Larry Gene Bell: The Sadistic Killer Who Tortured Families by Phone

0:00 May 31, 1985. Sherry, Faith Smith walked to her mailbox and never came back. What happened next was something law enforcement had never really dealt with before. A killer who didn't want ransom. He wanted an audience, and for two weeks he got one. [Music] We're talking about a case today that happened in South Carolina back in 1985.

0:47 The killer's name is Larry Jean-Belle, and the victims weren't only the people he killed. The families he terrorized afterwards suffered through their own living nightmare. Larry Jean-Belle was born in Ralph, Alabama in 1949. His family moved around constantly bouncing all over the southeast. He tried finding structure. Join the Marines in 1970. That career ended about a year later when he accidentally shot himself in the knee while cleaning his gun. After that he worked as a prison guard in Columbia, South Carolina for exactly one month in 1971. Spending time around inmates and watching how authority worked probably planted ideas in his head about power and control.

1:30 He got married in 1972, had a son, and by 1976 the marriage was over. Around this time he started working as an electrician's assistant, which gave him something dangerous, access to people's homes. Bell wasn't simply fixing electrical problems though. He was studying people, learning their routines, figuring out who would make the easiest target. Before we get to 1985 we need to talk about Charlotte, North Carolina, because Bell didn't wake up one day and decide to become a killer. In July 1975, 21-year-old Denise Newsom porch disappeared from the Yorktown apartments where she worked as a manager.

2:12 Bell lived 300 yards away. Then in November 1984, 26-year-old Sandy Elaine Cornette vanished after arriving home from work. Bell was a coworker of her ex-boyfriend who had been over to her house before. When detectives interviewed him, he gave them hypothetical information and even drew a map showing where the body might be buried. They couldn't prove it back then. Sandy's case stayed cold for decades, but in February 2025, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police department's cold case unit finally closed it. They formally named Larry Jean Bell as her killer. So now we know for certain that in May 1985, Bell had already been perfecting his methods for at least 10 years.

2:57 Which brings us to May 31, 1985. Sherry Facemith was 17 years old. She'd finished up her high school requirements and was getting ready for graduation, where she was scheduled to sing. On Friday afternoon around 315, she drove down to the mailbox at the end of her family's driveway on Platt Springs Road. Her dad, Bob, watched her go down from the house. When he looked again a few minutes later, her car was still there, door open, engine running, but Sherry was gone. Bob ran down to find her purse on the passenger seat. The mail she'd retrieved was scattered across the asphalt. No signs of struggle other than that.

3:37 This was a blitz attack, someone with a weapon forced her into another vehicle in less than 5 minutes. In broad daylight on a Friday afternoon, that takes a level of confidence that goes beyond normal criminal behavior. The FBI brought in John Douglas as one of their top behavioral profilers. Douglas looked at everything and immediately knew they were dealing with someone local, someone who understood the family's routine. And Douglas predicted something that turned out to be absolutely correct. The offender would contact the family. This crime wasn't about ransom. This was about psychological control. And John Douglas knew that. Three days later, on June 3rd, the phone rang.

4:20 It was Bell. He had Sherry's mom Hilda on the line. Over the next several days, he called eight times total. He used an electronic device to distort his voice. You would expect ransom demands on these types of calls. That's not what this was. These were psychological torture sessions. He told the family that Sherry was fine and would be coming home soon. Then in the same conversation, he described how he gave her three options for how she wanted to die. A gunshot, a drug overdose, or suffocation. He claimed she chose suffocation. He described wrapping her head in duct tape until she stopped breathing. Then he started discussing Sherry's funeral arrangements with her older sister, Dawn.

5:02 He wanted to stay involved in their grief to remain the center of their world even after Sherry was gone. And here's where the story takes another turn. During one of those recorded calls with Dawn, Bell made a slip. He said, quote, "All I wanted to do was make love with Dawn." Then he quickly corrected it to Sherry's name, but it was too late. The FBI profilers realized Dawn had been his original target all along. Sherry and Dawn looked remarkably similar, and the chaos of a five-minute blitz abduction, Bell had grabbed the wrong sister. When he realized his mistake, he didn't release Sherry. He used her murder as a weapon against Dawn.

5:42 The calls became increasingly focused on Dawn herself. He told her that God wanted her to join Sherry, that her death was inevitable. During one of Bell's first calls, he mentioned that Sherry had written them a letter. He called it her last will in testament. When the letter arrived, state officials intercepted it, and that letter became one of the most crucial pieces of evidence. Sherry had written this letter on a yellow legal pad while Bell held her captive. She knew she was going to die, and instead of filling those pages with terror, she wrote messages of love to her family and her boyfriend. She quoted Romans 8.28. She told them not to become hard or bitter. The spiritual maturity in that letter, written by a 17-year-old girl facing her own murder, was almost impossible to comprehend.

6:30 But here's where science cracked the case. The FBI took that legal pad to their laboratory at Quantico, and used a technique called "Electrostatic Detection Analysis," or "ESDA." When you write on a pad of paper, the pressure from your pen leaves microscopic indentions on the sheets underneath. The ESDA process applies an electrostatic charge to the paper, then uses a special powder that makes those hidden indentations visible. When they processed Sherry's letter, they discovered a partial 10-digit phone number that had been written on a previous page. That phone number became the key, and investigators tracked it to a couple named Ellis and Sharon Shepard. When law enforcement showed up and read them the behavioral profile John Douglas had developed, both Ellis and Sharon said the same name simultaneously.

7:19 Larry Jean Bell. Bell had recently house sat for the Shepards, and that phone number was one he'd written down during his stay. The Shepards also confirmed that Bell had regular access to a silver Buick Rivera. That detail sent alarm bells ringing, because a silver car matching that description had been seen at another abduction two weeks after Sherry disappeared. On June 14, 1985, 9-year-old Deborah May Helmick was playing in her front yard with her three-year-old brother at a trailer park. A silver car pulled in. Bell got out, grabbed the screaming little girl through her into the vehicle, and drove away while her toddler brother watched. Witnesses saw the entire thing.

8:00 Bell didn't care anymore about being careful. John Douglas had predicted this escalation. He told local law enforcement that Bell was in the disintegrating state and would likely strike again soon. Deborah's body was found June 22. She'd been murdered the same way as Sherry, suffocated with duct tape. In a detail that reveals the sexual component of Bell's pathology, Deborah's body was found wearing adult silk bikini underwear over her own children's underwear. Law enforcement arrested Larry Jean Bell on June 27, 1985. When they searched his apartment, forensic technicians found six human hairs that matched Sherry Smith. Combined with the phone number evidence, the witness descriptions, and the recorded phone calls, the case against him was overwhelming.

8:46 Bell's trials turned into psychological theater. His defense attorney went in for a guilty but mentally ill plea. Bell testified for six hours, but instead of answering questions, he repeated phrases like "Silence is golden." He claimed to be Jesus Christ. He exhibited bizarre outbursts. The prosecution demonstrated that all of Bell's theatrical behavior happened while the jury was present. When they left, he was calm and calculating, pretty normal acting. His madness was a performance. The jury in the Sherry Smith case deliberated for 55 minutes before convicting him. The Deborah Helmock trial had the same outcome. Both juries recommended the death penalty.

9:29 Larry Jean Bell spent a decade on death row filing appeals. On October 4, 1996, he was brought to the execution chamber. He been given a choice between lethal injection and the electric chair. He chose the chair. John Douglas later said that choice was Bell's final power play. His last chance to show everyone he was in control. Larry Jean Bell was pronounced dead at age 46 without offering any final statement. Sherry's sister Dawn wrote a book called "Grace So Amazing" about surviving this nightmare and became a national speaker helping other families deal with violent loss. And that 2025 development confirming Bell murdered Sandy Cornette back in 1984 proves what investigators suspected all along.

10:16 Larry Jean Bell wasn't someone who suddenly snapped. He was a calculating predator who'd been refining his techniques over a decade. The only reason he finally got caught was because he couldn't resist the need to torture the families. His compulsion to be the center of their pain is exactly what gave investigators the evidence they needed to take him down. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime Stories. Hi, I'm Joe, I'm the host and here's an email subject just saying hi. Hey Joe, no big story here that I want you to cover.

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