Bogeyman (14 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

August 6, 2002

T
he sticky hot days of deep summer had seized the Gulf Coast and immediately assaulted the three detectives like a warm sponge to the face when they stepped out of the car in front of the ramshackle house. The entire dirt-poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the tiny Mississippi town of Bay of St. Louis could have used a coat of paint and a yard-cleaning, but they weren’t there on vacation or to look at the scenery.

Stiff after riding all day and covering nearly six hundred miles in a mid-size sedan with two other large men, Sweet stretched his long frame and glanced at the unpainted house. The yard was overrun with weeds, the front screen door was partly off its hinges, and the screen was torn. There was no sign of life, and he wondered if anybody was home.

Three months had passed since the trip to Ohio that had nearly been a bust when Sunnycalb decided to play games and make his demands. It had turned out to be a blessing in disguise because the result was they’d cast the net farther and come up with inmates Tony Baker and Tim Creighton, neither of them pedophiles, who both would make good witnesses.

Since that trip, two of the three recalcitrant informants had undergone changes of heart; apparently time in the hole could be persuasive. Korecky had been the first to call and apologize; he said he’d cooperate with no more demands. He also offered that “there is another inmate who has information about the cases. He does not really want to talk to you right now, but I’m working on him, and I think he may come around.”

The former television evangelist Wasmus told prison authorities he didn’t want to talk to the Texas detectives anymore. But a week after Korecky changed his mind, Sunnycalb called to say he, too, was sorry and would cooperate without asking for anything.

Sweet had no choice but to accept Sunnycalb’s apology and then act like everything was cool between them. Even with the testimony of the other informants, he was the reason they’d gotten as far as they had, and he had the most information—sometimes being the sole link that tied one inmate’s details to another. His testimony would be vital at a trial.

“Playing nice” with Sunnycalb rankled Sweet. But the incident was a good reminder that the twice-convicted pedophile couldn’t be trusted, even if he could be believed. Sunnycalb was taking a chance exposing a brutal sexual predator who murdered children, but he was doing it for his own ends.

Now, as Sweet walked up to the house in Bay of St. Louis, his mind was on another witness. Someone who wasn’t a convict and couldn’t be accused by a defense attorney of trying to make a deal in exchange for testifying against Penton. Someone who had actually been in the clutches of the killer and lived to talk about it. He’d finally gotten the okay from his captain to travel to Mississippi to interview Tiffany Ibarra.

As soon as he received permission, Sweet called Bradshaw to see if he could accompany him. The Mesquite detective had eagerly agreed and brought Phillips with him. Although Ibarra’s story was more important to the Proctor case—both girls were abducted from the same area in Dallas several days apart—the detectives knew that all of their cases were stronger when they were working all three of them together. The Proctor case didn’t directly help the Meeks or Reyes cases, but as part of the whole, it strengthened them all.

When they left the Dallas area, the detectives didn’t head directly for Bay of St. Louis. First, they drove two hundred and seventy miles to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to talk to one of Penton’s former girlfriends he’d mentioned to Sunnycalb and Creighton. It was a loose end they had to tie up, but she really didn’t have much to say.

The next day they turned the car around and headed south another five hundred and eighty miles to Bay of St. Louis, a town of about nine thousand inhabitants on the Gulf Coast. Nine hours after they started, they walked up to the Ibarra home, where they were met at the battered screen door by Tiffany’s mom, Theresa. Sweet explained why they had come, but she shook her head. “Honey, y’all just missed her. She moved with her boyfriend to Batesville, Arkansas.”

The news was deflating. For the second time that summer, Sweet wondered how he was going to explain spending all that money on a road trip with nothing to show for it. He called his supervisor, Lt. Keith Thompson, who to his credit told Sweet to “do what you need to do.” Bradshaw’s supervisors told him the same thing.

It was too late to start for Batesville, so the detectives decided they’d spend the night in Bay of St. Louis. The extra time gave them a chance to talk to Theresa Ibarra.

Over the course of several hours, she told them about that day her daughter called her and said that a man had kidnapped her on the way to school. She also talked about its sad aftermath. Tiffany had survived, but she’d never been the same, said her mother. She blamed her daughter’s later problems with drug abuse and mental issues on the trauma of that day and then the days that followed when her classmate, Christie Proctor, disappeared. “She used to wake up from nightmares. She said she saw him in her dreams.”

Tiffany wasn’t the only one in her family haunted by the memory. Her mother could recall almost word for word the statements she and her daughter had given to the police. Aware of the old maxim that it’s easy to remember the truth but difficult to recall a lie, especially after so much time had passed, Sweet knew she was being honest. But he didn’t rely just on his gut instinct as a detective.

As with so many other aspects of this case, he had worked at linking the pieces so that together they formed an unbreakable chain leading to the conviction of Penton. Part of that was getting rid of the weak links. While the detectives were talking to Tiffany’s mother, her father, Carlos, came home from work. According to what Penton told Sunnycalb, Carlos Ibarra paid him to kidnap his daughter in order to scare her from being friendly to strangers. The detectives didn’t believe it but had to ask Carlos if it was true. As expected, he angrily denied the allegation. “Hell no, I’d never do that to my daughter,” he cursed.

The detectives left for Batesville the next day. It was getting to be a long trip, cramped in the sedan, eating on the run, and no one had thought to pack enough extra clothing for an extended journey. But finally, they pulled up to another home, this time in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood, where a young woman was waiting for them in the driveway.

Surprisingly, Sweet recognized Tiffany Ibarra. She looked a lot like her childhood photograph, just older.

At first, she didn’t invite them into the house. Her mother had called her and said they’d be on their way, but she and her boyfriend had moved in with his family, and she apparently didn’t want to talk in front of them. So they spoke for a few minutes outside, mostly about the detectives’ visit with her mother and father.

Then, her boyfriend’s mother poked her head out of the house and invited them all to come in. Tiffany sat down across a coffee table from the detectives and recounted her story. It was obvious that even fourteen years later, she was still frightened. She’d also been dealing all that time with survivor’s guilt; Christie Proctor had been a classmate, and even as a child, Tiffany was aware that she had escaped a similar horrific fate.

Tiffany didn’t talk about her drug abuse; most people won’t when talking to a police officer, even detectives who were not interested in their lifestyle choices. But she did say that she’d been haunted her entire life by Penton, and it was clear to them that she’d suffered long-term mental health issues because of what happened when she was ten years old.

Recalling her meeting with detectives Grisham from Plano and Martha Sanders from Dallas, Tiffany repeated her earlier observation that she believed that the Proctor case had been resolved when Penton was convicted in Ohio. She didn’t know that nothing had been done in Texas about the man she’d identified as her abductor.

Sweet placed a binder on the coffee table. In it was a page with another lineup containing six photographs of men, including a different picture of Penton than the one Grisham had used. He had barely opened the notebook to the lineup page, and it was still upside down from Tiffany’s vantage point, but she immediately leaned forward and tapped the photograph of Penton.

“That’s him,” she said without hesitation.

“Wait a minute; let me turn it around so you can see it better,” Sweet said.

“You don’t need to,” Tiffany responded. “That’s him. I will never forget his face. I still see him as clearly in my dreams as I did on the day he grabbed me.”

It took all of Sweet’s self-control to not give away his feelings regarding Tiffany’s identification of Penton. A positive identification like she’d just made was a detective’s dream. Tiffany Ibarra may have messed up her life with drugs, but she had never forgotten the face of the man who’d warned her,
“If I ever see you alone again, I won’t let you go!”
Whatever demons she struggled with, Tiffany had pointed a damning finger at a killer and done it without hesitation and with a good deal of courage.

Sweet was excited by what it all meant. Almost all the other evidence against Penton was based on the word of convicts—a collection of pedophiles, rapists, and murderers no jury would like, especially after a defense attorney tore into their criminal records and character. But Tiffany Ibarra was an eyewitness, herself a victim, and a sympathetic witness the jurors would believe. He could imagine her someday taking the witness stand in a courtroom and identifying Penton with the same certainty as she’d pointed him out in his notebook, giving a name and a face to the bogeyman who had haunted her dreams.

As the detectives got back in the car for the six-hour drive back to Dallas, Sweet imagined the day when he’d also take the stand and describe for a jury the circumstances surrounding Tiffany Ibarra’s identification of the man who ran her down on Waterfall Lane intending to rape and murder her.
“She picked him out before I could turn the notebook around. She pointed to him and said, ‘That’s him. I will never forget …’”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

October 21, 2002

T
wo months after Tiffany Ibarra pointed to a photograph of her childhood bogeyman, Sweet, Bradshaw, Phillips, and Meeks, as well as Sweet’s supervisor, Lt. Thompson, flew back to Ohio to follow up on Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Greg Davis’ request that they re-interview all the inmate informants.

Although they had not formally presented their cases to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office for prosecution, they had all worked with Davis in the past and respected him. Davis was the chief prosecutor for the Dallas DAO and likely would be trying the case. He tended to get the high-profile death penalty cases and won most of them. They agreed it would be a good time to run what they had past him. After watching a PowerPoint presentation of the three cases put together by Don Phillips and Billy Meeks, Davis said he wanted them to interview all of the informants again and get written statements.

Arriving in Ohio, the detectives split up into teams and headed out on their assigned tasks. Sweet, Meeks, and Thompson drove to Akron, where they met with a former inmate named Marlon Mitchell. He admitted that he’d been in a cell with Penton but didn’t remember him talking about any murders. Sweet got the impression that he just didn’t want to get involved.

Sweet and Thompson then continued on to Lima to interview James Doan, who was in prison there. Doan was more cooperative and repeated the story they’d heard time after time. Penton liked talking about raping and killing kids and seemed to “get off” on it. He didn’t have a lot of specific information or recall any names of victims. However, he did say that Penton spent a lot of time talking to another inmate, a former cop named Howard Guiher, a name Sweet had heard before from Korecky as someone who might have some information.

Meanwhile, Bradshaw and Phillips drove to north Columbus to talk to Albert Mulligan, who’d been in the jail when Penton was arrested for murdering Nydra Ross. They’d been able to reach Mulligan beforehand by phone, and he agreed to meet them on a street corner.

Columbus PD Det. Sheasby had sent Bradshaw a drawing that Mulligan made while in a cell with Penton. Mulligan’s daughter had died young, and the drawing was of a young girl ascending to heaven. However, as Mulligan now explained, Penton had taken the drawing and put breasts on the child, then added a merry-go-round and swingset. The killer had finished by sketching a lake on the page.

“I asked him about the lake,” Mulligan told the detectives, as he handed them the drawing. “He said it was in Texas.”

Like so many of the others who’d been exposed to Penton’s brutal sexual fantasies, Mulligan said the killer’s eyes would almost glass over as he recalled the murders in vivid detail. The monster truly loved reliving the pain, horror, and suffering he’d inflicted on children. He also told Mulligan that there were “four or five bodies in Texas” that could be linked to him.

After interviewing the former inmates, the teams met up and drove back to the house in Columbus where Penton and his family once lived. Davis wanted them to tear up every board in the attic and see if there was something they’d missed the first time. This time, they found costume jewelry, the sort little girls would wear, beneath the floorboards.

Bradshaw had forgotten about the necklace that Christi Meeks sometimes wore. The family wasn’t sure if she had it on that day, but now he wondered if Penton had kept a memento and stashed it with others beneath the floorboards.

Sweet also wondered if the trinkets belonged to one of Penton’s known victims or some child they’d not yet identified. He was absolutely convinced that Penton was a serial killer, even if he did not quite match all of the criteria noted by the FBI profiler for Ohio authorities in the Nydra Ross case. But they knew more now than the profiler had back then.

Some of the FBI assessment of Penton was spot on. Sweet and his colleagues knew from the prison informants that Penton was
“a sexual sadist who set up his fantasies in his mind before finding a victim to carry it out.”
And one who would
“dispose of a body in a preplanned place.”

They had no evidence that he’d ever used a vacant house. But he had assaulted and murdered the girls in remote places he’d scouted out and felt were immune from discovery. He’d also disposed of their bodies in such a way as it had taken three months to find the remains of Christi Meeks, two years to locate Christie Proctor, and one year to find Roxanne Reyes.

They’d found no evidence that he recorded or videotaped his crimes, but he certainly enjoyed reliving and describing them to the extent that he might as well have had a film projector in his head.

There was no proof that Penton had been sexually abused as a child, but Sweet recalled the interview with Penton’s sister, Amanda, and her remarks about the man in the Big Brother organization, a man who had never married but had shown a special interest—including overnight excursions—in Penton from childhood until he quit high school and joined the Army.

As predicted by the FBI profile, he’d lived with his mother following the murder of his son in Texas. The killer’s sister, Amanda, also had claimed that Penton hit and otherwise cruelly abused his first wife, Katherine, including when she was pregnant with the son he eventually shook to death for crying. Bradshaw had located Katherine and spoke to her on the telephone. She told him about Penton killing their child and confirmed her former sister-in-law’s recollection of how he’d abused her.

Because the bodies of the three victims in Texas were too badly decomposed when found, there was no physical evidence of whether Penton engaged in anal intercourse or bondage, which the FBI profiler said he would do “
because his sexual thrill is fear of the victim.”

The informants told them that Penton claimed that he sometimes kept his victims alive for several days, sexually assaulting them at will. There were also the photographs of children found in his cell on which he’d written the letter “A” for anal assault.

Julia Diaz, Michael Meeks, and Tiffany Easter had reported that Penton would attempt to lure a child, such as with a promise of cookies or candy. But contradicting the FBI report, the detectives also knew from Diaz and Tiffany Ibarra that he would also chase and physically restrain his intended victims, even if other people were nearby.

Penton had killed Nydra Ross by strangling her as the profiler indicated. The bodies of the Texas victims were too decomposed to establish a cause of death, but it was not by stabbing or gunshot.

As the FBI profile had suggested, after Nydra Ross went missing, Penton had volunteered to help search for her. However, in most of the cases they knew about besides Ross, Penton had grabbed his victim and disappeared; perhaps he’d only changed in the Ross case because he knew her uncle and was trying to divert suspicion from himself.

Unlike the FBI profiler, Sweet was convinced that Penton fit the mold of a serial killer. Sweet knew that Penton’s methods varied only by the smallest of details: he’d lure or snatch his victim; drive her somewhere he felt safe to sexually assault her for days; then strangle her and leave the body in a remote area.

The profiler didn’t believe that Penton was a serial killer because he didn’t
“strike regularly … as in once a month.”
However, the profiler wasn’t aware of the other murders, or Sunnycalb’s claim that Penton boasted of having killed fifty or more children. Even if the real number was half that, as Sweet suspected, or even a third, it meant he had killed regularly and often. Now, they had to do everything in their power to make sure he never killed again, and that the families of those he had murdered got the answers they deserved.

Leaving Penton’s former home in Columbus, the detectives drove to the Warren Correctional Facility. There, they again broke into teams; this time Sweet and Meeks began by interviewing Korecky, while Bradshaw and Phillips talked to a potential new witness and former cellmate of Penton whose murderous ways overshadowed even their suspect’s. His name was
Donald Harvey
, also known across the country to the media and public as “The Angel of Death.”

Korecky repeated his assertions that Penton had talked about attacking little girls in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. But now he added that his former cellmate also claimed to have victims in Indiana, which reminded Sweet of another case that had been in the news a few months earlier.

During his conversations with Sunnycalb, the informant had often brought up the names of other alleged victims. Limited in time and resources, Sweet had to concentrate on the Texas cases, but he occasionally put in a telephone call to other law enforcement agencies to fill them in on cases that fell in their jurisdictions. One of those was the abduction of six-year-old Shannon Sherrill who had disappeared in October 1986 from her mother’s yard in Thorntown, Indiana.

In July, the Sherrill case suddenly exploded back into the national spotlight when an apparently “mentally ill” woman named Donna Walker came forward claiming to be the long lost child. She’d pulled off the hoax for several days before being exposed, causing Shannon’s family to get their hopes up, only to have them dashed.

Sweet wasn’t surprised that Walker’s claims proved to be false. Since early in their conversations, Sunnycalb had been saying Penton abducted and murdered the girl, and the detective believed him. He’d even tried calling the Thorntown Marshal’s Office several times to pass on Sunnycalb’s information. After identifying himself and the purpose of his call, he’d been told that someone would get back to him, but no one ever did. Apparently a seventeen-year-old case wasn’t a high priority.

Most of the rest of what Korecky said just repeated what he’d told them the first time. However, he did add that Penton said he initially wanted to abduct the older child, Julia Diaz, but she ran away, so he’d settled for Roxann. That bit of information was important to Sweet because it matched Julia’s description of what happened that day. Again, more links formed in the chain.

Korecky’s assertion that Penton was really after Julia Diaz also taught Sweet a lesson about not letting his personal feelings get in the way of his investigation. Ever since he started talking to Sunnycalb, the informant had said the same thing: Penton wanted Diaz. But it wasn’t until Sunnycalb wrote down his official statement that he also added that Penton had actually searched the apartment complex looking for Julia.

When he read the statement from Sunnycalb, Sweet recalled the police report taken from Wanda Huggins. She was the witness who told the police that she’d seen a strange man walking through the apartment complex on the afternoon of the abduction and that he’d run away after she made eye contact. But no one had ever followed up on the information.

So in September, Sweet had gone looking for her. The first thing he learned was that she was a drunk and no one took her seriously. He still wanted to talk to her and finally found her living in a mobile home park in Terrell, Texas.

Sweet called her and asked her if she recalled the day Roxann Reyes was abducted. She was an older woman, but she repeated the same story she’d told a police officer fourteen years earlier.

“Did a detective ever follow-up and talk to you about this?”
he asked.

“No.”

Sweet was shocked. It didn’t make sense that no one had questioned an eyewitness or showed her a photo lineup to try to identify the man she saw.
“Do you think you’d remember his face if you saw a photograph of him?”

“I might.”

Sweet told her he wanted to come see her right away, and she gave him directions. Forty-five minutes later, he walked up to the door of her mobile home and knocked. An old, gray-haired woman answered.

“Hello,”
he said.
“I’m Detective Sweet with the Garland Police Department.”

Huggins looked confused.
“I haven’t done anything in Garland,”
she protested.

Sweet realized that the old woman didn’t remember talking to him forty-five minutes earlier and thought she was in trouble for something in Garland.
How in the world is she going to remember Penton’s face from fourteen years ago
, he wondered. He was not very optimistic when he explained why he was there.

She suddenly seemed to remember talking to him and invited him in. He showed her the lineup, and to his surprise, she instantly pointed to the photograph of Penton.
“I’m sure that’s him,”
she said.

It was a positive identification, but Sweet wasn’t excited about it. She couldn’t even remember a conversation she’d had less than an hour before. He left thinking that he probably should get a sworn statement from her but decided that it was probably blind luck that she’d picked Penton’s photograph.

However, now, a month after he’d dismissed Wanda Huggins as an unreliable witness, a third person, Korecky, had corroborated what Julia Diaz had told police about Roxann’s kidnapper chasing her through the apartment complex. Whatever issues Huggins had with alcohol, she’d positively identified the man she saw in the apartment complex as David Penton. But no one had believed her, not even Sweet. It was a valuable lesson not to judge witnesses because of their lifestyles. He resolved to visit Huggins again and get a sworn statement from her.

After talking to Korecky, Sweet and Meeks met up again with Bradshaw and Phillips, who’d been interviewing Donald Harvey. The notorious Angel of Death was believed to have murdered between thirty-six and fifty-seven adults from 1970 to 1987. Most of his victims were patients in hospitals where he worked as an orderly, but he also murdered his homosexual lovers, friends, and neighbors who got on his bad side. His favorite means of execution was poison, though he’d also resorted to suffocation and once even impaled a patient by shoving a coat hanger up the man’s catheter. When the police finally caught up to him, and he knew they’d read his carefully detailed diary, he confessed in order to escape facing the death penalty; instead he was sentenced to four consecutive twenty-year sentences.