KAYLENE HARRIS - 13 yo (12/1999) - / Convicted: Tommy Lynn Sells - Del Rio, TX

Crime scene photos: Tommy Lynn Sells

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Photos of the week

• Krystal's friend, Kaylene "Katy" Harris, was a beautiful 13-year-old who fought for her life after being attacked in her home on Dec. 31, 1999. Unlike Krystal, she did not survive.
  Credit: Harris Family
  

Jury convicts drifter of capital murder in death of teen


File 2000/The Associated Press
Confessed killer Tommy Lynn Sells leaves the Val Verde Justice Center in Del Rio, Texas, during his September 2000 trial for the murder of a 13-year-old girl. A judge on April 2, 2014, halted Sells' imminent execution while ordering the state to disclose its new lethal-injection drug supplier to Sells' attorneys. After his arrest in the Del Rio case, Sells confessed to killing at least 13 people during 20 year of drifting across the country.

DAVID MCLEMORE
Staff Writer
Published: 02 April 2014 01:03 PM
Updated: 02 April 2014 01:04 PM

Editor's note: This story was originally published Sept. 19, 2000, editions of The Dallas Morning News.


DEL RIO, Texas - After deliberating slightly more than an hour Monday, a Val Verde County jury convicted Tommy Lynn Sells of capital murder for the 1999 knife assault that left a 13-year-old girl dead and her 10-year-old friend with a slit throat.

Jurors will return to the courtroom Tuesday to hear testimony on whether Sells should receive the death penalty for the murder of Kaylene Harris, 13, who was slashed to death Dec. 31, 1999, in the bedroom of her family's mobile home west of Del Rio.

Prior to the trial last week, Sells pleaded guilty to attempted murder in the attack on Krystal Surles, 10, who was visiting Kaylene and her family.

The seven-man, five-woman jury began deliberating at 1:35 p.m., following three days of testimony. They returned a verdict just more than an hour later.

Sells, 36, a drifter who has claimed to have killed at least 13 people during two decades of traveling the country, showed no emotion as the jury's verdict was read. Friends of the victims, however, reacted with tears and gasps.

Ten-year-old Krystal, whose eyewitness account of seeing her friend Kaylene murdered brought jurors to tears, watched the entire trial.

"I wanted to be here to see him get what he deserved," she said. "Now, maybe I can sleep at night without nightmares. I've had to sleep with my mom. Now, I can go back to my own bed."

Asked whether she felt justice had been done, Krystal replied, "Yep. It feels good."

Her mother, Pam Surles, said the happiness was mixed with the awareness that her daughter's recovery is far from complete. "She's a strong little girl, and she's doing well," Mrs. Surles said. "But the recovery is far from over. As for me, I'll be happy when they give him the death penalty. That man is pure evil."

Krystal and her mother rushed across the courtroom to hug Terry and Crystal Harris, parents of the murdered girl. Mr. Harris, sobbing heavily, smothered Krystal in a bear hug, unable to speak.

Later, he said, "We still have our faith in God and the love of our family. If Kaylene's purpose on earth was to get a murderer like this off the street, that's God's will. But when you have a rabid dog, you put him down. That's what Tommy Sells is, a rabid dog. He needs to be put down."

District Attorney Tom Lee called the verdict a wonderful thing for the victim's family and the people of Val Verde County. "The jury's verdict was quick and sure," he said. "Our evidence of his guilt was compelling. Now, we're ready to go to the next phase."

Earlier Monday, during closing arguments, both the prosecutors and defense used the theme that actions speak louder than words. For the state, it was clear Sells entered the Harris home intending to rape and kill Kaylene. The defense argued that Sells showed no premeditation, that he acted on a whim.

Difficult task for defender 
It was a difficult case for Del Rio attorney Victor Garcia, appointed by the court to defend Sells. He said he found himself defending a man he hated, against crimes to which Sells already had confessed.

Yet, Garcia argued, the state's evidence failed to show that Sells had broken into the Harris family trailer with the specific intent to sexually assault Kaylene Harris, a key element of the state's capital murder charge.

"I can't justify Tommy Lynn Sells' actions," Garcia said. "I hate him too, more than you can imagine. But the state must prove every element of the offenses charged to get capital murder. And they did not do that. Tommy Lynn Sells is not guilty of capital murder." 
 Garcia said outside of the courtroom that he indeed hates Sells because of the age of the victim and viciousness of the assault.

"I told Tommy I didn't like him and was going to tell the jury that. He said he understands," Garcia said. "And he does. He feels terrible about what he's done."

'Horrible crime' 
Earlier, during the state's closing arguments, Assistant District Attorney Fred Hernandez took jurors through the grisly details of the knife assault on Kaylene and Krystal. Jurors appeared shocked as Hernandez showed photographs of Kaylene's bloody body, with close-ups of the five-inch slash across her throat.

Some jurors turned away from the photos as Hernandez described how 16 knife wounds inflicted with a 12-inch boning knife had pierced Kaylene's body.

"This was a horrible crime, something you don't want to see again," Hernandez said. "But it's a reality of what the Harris family has to live with and what this community has to remember."

The assault on Krystal, who witnessed the murder from the top of a bunk bed, missed being murder by millimeters, Hernandez said. The knife slashed diagonally through her larynx and missed the carotid artery by one or two millimeters. Krystal survived - with a 5-inch pink scar - to deliver devastating testimony at the beginning of the trial.

In videotaped statements given to investigators, Sells initially said he went to the Harris trailer at about 4:30 a.m. to collect $5,000 on a cocaine debt that Kaylene's father owed. Investigators said Sells' statements about the alleged drug deal were contradictory. 
Harris angrily denied the claim after the trial Monday.

"There was no drug deal. I owed him $60 on a Weedeater, and that's all. I've never seen a bit of cocaine, much less the two ounces he said he sold me," Harris said. "It's just [expletive] he came up with to cover the fact he's a lying pervert, child-killing bastard." 
Harris said he and his family met Sells at the community church they both attended in nearby Comstock. "On Christmas Eve, the week before he murdered my daughter, Tommy's wife had kicked him out and we took him in," he said. "He better thank God every day that the Val Verde County deputies got him before I did."

Sells' confessions 
Shortly after his arrest, Sells voluntarily began confessing to homicides during the periods he drifted across the country. He is linked to 13 killings, including the rape-slaying of a 13-year-old girl in Kentucky in May 1999 and the slayings of an Illinois family of four in 1987.

Sells settled in Del Rio about 1997, arriving as a carnival worker. He married and began working as an odd-jobs repairman and a car salesman.

Outside the courtroom, Lt. Larry Pope, a Val Verde County sheriff's office investigator, said the yearlong criminal investigation had been an emotional ordeal.

Lt. Pope and Texas Ranger John Allen spent days with Sells as he recounted the assault on the two girls in two videotaped and written confessions. They also listened as Sells admitted killing 12 other people during two decades of drifting across the nation.

"It's just a nasty case, and I've tried hard to come up with anything good that comes of it," he said. "For the killing to stop, we may have to kill Tommy. About the only positive thing is that no one else has died since this little girl died."

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/headlines/20140402-jury-convicts-drifter-of-capital-murder-in-death-of-teen.ece

Tommy Lynn Sells


BY David Krajicek


The Last Murder
At 4 a.m. on December   31, 1999, 20 hours before the turn of the millennium, a car rolled to a muted stop in the Guajia Bay subdivision, west of Del Rio, Texas.

A bearded man with a mullet haircut got out and padded quietly toward a double-wide trailer, home of Terry and Crystal Harris and their kids. He whispered reassurance to a caged pet Rottweiler in the backyard and approached the pen to allow the animal a whiff of his scent.

The man used the blade he was carrying, a 12-inch boning knife, to try to trip the lock on the back door. That failed, and so did an attempt to enter the home through a rear window that held an air conditioner.

He walked around to an open window on the front of the house. He tipped over a metal tub to use as a step, removed a screen and hoisted himself up and in.

The man found himself in the bedroom of Justin Harris, 14, who was blind. The boy was roused awake, but he thought the noise was his siblings horsing around.

Justin called out, "Will y'all stop coming into my room!"

The man moved out of Justin's room to the next bedroom. He opened the door and flicked a flame to his cigarette lighter. There slept a Harris family friend, Marque Surles, 7. In the master bedroom, he flicked his lighter again and found Crystal Harris asleep with her daughter Lori, 12.

Finally, in the fourth bedroom he found what he was looking for. 

In the bottom rack of a bunk bed lay Kaylene "Katy" Harris, 13.

The man lay down beside the girl and nudged her awake.

She looked at him sleepily and said, "What are you doing here?"

The man held a hand over her mouth and menaced Katy with the knife.

He drew the blade down her body and deftly sliced off her shorts, panties and bra, as if he'd done that sort of thing before.
When the man began fondling her, Katy wiggled free, stood up and screamed, "Go get mama!"

Only then did the intruder realize that a second girl, Krystal Surles, 10 years old and 80 pounds, was asleep on the top bunk.

The man poked his knife at Katy and turned on the bedroom light. Seeing blood, the girl said, "You cut me!"

The intruder moved in behind Katy.

Krystal Surles, survivor

"He had his hand over her mouth," Krystal Surles would later say. "She was struggling. She told me with her eyes to stay there and not move, and so I didn't."

As Krystal watched, the man dragged the blade of his knife across Katy's throat once, and then repeated the motion a second time.
"She just fell," said Krystal. "And then she started making really bad noises, like she was gagging for air but couldn't get any because of the blood."

The man continued his knife work after Katy collapsed. A coroner would catalogue 16 stab wounds, three of which went all the way through her body, in addition to the two gashes to the throat.

The intruder moved toward Krystal Surles.

"I told him, 'I'll be quiet. I promise. I won't say anything. It's Katy making the noise,'" she would later say.

But the intruder showed no mercy.

"He reached over and cut my throat," she said. "I just lay there and pretended I was dead. If he knew I was alive, he would come back and kill me for sure."

The assailant switched off the light and walked out, leaving through the front door. After a minute, Krystal heard a car start and drive off. She put a hand to her throat and ran outdoors. Assuming that everyone in the house had been killed, she made her way to a neighbor's house a quarter-mile away.

There, retiree Herb Betz was up early to watch TV coverage of the arrival of the millennium in Australia. He heard a door knock and peered through the peephole. There stood Krystal Surles in a T-shirt, boxer shorts and socks. She was awash in blood.

The child was unable to speak. The knife had severed her windpipe and grazed the sheathing of her carotid artery. She had come within a millimeter of Katy Harris' fate.

"Her little eyes were saying to me, 'Help me,'" Betz told Texas journalist John MacCormack.

Betz dialed 911. As she lay waiting for help, Krystal asked for writing instruments, and she penned three brief notes:

• "The Harrises are hurt."
  
• "Tell them to hurry."
  
• "Will I live?"
  

Betz said, "I kissed her on the forehead and told her several times she'd be all right. I didn't believe it. I thought she'd die on my kitchen floor."

Medical rescuers found the girl in shock, her body convulsing.

She was raced to a Del Rio hospital, and then flown by helicopter to University Hospital in San Antonio, where surgeons worked for hours to repair the damage done by the five-inch cut across her throat.

Back at the Guajia Bay subdivision, rescuers found Katy Harris dead, although the others in the house were unharmed.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/tommy_sells/index.html

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Execution of serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells back on schedule



by Sharon Ko / KENS 5
Follow: @sko_kens5
Posted on April 2, 2014 at 6:13 PM

Updated today at 12:32 PM


Related:

• Tommy Lynn Sells executed for 1999 stabbing of Del Rio girl
  
• Judge halts execution of Tommy Lynn Sells, cites drug source secrecy
  

SAN ANTONIO -- The execution is back on for confessed serial killer, Tommy Lynn Sells, after the federal appeals court overturns a judge's ruling.

A federal judge in Houston, U.S. District judge Vanessa Filmore, stopped the scheduled execution. Sells' attorney argued the state must reveal the information about the supplier of a new batch of drugs that would be used to kill Sells. They wanted to verify the quality of the drug and keep the inmate from unconstitutional pain. Another inmate set to die next week, Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, also is involved in the lawsuit.

But state officials have insisted the identity of the supplier must be kept secret to protect it from threats of violence.
 
The upcoming execution of Tommy Lynn Sells was scheduled just days before the start of Fiesta in San Antonio.

In 1999, Sells murdered Mary Bea Perez after snatching her from the Fiesta celebrations. He strangled her and her body was later discovered in the Alazan Creek 10 days later. It's a case Bexar County district attorney Susan Reed prosecuted, with a jury sentencing Sells to life.

"He reminds me of what you see in many serial killers, where they have absolutely no respect for life. We've seen the railroad killer. Sells, Morin, and  others, they seem to target women. In many instances, it has to do with I suppose being in control," said Reed.

But it was the death of 13-year-old Kayleen Harris in Del Rio, Texas that put Sells on death row. He went in her bedroom New Year's Eve 1999. He slit her throat and stabbed her. Her friend, Krystal Surles, who was 10-years-old at the time would live to help investigators catch Sells. A jury sentenced him to death in 2000.

In the years to come, Sells agreed to talk with investigators across the country to help some unsolved murders. In one of Sells' final interviews with KENS5 several years ago, he said he's never denied his guilt.

"You know something? If I do tell you I'm sorry and show remorse, there's' going to be people out there that don't buy it and they're going to just throw rocks at me. And they don't want to hear. I think it's between me and my maker now. It's not between me and society," said Sells.

Stay with KENS 5, we will be covering Sells' execution in Huntsville Thursday.

http://www.kens5.com/community/Timeline-of-a-killer-The-Tommy-Lynn-Sells-Story-253427361.html
Click here to see a timeline of Tommy Lynn Sells.

http://www.kens5.com/news/AP-Execution-of-Tommy-Lynn-Sells-back-on-schedule-253647701.html

Hell will soon have another resident.