Morning serial

Last night before bed, I made a little mistake in listening to a DARKNESS RADIO true crime show with Dave Schrader featuring the owner of Serial Killer Magazine. The show was great and interesting. True crime fascinates me … actually scares me. The intense reality that exists beyond the safety of our locked doors and closed windows is abhorrent, often.  There is much to be written and told of true crime—too much to start now. But I’m curious how many others out there are interested in true crime.. How many people are both fascinated and horrified by the macabre.. and how many fear reality more than fiction?

Tommy Lynn Sells is dead.

I am very deeply troubled about the death penalty.. I so often think it’s something we should not do, so often think it’s wrong for a nation to still perform ritualistic executions of murderers or criminals..But we do. 

Today, though, I am not weeping for Tommy Lynn Sells.

Sells was put to death in Texas despite last minute attempts to delay..

Sells was one of the more brutal serial killers—and someone that until very recently I really knew nothing of. I am actually a little surprised that our media didn’t tout this man’s horrid crimes as much as they did other serial killers throughout history. Sells ranks up there with the most insane of evildoers to grace our society.. he murdered men, women, and children. He did it without regard or concern.. 

I actually learned the most about Sells from Dave Schrader’s DARKNESS RADIO.. Schrader interviewed author Diane Fanning about Sells.. The horrific nature of his crimes disturbed me to my core. There is a laundry list of murders committed and also some he is suspected of.

Sells is suspected of killing the Dardeen family in 1987--the story of these murders is beyond comparison.. if Sells did it, that means he killed a father, a 3-year-old, a mother—who gave birth during her death. The premature baby girl was then savagely beaten and killed, too.. 

This is one case that made me question the death penalty—but in the other way. It made me wonder if my opposition to it was just a fanciful dream that people are ‘decent’ … indecent people like Sells maybe don’t deserve oxygen.. 

Regardless of that, Sells is dead now.