Bogeyman (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

January 6, 2004

I
n August 2003, David Elliot Penton was extradited to Texas to stand trial for the murders of Roxann Reyes, Christi Meeks, and Christie Proctor.

Waiting for him at the Collin County Jail when he arrived were detectives Gary Sweet, Bruce Bradshaw, Don Phillips and Billy Meeks.

They were shocked when they saw Penton in the booking room. He looked as if he’d lost thirty, maybe forty, pounds.

“We told you we were going to bring you back,” Bradshaw said when Penton glanced their way. The killer didn’t reply, but the distraught look on his face said it all.

Still, the detectives knew the hard part was just beginning. Every detail of their investigation would be analyzed by Penton’s defense team. They hoped they had not missed something that would let Penton slip away from justice.

Sweet thought Penton’s weight loss was probably due to stress. The defendant had been given an attorney and knew what evidence the detectives had amassed during their investigations. In spite of his claim that he was smarter than those in law enforcement who pursued him, his need to boast about his horrific crimes, the little mistakes he’d made, and then meticulous police work had combined to bring him back to Texas, where he would be facing the death penalty.

His chances of acquittal had not gotten any better since his indictment, either. In fact, the cases against him grew even stronger after news reports about his indictment, including a recent prison mugshot, hit the television broadcasts and the front pages of newspapers throughout Texas. The most significant additions were two more young women who came forward and claimed that Penton had tried to abduct them when they were children, too.

Shortly after Penton was indicted, Bradshaw called Sweet and said a young woman named Tanya Dickerman called him and said that the man shown on the newscast had attempted to kidnap her on November 30, 1987. The date was particularly important because it was the same month and year that Roxann was abducted.

Dickerman told Bradshaw that a man in a gray sedan followed her and her brother to school one morning. Then when school let out, he was waiting. As she walked home alone, he pulled up next to her and asked if she wanted to go with him to buy ice cream.

“She told him ‘No,’ and ran home,”
Bradshaw told Sweet. When she got to an alley near her house, the man was still following her, so she ran to a neighbor’s home. The neighbor called the police.
“She said when her mom got home from work she found the back door to their house open.”

Seventeen years later, Dickerman saw Penton’s photograph on the television news and called Bradshaw.
“That’s the guy that tried to get me in the car.”

Bradshaw asked her if a police report was filed in 1987. Dickerman said yes and in fact remembered that he was the detective who had come to her house to interview her about the incident.

“I didn’t remember it at first,”
Bradshaw told Sweet.
“But I went back to the archives and reviewed the report and recalled some of it.”
Nobody but Dickerman and her brother saw the stalker, and they didn’t get a license plate number; so there was nothing to follow up.

The other caller’s name was Amanda Rollins. She told Bradshaw that in early January 1985, she was five years old and playing outside of an apartment complex just six-tenths of a mile from where Christi Meeks was abducted when a man grabbed her.
“She said she kicked him and ran away,”
Bradshaw told Sweet.
“Then she hid in the bushes until he left.”

After Christi disappeared, Bob Holleman interviewed Rollins and her brother, who’d witnessed the attempted abduction.
“There’s a copy of the Dallas police report about the incident in the Meeks file, along with Bob’s notes,”
Bradshaw said.

He met with Rollins and showed her a photo lineup that included Penton’s 1988 mugshot from Ohio, which was different from the photograph shown on the newscast. Without hesitation, she’d pointed to Penton.

All of their lives, the two young women had lived in fear of the bogeyman: that someday he’d come back for them; that he was just waiting. Now they’d been able to put a face and a name to him and, as with Tiffany Ibarra, could point to him from the witness stand and condemn the man who’d haunted their dreams and stood in the shadows of their nightmares.

In addition to interviewing the two young women, Bradshaw had continued following up on his case’s loose ends. In November, he’d asked Christi’s brother, Michael, to undergo hypnosis to see if that would help him recall anything new. But nothing much had come of it other than the realization that the abduction had haunted the young man all of his life.

Bradshaw and Phillips also tracked down Tiffany Easter, who had been Christi’s playmate the day the man lured her friend away. They found her living in Irving, Texas, with children of her own.

Just the sight of Bradshaw, however, caused her to burst into tears. The detective believed that she blamed herself for what happened—after all, she’d been the older child but hadn’t been able to save her friend—and seeing him brought back all the haunting memories.

So Bradshaw excused himself and asked Phillips to carry on the interview. Even then, Easter was too distraught to say much. She said that after Christi disappeared, she’d become withdrawn and lived in constant fear that the man who took her friend would come back for her. When Phillips showed her the photo lineup that included Penton, she started crying again but wouldn’t point to a photograph.

“You know he’s there, don’t you?”
Phillips asked.

Easter nodded. Eighteen years had passed, but she was still too frightened of the bogeyman to identify him.

Meanwhile, Sweet also made it a point to continue talking to the informants. He spoke almost daily to Sunnycalb, usually about some of the cases in other jurisdictions that Sweet had for the most part set aside to concentrate on the three Texas murders. As a result, he started calling the other law enforcement agencies—such as in Temple, Texas, Thorntown, Indiana, and Pennsylvania—trying to interest them in at least talking to Sunnycalb.

He also stayed in touch with the former cop, Guiher. Of all the inmate informants, he seemed the most credible and likeable; the only one whom Sweet believed was talking about Penton for no other reason than it was the right thing to do.

Sweet spoke a few times about the upcoming trial with Tammy Lopez, who kept thanking him for everything he’d done to find her daughter’s killer. He also talked to Julia Diaz to prepare her and try to calm her nerves about facing Penton from the witness stand.

After all the pre-trial hearings and motions, Penton was set to go to trial on January 10. Davis was going to start by trying him for the murder of Roxann Reyes, considered the strongest of the three cases because Sweet had better witnesses and more of them. Some witnesses would be called at each of the trials, such as the inmate informants and Tiffany Ibarra. But Sweet also had Julia Diaz, who could testify about the man in the gray sedan and had described him to police as having the large mole over his right eye, and Wanda Huggins, who’d positively identified Penton as the stranger she saw in the apartment complex that day. There was also Roxann’s aunt, Tanya, who could place Penton in a drug house a couple of blocks from the apartment complex.

Sweet’s testimony would tie it all together, such as the photographs from Penton’s prison notebook and the title to the gray Datsun. From the witness stand, he would testify how all the disparate pieces of evidence and the testimony of all the witnesses when pieced together showed that David Penton was the man who abducted and murdered Roxann Reyes. The other detectives would then add their pieces to the puzzle.

The detectives knew they had strong cases, and Davis seemed confident throughout the many pretrial hearings. Then, just a few days before jury selection was to begin, they received calls asking them to report to the courthouse. They thought it was just another pre-trial hearing or something to do with jury selection.

When they arrived, the detectives were directed to a room where they were surprised to see the families of the victims and the prosecutor. Then Davis broke the news: Penton’s defense attorneys claimed to have “new evidence” they said demonstrated that their client was working in Ohio during the time of Roxann’s murder.

Sweet didn’t say anything, but he knew the “new evidence” was a lie. They had too much on Penton. He was a dead ringer for the composite, down to the mole on his face; Wanda Huggins had seen him in the apartment complex just after the abduction; Tanya saw him there several times before the murder; he’d confessed to numerous inmates and gave accurate details not available through open records. There was too much evidence to doubt the case.

Davis didn’t think the “new evidence” was valid, either, but proving it when the trial was just days away could be tough. Going to trial would be risky, he said; all it would take was one juror who believed even a suspect piece of evidence. “And if we lose, we can’t retry him again.”

Unwilling to take a chance of letting Penton off for the murders in Texas, Davis said, the District Attorney’s Office had decided to accept a defense offer. Penton had agreed to plead guilty to the three murder charges and be sentenced to life without parole. Even if Ohio authorities paroled him, they then would turn him over to the Texas Department of Corrections. He’d never get out of prison, but it would eliminate the threat of the death penalty.

Davis said that Penton was on his way to the courthouse to enter his plea. After that, the families could make victim impact statements to the court.

Everyone in the room seemed stunned. The families of the victims weren’t asked their opinion before the deal was reached and weren’t happy with the decision. Christi’s father, Mike Meeks, along with his ex-wife, Christi’s mother Linda, got up and walked out of the meeting.

Bradshaw watched Meeks go with regret. He and Holleman had been close to the family, and he could empathize with a man whose five-year-old daughter had been so cruelly taken from him. Now, he felt as if he’d somehow failed Christi’s father.

Penton’s appearance in court was anti-climatic. He never looked over at the detectives, who had told him they would bring him back to Texas to pay for his crimes. Nor did he reveal any details, or apologize for his crimes—only telling the judge that he understood the charges and what the repercussions would mean before pleading guilty to the three murder charges.

Listening to Penton plead guilty was a bittersweet moment for Bradshaw. In December, his oldest daughter, Jodi, had been married in Italy. He and Gail and Laci had traveled to Rome for the wedding and visited the Vatican, as well as several churches. It was a beautiful wedding and wonderful trip; however, Bradshaw kept thinking about Penton and the upcoming trial. On his way out of the San Silvestre church, he noticed a small collections box. He took a coin out of his pocket and said a prayer that Penton would eventually confess his crimes. And now the bogeyman that he and Holleman had pursued all those years before was standing in front of a judge in a Collin County courtroom doing just that.

Tammy Lopez was the only family member of a victim to make a statement. Sweet was surprised at how composed she was, though, as was obvious from the first time he met her, she was not the same person she’d been before her daughter was murdered. There were few dry eyes in the courtroom, and even Penton wept—though he didn’t so much as glance at her—when she looked at him and said that he didn’t just murder her daughter, he’d killed part of her, too.

Later, when announcing the decision to accept the plea deal to the media, Collin County District Attorney John Roach said that when Penton pleaded guilty to three murder charges, he also waived all rights to file any motions for a new trial or appeal his sentence. Just six months after stating that his office would seek the death penalty, Roach now said his office had achieved the goal it set out for itself when Penton was indicted.

“We have permanently removed and separated a predator from the rest of us,” he said. “This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the resources of my office have been deployed to ensure such a result.”

Assistant district attorney Davis told various media sources that new evidence had come to light that could have created reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds as to Penton’s guilt. He said that the evidence was circumstantial but might have been enough to cause a juror to hesitate to convict.

“I have no doubt that if David Penton were found guilty in these cases he would have received the death penalty,” he said. “The risk was on the guilt portion of this case.”

An angry Mike Meeks, however, told the
Dallas Morning News
that he’d been led to believe that the meeting was to discuss jury selection. The plea deal was done before the families ever arrived at the courthouse, he said, and Davis
“didn’t ask us”
if they wanted to accept.
“His words were, quote, ‘I can’t win this case.’”
Then he told them about the deal.
“I feel like I have a right to be mad; I felt like we had all been lied to by Greg Davis.”

The plea bargain left Meeks saying he was confused as to whether the authorities had even arrested the right man for his daughter’s murder. He asked why, if Penton wasn’t in Texas when one of the girls was killed, would the prosecutors even accept an admission of guilt for the crime? And why would Penton plead guilty if he had the evidence to prove he was innocent?

The families deserved a trial to learn the answers to those and other questions, Meeks complained.
“For eighteen months, I’ve been told this man was going to die. I was told from Day One that this was a death penalty case. They’re taking the easy way out, in my opinion.”

Asked by a reporter if he would have preferred a trial even if Penton was acquitted, Meeks didn’t hesitate to answer yes. Now, he said he would have to file an open records request so that he could look at all of the evidence for himself.
“For the last 20 years—since January 19, 1985—I’ve been told this and that, but I’ve never been allowed to see anything. In the law’s eyes it is over; I guess I need it to be over in mine.”