Through the Window (30 page)

The D.A., Fred Hernandez, got his guilty verdict of my death by showing a picture of a 13-year-old girl naked on a cold stainless steel table in the morgue, her head laying on a wood block, her neck turned so the wound is open and a pair of hemostats pulling the meat of the neck back. That is what got me the guilty verdict, not evidence. I still do not get it to this day. That picture had nothing to do with what happened at the Harris home.

I am not making light of what has been done at or by my hands. Maybe John Kemp said it best, “It just goes beyond explanation so I won’t try.” I’ll leave that for Ms. Fanning and other big wigs. This is not about the D.A. Though I have been
condemned to die, sentence passed by a jury, not of my peers, but of his. That bunch of folks has no idea of what kind of life I’ve lived. I was asked not long ago was I saved. I said from what. My belief is not my religion that is for the Jews. Ask them what they did with Christ. Want to be saved from y’all till y’all kill me. I look at death as a welcome to a better life. And once again, I’m not going to get into my higher power or my beliefs. It would just leave another door opened for a Jew to kick at. I do believe my life will be much better on the other side. I am an orphan child. I am my strength. I believe in the law of nature. That would be my spiritual heritage. The Lord is my friend. I’ve found him before the end.

As the others, I want to cry and scream. Our hearts burst with sadness and sorrow. The pain I’ve taken in and given is a darkness I’ve been terrified of almost as long as I can remember. This is not just in my head but throughout my body. I guess a few has been worrying about me but to them I say I’m ready. I’m tired of the pain and feel it all the time. I’m tired of being alone. I never knew where I was going or where I just came from. I’m tired of people being mean to each other. I’ve just not known how to help. The darkness is my greatest fear. I’m all broken up on the inside. That’s how it is everyday all over.

I hope all can forgive me. Don’t let that rage and hate keep eating at you as it has me. It will destroy you.

Jessica, you and yours really tried. Y’all was able to open a door with me no one else had up to that point in time. If I was ever able to love, it was by you. It just came a little late.

Donna, you have opened my eyes to so many things. If anyone can understand me, it’s you.

My family: I love y’all.

My Del Rio attorney, Victor Garcia, first ever Mexican Jew I met. But because you are a Mexican, I guess you tried. You should have had help!

San Antonio Attorneys Jay Norton, “Jew,” Michael McCrum, want to be Jew, Susan Reed, D.A., Ha, Ha, Fuck y’all.

Texas Rangers John W. Allen, Coy L. Smith. Someone had to do it.

Sheriff A. D’Wayne Jernigan Isaiah 55:7.

Lt. Larry Pope. It takes one to understand one.

Tony. Miss you.

Texas Death Row. Inhuman, cruel act on humans. Out of all my rage, I’ve never once made one of my victims suffer as y’all do. I want the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to explain how y’all have come up with a way to discipline: loss of privilege, either food, gas, commissary, visits, along with other means. Brute force can rehabilitate a person? So what y’all are doing here on death row is an act of revenge.

Again, the jury was not told everything. But not telling the whole truth is just as bad as lying. I am controlled in this society 100% on Death Row. Is this society safe for us?

TDCJ Ad-Seg does have a plan to control all convicts. Spokesperson for TDCJ, Royce Smithey, chief investigator, said at my trial if you put a person on death row and execute them, I guarantee you they won’t be violent. Maybe he should guarantee to every person in society that brute force is the key to their safety. Might is right. Death is the key to getting rid of something. The only contact I have with anyone in this society is when I stick my hands behind my back through a bean hole. I was overlooked as a child.

I am overlooked again by truth and justice.

I’m a one-man band. Don’t hold nothing against my family, friends or loved ones. They are
just doing what y’all are doing: trying to cope with it all.

Ms. Fanning. Thank you.

Peace,

Tommy Lynn Sells 999367

Death Row

3872 FM 350 South

Livingston, Texas 77351

It is easy to look at crimes committed by Tommy Lynn Sells and say, “There is a monster.” The problem is far more complex than that. Yes, Sells has done many evil things. But it is dangerous to polarize him or those like him and see nothing in them but bad. Individuals with antisocial personality disorder are often very charming and likeable in the right setting. If you are only prepared for a one-dimensional monster, they will catch you off guard.

It is difficult for the average person to comprehend the existence of a killer so cold-blooded he is capable of beating to death a newborn baby seconds after her birth. It is impossible to understand.

We naturally find it repugnant for a person who commits acts like these to be included in the group we call our fellow human beings. But he is.

He has his own set of moral guidelines that intersect our own in some places. The most obvious example was during the flood, when he tried to rescue a woman as she was washed down the street, and when he tried to free a trapped cat under the house.

Then, there are areas in his code of behavior that travel over very alien ground. In the murder of Haley McHone, for example, he blamed the neighborhood. He said that they knew the overgrown area was dangerous. The body of a college student had been left back there only a year and a half before. He said that, had they cleaned up that area after that murder, if they had thought first of the safety of their children, he would never have had an opportunity to kill that girl. He pointed a righteous finger at community negligence
rather than carrying the weight of the blame on his own shoulders.

Many people who encountered Tommy Lynn Sells were surprised to find a charming, enjoyable conversation-alist—from hardened investigators to Crystal Harris, who felt betrayed by her own ability to judge people. She described the man she knew before the crime as “a young man who came to us for help and guidance.”

Beneath Sells’ glib charm is a rotted treasure chest brimming with manipulative cunning, barely suppressed anger and an abiding sense that everyone is out to get him, so he’d better get his licks in first.

Whenever we look at someone like Tommy Lynn Sells, we are left with the big question of Why? Textbooks are full of possible explanations. Anti-social personality disorder is created in a stew of childhood violence and abuse, early maternal rejection and organic brain damage. There are others who have passed through these tortures and, although wounded, did not take the same path as Sells.

Ultimately, there are a lot of unknowns with this disorder. Likely it is the cumulative effect of these factors and more that have yet been identified, but which together simmer in young developing minds, warping their thought processes and producing violent perpetrators.

These are people who are easily bored, but not readily aroused. What would excite one of us would leave a psychopath untouched. Once they cross the line and commit their first murder, a barrier is broken and they are compelled to commit these violent acts again and again. They get immediate gratification and release, but never find a level of permanent satisfaction.

In interviewing and researching Sells, I became familiar with many aspects of his personality, but not one side of him seemed to have reality as a touchstone.

I saw a man who dearly loved his last wife, Jessica, and who had bonded with her two sons. One who still loved his mother despite their unhappy past—someone who
wanted to understand why every relationship he ever had had ended in abandonment.

I also saw a person who could lie and, at the moment of his deceit, truly believe he was telling the truth—one whose self-aggrandizement surpassed the rantings of a young Muhammad Ali, and whose tricks of manipulation spooled off his tongue without conscious thought.

Then, there was the little boy. The one who yearned for love and family. The one who still had pleasant dreams of the carousel birthday cake his Aunt Bonnie made for him, and who still had nightmares about the man who sexually assaulted him with regularity when he was a child.

Finally, I saw the sharp up-ticks of anger, the flared eyes, the clenched fists, the pinched lips that heralded the arrival of the predator. Then I would be looking at a killer capable of throttling a girl for five eternally long minutes while her life slowly fled into the night; a murderer willing to beat a woman or a child to death with a bat; an unbridled aggressor who could slice a throat without a twinkling of remorse.

My method of coping with this waltz with evil was to create a Janus-like figure in my head. One face was the Tommy who made me laugh—on the other side, the face that made me cringe in fear. This separation, too, is a form of the polarization that mental health professionals decry. But for me, walking down the dark corridor of Sells’ life, it was my shield.

Tommy Lynn Sells is behind bars, locked securely on death row, awaiting his execution. We are now all safe from him—but, unfortunately, he is not an anomaly.

“I have never, never met anybody that’s as manipulative. Most of the time when you talk to someone who’s done something wrong, it’s almost like they have a sense of remorse or regret. He just likes to keep killing from beyond the grave. He can just manipulate you and there’s nothing you can do about it,” said Texas Ranger Coy Smith.

Ranger John Allen added, “This guy went eighteen
years killing people and never, never got caught. How did he do that? He was never even a suspect. If he never mouthed off, he would never be a suspect in one other homicide—anywhere. That’s what blows my mind.”

THE
DARTMOUTH
MURDERS

Two kindly professors…

Two teenage suspects…

One brutal crime…

Eric Francis

On January 27, 2001, popular Dartmouth College professors Half and Susanne Zantop were found slain in their home in the wooded outskirts of Hanover, New Hampshire. Both had been stabbed repeatedly in the head and torso with twelve-inch combat knives. The crime—unprecedented in the bucolic college town—sparked a nationwide manhunt. Then, weeks later, a CB-radio call aroused the suspicion of an Indiana cop, leading him to a truck stop east of Indianapolis—and the arrest of two suspects. Their identities would be as startling as the crime itself…James Parker and Robert Tulloch were two clean-cut, straight-A, Vermont high school students with impeccable reputations. Investigators couldn’t imagine any motive they might have had for the vicious killings. Could these boys have snuffed out the lives of perfect strangers with such intense, cold-blooded fury?

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FROM ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS

THE
GOOD
DOCTOR

The Shocking True Story of
A Prolific Serial Killer

WENSLEY CLARKSON

F
ifty-five-year-old Dr. Harold “Fred” Shipman had a noble dedication to his profession, winning the trust of his patients with ingratiating charm and an old-school bedside manner. In fact, he even made house calls—but his unsuspecting patients had no idea of the evil that lurked behind the friendly façade of the kindly doc-tor….After thirty years of practice, Dr. Shipman’s true nature was finally exposed—that of a calculating killer who delivered his own prescription for death. Authorities eventually unearthed the shocking possibility that the fatherly physician had killed as many as 297 people. The search for answers would take investigators into the life of a man who forever changed the stereotype of the sweet country doctor…?

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FROM ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS

HE STOLE THEIR HEARTS—THEN TOOK THEIR LIVES…

SMOOTH
OPERATOR

THE TRUE STORY OF SEDUCTIVE SERIAL KILLER
GLEN ROGERS

Clifford L. Linedecker

Strikingly handsome Glen Rogers used his dangerous charms to lure women into the night—and on a cruel date with destiny. For when he got them alone, Rogers would turn from a sweet-talking Romeo into a psychopathic killer, murdering four innocent women during a six-week killing spree that would land him on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. Finally, after a twenty-mile high speed police chase, authorities caught the man now known as one of history’s most notorious serial killers.

AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD
FROM ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS