Child Victim talks about serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells
Patty
By LEE HILL KAVANAUGH - The Kansas City Star
Date: 03/17/01 22:15
Del Rio, Texas, Dec. 31, 1999:
Around 3:50 a.m., Tommy Lynn Sells slipped through a window into Terry Harris' home. He
carried a 12-inch boning knife.
He crept past the bedrooms of sleeping family members, peeking in at them, moving on until
he found whom he was looking for.
Kaylene Harris, 13, was asleep on the bottom bunk. In the top bunk was her friend,
10-year-old Krystal Surles, from Yates Center, Kan.
Sells flicked on the light, put his hand over Kaylene's mouth and dragged her to the
floor.
They struggled, and he began to stab her, again and again, 16 times in all. Then he
slashed her throat.
A noise caught Sells' attention, and he looked up into Krystal's brown eyes. He went
toward her, and she grabbed her throat with both hands.
"Move your hands," he hissed.
When she did, he cut her throat, too. An alarm clock went off at 4 a.m. in another
bedroom. On his way out Sells shut it off.
In less than 10 minutes he had shredded the lives of two families. Today the pain and loss
he left continues, as survivors try to heal, try to go on with living.
The Surleses
Yates Center, Kan., March 3, 2001:
Krystal Surles, now 12, bounces into her room, picks up a 3-foot tall lion and plops the
stuffed animal on the highest shelf. The lion almost hides a plaque from the Val Verde
(Texas) County sheriff's office that reads: "For invaluable assistance in solving the
murder of Kaylene Harris and attempted murder of yourself."
Krystal is the reason that Sells now awaits execution.
The night her throat was slashed, she stayed alive by feigning death -- even as her
windpipe was severed, her fingers sliced, her vocal cords nicked. Sells' knife had sliced
through the sheath covering her carotid artery, but it failed to cut the artery itself.
Within hours of life-saving surgery -- on the first day of a new century -- Krystal
astounded police. Though unable to speak, she wrote notes telling them exactly what had
happened, describing through gestures to a police artist a man with a beard and long hair.
But Krystal shrugs off any compliments about being a hero. Instead, she shows off her
collection of stuffed animals, donated by people throughout the country. She also displays
a grainy photograph taken at a Texas mall of herself with Kaylene, just hours before the
murder.
"Kaylene wasn't allowed to wear makeup, so we hid makeup in her purse, put it on in the
bathroom, took the picture and then ran to the bathroom to take it off again," she says.
It's a story she has told before. A pleasant memory. A way to avoid talking about what
happened later.
Scattered around her sunlighted bedroom are Beanie Babies and floppy stuffed animals. An
open suitcase sits on the floor, filled with rumpled clothes.
"I still haven't unpacked from going to `The Montel Williams Show,' " says Krystal. She
gushes about her visit to New York, seeing the Statue of Liberty up close, eating at
McDonald's with a police escort and ordering "like $80 dollars worth of french fries."
Krystal is a veteran of several television shows: "America's Most Wanted" -- twice --
"20/20," "48 Hours," "Inside Edition." Just two days earlier, producers from the "The
Oprah Winfrey Show" and "The Maury Povich Show" called wanting her to appear.
"I'm tired of talking about what happened. It ruins everything," Krystal says, as she lies
down on the living room floor to watch an MTV video. She does not sleep in her bedroom;
she sleeps in the living room -- where the noises of her family comfort her.
"I know Montel thinks it's good I talk about it, but I don't like to....The very worst
show to be on was `48 Hours.' They showed `him' reading the Bible and kissing his wife.
Yuck.
"He's nothing but a rock outside my window. I don't think about him. He's a jerk."
On the day she testified, Sells asked to not be present. But the little girl from Kansas
insisted he be there.
She wanted him to see the jagged pink scar on her neck. She wanted him to hear what it was
like to wake up to a nightmare. She wanted him to feel ashamed for the evil he had doen.
"Krystal looked him right in the eye," recalls her mother, Pam Surles, about the trial.
"That took courage and strength. I know a lot of adults that couldn't have done that."
Not a day goes by that Surles doesn't thank God for her daughter, and for her other
children, too: Marque, 8; Amber, 5; and the children of her fiance, Doug Luker. She broke
off her engagement to Luker soon after the attacks, but the two are back together. Next
week they are getting married.
As her mother speaks, Krystal dances in front of the television to her favorite musical
group, Blink 182, giggling with her girlfriend, Laci Sicka, 12.
"Mom, can we get out my memory box?" Krystal says.
Surles nods and disappears into another room. She brings out a deep blue plastic container
filled with an assortment of papers, photographs, newspaper clippings and baseball caps
from police and media.
There's a banner that classmates from Krystal's school made for her, and there are
hospital gowns that she wore the eight days she stayed in the hospital. ("The first ones
they gave me didn't cover my butt," she says, and then giggles.) There are photos of a
bloated Krystal sitting in the intensive-care unit, her throat bandaged, IVs snaking into
her arms.
"See how swollen her face was? I thought he had beat my child," says Surles. "We wouldn't
let her see a mirror at first."
Krystal goes into her bedroom with Marque and Laci. She doesn't like the talk about "it"
again. Surles waits until her daughter is out of earshot.
"First off, we're all in counseling. This affected our entire family. Did you know that
Marque was there, too, and slept through the attacks?" she asks.
"We're trying to focus on the positives. Krystal knows she helped a lot of other people
whose family members were killed by Tommy Lynn Sells."
Krystal's and Laci's voices drift from her bedroom. The two are grinning into a round
mirror and taking artsy photographs of themselves with an instant photo camera. Shrieks of
laughter pour out when they view the results.
"Krystal doesn't see her scar anymore," Surles continues. "It bothers her that some people
talk to her throat instead of to her."
Surles tears up easily when she recalls those first days after the attack.
"It would be easy if we could sweep this whole thing under the carpet and pretend it
didn't happen," she says. "But it wouldn't do my girls or family any good to do that. We
live in a really messed-up world, and we have to understand that sometimes things like
this happen."
The one-year anniversary of the murder passed quietly, but the family will never celebrate
New Year's Eve again.
There will be a time for closure, says Surles.
"Krystal wants to be there at his execution. She and Doug made a pact while she was still
in the hospital. They'll hold hands and watch Sells die together.
"She's already seen one person die."
The Harrises
Neodesha, Kan., March 4, 2001:
Twenty-five miles from the Surleses, another family struggles every day with pain that is
even worse.
A winding driveway encircles the Harrises' clapboard farmhouse. The family left Texas
about a month after Kaylene's murder, moving back to their native Kansas.
Cattle graze on their 15 acres. A pond, flanked by tall grass, sprawls behind the house.
The view for miles is of rolling hills with rows of 30-foot tall pecan, elm and hackberry
trees.
"Looking out there makes washing dishes a pleasure," says Crystal Harris. "We wanted a
place in the country that is hard for others to find."
She pours white sugar into some freshly brewed tea. Crystal Harris, 32, is reed-slender
and petite, with shoulder-length hair and sad brown eyes.
"We had to move," she says. "I couldn't stay in a house where something that terrible
happened. None of us could sleep there anymore. I couldn't watch any of the television
shows about Kaylene's murder. When they showed footage of the inside of our house -- the
same room I cleaned every day -- and then they focus in on the blood stain on the rug...It
was too much."
She looks away.
Terry Harris, 38, pours himself some tea and sits down next to his wife at the dining room
table. A burly man who stands 6-foot-1, he was once a law officer in Oklahoma and then
Parsons, Kan. He worked as a bouncer in a Kansas City nightclub. In Texas he worked at
Laughlin Air Force Base as a quality controller.
His hair is long, gathered in a ponytail. Once he shaved his head because his daughters
asked him. Weeks before she died, Kaylene asked him if he would let his hair grow out. He
has not cut it since her death.
"Kaylene was always smiling one of those big, toothy grins," he says. "God, she was
beautiful."
He jumps up and grabs a plate-sized oval photo of Kaylene. Her blond hair is swept under a
denim hat. She sits in a boat, laughing at the camera. Terry Harris stares at Kaylene's
image.
When Kaylene was 4 years old, she asked Harris, who was not her biological father, to be
her daddy. Within months he had adopted all three of Crystal's children. On the day of the
adoption the children sang a song in the courtroom that so touched the judge, he cried.
Terry Harris smiles at the memory.
But in an instant, the memory flits away.
"It took just 10 minutes for Sells to uproot our family," he says. "He stole our
daughter's accomplishments, every birthday, every holiday....For a whole year, everything
snowballed downhill.
"He stole our lifestyle. We may have to file bankruptcy. I'm not allowed to work -- I have
too many anger issues. The drugs we're on for depression are really expensive. I don't
feel like a man. Forget about sex. There's no way you can plan for something like this."
He pauses. His calloused hands clench, relax and then clench again. Crystal Harris pats
his back softly.
"It eats me up that I tried to help Tommy (Sells)," Terry Harris says. "I talked with him.
He was a guy down on his luck that I tried to help.
"He repaid me by killing my daughter....
"Jesus, I miss her."
Terry Harris says he's drinking and smoking more than he should. Crystal Harris keeps
losing weight. Both parents worry about their children: Terry's biological son, Shawn, 18,
and their other children, Lori, 13, and Justin, 15.
Terry Harris leaves the room. Crystal Harris stays seated, her eyes focused on things far
beyond the scene outside the window. Paintings of angels hang on nearby walls. She has
discovered she loves to paint, losing herself in the images she creates.
Angels are her favorite subjects.
"Oh, I realize our life will never be the same again," she says, and then sighs. "I
questioned God, asking Him why He allowed this to happen. But then I found a verse that
gave me much comfort: Precious in the eyes of the Lord are the death of his saints. Psalm
116."
The family has avoided the media. Talking about their daughter hurts too much. So does
hearing about how Krystal Surles is a hero, without mention of their own daughter.
"You know, our daughter was a hero, too," says Crystal Harris. "Somebody had to die, and
somebody else had to watch him do it."
She stops to wipe her eyes.
"She was our baby....We're trying to see the good in each day, but sometimes that's hard."
Reminders are everywhere of their loss. One stays chilled in their refrigerator -- a
bottle of New Year's Eve champagne once reserved for a celebration.
Now, it's reserved for a solemn toast -- at Tommy Lynn Sells' execution.