Sean Richard Sellers
Sean was born on 18th May 1969 to Vonda and Rick Sellers. Vonda had been only fifteen when she became pregnant with Sean and was sixteen when he was born. The family lived in Concoran, California but by the time Sean was three the marriage had broken up. This did nothing to improve Vonda’s volatile temper and she often hit the little blonde boy, frequently slapping him across the face.
By the time he was five his mother had met Paul Bellofatto, a former Green Beret. Paul told Sean that he had killed the enemy whilst on duty in Vietnam. He was now a cross country trucker and Vonda decided to join him on the road.
She gave Sean to her father and his second wife. At other times he was cared for by his great-grandparents. His mother and stepfather came home every few weeks for a short visit then left again. Each time Sean would wave them goodbye then lock himself in the bathroom and cry.
At school he had to explain that his surname was Sellers after his natural father although his parents had the surname of Bellofatto. Plus his grandfather who he lived with had yet another surname. He knew that he was different.
Sean was a bright little boy who liked animals and said that he wanted to be a vet when he grew up. He loved his pets but was sometimes separated from them when his mother took him away to her latest living quarters. He’d stay with Vonda and Paul for a few days or weeks then be shipped back to his grandfather or to other relatives. He had virtually no stability in his life. To the outside world he seemed unusually self-reliant – but deep down he was filled with fear, low self-esteem and an increasing rage.
When Sean was eight his parents again took him to live with them, this time in Los Angeles. The couple were living with relatives in an apartment block that was supposed to be childfree so he was constantly being told to keep quiet. Various relatives shouted at him and one of them made the child give him oral sex. Like most abused children, Sean thought that this was his fault. Within weeks it was clear that they were never going to play happy families so his parents shipped him back to his grandfather’s house in Oklahoma and he returned to school there.
The next seven years passed in this way. Every so often Vonda and Paul would take Sean to live with them in their latest house. They never stayed in the one town for more than a year so he often had to cope with new schools and new friends. By now Vonda’s violence had increased and she hit her son with a belt, a hairbrush and wooden spoons. Sean tried very hard to please her then opted for trying to avoid her by staying in his room. Meanwhile Paul spent little time with his stepson and Sean came to the conclusion that the man – who he thought of as Dad – didn’t like or admire him at all.
Vonda and Paul smoked dope and by age twelve Sean had joined them in this. He also started playing Dungeons & Dragons games.
By the time Sean reached his teens he was filled with rage. He turned to the martial arts to improve his self-esteem and read up on how to kill people. During this period he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle who laughed at him for his interest in Ninjutsu. But Paul took him to see the film Rambo and said that soldiers should be able to kill people and not worry about it.
When Sean was fifteen they moved him again, this time to Colorado. For the first time in ages he was happy. He joined the Civil Air Patrol and became a cadet commander. This pleased Paul and their relationship improved. But the couple decided to move back to Oklahoma which would mean Sean losing everything he’d built up. Sean begged them not to go – or to let him stay on his own – but they made him return, showing his wishes didn’t matter. Like many children, he was being given no respect.
His needs ignored once too often, the boy gave up trying to be part of everyday life. He no longer tried to make friends and began to read up on Satanism in the hope that it would give him some control over his days.
He and his friend Richard would talk about what it would be like to rape and kill people. They also planned robberies but didn’t carry them out.
The teenage Sean increasingly turned to the occult in the hope of acquiring power. He wrote in his own blood that he served Satan and added ‘to my enemies, death.’ He told his schoolmates that he saw flying demons. This isn’t unusual in poorly patented individuals. Under intense stress, people often hallucinate and see or hear things – usually of a frightening nature – that aren’t actually there.
He got into a fight at school about satanism and when a teacher intervened she discovered he had the occult book The Satanic Bible. She called his parents who discovered he’d set up a satanic altar in his room. Sadly, this started yet another shouting match during which his stepfather yelled ‘You don’t exist.’
Sean was now even more desperate to prove that he did exist, to exert some form of power. He decided he’d enhance his satanic status if he broke the Ten Commandments. His seventeen-year-old friend Richard was also interested in murder and the two youths decided to kill a shop clerk called Robert who Richard knew.
On 8th September 1985 the boys entered the convenience store where thirty-six-year-old Robert Bower was working the night shift. Richard was angry at Robert who had previously refused to sell him beer because he was underage.
The boys went to the store and spoke to him for the next hour. They joked that he was at risk because the store didn’t have a security camera but Robert explained that there was only fifty dollars in the cash register at any one time. He had no reason to fear Richard and had no idea that Sean – who he didn’t know – was toting Richard’s grandfather’s gun.
Moments later, Sean aimed the gun at the clerk’s head, fired and missed. The shocked clerk ran and Sean fired again. This shot also missed as Robert had slipped and fallen to the floor. He screamed and grabbed hold of a jacket, trying to hide behind it. Sean could see his terrified eyes. Nevertheless, he fired a third time, hitting the man and sending blood spurting everywhere. Laughing, the youths raced from the store.
No one connected the brutal killing with the withdrawn teenage boy. Sean didn’t think about the death for days – but when he did he felt superior. He wondered if his stepfather would be pleased with him for taking a life and not feeling upset about it. Paul had given him the impression that soldiers who suffered from post traumatic stress were weak.
Sean got a job as a bouncer for a youth club. There he met a teenager called Angel and for the first time, he fell in love. Unfortunately, Sean’s mother couldn’t stand the girl who smoked and was a high school drop out. Sean thought that Angel reminded his mother of herself as a girl, acting tough but feeling lost. Vonda called Angel a tramp and a bitch and tried to split the couple up.
The next six months were increasingly unpleasant at home. Sean brooded in his room and practiced the so-called black arts. He took driving lessons to have more control over his destiny. Meanwhile his mother threw him out of the house so Sean decided to sleep in his van but Paul promptly went to Sean’s work and fetched him back. His mother then threatened to send him to his natural father in California, presumably to separate him from his girlfriend.
During one of their many arguments, Vonda attacked Sean – but this time he pushed her back, meeting violence with violence. He alternated between just wishing he could leave and wishing that she was dead. He even put rat poison in her coffee but it had no effect.
Sean had been counting the days until he turned eighteen and could leave home, but now he just could not wait. He was only sixteen – but during those sixteen years he’d had good reason to build up a lot of hate.
On 5th March 1986 he waited until Vonda and Paul went to bed, stripped to his underwear and went through one of his satanic rituals before creeping into their bedroom with Paul’s .44 revolver at his side. He would later say that he felt like he was shooting his way to freedom, knocking down the door of a prison cage.
He put the gun close to his forty-three-year-old stepfather’s head and fired, killing him instantly. He turned the gun on his thirty-two-year-old mother and shot her too. As she rose, wounded, from the bed he shot her again, watching the blood run down the side of her head. He laughed, just as he had done after killing the shop clerk. Then he showered and staged the scene to make it look like a burglary.
Afterwards he drove to Richard’s house and they talked about what they’d say to the authorities. Sean contacted them after pretending to discover the bodies the next day.
The police went to his school and were told about his problems with his parents and his interest in satanism. He was soon arrested. The police also spoke to Richard who agreed to testify against Sean to save himself.
The media immediately blamed the young killer’s crimes on Dungeons & Dragons. (Many journalists would have run out of things to say years ago if the game had never been invented.) Meanwhile the Christian community decided it was his interest in the occult that was to blame.
As usual, few people bothered to notice that, by the time he was nine years old, Sean had only spent a total of six months with his parents. Instead, he was passed around like an unwanted parcel – and in the years leading up to his becoming a murderer he’d lived in six different towns. Largely friendless and completely powerless he’d turned to an ostensible source of solace and power, the occult. But it wasn’t any so-called demon that committed these crimes – just a badly neglected teenager with a gun.
Sean’s defence team failed to have him tried as a juvenile so they entered an insanity defence, saying that his interest in satanism constituted madness. The prosecution alleged these were thrill killings. The jury were back with a guilty verdict within three hours.
At the time of the trial, in October 1986, Oklahoma didn’t allow life sentences without the possibility of parole. Some of the jurors were allegedly worried that if they gave the youth life he’d be paroled in as little as seven years. Whatever their various motivations, they voted for the death penalty and Sean was sent to Oklahoma’s McAlester Prison.
For the next thirteen years Sean Sellers remained on Death Row, saying alternately that a demon or drugs had made him kill his parents. He got religion and started to write religious poetry, becoming a pin-up for many born-again Christians. Unsurprisingly, the family of the innocent clerk he’d shot were wishing that he hadn’t been born the first time around.
Christian visitors flocked to the triple murderer and his new friends included those who performed exorcisms for money. He gave interviews to ministers about the supposed dangers of satanism. He also published a book that blamed the world’s ills on black magic, heavy metal music and drugs.
Yet he’d made the connection between the violence he’d endured and his own violent murders, writing that ‘Mum… slapped me in the face… mashed my mouth into my teeth… hit me in the head with butcher knife handles, hairbrushes, whatever she had in her hand… I tried to live in my room as much as possible. I hated her as much as I loved her.’
Sean now decided there was a deity out there who loved him. He appeared on talk TV renouncing the occult and saying that he’d seen the light.
This usually goes down well with parole boards and those who oppose the death penalty – but it shouldn’t as many children who kill come from religious backgrounds. The same is true of adults who murder. Some of the world’s most sadistic serial killers – including Ted Bundy, Rose West, Dean Corll, Richard Ramirez and Robert Berdella – had deeply religious upbringings. The same is true of necrophile killers like Ed Gein. And the very devout John List murdered his mother, wife and three children when his prayers went unanswered and his family started to move away from the church.
During his years on Death Row, Sean produced many devout words. He also married a born-again Christian in 1995 who said that when watching him on TV she’d ‘seen Jesus in his eyes.’ (Another woman had said the exact same thing about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, adopting her and proclaiming she was innocent. But the eye-reading proved unreliable as Aileen later confessed.)
By 1997 Sean’s marriage had been annulled. By early 1999 he’d run out of appeals and on 4th February 1999 he entered the McAlester Prison execution chamber singing hymns. He was twenty-nine years old.
Sean was strapped down and both of his arms were injected with a drug designed to render him unconscious, stop his breathing then stop his heart. Watched by fourteen witnesses, he was pronounced dead at 12.17am.
Sadly, there are still groups and individuals trying to blame his crimes on the medieval concept of demons rather than looking at the violence and neglect he endured for sixteen years.