Coast to Coast: The Life, Crimes, and Twenty-Year Killing Campaign of Tommy Lynn Sells (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798235423459)

Coast to Coast: The Life, Crimes, and Twenty-Year Killing Campaign of Tommy Lynn Sells

On New Year's Eve 1999, a ten-year-old girl named Krystal Surles had her throat cut and her best friend murdered in a mobile home in Del Rio, Texas. Unable to speak because her windpipe had been severed, she walked to the nearest house and asked for a notepad. What she wrote in the next few minutes ended a twenty-one-year murder campaign, and began the most extraordinary accounting in modern American criminal history.

Coast to Coast is the definitive narrative account of Tommy Lynn Sells, the transient serial killer who moved through the United States by freight train and carnival circuit for two decades, killing across more than a dozen states while two wrongly convicted people sat in prison for his crimes. Drawing on court records, psychiatric evaluations, forensic case files, and the developmental science of trauma and violence, Finbarr Moore reconstructs not only what Sells did but how he was made, and, crucially, how a nation's fractured systems of child protection, mental health care, and interstate law enforcement failed, at every turn, to stop him.

This is a book about killers and victims and survivors and the wrongly imprisoned. But above all, it is a book about the children, the ones who died, and the one who lived to tell us everything.