereabouts.

It was December before DNA tests verified what the sheriff and Susan instinctively knew: the bones belonged to 14-year-old Bobbie Lynn.

The devastated mother stumbled through her grief, planning her daughter’s funeral. No one knew how Susan could possibly continue to function after this fourth tragedy.
Local churches were too small to hold the large numbers of people wanting to stand by her side and mourn the death of the teenager. Ultimately, the funeral was held in the school gymnasium and that facility only barely contained the overwhelming crowd.

AFTER receiving a tip, investigators centered their case on Deb’s Sports Bar, a Kingfisher tavern. Officers searched the bar, the bar owner’s residence and four vehicles. They obtained hair samples, drugs, adult videos and ammunition. They interviewed a man and woman who co-managed the bar, as well as two others. It was all to no avail.

The hair samples gathered did not match Bobbie Lynn’s. The ammunition found could not be linked to the shooting. The case remained open.

AFTER the funeral, Susan’s waiting began anew. This time, she waited for justice. She often thought about her daughter’s angel. Three years before she died, Bobbie Lynn had told her mother about the angel dressed in white that appeared to her in the garden. She showed her mother the exact spot where the apparition always presented itself, but Susan could never see it. As a service manager at a Ford dealership, she was a nuts-and-bolts kind of person, more used to finding answers to practical problems than in exploring otherworldly phenomena. She searched the garden many times for some trick of the light or other optical illusion that could logically explain this unearthly vision. She never found an answer. And she never saw Bobbie Lynn’s angel.

TOMMY Lynn Sells returned to Del Rio. After two rounds of interviews, the charge that Sells had molested Jessica’s daughter was ruled unfounded. Jessica and her children were able to move back in with Sells. He remained at home for a few months with his family and worked for Amigo Auto Sales.

Bill Hughes, Sells’ employer, invited Tommy and Jessica
to go to services with him at Grace Community Church. Terry and Crystal Harris and their children were at the services, too, that Sunday.

When Terry Harris needed a new vehicle, he wanted to go to a dealership he could trust. He chose Amigo Auto Sales because a fellow church member owned it. The salesman who assisted him in the purchase of the truck was Tommy Lynn Sells.

One evening, Sells showed up at the Harris home and Terry invited him inside. Crystal took one look at his scruffy hair, his beard and his rampant tattoos and uneasiness swept over her. She chided herself for this unChristian attitude of judging an individual by his appearance. Curiosity compelled her to join the men in the living room and listen in on the conversation.

Sells admitted that he had been in prison. He also said he had an alcohol problem and that it was tearing his marriage apart. He confessed that he did not know what to do to save his relationship with Jessica. “Terry, you are so lucky. You have such a good family. Your children listen. You have a nice wife. A nice home.”

Terry listened and offered what advice he could. While the two talked, the children milled about the house in their typical fashion, crossing the living room from time to time, but never seeming to pay much attention to the adults.

Down the hall in their bedroom, Katy confided to Lori, “I don’t like the way that man looks at me.”

“You oughta tell Dad,” Lori said.

“No. He’ll just get mad.”

“Then tell Mom, Katy.”

“She’ll just tell Dad,” Katy said with that note of exasperation that an older sister always cultivates to use on the younger siblings.

“You oughta tell them anyway.”

“If I tell, Dad will beat him up. Then Dad will be in trouble.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lori conceded. Lori never repeated this conversation to anyone while Katy was still alive.

As Crystal sat with the men in the living room, she developed a morbid fascination with Sells’ tattoos—partic-ularly the one poking out of the neck line of his shirt. In a lull in the conversation she could not resist injecting a question: “I’ve heard that all those prison tattoos have special meaning. What do yours symbolize?”

He turned toward her. His eyes pinned her to the back of the sofa like a specimen to a mounting board. “Lady,” he said, “you don’t want to know.”

These words, and the expression on his face, still dance an ugly rhythm through Crystal’s sleepless nights.

ON December 27, 1999, customs reported that Sells had crossed the border from Mexico into the United States. He had a load of drugs and was making a run north.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

SELLS confessed to committing this crime, but also claimed an inability to remember details because his mind blacked out. What follows is a thoughtful blend of information and conclusions gathered in interviews with law enforcement personnel and with the family and friends of the victims with what was learned from Tommy Lynn Sells—both his recollections of the night and the facts of the case he ferreted out after the fact.

ROUTE 44 runs through Joplin, Missouri, and across the state line into Oklahoma. Less than ten miles from the boundary, State Route 59 cuts west to the small town of Welch.

Down a long driveway off a country road, less than five miles northwest of Welch, was the modest trailer of Danny and Kathy Freeman. They lived there with their daughter, Ashley. An addition built by Danny had doubled the size of the original mobile home. A rock foundation and a walkway dressed up its appearance. Their home had the convenience of telephone service and electricity, but the Freemans did not have running water and used a wood stove to heat their home.

Christmas 1999 was a somber affair for the family, since it was the first one they had celebrated since the death of their only son, 17-year-old Shane. Earlier that year, in a confrontation with Craig County Deputy David Hayes, Shane had been shot to death.