Through the Window (5 page)

He fathered a boy in Arkansas in 1982, with a woman named Cindy Hanna. Cindy was his first love, but the odds were stacked against the couple. Cindy’s father strongly disapproved of Sells. The fact that he had robbed the church the Hannas attended did not endear him to the family.

SELLS later confessed to two murders during his time in this area. One has been verified, but with a slightly different outcome.

He crept up to the home in a wooded area just south of the Pulaski–Saline County Line at 14715 Chicot Road. He did not plan to harm anyone. He just wanted to break in and steal what he could. Unfortunately for Hal Akins, he was at home when Sells came calling. When caught in the act, Sells ran and Hal followed. Without warning, Tommy turned and fired a shot. Hal dropped to the ground, held his breath and pretended to be dead. Tommy believed that he had killed him. But Tommy was wrong. And Hal was lucky.

TOMMY and an accomplice kidnapped a woman seven miles southwest of Little Rock at a fast-food restaurant. They took her down a dirt road to a bluff overlooking a 100-foot-deep lake. The trilling songs of birds and the rustle of leaves caressed by a breeze provided a harmonic backdrop to the screams of a tormented young woman. When they were through with her, the scent of fear, seminal fluid and blood overwhelmed the fresh fragrance of the forest. One grabbed the arms, the other picked up the legs of the dead victim. They gave her body a swing and heaved her into one of the water-filled rock quarries that folks in southern Pulaski County call “blue holes.”

SELLS was fairly stationary in 1983, living in the 3300 block of Edmundson in Breckenridge Hills near St. Louis, Missouri. He managed to accumulate three traffic tickets in
the area that year, in June, July and December.

Thomas and Colleen Gill and their two children were residents of the West End neighborhood of St. Louis at that same time. They owned and operated Colette & Thomas on Hair, Ltd., a beauty salon in Des Peres. They bought their large home at 23 Washington Terrace in need of repair and renovation in January 1983.

On July 31, a man matching Sells’ description was seen fleeing the Gill family home, just as Thomas Gill was pulling up to the house. When Gill walked inside, the bloody, bludgeoned bodies of his wife and his 4-year-old daughter, Tiffany, greeted him chillingly. He raced upstairs to his 1-year-old son, Sean. The boy was sleeping soundly, unaware of the insanity that had erupted downstairs.

The neighborhood had been plagued by burglaries, but Colleen still wore a generous diamond ring on her hand. Suspicions shifted to Thomas Gill because he had purchased a $600,000 life insurance policy on his wife only three weeks before. But suspicion never amounted to indictable proof—and Gill was never arrested.

ON May 8, 1984, Sells was under arrest by the Scott County Sheriff’s Department in Benton, Missouri. He was charged with stealing a Ford Mustang and released in custody to Dunklin County. There he pleaded guilty to the felony and was sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary system by a judge who was the father of one of Sells’ grade school friends. While serving his sentence, Sells’ daughter was born to Nicole Snow.

He entered the Missouri State Penitentiary, now known as the Jefferson City Correctional Center, on September 18, 1984. At the time, it was known as “The Walls.” Convicts simply called it “God’s bloodiest forty acres on earth.” Minor infractions for creating a disturbance bounced him to Algoa Correctional Center, then to Boonville and then back to Algoa. From there, he was paroled on February 18, 1985.

IN July, he stole another car, drove it to Rolla, Missouri, and abandoned it at a doughnut shop. On the 19th, he checked into the New Horizons Rehabilitation Center in Vichy, Missouri, fifteen miles to the north. Three days later, his mother informed law enforcement of his location, and an officer from Clayton, Missouri, interviewed him by telephone about the car theft. Soon another phone call came, this one from his parole officer. Concerned that he’d be picked up on a parole violation, Sells fled the rehab center. Days later a woman and her 5-year-old boy lay dead because Tommy Lynn Sells got angry.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IN the southwestern corner of Missouri lies the city of Springfield. It bills itself as “The Gateway to the Ozarks.” Traveling south, the terrain gets hillier, the countryside less tame.

The Ozarks are an old range of mountains. The ragged peaks that once heaved up from the earth in a cataclysmic event have eroded with the passage of time. Now, the mountains are rolling pillows accented by dramatic valleys.

The White River raced through the Ozarks in Taney County where dams built between 1911 and 1958 created three lakes heralded for their bass fishing, and as a source for hydroelectric power. The county bordering the State of Arkansas had a population of less than 10,000 in the mid-eighties. It wasn’t a very diverse group—98 percent of the populace was white.

In the summertime, the sides of back roads are littered with wildflowers—the brilliant red of Indian paintbrush, the pulsating pink of dianthus, the golden glow of goat’s beard. The Mark Twain National Forest covers a large portion of the wild and beautiful county.

In the shadow of this forest, nestled at the mouth of Swan Creek, is the county seat of Forsyth. It is a town that clings fast to its past. It’s a place where you can still experience a flashback to the fifties in an old-fashioned cafe with red-and-white oilskin tablecloths and a worn linoleum floor.

The slow, peaceful environs of Forsyth and the breath
taking beauty of its surroundings were permanently scarred when the carnival came to town.

ON Friday, July 26, 1985, Rory “Willie” Cordt was excited about turning five in eight days. He was a cute boy with a bowl-shaped haircut and a smile that seemed two sizes too big for his little face. He was looking forward to starting kindergarten in the fall. At the moment, though, he was just about beside himself because he was going to the carnival at the Taney County Fair with his mother, Ena Cordt, a pretty and petite woman with brown hair and dark eyes. Willie thrilled at the lights, the rides, the games he could only dream of winning. And dream he did, like any other little boy: visions of being older and bigger; hopes of one day winning that enormous teddy bear and giving it to his mommy with pride.

Awestruck, he clutched his mother’s hand, reveling in the dirt and sawdust underfoot, the smell of cotton candy and popcorn in the air and the roar of the crowd and the machinery. He immersed himself in a wild, wonderful world of 4-year-old fantasy. Reality, though, was waiting at that carnival for Willie and Ena: waiting in the shape of a man—a man named Tommy Lynn Sells.

Life gets a little lonely for a divorced mother in a small town. After years as a maintenance worker at Skaggs Hospital in Branson, she now toiled away at a car wash in Forsyth during the day and cared for her son at night. Maybe she was looking for a little excitement. Maybe she just took pity on a young man and invited him over for a home-cooked meal. Or maybe she thought she’d seen the last of him after some harmless flirtation on the carnival grounds and had no idea he was coming to visit that night. Ena can no longer let us know.

The seductive words he whispered to her in the shadow of the Ferris wheel that night led her to the worst decision in her twenty-eight years of life. Like a leaf in a whirlpool, she was drawn into his world of uncontrollable violence.

THE yard of the split-level home on Willow Lane was littered with balls, toys and other signs of a child. Inside, the rooms were clean but slightly disheveled. It was late when Tommy arrived, and little Willie was in bed.

According to Tommy it was a pleasant visit, up to a point. He excused himself to use the bathroom.

While he was out of the room, Ena looked through Tommy’s knapsack. Perhaps she was just curious and wanted to know a bit more about the stranger in her home. Had he given her his real name? Was he really from Missouri? Show me.

Unfortunately, she took too long in her inspection. When Tommy emerged from the bathroom, he caught her pink negligee–clad body bent over his bag. Without a moment’s doubt, he concluded that she was after his stash of cocaine. Convinced she was trying to steal his drugs, he flew into a rage.
No one steals from Tommy Lynn Sells. No one treats him like a punk.

He roared down the hallway, spotted little Willie’s baseball bat along the way and snatched it up without slowing his pace in his race toward Ena. She froze in the icy glare of his cold eyes. He lifted the bat high in the air and slammed it down with fury. Viciously he beat her on the head, on her upraised arms, on her bowed back. She screamed. She begged for help. She prayed for her neighbors to hear. And then her horror intensified, multiplied. Willie stood framed in the doorway, frightened and powerless, crying and pleading for it all to stop. But it was too late for Ena. She could not comfort her son. She was not able to put up much of a struggle. She could not escape. The blows were too hard, too fast, too final. Her skull was fractured. And now Sells brandished a knife from her kitchen. One quick slice to her throat and Ena was gone. Her body slumped by the end table.

Sells noticed Willie, too. He stepped over the battered, lifeless body of Ena. And in two strides, his hand grasped
the scrawny little arm of the 4-year-old boy and dragged him into the living room. All the while, he beat Willie on the head with the boy’s own baseball bat, then slit his throat with his mother’s knife and dropped the still body to the floor by the couch. It did not matter that Willie was only 4. All that mattered was that he was a witness. And Joe Lovins had warned Tommy that a witness should never be left alive.

When his rage was spent, Sells calmly removed all identifying traces of his presence from the home, wiping away fingerprints and gathering his belongings. Carrying Willie’s bat, he forced his way out of the bloody house through a seldom-used door and fled anonymously into the night. Carnival workers often disappeared on a whim. His absence raised no suspicions.

ENA and Willie’s bodies lay cold and unnoticed for three days. At seven in the evening on July 30, 1985, Ena’s parents, Bob and Jill McIntosh, made the gruesome discovery. Her red car was parked out front, but not a sound came from inside the house when they knocked on the door. They pushed it open and the smell of rotting flesh assaulted their nostrils. Then their eyes consumed the blood spattered on the walls and puddled on the floor. In the midst of all this carnage, the battered and bloated bodies of their daughter and grandson lay crumpled on the floor.

On the day Willie should have been celebrating his fifth birthday, he was instead buried in the ground beside his mother at Snapps cemetery in rural Taney County. To the relief of the family, Ena’s other child, 8-year-old Peggy, was still alive. She had spent that part of her summer vacation visiting her father.

LAW enforcement was left with no motive, no firm suspects, and no solution to a double homicide in a small town. And Tommy Lynn Sells was left on the loose.

CHAPTER NINE

IT was soon obvious that Sells’ visit to the rehabilitation center had not been a success. On September 4, 1985, Sells, drunk and drugged, drove down the road with two underage girls. He lost control of his vehicle, causing it to flip and roll three times. All three occupants walked away from the scene with only minor injuries. Because of this incident, Sells was arrested in Missouri for driving while intoxicated and for charges related to the minor girls. Thirty days later, the court dropped the charges related to his driving companions for time served.

On October 15, his parole revoked, he returned to Missouri State Penitentiary. On the 29th of October, he transferred back to Boonville Correctional Center. His violations behind bars were infrequent and minor—creating a disturbance and self-mutilation. He was released with his sentence served in full on May 16, 1986.

CHAPTER TEN

WHEN Crystal Harris was a teenager in Kansas, she made a number of foolish decisions. Early in 1985, she got pregnant and married the father of the child she was carrying. In November, at the age of 17, she became the mother of Justin. He was blind from birth. Ten months later, her daughter, Kaylene, was born. Lori came next, just sixteen months later.