Sean Sellers: Murders, Trial, and Execution

Sean Sellers was an Oklahoma teenager who murdered a convenience store clerk and then his own mother and stepfather in 1985 and 1986, when he was sixteen. He was executed by lethal injection on February 4, 1999, at age twenty-nine, becoming the first person in the United States in forty years to be put to death for crimes committed at sixteen. His case drew international protest and became a frequently cited example in the legal campaign that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court banning the juvenile death penalty in 2005.

The Three Murders

The first killing happened on September 8, 1985, at a Circle K convenience store in northwest Oklahoma City. Sellers, sixteen, went in with a .357 magnum loaded with hollow-point bullets, fired twice at clerk Robert Paul Bower, thirty-two, and killed him with the second shot. He took nothing. He later told his friend Richard Howard that he “wanted to see what it feels like to kill somebody” and described the killing as a “fantastic prank.” In his own account, the murder followed a “lust ritual” and was an act of “ultimate loyalty to Satan.”¹ The case went unsolved for months.

On the night of March 4–5, 1986, Sellers shot his mother Vonda and his stepfather Paul Bellofatto as they slept, using a .44 caliber revolver that belonged to Bellofatto. Each was killed with a single shot to the back of the head. He committed the killings in his undershorts to keep blood off his clothing and then staged the scene to look like a break-in. Afterward he went to Richard Howard’s house, confessed, hid the weapon there, and returned home to “discover” the bodies and call police. He later boasted to Howard about faking his grief. Police traced the .44 recovered from Howard’s house to the murders, and Howard’s statements tied Sellers to all three killings.²

Trial, Conviction, and Death Sentence

Sellers was tried in the District Court of Oklahoma County before Judge Charles L. Owens on three counts of first-degree murder. The prosecution’s central witness was Richard Howard, who had originally been charged with first-degree murder himself. In exchange for testifying, Howard pleaded guilty in juvenile court to being an accessory to a felony and received a five-year deferred sentence.²

The defense argued that Sellers was so consumed by Satanic obsession that he was not in control of his actions. Psychiatrist Dr. Martin Krimsky testified that Sellers was “legally unconscious” during the three killings. The trial judge refused to instruct the jury on unconsciousness or automatism and refused a manslaughter instruction, leaving jurors a choice between first-degree murder and acquittal. The judge also barred expert testimony about developmental differences between juveniles and adults, which cut off any argument that Sellers’ age should carry special mitigating weight.³

Prosecutors told jurors that Sellers “became a man” when he picked up his weapons and that he remained a continuing threat. On October 2, 1986, the jury convicted him on all three counts and recommended death for each.³

Appeals and the Multiple Personality Disorder Claim

In 1991, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld all three convictions but struck one aggravating factor, that the killings were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel,” because the trial court had not required proof of torture or serious physical abuse before death.⁴

The sharpest fight in the later appeals was over a new diagnosis. In October 1992, six years into his incarceration, a psychologist and neurologist concluded that Sellers suffered from multiple personality disorder (MPD) and identified three alter personalities. Dr. Dorothy O. Lewis, a New York University psychiatrist who had evaluated him before trial in 1987, said she had originally misdiagnosed him as schizophrenic and now agreed he had MPD. She said the disorder typically takes six to seven years to diagnose correctly.⁵

Other experts were unconvinced. Psychiatrist Dr. Marcus Barker told the Daily Oklahoman he had “grave doubts” about the diagnosis and called a finding of MPD that first appeared six years into a death sentence “questionable.” Fred Cook, a unit manager at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, wrote in a letter that he had personally seen an investigator coach Sellers during diagnostic testing with index cards reading “roll your eyes” and “stammer.”⁵

In state post-conviction proceedings in 1995, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the MPD and brain-injury claims as procedurally barred. The court held that MPD was a recognized illness at the time of trial, that competent counsel could have discovered it with reasonable diligence, and that the original defense team’s decision to pursue an automatism theory was entitled to heavy deference.⁶

Sellers then sought federal habeas relief. In Sellers v. Ward, 135 F.3d 1333 (10th Cir. 1998), the Tenth Circuit went further than any other court on the medical question. It acknowledged “uncontroverted clinical evidence” that Sellers suffered from MPD and that an alter personality may have been in control during the murders, writing that his “illness is such that he may be able to prove his factual innocence.” Even so, the panel held that a freestanding claim of actual innocence based on new evidence is not grounds for federal habeas relief without a separate constitutional violation at trial. The MPD evidence had never been tested by cross-examination, and the court found it did not meet the “extraordinarily high threshold” of showing that no reasonable juror would have convicted. The Tenth Circuit affirmed the denial of relief and suggested Sellers pursue executive clemency.⁴

Clemency Denial and Execution

The competing MPD claims were put before the Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Paroles at a clemency hearing on January 27, 1999, a week before the scheduled execution. Neither the Board nor Governor Frank Keating was willing to grant clemency.⁷ A final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied around 7:00 p.m. on February 3, 1999.¹

Sellers was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m. on February 4, 1999. He was twenty-nine. Seven relatives of Paul Bellofatto witnessed the execution, along with seven witnesses Sellers had chosen, including two spiritual advisers.¹

Speaking to the Bellofatto relatives from the gurney, Sellers said: “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.” He urged them to turn to God and not “hate all your lives.” His last words, sung softly, were: “Set my spirit free that I might praise Thee. Set my spirit free that I might worship Thee.” He told his own witnesses, “I love you all,” and then said to Warden Gary Gibson, “Let’s do it, Gary. Let’s get it on.”⁸

Outside, about a hundred death penalty opponents stood with candles. Reporters from England, France, and Germany were in the press corps.¹

Why the Case Still Matters

Sellers was only the tenth juvenile offender executed in the United States during the 1990s and the first in forty years to be put to death for a crime committed at sixteen. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both campaigned against the execution, calling it a violation of international law prohibiting the death penalty for people under eighteen at the time of their offenses.⁷⁹

Sellers’ attorney, Steven Presson of Norman, Oklahoma, built much of his later work around the argument that “kids don’t have the same moral culpability that adults have.” Presson also represented Scott Hain, another Oklahoma inmate executed in 2003 for crimes committed at seventeen, and petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to abolish the juvenile death penalty.¹⁰

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, that executing offenders who were under eighteen at the time of their crimes is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The decision overturned the Court’s 1989 ruling in Stanford v. Kentucky and rested on research showing that juveniles are categorically less culpable than adults because of their developmental immaturity. Roughly seventy people then on death row for juvenile crimes had their sentences commuted.¹¹

Presson called the day the ruling came down “bittersweet.” He kept the ashes of both Sellers and Hain on his desk. “We finally won your arguments,” he said. “It came six years too late for Sean.”¹²

1
Clark Prosecutor. Sean Sellers Execution Summary
2
Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. Sellers v. State, 1991 OK CR 41
3
Amnesty International. USA: Sean Sellers – Child Offender Facing Execution in Oklahoma
4
Findlaw. Sellers v. Ward, 10th Cir. 1998
5
The Oklahoman. Condemned Killer’s Mental Diagnosis Draws Skeptics
6
Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. Sellers v. State, 1995 OK CR 11
7
Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch Condemns Execution of Juvenile Offender
8
The Oklahoman. Sellers Executed for 3 Murders
9
Amnesty International. USA: Death Penalty – Sean Sellers
10
The Oklahoman. Supreme Court: Penalty Judged Cruel and Unusual
11
Justia. Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551
12
Time. Too Young to Die