Larry Gene Bell: The Sadistic Killer Who Tortured Families by Phone
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In May 1985, seventeen-year-old Shari Faye Smith was abducted from her family's driveway in broad daylight near Lexington, South Carolina, sparking one of the most intensive FBI investigations in the region's history. The perpetrator, Larry Gene Bell, tortured Shari's family with phone calls for days before killing nine-year-old Debra May Helmick two weeks later, turning the Midlands into a landscape of fear during what became known as the "Summer of Terror."
This case has everything that makes true crime both fascinating and deeply unsettling. Bell didn't stop after killing these girls. He played a sick game with their families, making phone calls where he'd describe what he'd done, all while using voice-altering technology like some bargain-basement supervillain. And here's what really gets me about this story: the breakthrough that caught him came from handwriting indentations on a legal pad. Sometimes the smallest detail is the one that brings a monster down. Plus, there's a 2025 update that confirms Bell had been hunting victims for a full decade before anyone connected the dots.
#LarryGeneBell #ShariFayeSmith #DebraMayHelmick #TrueCrime #SouthCarolinaMurder #SerialKiller #FBIProfiling
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | May 31st, 1985, Sherry Fay Smith walked to her mailbox and never came back. |
| 0:09.0 | What happened next was something law enforcement had never really dealt with before, a killer |
| 0:14.0 | who didn't want ransom. |
| 0:16.0 | He wanted an audience, and for two weeks he got one. He got one. The We're talking about a case today that happened in South Carolina back in 1985, and the killer's name is Larry Gene Bell, and the victims weren't only the people he killed. |
| 0:52.3 | The families he terrorized afterwards suffered |
| 0:55.1 | through their own living nightmare. Larry Jean Bell was born in Ralph, Alabama in 1949. |
| 1:02.1 | His family moved around constantly bouncing all over the southeast. He tried finding structure, |
| 1:07.8 | joined the Marines in 1970, but that career ended about a year later when he |
| 1:12.0 | accidentally shot himself in the knee while cleaning his gun. After that, he worked as a prison |
| 1:17.8 | guard in Columbia, South Carolina for exactly one month in 1971, spending time around inmates |
| 1:24.6 | and watching how authority worked, probably planted ideas in his head |
| 1:28.4 | about power and control. He got married in 1972, had a son, and by 1976 the marriage was over. |
| 1:37.3 | Around this time, he started working as an electrician's assistant, which gave him something |
| 1:41.8 | dangerous, access to people's homes. |
| 1:45.5 | Bell wasn't simply fixing electrical problems, though. |
| 1:48.9 | He was studying people, learning their routines, figuring out who would make the easiest |
| 1:53.9 | target. |
| 1:55.3 | Before we get to 1985, we need to talk about Charlotte, North Carolina, because Bell didn't wake up one day and decide |
| 2:02.4 | to become a killer. In July 1975, 21-year-old Denise Newsom Porch disappeared from the Yorktown |
| 2:09.7 | apartments where she worked as a manager. Bell lived 300 yards away. Then in November 1984, |
| 2:21.2 | 26-year-old Sandy Elaine Cornett vanished after arriving home from work. Bell was a co-worker of her ex-boyfriend who had been over to her house before. |
| 2:27.5 | When detectives interviewed him, he gave them hypothetical information and even drew a map |
... |
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