Through the Window (6 page)

One month after Lori’s debut into the world, the 20-year-old Crystal filed for divorce. She packed up her meager belongings and removed her brood from the explosive atmosphere of an abusive home.

She bought a place of her own and settled into a lively home that bounced with the kinetic presence of three toddlers. In 1990, she met a neighbor, Terry Harris. Their relationship started as a friendship, but soon spilled over into romance. Gun-shy from her first encounter with matrimony, Crystal was reluctant to even discuss walking down the aisle until she was certain she was not making another mistake. Instead, she invited Terry and Shawn, his first-grade son, to move in with her nest of rug rats. This decision horrified her parents but, since it didn’t cause a permanent family rift, it suited Crystal well.

The blended family built a foundation of trust and love in Kansas for the next five years. When Katy went off to kindergarten, she became aware that she was different from the other children in her class. They all had a mommy and a daddy. She had a mommy and a Terry. She crawled into his lap one evening and asked, “Would you be my Daddy?”

“Yes,” Terry said, smothering her with an emotional hug.

Crystal raised an eyebrow at his response. She and Terry had not yet discussed marriage.

AFTER leaving prison, Sells worked for Atlas Towing in St. Louis for a short time. He drove a one-ton tow truck and a big tow rig, hauling vehicles and making emergency roadside repairs. While employed in this capacity, he met and married a woman named Sandy who has since died of breast cancer.

One night, about five minutes from the Arch just off Broadway in downtown St. Louis, he was repairing the vehicle of a stranded motorist. Without provocation, he claimed, the man kicked him. Sells pulled his gun, shot the man and left him for dead. Before he could leave the area, he was arrested in Pagedale Township just outside of St. Louis for stealing a light bar from one of the tow trucks. The charges were dropped and Sells resumed his nomadic existence, criss-crossing the country.

SELLS meandered south until he reached Aransas Pass, Texas, a seedy little fishing town separated from the Gulf of Mexico by the outlying Mustang Island. There, he got a job with Gulf Team Shrimp. Their shrimping boats went out to sea for thirty days at a stretch. On one of these trips, he overdosed on heroin. He turned blue and passed out before he could push all of the heroin. He was discovered with the needle still stuck in his arm. When James, the rig man, found him, his breathing was labored. Since the boat was two-and-a-half days from the dock—and proper medical care—his survival was questionable. Bobby, the captain, called the Coast Guard. Before they arrived, Sells regained consciousness. He was still alive when the boat reached shore.

After that harrowing experience, he did not go back to sea. Instead, he floated across the nation, going wherever impulse led him. There were violent encounters along this
journey. He may have killed 19-year-old Michelle Xavier and 20-year-old Jennifer Duey in Fremont, California, in 1986. Their bodies were discovered off Mill Creek Road. One was shot in the head, the other’s throat was sliced wide open.

IN late April 1987, Sells hopped a freight train and rode it as far north as he could go. He disembarked in Lockport, New York, near Niagara Falls. In that town, on May 1, Susan Korcz was in a local bar fighting with her boyfriend, Michael Mandell. She stomped out in disgust, heading in a direction that would not have taken her home. She was never seen again. She was listed as a missing person.

Leads were followed and suspects questioned with no results. Susan did not show up or call the hair salon where she worked as a beautician. There was no activity on her credit cards or in her bank account. She did not contact her family. Within weeks, Susan Korcz was presumed dead. Police conducted canal and waterway searches but did not find her body.

In the center of Lockport is the Niagara escarpment. Some of the hillsides take an abrupt fifty- to sixty-foot drop. Near the escarpment, a canal with a series of locks gives the town its name. More than seven years after Susan’s disappearance, a worker from a plant was sent up on the hill to clear off the debris. He saw what he initially thought was a piece of trash, but when he picked it up, he realized it was a human skull. Susan Korcz’s body had finally been found, 800 feet from the canal, near a railroad trestle. She had been buried in a shallow grave covered with debris. Due to the advanced state of decomposition, the cause of death was unknown.

On May 3, 1987, two days after Susan’s disappearance, and two states away, Sells awoke with blood all over his clothes.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SELLS wandered aimlessly toward the Southwest until he came to a stop in Humboldt County, Nevada. It is a desolate area where the largest employers are in the mining industry. Since the early 1800s, they’ve pulled silver, copper, molybdenum, tungsten, iron, bauxite, clay and mercury out of the ground. It’s a countryside spotted with hot springs and abandoned mines. To the south of the county, in the shadow of Bloody Run Peak, is the small town of Winnemucca, population nearly 13,000 in 1987.

Arriving in that town, Sells worked for the Raymond Lavoie Roofing company. But his expenses were bigger than his paycheck. He passed a bad check on October 28. Then on the 30th, he stole a bank bag and a handgun from his employer’s truck and used Raymond Lavoie’s credit card to rent a hotel room for a woman.

STEFANIE Stroh, a 20-year-old student at Reed College in Oregon and long-time resident of San Francisco, had just returned from her ten-month trip to Europe and Asia. When she flew into New York, she decided to fulfill her lifelong dream of hitchhiking across the United States with a friend. They traveled together as far as Salt Lake City. She called home nearly every day and her mother mentally plotted her cross-country progress. She was not too worried—Stefanie never told her she was hitchhiking.

On October 15, at Four Way Truck Stop in Wells, Nevada, Stefanie Stroh went to the pay phone and called her parents collect. After a breathless description of the sights she had seen since the last call, she told them where
she was and assured them she would be home in a couple of days.

The next day, she was in Winnemucca at the Motel 6. No rooms were available and she asked about the possibility of accommodations in Reno, planning to continue her journey down Route 80.

AS Tommy Lynn Sells told the Texas Rangers, he zeroed in on the young woman on the side of the road. She looked better and better the closer he got to her. The 5’5” large-breasted woman with sun-bleached dark brown hair was dressed in hippie-style clothing, and carrying an orange sleeping bag roll and a gray backpack with two small drums attached. She stuck out her thumb as Sells approached, presenting him with an opportunity he could not resist. Coming to a stop, he pushed the passenger door open. Stefanie ran over to the pick-up truck and paused at the door.

“Where are you headed?” she asked.

“Where you want to go?” he answered.

“Reno.”

“Hop in. I’m heading that way.”

Stefanie swiveled into the passenger seat, filled with relief. Near Lovelock, Sells turned off the highway with an invitation instead of an explanation. “I’ve got some acid. You want to drop some with me?”

Since she had already taken major risks hitchhiking across the country, drug experimentation in the desert no longer seemed extreme. While waiting for the effects of the drug to transport her to another place, she regaled Sells with tales of Paris. Then, high on LSD in the surreal environment of the desert, her life crystallized and shattered into pieces as Sells choked her to death.

In the stolen truck Sells drove that day, the vehicle’s owner had a convenient washtub and a bag of quick-mix concrete. Sells placed Stefanie’s feet into the tub, mixed up and poured in the concrete and left her hanging off the tailgate of the pick-up overnight while the concrete hardened.

In the morning, he dragged her weighted body, her gray backpack and other belongings over to a thirty-foot-wide hot spring. It was not one of the tame bodies of water that attracted droves of people to soak in comforting warmth. Anyone sticking their toes in this spring would deeply regret their recklessness. He dropped her in feet-first, watched her sink into the bubbling water and drove out of the desert.

THREE days later, when their daughter had not arrived home and had not called, Stefanie’s mother and stepfather, Joni and Grant Settlemeir, called the Winnemucca Police Department and filed a missing persons report. When authorities ascertained that Stefanie had been hitchhiking across the country, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that she had been abducted across state lines. Because of this assumption, the FBI was on the case by mid-November.

In no time, Marvin Stroh, Stefanie’s father, was on the scene with nine friends and family members. They traveled from the airport straight to the Chrysler dealership. Stroh purchased eight Jeeps outright and set out to find his daughter. Because the last call received from Stefanie came from Wells in Elko County, the search began there. Then they got word about Stefanie’s presence in Winnemucca and turned their attention to Humboldt County.

Ranger Coy Smith, long familiar with the desolation of West Texas, was amazed by the emptiness he found in this part of Nevada. “It is the end of the world out there,” the Ranger said. “You can drive for days and there ain’t nothing.”

And drive for days they did—into the desert and down Route 80 to Reno. All along the way, they plastered up posters and asked questions. Then they focused on Reno itself, stopping at moderate- and low-priced hotels to see if Stefanie had ever made it that far down Route 80. Without success, they returned to the dealership, sold back the Jeeps and flew back to the West Coast.

The search fliers were posted everywhere in Winne-mucca and Reno as well as up and down the interstate for miles. Authorities conducted interviews at all the truck stops in Humboldt and surrounding counties. Motel 6, where she had stopped looking for a room, provided names and addresses of everyone staying there on October 16, in hopes that someone had seen her after she left the front desk. They asked questions at any other place someone might stop when traveling through the area. Joni Settlemeir made television appearances pleading for information about Stefanie. Any resident of Nevada would have been hard-pressed not to be aware of her disappearance.

But the task of law enforcement was onerous. Route 80 is the most well-traveled truck route in the country with 32,000 to 36,000 vehicles passing through every twenty-four hours. The isolation in the surrounding countryside complicated their search even more. “You could go one quarter of a mile off the freeway and never see another person walking or a cowboy on horseback,” said former Humboldt County Sheriff James Bagwell. “You could hide a body out there and nobody would find it—ever.”

The city of San Francisco offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to Stefanie, or to the person or persons responsible for her disappearance.

The Stroh family hired a psychic to aid in their search. They were told that they could find Stefanie’s body in the bottom of a well or a mine near an eastern Nevada town with four syllables in its name. Both Winnemucca and Battle Mountain fit that description. There would be a white building, a ravine and strip mining nearby. And finally, the psychic said, “I see her feet in concrete.”

Authorities scouted the area. They found an old road-house that matched the psychic’s profile. The abandoned dry well there could have been a substitute for a ravine. Chief Mike Curti called in the city fire rescue truck with its powerful lights. He peered with binoculars down the shaft, but the light did not penetrate the depths.

The police chief called the sheriff’s department and
they brought their video camera out to the old well. They lowered it down and got back tape of the scene below. Although the images were sharp enough to identify an old television antenna and other debris, there was no sign of Stefanie Stroh.

The family requested an aerial search of the area in hopes of finding elusive clues. A pilot on his way to California to pick up a prisoner was willing to do the job. Low and slow, with camera rolling, he scanned the area between Winnemucca and Lovelock on the chance the girl had been slain and thrown off the highway.

In late November, a Winnemucca resident reported an incident she’d observed around the time Stefanie disappeared. She said she was traveling along the frontage road when she saw a girl matching Stefanie’s description in a scuffle with a truck driver at the side of the highway. She stopped and asked if she should call the sheriff, but the girl did not respond. The man jumped into his rig and the woman walked westward on the highway.

In a few days, another woman stepped forward offering a different version of events. She claimed the man was walking along the highway and a woman drove up in a rig, got out of the truck and a scuffle ensued. This woman did get the name of the truck company, making it possible to track the identity of the driver. Soon, the FBI got a name from the Arkansas-based trucking firm. But the man was no longer employed by that business and his location was unknown.

From diner to lunch counter, Winnemucca buzzed about nothing else as they downed their cups of coffee. In time, no news was reported and interest waned in the community—no one there actually knew the girl. On several occasions, over the years, someone stumbled across unidentified human remains out in the desert. The buzz would pick up again and each time, the family and friends of Stefanie Stroh held their collective breaths. But Stefanie was never found. If she had been, the answers would be clear.
As it now stands, some law enforcement officials believe Sells’ version of events. Others do not.

NEITHER his friends nor his employer knew of any plans to leave Winnemucca, but on November 3, Sells was heading out of town, trolling again. In a matter of days, he made it to Illinois and committed the most gruesome murders of his life.