Sean Sellers

Sean Richard Sellers (May 18, 1969 – February 4, 1999) was an American serial killer and one of 22 people in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976 to be executed for a crime committed while under the age of 18, and the only one to have been executed for a crime committed under the age of 17. Sellers was the first person to be executed for a crime committed at the age of 16 since 1959. His case drew worldwide attention due to his age as well as his jailhouse conversion to Christianity and his claim that demonic possession made him innocent of his crimes.

Crimes Sellers and his best friend, Richard Howard, had discussed how it would feel to kill someone. Sellers later confessed to the September 8, 1985, murder of Robert Paul Bower, a 36 -year-old Circle K convenience store clerk who had refused to sell beer to Howard. According to Howard, who was present for but did not participate in the murder, Sellers "wanted to see what it feels like to kill somebody."

Sellers said he decided to kill his mother after a fight over his girlfriend, whom his mother did not like. He had served his mother several cups of coffee laden with rat poison, but it did not work. On March 5, 1986, Sellers shot and killed his mother Vonda, 32, and stepfather Paul "Lee" Bellofatto, 43, with a .44 caliber revolver while they were asleep in the bedroom of their Oklahoma City home. Wearing only underwear to limit blood spatter on himself, he first shot his stepfather. The shot awoke his mother, whom he shot in the face. Sellers tried to disguise his guilt by arranging the crime scene to look as if an intruder had committed the killings.

Howard testified that after the murders, Sellers came to his house and said he had killed his parents. Howard was also initially charged with first degree murder, but the charged was dismissed and he received a five-year suspended sentence for being an accessory after the fact after agreeing to testify against Sellers. ) caused him to murder his victims. In later documents, he claimed to have read The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey "hundreds of times" between the ages of 15 and 16, when the crimes were committed, and in a "confession" letter written from prison, he reflected on this period of his life: "I got very involved in Satanism. I truly thought it was an honest way to live, and the rituals of it would enable me to control my life."

His attorneys also argued Sellers was addicted to the game Dungeons & Dragons, although Sellers would later write that the game had no part in his crimes and that "using my past as a common example of the effects of the game is either irrational or fanatical." At the time, Oklahoma law did not give juries the option of giving a life sentence without the possibility of parole (that choice became available in 1987). One juror later said that the jury feared that Sellers would be paroled in 7 to 15 years, and that this prison term was not lengthy enough. This led the jury to vote for a death sentence. However, other jurors denied that this was part of the deliberations.

Conversion to Christianity Sellers became a Christian while in prison. His friends started a website on his behalf, and he campaigned for clemency based on his religious conversion, age, and involvement in Satanism. While on death row, Sellers made numerous appearances in the mass media, appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and on a notorious segment of Geraldo about Satanism. He appeared in documentaries about Satanism and serial killers for 48 Hours, MSNBC, WNS NEWS and the A&E Network. Sellers married in prison on February 14, 1995, but the marriage was annulled in 1997. Of his many surviving family members, only his step-grandfather believed his conversion to be sincere. However, the prison chaplain believed he had truly converted.

Appeals and execution During his 1999 appeal to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Sellers contended he had multiple personality disorder (now dissociative identity disorder). The appellate court ruled that there was "uncontroverted evidence" of Sellers' religious conversion and that he may indeed suffer from multiple personality disorder. The panel of judges concluded that while Sellers might have been insane at the time of his crimes, the claim was made too late to be raised on appeal. Human Rights Watch condemned this decision to "[uphold] the sentence on narrow procedural grounds" despite the "acknowledged 'uncontested clinical evidence' that Sellers suffers from multiple personality disorder", adding in its letter to Governor Keating that "No civilized society can accept the execution of a person who was a child at the time he committed his crimes and who was – and remains – afflicted with a mental disorder. Such an execution offends the most basic principles of international justice and morality." In its 1999 letter HR Watch observed also that since 1990, the only other countries known to have executed juvenile offenders besides the United States of America were Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen.

Psychiatric experts scoffed at Sellers' claim, arguing that any true mental illness would have been diagnosed soon after Sellers' arrest and not seven years later. Prison officials also cast doubt on Sellers' mental illness by saying they saw Sellers rehearsing the evidence of mental illness and receiving coaching from his attorneys.

Sellers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court declined his appeal.

Sellers' imminent execution brought condemnation from a wide variety of sources, including the European Union, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the American Bar Association, and Bianca Jagger. Nearly all raised issues about his age at the time of the crimes, and many argued that his religious work from prison outweighed the state's need to execute him. He began his final statement by addressing his step-siblings:

quotation|All the people that are hating me right now and are here waiting to see me die, when you wake up in the morning, you're not going to feel any different. You're going to hate me just as much tomorrow as tonight.

When you wake up and nothing has changed inside, reach out to God and He will be there for you. Reach out to God and He will heal you. Let Him touch your hearts. Don't hate all your lives.

I love you all.

While in prison, Sellers authored a book of love stories and poems titled Shuladore. The book was self-published, and sold via his Web site. Under Oklahoma law, a defendant cannot "receive any proceeds or profits from any source" as a direct or indirect result of his crime. An Oklahoma grand jury investigated whether Sellers or his friends received profits from the sale of the book, but no indictment was forthcoming. A Christian book publisher issued Sellers's autobiography, Web of Darkness, in 1990.