The Confession of My Crimes

Robert Paul Bower, Vonda Maxine Bellofatto, my mother and  Paul Lee Bellofatto, my stepfather.

First I must apologize for not doing this long ago.  All I can offer you for that is that I did not understand your need for this.  I didn’t know it was important, because no one ever told me it was.  And more than that, many people work hard to keep barriers between us, whether it be my attorneys who try to protect me legally, or my friends who don’t understand the pain I’ve caused, or even you, who never came to me to ask why and how, or to see if there was any true sorrow in me.  If I had known this was so important I would have done it long ago.  Please forgive me first for that.

This is not a testimony.  I know you don’t care about my "spiritual state" and you don’t want to hear me get "past" my crimes.  To you I know that appears as if I’ve shrugged them off.  I haven’t.  This is my confession, and it has no other purpose but to offer you the answers you deserve- and deserved long ago.  I also need you to understand I’m offering only explanations.  I’m not in any way trying to pass blame to any other person.  There are reasons why I did what I did, but I’m still the one who did it, and the responsibility, no matter the reasons, is still MINE.

I was not a cruel person.  I didn’t commit murder because I enjoyed causing pain.  I had pets all my life, and I wanted to be a veterinarian.  I never was a bully, or provoked fights, or picked on people weaker than I was.  In fact I got into a few fights standing up for people who were being picked on.  When we’re kids we just feel things.  When we’re adults we look back on our childhood and we figure out some of what we were feeling and why.  There was a LOT of anger in me as a kid.  I didn’t know that, but it was there.

Mom had me at 16, and when she was 21, I was 5.  I don’t remember much before 5, but at 5 she left me with her father, my "Papa" (PAW-PAW) Jim Blackwell, his wife Geneva- "grandma" to me- and Papa’s parents- Great grandpa and Great grandma to me.  And she left.  She met Lee- Dad to me- and she was gone.  I only saw her when she managed to make it in every few weeks.  And every time she and Dad left, I smiled, waived goodbye, and went to the bathroom, closed the door, and cried.  Every time.  And I never once let anyone see me do it.

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In school I was Sean Sellers.  But my grandparents were named Blackwell, and my Mom and Dad were named Bellofatto.  I didn’t know what the heck a "divorce" was, or why I had a different name, all I knew was that in that little bitty town I was the ONLY kid whose name was not the same as his parents.  I was different- and in grade school no child wants to be different.

 At age 8 Mom and Dad moved me to Los Angeles to live with them.  This is no exaggeration; the school I went to in L.A. was as big as the town I lived in with Papa and Grandma.  I hated it.  Kids speaking Spanish, us living in dad’s Aunt Terrie’s apartment complex where no kids were allowed- so I had to be quiet all the time.  I went from running all over the place, climbing trees, knowing everyone, to staying in or beside the apartment complex, being quiet, knowing no one, and being yelled at all the time.  Aunt Terrie’s house was not a place for kids- and we ate dinner there quite a bit.  I was always being yelled at for either being too noisy, or for fear I was about to break something.  At school I was bullied by boys two feet taller than me, in groups; that was my encounter with gangs.  A white boy from a tiny town in Oklahoma among Chicano’s in Los Angeles.  I’d never been afraid of going to school before.  Then one day at the apartment complex some older relative molested me.  He got me to suck his balls.  I never told anybody that either.  I thought I’d get in trouble, and I was ashamed.

We didn’t stay there long and I went back to Oklahoma to Papa and Grandma, but there was a LOT of anger in me over all of that.  Over the next few years, Mom and Dad kept picking me up and moving me here and there. We never lived in one house more than a few months, or in one town more than a year, so I had several different schools, and never made any lasting friendships.  That built up a lot of resentment. 

Then there were things like Mom’s temper.  She always spanked me with a belt, but she also just hit me.  Slapped me in the face, "mashed my mouth"- a flat palm, straight-on blow to the lips that mashed my lips into my teeth.  She did that when I got "mouthy" and it made my lips swell.  It always shut me up though.  She hit me in the head with wooden mixing spoons, butcher knife handles, hair brushes, whatever she had in her hand.  Usually it was because I said something wrong, or if she was cutting my hair and I was fidgeting, SMACK!  "Be still dammit!"  I never knew what would get me smacked, so I learned to be very careful around Mom.  I walked on eggshells and avoided her when I could.  I tried to live in my room as much as possible.  I hated her as much as I loved her.

So by the time I became a teenager and rebellious, there was a LOT of anger in me.  Sometimes it just welled up and exploded.  I’d go to my room and just tear something apart, or go outside and kick a tree until my foot hurt.  When I was 13, Dad’s nephew, Steven, came to live with us.  I liked Steven a lot.  He was 18, and he introduced me to Ninjutsu.  I got into the martial arts and ninja stuff and I saw something in Steven I longed for.  Dad liked him.  Steven was crass, tough, he liked the military, and he and Dad would talk quite a bit.  Dad NEVER spent any time alone with me.  We never did anything together.  The closest we ever came to it was when he let me help him fix something around the house.  I never consciously made this decision, but looking back I realize now, I wanted to be like Steven so dad would like me.

I got really into that Ninjutsu stuff because of that.  But it didn’t do what it was supposed to.  I ended up living with my Aunt Debbie and Uncle James for awhile, and James thought it was all nonsense.  He ridiculed me, made fun of me, and thought I was quite foolish for spending money on martial arts lessons.  He laughed and teased me when he heard my instructor had gotten his jaw broken in a bar fight.  All that plus the fact I’d been moved yet again to another school in the middle of the year, only added to all my anger.  And the books I was finding on Ninjutsu were demonstrating ways to kill people.  

Ninjutsu was never a martial art of self defense.  Today it has evolved into that, but originally the Ninja were soldiers whose art was assassination, and that was it.  Nothing else.  The books I was reading about Ninjutsu talked a lot about killing people.  There were photographs, showing step by step demonstrations with instructions on how to kill someone with a knife, a stick, or your bare hands.  Not self defense demonstrations, but ways to sneak up on someone and kill him.  The philosophy of it was Zen.

When First Blood came out, we all went to see it.  Me, Mom, Dad, and Steven.  Steven and Dad liked it.  When Rambo the novel- the sequel to First Blood- came out, Steven bought it.  I read it.  John Rambo was a Buddhist.  He chose that religion because Zen taught him how to kill without suffering from a conscience.  The Zen in these martial arts books taught the same thing.  It was a philosophy that said Karma rules life.  It is the Karma or fate of some people to die, and the Karma of others to kill them.  No big deal.  It just is.  Dad had killed people in Vietnam.  Being able to do so and not be bothered by it was a sign of strength to him.  The scene in First Blood where Rambo breaks down and cries- that was weak to Dad.  When he heard that Martin Sheen had a nervous breakdown making Apocalypse Now, he said, " The movie was nothing.  He should have been there for real," and that was his way of saying the actor was weak.  I wanted to be like my Dad, and as crazy as this sounds, a part of that was to have the strength to kill someone, and not be bothered by it.  I didn’t want to kill anyone, I just wanted to have that strength.  I wanted to be like Dad, and be able to shrug and say, "It’s not hard to kill someone," like I’d heard him say to Steven, and knew with conviction he’s done it.

Then when I was 15 we were living in Colorado where I loved it.  I was involved in Civil Air Patrol, and had become the cadet commander of my squadron.  Dad was proud of me for all I was accomplishing in C.A.P. and I’d pretty much set aside all the Ninja stuff.  Then we moved again.  I literally begged Mom and Dad not to, to let me stay, anything, but we came back to Oklahoma, and everything changed.  That was the last straw for me.  For the first time in my life I had been really, REALLY happy in Colorado, and it was all gone.  Something just broke inside of me and all my anger boiled into contempt.  For awhile I quit trying to make new friends at school.  I just did my work without talking to anyone.  That’s when I got involved in the occult.

I met a witch, learned about black magic, and got interested in Satanism.  I was mad at God, I didn’t LIKE God because of how I perceived Him, and the stuff I read on Satanism said two things that appealed to me. #1-- it offered freedom, and #2--it promised power to control my life, and others.  I’d been carted all around the state and Colorado all my life, slapped, smacked, hit, and had whatever I wanted ignored.  I was mad and the idea of controlling my life to get what I wanted was like candy to me.  Plus I looked at the way everyone around me lived and the stuff I read in the Satanic Bible in principle was lived out in lifestyle by Mom and Dad and everyone else I knew.  No one was a real Christian.  We didn’t go to church.  We didn’t talk about God.  Mom and Dad cussed like the truck drivers they had been for so many years, Mom bought me a box of condoms when I was 13 and Dad told me to use them, we’d stolen stuff out of the trucks Dad drove, I’d seen Mom lie to people’s faces to get a deal or sell something, my aunt and uncle, and mom and dad smoked pot, and bought speed, so what was the point of pretending to serve God when we lived like Satanists?  Satanism taught me that I should make my own rules to live by in life, and that’s just what everyone I’d grown up around did, so 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.  Even then I didn’t want to kill anyone.  That desire didn’t start until later.

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As I began to do all those Satanic rituals, I found myself having some strange problems.  As a kid I’d heard voices in my head.  A part of the reason why I never told anyone about that incident of sexual molestation in L.A. was because it seemed like MY idea from things I heard in my head.   Those voices were just a part of the way I thought, and I never gave them any consideration.  But as I did all these rituals those voices changed.  They started sounding different- and being a Satanist, I decided they were demons and it was no big deal.  Demons were the beings that would DO the things I wanted done.  They were the keys to the power Satanism promised me, so I wasn’t afraid of them.  Other things began to happen too, though.  I began to have "blackout" periods where I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing.  I also felt so empty inside.  Cold.  All that anger which had turned into contempt was now becoming a cold hatred toward Mom specifically, and by proxy toward Dad.

I need you to know this before I continue.  I tried to get OUT of Satanism once.  I didn’t like what was happening inside me, and I was scared.  I called a prayer line on T.V.  I talked to a Catholic priest.  I went to a Christian prayer meeting.  But I’d "sold my soul" to Satan and I was convinced I was doomed.  No one knew how to help me because no one had any experience at it.  I really wanted OUT, and when I discovered I couldn’t get out I had only two choices that I saw;  #1 was to go to hell like all the other hypocrites who lived according to the tenets of Satanism but didn’t worship Satan, or #2 worship Satan still and rule OVER those hypocrites in hell.  If I was going to hell I was at least going to be a ruler.  So I got back into the occult.  My God, how I wish I hadn’t, but I did.

After that, things got worse.  My mind was a jumble.  I told Mom I thought I was going crazy.  I told it to a teacher at school- Mrs. Noel, my drama teacher- too.  Richard Howard, my best friend, and I had begun to talk about bizarre and evil things together.  I honestly don’t know when it started or why.  We were both involved in Satanism, and Richard seemed to be the one to bring this stuff up.  He talked about raping and killing an old girlfriend of his, torturing her, of stealing the cash from the money bag his boss took to the bank at night, and killing her.  I fell right along with him.  I enjoyed talking about this evil as much as he did.  We planned robberies and rapes and violence, NEVER ONCE with any intention of doing them.  We’d just say, "wouldn’t it be a kick to do this!"  And we’d laugh about it. 

The closest we ever came to actual planning was in the matter of his boss and that money bag. We actually drove out to where the bank drop slot was and scoped it out and thought the crime through.  Richard wanted ME to actually do it because I was the one into Ninjutsu, and I could sneak up on her.

Somehow, one night, during one of those kinds of conversations, right after we’d done a Satanic ritual in the yard beside his house, we decided to kill Robert Paul Bower.  I wish I could tell you how it came up, but I can’t.  I honestly don’t remember anything after that ritual except a haze and images of me and Richard talking.  Richard got the guns.  His grandfather’s .357 revolver that was loaded with 5 shells that looked like hollow points to me, and a .22 rifle of his brother’s.

We had talked several times of killing his girlfriend’s father- Al Hawks.  Richard wanted Al dead because he had beaten Tracy one night, bruising her eye and face, when he caught her on the phone with Richard.  I think we were going to kill Al that night, but for some reason we were going to kill Robert Bower first.  That seems stupid to me now, it makes no sense, but that’s what I think we were doing.  I was going to kill Robert Bower and Richard was going to kill Al.  Maybe so each of us would have a murder and couldn’t tell on the other?  I don’t know.  My mind was too gone to remember it.

Richard chose Robert Bower.  I didn’t even know the man.  I had said I wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.  I’d said that many times, but that was not the reason we were going to kill Mr. Bower.  He worked the midnight shift at a very remote Circle K store and one night, because Richard stopped in and talked to him a lot on the way home from seeing Tracy, Richard thought Robert would sell him beer.  When we got to the store, Mr. Bower refused, and that had made Richard mad.  That had qualified him as someone we’d like to kill, and we’d talked about him in those conversations about killing.  That night we just somehow decided to really do it, and it would be an offering to Satan to prove ourselves.

 We went to the store and Richard talked to Mr. Bower for probably an hour.  We bought fountain drinks, questioned him about not having a camera in the store.  Wasn’t that dangerous?  Someone might kill and rob him.  Robert wasn’t concerned.  There was only 50 dollars in the cash register at any one time, the rest was in the safe, and no one was going to kill him for that.  Richard and I gave each other amused glances.  A few customers came and went.  Finally as Robert came out of the store to look at Richard’s clutch pedal, since we’d just put a new clutch in his car and Robert’s also needed one, Richard looked at me and said, "Let’s do it."  I took the revolver and followed them back in, but I froze before I got inside.  I went around the side of the store.  I couldn’t do it.  Just couldn’t.  Then this voice spoke inside my head and said I was weak, I was a coward, and something blinked inside my mind.  That’s the only way I can describe it.  One second I was shaking and saying I couldn’t do this and then BLINK!  I was cold, determined, heartless, and evil.  I walked back around straight and tall, opened the door and stepped in.

Richard saw me and held up something in the aisle where he stood.  "How much is this," he asked.  

Robert Bower was taking a sip of coffee.  He peered over the brim of the cup, swallowed, said something and set the cup under the counter.  As he stood up, I raised the gun over the counter, aimed it at his head, and just as he looked at me, fired.  He flinched and it missed.  He ran and I fired again, but he slipped and fell and I missed again.  I heard him cry out, though.

He grabbed a green windbreaker which he wore when stocking the walk in refrigerators and held it up in both hands, hiding behind it as he ran bent over back and forth behind the counter.  Richard came up to the counter and he ran from him and almost IN to me.  I saw his eyes over that jacket, filled with panic, and I heard Richard say, "DO IT!"  I fired, and Robert Paul Bower flew backward landing hard on his side.  Blood splattered everywhere.  He didn’t move.  When I turned around, Richard was leaning over the counter trying to figure out how to open the cash register.  I said, "Go," but he didn’t move.  I took a few steps and said, "Go!" and he sprang out the door.  We got in the car and left.  In the car we laughed about it.

In a way that hurts worse than the deed.  I always want to skip that part, but I will NOT.  I won’t allow myself that.  We laughed about it.  We killed that man and we giggled like it was a fantastic prank since he’d had no clue what we’d come there for.

I don’t know why, but we didn’t go on to Al Hawks house afterwards like we’d planned.  Richard put his grandfather’s gun back, we emptied it and pressed the bullets and shells into the ground in the back yard.

After that, I had killed someone.  Sometimes I wanted to tell Dad so he’d be proud of my strength.  He’d see me as strong, not weak.  And sometimes I didn’t even remember doing it.  I didn’t live under a constant awareness that I’d killed someone.  Most of the time I didn’t even know what I’d done.  It was that blinking in my mind.  The person who couldn’t do it didn’t know he did, then blink, the person who did do it, remembered.  That’s the best I can explain that.  When I was that person, that murderer, I felt superior.  I looked down on people with the secret knowledge that I had killed and was capable of killing them too.  When I was not that person I was just a confused teenager, going to school, working, learning to drive, still full of anger, and counting the days when I’d be 18 so I could move OUT of that house.

Things turned very, very stressful at home.  I met and fell in love with a girl named Angel, and Mom hated her.  I mean hated her.  Angel was a high school dropout, she was 15, she smoked, and I think Mom saw too much of herself in Angel and hated that.  Mom had gotten pregnant with me at 15.  She badmouthed Angel all the time to me.  Called her a bitch, a little tramp, a loser, and did all she could to keep me from seeing her.

After a big argument one day with Richard at the house as Mom and Dad were getting ready to go out with some friends, Mom told me, "You want to leave?  Go.  Pack your shit and get the fuck out!"  While they were gone that’s exactly what Richard and I did.  I moved OUT.  That night Dad came to work, took the keys to my pickup, and told me to get my ass home after work.  The next day I was forced to move back in.  Mom was ready to ship me off to California to Rick Sellers, my real father, but Dad said no.  I was moving back and I was going to do what I was TOLD to do.

Things became even worse after that.  Mom ranted about Angel, we even got into a physical fight over her.  It wasn’t much of a fight.  Mom wailed on me like she always did, but now I was bigger than her, and I just pushed her.  All the while that blinking was getting worse in my mind.  I couldn’t get away.  I couldn’t move out.  I decided to kill my mother.  I bought some rat poison and put it in her coffee, but it didn’t work, even when I served her 3 cups of it.  But after that, blink! and everything was different.  We argued, but I just wanted to leave, I didn’t want to kill her.  Then blink! and I’d be planning her death.

One night that blink happened and when I came home form work I was the cold murderer who had killed Robert Bower.  I went to their room before they went to bed and took Dad’s .44 revolver from the drawer beside the bed.  I put it in my room and waited for them to go to bed.  Dad talked to me about rebuilding the engine of my pickup together.  When they were in bed I went to my room, did a ritual, dressed only in my black underwear, and then crept quietly into their room.  There was nothing but cold hatred in me.  There was some sense of, "Sean needs to be free and this will free him.  This is the only way."  That was not a conscious thought, just a sensation.  It’s like that was the motivation behind it.  I wasn’t committing murder, I was removing an obstacle from my way.  I was knocking down a door to a prison cage.  All I felt, however, was coldness.

I put the gun close to Dad’s head and fired, then immediately fired again at Mom’s head.  Her head raised up, neck craning backward, and I fired again.  Then I laid the gun down in the hallway and went back to the room.  I felt relieved.  I felt like a great weight had been taken off my shoulders.  I went to take a shower and the blinking started again.  There was a lot of blinking.  So much so that nothing is clear.  I ended up at Richard’s house, and we planned what to do for the police.  

But it wasn’t all an act.  There would be a blink and I’d cry real tears in real grief.  Then another blink and I was calm and cold and putting on a show.

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I’ve lived for 12 years now with the memories, knowledge, and grief of those 3 murders.   This doesn’t matter, but after years of work the blinking is gone and I remember everything both parts of me did.  The stuff I don’t remember is when- I think- there was too much blinking, like a light switch going on and off.  Flick flick flick flick ON.  Flick flick flick flick OFF.  I remember the ON and OFF parts, but not the flick flick parts.  What I remember horrifies me.

I see Robert Bowers’ eyes, panic struck.  I imagine the sheer terror of his last moments alive, and I wonder how long he laid there dying.  Was he conscious?  How could I have done that?

I hear the words Dad said about rebuilding my pickup’s engine.  We would have done that together!  We finally would have done something together.  I see Christmas dinners that never happened.  My mom with a grandchild on her lap.

These are the ghosts I live with, and I hate myself for all I became and did.  I am not just sorry, I am haunted.  I think of all the people I hurt, of all the moments I stole from YOUR lives, and I know I deserve to die.  It’s not right for me to go on living when these 3 people didn’t.  All I can offer you are the answers to why I did it, and to tell you it destroyed my soul when I did.  No matter how long I live, or where I live, I destroyed myself when I killed Robert, and Dad, and Mom.

I beg for your forgiveness.  I know I do not deserve it, and I know you hate me and always will, but I beg you, please, know that I am so sorry for it.  Forgive me for the pain I caused you.

 From this I hope you can understand what happened and why, but I will not offer any kind of "justifications" or mitigation; no matter the reasons, no matter the explanations, I am the one responsible for my actions, and I take full blame upon myself alone.  I also didn’t write this to condemn Richard for his part in it.  I’m the one who had the gun in my hand, and how the law worked it out is irrelevant.  I only told it all as I did because that’s the honest way it all happened.

Please know that for as long as I live I will be haunted with the sorrow for what I did, and when I die I will have counted it more mercy than I deserved to have lived the life I did.  Until that day, I want you to also know, I will spend my life trying to do things that will touch the world in a good way, to give back for all I took from you.  That’s the only thing I can offer with my hands and my heart.  It’s simply all I have.

Please forgive me.

-- Sean Sellers