A man executed on NC death row also killed a woman in 1984, Charlotte police now say
A twice-convicted murderer was still the only suspect in a Charlotte woman’s disappearance when he died in a South Carolina electric chair in the 1990s. Now police say there’s enough evidence to tie him to her 1984 disappearance, and “he would have been charged if still alive.”
Sandee Cornett, a 26-year-old part-time model and insurance adjuster, went missing from her southeast Charlotte home on Nov. 19, 1984. Charlotte police have long suspected Larry Gene Bell played a role in her disappearance but are only now naming him as Cornett’s suspected killer. They cited no new evidence or reason in a Monday statement clearing Cornett’s cold case.
Six months after Cornett vanished, Bell in May 1985 abducted and killed a 17-year-old girl in South Carolina. Two weeks after that, in June 1985, he did the same to a nearby 9-year-old girl. While holding the 17-year-old captive and making her write a will, Bell taunted her family with several phone calls. Both bodies were found after Bell anonymously called police to tell them precisely where they were located. He suffocated the girls with duct tape.
After being arrested in the young girls’ deaths, Bell in July 1985 told police that when they find Cornett’s body, the “bones of her hands and fingers [will be] like she is praying,” The Charlotte Observer reported. He also described, in detail, what her home — the scene of her disappearance — looked like when police found it.
His precise description, if true, was something only her killer would know, police said at the time.
After Cornett disappeared, police said, her bank card was used to withdraw about $1,000. In July 1985 interviews with police, Bell gave accurate details of those transactions. Detectives established that Cornett knew Bell, a former Eastern Airlines reservations agent, through an ex-boyfriend of hers who worked with Bell.
Officers never charged Bell with any crimes related to Cornett’s disappearance. In 1987, the Observer reported that “it may be a while — if ever — before the Mecklenburg County district attorney’s office decides whether it will charge convicted murderer Larry Gene Bell in the disappearance of Sandee Elaine Cornett.”
The Mecklenburg district attorney at the time, Peter Gilchrist, said her case “is not a pressing matter… we don’t have the body, and [Bell] is certainly in a safe location and probably will be for the rest of his natural life.”
In 1987, Bell had for a year been on death row, convicted of killing the two young South Carolina girls. He died in October 1996.
Bell, who police “believed to be a psychopath,” never confessed to killing Cornett, said former CMPD homicide detective Rick Sanders in a video posted to the department’s social media page Monday. But he told police “the Bad Larry Gene Bell did it” and said a supernatural being resembling him often hovered over him, Sanders recalled.
So nearly 30 years after Bell’s death, Charlotte-Mecklenburg are changing his classification from a suspect in Cornett’s disappearance to a chargeable suspect in her murder.
In their news release Monday, the department said it came to its decision after reviewing four decades of “casework and evidence” and consulting current Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather.
The Charlotte Observer last reported on Cornett’s disappearance in 1992, when police searched a South Carolina well after a tip from a teenager who once hitchhiked with Bell in 1984. He was 15 when Bell showed him two bodies at the bottom of a well, the man told police eight years later.
Officers thought they might find Cornett’s remains at the bottom. They didn’t. They are still searching for a body. Cornett’s family, Sanders said in the Monday video, wants a proper burial.
Police do not believe Bell had any accomplices when allegedly killing Cornett, but they think some people — perhaps Bell’s hunting or fishing buddies — might know where he left her body.
