In custody Sells, a drug-addict and drifter, admitted to the Rangers that he had killed between 20 and 50 people in several states over the last two decades. To date Sells has been charged with one homicide in Texas and one in Kentucky. However, he is considered a strong suspect in eleven more deaths in half-dozen states.

Not unlike serial confessor Henry Lee Lucas, Sells has traveled to Idaho, Nevada and Arkansas to try to confirm slayings that he has confessed he committed. One of the alleged victims in Central Arkansas was found alive and well. "We went to Little Rock, Arkansas, and he was able to take us to a house where a burglary and shooting had occurred," said Texas Ranger John Allen said. "For 18 years he was sure he had hit the guy, but it turns out the guy just fell to the ground and lay there like he was hit."

In March Tommy Lee Sells guided detectives around Pulaski County in Central Arkansas looking for evidence of two murders he said he commited there in early 1982. Sells eventually guided the detectives to a "blue hole" in southern Pulaski County and told a story of the rape and murder of a woman whose body was thrown into the deep water of a bauxite pit. Sheriff's deputies have not yet sent divers into the pit to find the body, saying they won't until they can confirm other parts of Sells' tale. "It's hard to justify spending money on divers until we can get some sort of corroborating evidence that there is a missing person," Pulaski County sheriff's office spokesman John Rehrauer said. "We have not been able to establish a connection to what Sells thought happened and anything in our records. Until we do, we're not going to go to the expense of diving."

Several weeks after the Little Rock trip, Texas authorities took Sells to southern Idaho on a similar mission, because he had confessed to three area murders. Authorities believe that two of those murders occurred in the fall of 1988 at a bridge overlook just outside of Twin Falls. The third murder occurred the following year in neighboring Gooding County. "He said he was driving a stolen black Dodge van in Salt Lake City and brought the woman -- who he had been seeing for a couple of weeks -- and her son to spend the night on the Snake River," a Twin Falls County sheriff's spokesman said. "He said he killed them and dumped them in the river." As of now police have no missing persons report to match the alleged killing. In the third murder, Sells confessed to abducting a woman who was hitchhiking from Canada to Salt Lake City.