A Kansas City investment banker killed himself after an FBI raid at the same mansion where his wife reportedly also committed suicide two weeks ago.
The feds executed a warrant on 64-year-old widower Mark Sellers’s door at around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. On July 18, Sellers had been transported to a hospital for a heart attack after he reportedly discovered his wife Sandra’s lifeless body on their bed with a gun gripped in her left hand.
A source close to the case told The Daily Beast that the feds were pursuing a “significant financial fraud situation.”
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Sellers refused to open the door.
That’s when sources say the feds, marshals, and local cops entered using a sledgehammer.
Sellers dashed out of the house and rocketed his red Ford Explorer Limited out of his property.
He didn’t get far.
“He got into his car and tried to get away,” R.J. Campbell, who was standing at his front door, less than 10 feet from the melee, told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview. “He comes tearing around the corner from the cul-de-sac.”
In a matter of seconds everything took a tragic turn.
“There were cops running from behind and other cops who used [their] cars as a back group blocking him,” Campbell said of the perimeter that authorities established just off the mansion located on the leafy block of Northwest 60th Street and Cosby Court.
And with their guns drawn they demanded Sellers exit the vehicle.
“Then, I heard one cop shout, ‘He’s got another gun,’” Campbell said.
In a flash Sellers apparently turned a pistol on himself.
“Then I heard: ‘Pop-pop.’ Two shots,” Campbell said of the burst of gunfire in succession. “They were kind of not really loud, like small caliber shots.
“Not a .45—maybe a .22 or something like that,” Campbell, a 77-year-old retired federal prosecutor, told us. “The next thing I heard was sirens and an ambulance coming from two different directions.”
Authorities smashed Sellers’s front driver side window to pull him out and then rushed him to a local hospital where he died of a “self-inflicted gunshot wound,” according to an FBI statement.
In the wake of the suicide, the feds continued searching Sellers’s home.
“They did search the house afterward,” Campbell said of the scene that didn’t come down until two hours after the gunshots.
Alan McCracken, a 71-year-old agriculture expert, was watching from the second floor of his home as the deadly drama unfolded below.
He said that though he didn’t hear the shots, he managed to get a poised response from responders when he stepped out of his home.
“They were being very active by going up and down the street and one cop told me ‘No, there’s nothing to worry about. We’re taking control,’” he told us.
As a couple Mark and Sandra Sellers will be remembered as infrequent residents, but also not the most hospitable neighbors.
“I met them and let’s just say I don’t have anything nice to say about them,” McCracken said. “They were a strange couple.”
According to McCracken, the couple used the mansion as a pied-à-terre.
“They were here a few times a year,” he said.
Property records show the Sellers did own multiple properties, including a home about a 40-minute drive north in Lawson, Missouri.
One neighbor, who refused to give her name, confirmed the sixtysomething couple had kids.
“He’s been here for years just like his wife,” the neighbor said. “His wife shot herself two weeks ago and they have children so this all really something.”
Indeed, Sandra Sellers had apparently ended her life on July 18. The second Sellers suicide sent neighbors, already reeling from one tragedy, into a state of distress.
Relative Stephen Sellers told The Daily Beast he had learned about Mark’s suicide but that he was still searching for answers. “I know what happened today but I don’t know how this happened,” he said. “I have been updated but this is tough right now.”
The home remains sealed but is still on the selling block.
According to Edie Waters, the 8,800-square-foot home—which has been on and off the market for the past two years—is still asking $1.295 million.
“It’s still for sale but due to the circumstances after what has happened I have to wait until the house clears trust,” she told us.
Waters says she will not be going forward with any showings until the crime scene tape comes down and there is a clear trustee designated by a probate lawyer. “If anybody wants to see the home I do not show it,” she added. “I’m waiting to see whose signature goes on what.”
Sellers was a “General Partner” at his financial banking company called UBSS, LLC.
On its website the shop is described as providing custom, a la carte “consulting services... to help your company reach its potential” from brick-and-mortar companies to “start-ups and small growth firms.”
Sellers’s own bio boasts “39 years experience” in everything from finance to restaurant operations. Sellers goes on to showcase his hands-on skills in “crisis and transition or intervention management” that has brought success to four regional grocery chains as well as a national publicly-traded company.
His longtime business partner, Thomas Denmark, who’s listed on Sellers’s company site as a “General Partner,” has almost identical bona fides.
When reached by The Daily Beast at his Atlanta home, Denmark said he had been estranged from Sellers for “a year and a half.”
“We did work together for a while,” he told us.
He said he had been “aware” of Sandra Sellers’s suicide but that he had just learned about his business partner’s fatal end only hours before.
The fact that the banker gave authorities the slip and then shot himself only two weeks after his wife took her own life has some in the neighborhood suspecting foul play.
Sandra Sellers’s death was believed to be a clear-cut suicide, based on multiple local reports.
Her death was reported at around 1:45 p.m. on July 18.
And it was Mark Sellers who discovered her body.
When cops arrived at the palatial residence, they saw the 63-year-old woman lying “face-up on the bed with an apparent gunshot wound to the left side of the head and a firearm in her left hand,” according to the initial police statement.
A search for pills by cops revealed “two other firearms inside the drawer” from the nightstand next to her bed, the statement claims.
Sandra Sellers’s legs were discovered to be “dangling from the side of the bed” and there was a “large blood stain and apparent burn mark” on the pillow just above her head.
Mark Sellers was lying on the bed next to her and reportedly “breathing but unresponsive.”
The police pronounced Sandra Sellers dead at the scene and transported her husband to St. Luke’s North hospital to be treated for what sources said was a heart attack.
The second tragedy has left Sellers’s business partner reeling.
“I just got a call from a buddy of mine who said something else bad has happened,” he said. “I’ve been on the phone with a lot of people to figure out what’s going on. It’s all new to me.”
Despite teaming up with Sellars, Denmark claims he’s been in the dark for awhile.
“I don’t know anything that’s going on with him,” the 60-year-old entrepreneur added, citing the long time since he saw Sellers in the flesh.
He went on to say they were estranged as business partners; their communication reduced to near silence.
“I haven’t talked to him in several months,” he said, refusing to delve into specifics of the warrant the FBI served on Sellers Tuesday morning. “So I don’t have any knowledge of what was going on with him.”
