Bogeyman (18 page)

Meeks said he did have one regret about his actions. By walking out on the meeting with Davis, he wasn’t there to face Penton in the courtroom later.

Tammy Lopez told the media that Penton showed no remorse at the hearing.
“He killed our children, but he also killed us,”
she said.
“He destroyed their lives, and he also destroyed our lives. And we’re the ones paying.”

Sobbing as she described Penton to the media as
“a devil,”
she, too, said she wished that Penton had gone to trial and received the death penalty. Her only solace was that in the end, he would pay for his crimes on Earth and after his death.
“Because God knows what he did and he will be punished,”
she said.
“I know he’s not going to go through the pain my daughter went through, but he’s going to go through pain.”

Christie Proctor’s mother, Laura, said that at least Penton would never harm another child.
“Essentially, he’ll die in jail.”
But the girl’s father, Howard, added that while there was
“some sense of closure. I personally would have preferred the death penalty.”

One of Penton’s defense attorneys, Gregg Gibbs, said he was pleased with the plea bargain. He said his client understood that he was never going to be a free man again.
“We just wanted to save his life,”
he told the
Dallas Morning News
.
“David is very ready to get out of the Collin County Jail. I know he is glad this is over; this brings closure to the family and to the client.”

Gibbs, a former Plano police detective before he left for law school, acknowledged that the new evidence was not
“rock solid or bulletproof.”
However, he said, it would have improved his client’s chances at trial.

Penton’s other attorney, Edwin King, called the deal a
“fair resolution”
and said that the state’s evidence was
“very thin.”
He said the recent evidence discovered by the defense indicated that his client was working in Ohio at the time of the Reyes murder. The decision to accept the plea bargain was Penton’s.

The “new evidence” the Penton defense team revealed on the eve of his trial turned out to be timecards that purported to show that the defendant was working for a temp agency in Ohio at the time of Roxann Reyes’ abduction and murder. The timing was such that Sweet and the other detectives didn’t have the opportunity to investigate the claim.

However, Sweet later looked into the defense claims. He learned that Penton had indeed worked for the temp agency, but one of his jobs was dealing with the timecards. The killer kept all the records for when temp agency employees, including himself, were working, so he could have easily manufactured an alibi.

The timecard pretext was flimsy at best, especially when confronted by the mountain of evidence Sweet and the other detectives had gathered. But debunking the defense ploy would have taken reopening the investigation, money and time away from his regular caseload for more trips to Ohio, and the cooperation of the temp agency to prove Penton manipulated his timecards to give himself an alibi. And with the trial only days away, it wasn’t possible. The District Attorney had to make a decision and chose to make sure that Penton never left prison.

When Sweet heard about King’s comments on the state’s evidence, he shrugged it off as typical defense attorney posturing and thought they’d pulled a fast one. The defense knew it would be tough for the prosecution to investigate the “new evidence” before the trial. And if the defense really believed that the evidence was valid, why plead guilty at all?

However, it was over, at least for the three cases he and the other detectives had focused on. But that that didn’t mean that Penton was off the hook for any other murders he’d committed. Before the child killer was shipped back to Ohio, the detectives asked the defense attorneys if they could talk to him again. They wanted to see how close they were with some of the details of their investigation and hear the truth from Penton himself.

So Billy Meeks set up a lunch meeting with King, at which the defense attorney was very complimentary about their investigation. “Very thorough,” he said. “You did a good job.” But when they asked if they could interview his client again, he said no.

Why not, Sweet asked, Penton had forfeited any right to appeal the Texas conviction, so whatever he said in that regard couldn’t come back to haunt him at a new trial there?

But King said he still couldn’t allow it. He said he was worried that Penton might implicate himself in other murders, and the deal with the Collin County District Attorney was only for the three he pleaded guilty to at the hearing.

Sweet knew then that Sunnycalb was right about there being more murders. The defense attorney had as much as admitted that Penton had killed other children, and the attorney was protecting him from self-incrimination. But that didn’t mean Sweet and the other detectives had to let it go.

PART III

Prayers Have Been Answered

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

S
weet was disappointed that Penton escaped the death penalty. He thought that of the cases he’d worked on in his life, no killer was more deserving. But also gone was the possibility of using it as leverage to get him to confess to other murders he’d committed and reveal where he’d left the remains.

However, he understood Davis’s concern. It only took one holdout juror—someone basing their decision on emotion or some wacky theory, rather than the evidence—to ruin all the hard work they’d put into making Penton accountable for his crimes.

After Penton’s hearing, Sweet had an opportunity to talk to Tammy Lopez in the hallway outside of the courtroom. She hugged the tall Texas lawman and said once again that she was grateful for his efforts. “I’ll never forget what you did for me and Roxann.”

When he got back to the office, Sweet called Tiffany Ibarra and told her about the plea bargain. She accepted the news, thankful that she wouldn’t have to face Penton. Julia Diaz also seemed relieved when he talked to her. They were both satisfied that the bogeyman who’d terrified them as children and would haunt them the rest of their lives wasn’t going to ever be free to kill or frighten anyone again.

Bruce Bradshaw was also okay with the deal, but for other reasons. Visiting the prison in Ohio was his first experience seeing what existence was like for a prisoner serving a life sentence. Every detail of the prisoner’s life was monitored and scheduled. Small commodities, such as a can of soda or a candy bar, were a treasure to be hoarded or traded like gold. Prison was a dangerous world to live in, consisting of steel, concrete, and hard men, whom society had judged not fit for life in the community. He thought that spending every day and night for the rest of his life locked up behind walls and bars was a worse fate than execution, and Penton was welcome to it.

The deal that spared Penton’s life also brought to a close a long dark chapter in Bradshaw’s career. There had been times after Sweet arrived at his office and revived the pursuit of Penton that he wondered if they were just headed for another dead end. But whenever he felt like giving up, Sweet and Don Phillips kept him going, and he would always be grateful to them for that; together with Billy Meeks, they’d made a heck of a team and laid to rest a case he thought might never end.

Sweet stayed in contact with Sunnycalb, who continued to feed him information on other cases Penton had admitted. When he was working on the Texas murders, Sweet continuously had to keep Sunnycalb focused on them, promising that when his investigation was over, they’d pursue these others. So now when time allowed, Sweet took notes while talking to Sunnycalb and then passed on the information to law enforcement agencies where the crimes were committed. He also vouched for the informant’s credibility.

Sunnycalb wasn’t always cooperative. He didn’t want to work with anyone except Sweet, who had to convince him to cooperate every time a detective from another agency wanted to talk to the inmate. It took a lot of explaining to convince Sunnycalb that the Garland Police Department was not going to let Sweet go all over the country working on cases, nor were other departments going to want him to poke his nose into their jurisdictions.

Sweet had his own current caseload to deal with, as well as a growing reputation as a cold case investigator, which included solving the 1992 murder of a 79-year-old woman and the shooting of her three grandchildren. The woman’s son, a career criminal named Ron Adkins (aka Tyler), who had once been arrested in Memphis for attempting to steal the body of Elvis Presley, had stolen money from a drug dealer in Tennessee. Although Tyler tried to claim that the murder and shootings were tied to his work as an informant for various law enforcement agencies, the truth of the matter was that his own criminal actions resulted in the attack on his family. But Sweet was able to put together the case by tracking down old witnesses, including several who recanted original statements that backed up the killers’ alibis, and put the two gunmen—one in 2007 and the other in 2011—in prison for life.

Sweet pursued many other violent men accused of murder and never lost a court case, but none of them compared in pure evil to Penton. In continuing to try to interest other law enforcement agencies to look into other cases against Penton, he hoped that one of those agencies would try to win a death penalty sentence. If Penton faced execution, Sweet believed that he might save his life by working out a deal to reveal what other murders he’d committed and help authorities find the remains.

Two of those cases Sweet pushed were in Texas. Early on in his discussions with Sunnycalb, the informant had told him that Penton talked about abducting and murdering Angelica Gandara in Temple, Texas. But when Sweet contacted the Texas ranger assigned to the case, the man sent him his files and wished him luck. He’d since found out that the officer had been close to retirement and not interested in pursuing old cases.

After Penton pleaded guilty, Sunnycalb continued bringing up the Gandara case, and Sweet decided to find out what he could on the case. He learned that Angelica was eleven years old when she disappeared in her hometown of Temple, Texas, on the evening of July 14, 1985. She was walking home from her grandmother’s house only two blocks away when she vanished. A witness claimed he saw the little girl in an unidentified pickup truck in the company of an unidentified Caucasian male and female. The witness said the dirty, beat-up truck’s hood, front fender, and bed were painted red and white, the doors were blue and the top of the truck was white.

Although the vehicle didn’t match any Penton was known to drive, nor was he known to commit his crimes with a female accomplice, Sweet still thought it was worth checking out. Temple was only twenty-five miles from Fort Hood, where Penton was stationed at the time. And Sunnycalb seemed to have a lot of details about the crime.

Sweet called The Temple Police Department. The Texas Ranger he’d contacted earlier in his investigation wasn’t interested in solving an old cold case. But after Sweet explained why he was calling, Det. Jerry Bryan with the Temple Police Department jumped right in.

After speaking with Sunnycalb, the investigator told Sweet that the informant had discussed some details that he believed could have only come from someone who had been in the area or heard about from someone else who had. They knew that Sunnycalb had never been to Temple, Texas, so he’d had to learn them from someone else.

However, Penton was not the only suspect. Temple police also considered a convicted rapist-murderer, Ramiro Rubi Ibarra (no relationship to Tiffany or her parents) as a possibility. In 1997, Ibarra was convicted of the 1987 rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old girl in the area. An acquaintance of the girl’s family, he’d broken into the house and attacked her one night when she was alone. He’d been convicted in that case and sentenced to death. The police thought he also made a good suspect for the Gandara abduction, but were never able to link him to the case.

In the meantime, Sweet, Bradshaw, and Meeks traveled several times to Temple to help the investigators with their case. They even met with a team of FBI agents who were helping Bryan and showed them the PowerPoint demonstration Phillips and Meeks had put together for Davis. Soon after, Penton was declared a “person of interest.”

Another case that Sunnycalb mentioned quite a bit over the years took more digging by Sweet because the informant didn’t have a name or exact location. He said that Penton talked about abducting a young black girl from a mobile home in East Texas. “He brags about how he crawled in a window and took her out right past her parents’ bedroom door, which was open,” Sunnycalb said.

While still working on the Texas cases, Sweet looked up all the missing children cases from that time period. He found one that seemed to fit Sunnycalb’s description in Big Sandy, Texas. On the night of April 2, 1986, five-year-old Ara “Niecie” Johnson was abducted from her bedroom in her mother’s mobile home and never heard from again. She’d gone to bed that night dressed in a pair of panties and wrapped in an orange bedspread, which was also missing. Her mother discovered her gone in the morning and the front door left open.

Sweet called the police department in Big Sandy and asked for details about the crime and was told that the kidnapper gained entrance through a back window and left with the child through the front door. Once again Sunnycalb was right on the money. But when Sweet tried to interest the local law enforcement agencies, he never heard back.

Now, three years later, Sweet tried again by calling the Upsher County Sheriff’s Office. This time he was put in touch with investigator Freddie Fitzgerald, whom he told about Sunnycalb and the role he’d played in solving the Dallas-area cases. “He can be difficult to work with, but he’s worth listening to,” he advised.

Perhaps because of his success with the Penton investigation, he could tell that Fitzgerald was taking him seriously. The investigator drove to Garland several times to look at Sweet’s files and kept the Garland detective updated on the status of his investigation.

After that, the Upshur County Sheriff’s Office was convinced they were after the right man. The sheriff, Anthony Betterton, told Kenneth Dean of the
Tyler Courier-Times-Telegraph
that Penton was now a “person of interest” in the Johnson abduction.

Of course, word got around in the Ohio prison system. Aware that other authorities were now investigating him because of Sweet’s continued interest in cases, in March 2007 Penton granted his first interview since his conviction to Dean, who traveled to Ohio to meet with him.

In the story that followed, Dean described Penton as
“intelligent, elusive, and somewhat proud of his ‘notoriety.’ He also contradicted himself numerous times. Penton’s moods changed so quickly, the changes were sometimes unnerving to watch. As he answered some questions that clearly bothered him, he would become red-faced with anger as he moved his hands rapidly, then his eyes would tear up, and finally he would sneer or laugh in my direction. The changes often occurred within a one-minute period.”

Penton wouldn’t discuss the Nydra Ross case with the reporter because of
“other investigations”
pending against him, particularly the 1986 disappearance of six-year-old Shannon Sherrill from Thorntown, Indiana. However, he denied murdering the three girls in Texas, even though he’d pleaded guilty. He told Dean,
“‘I only signed the plea agreements because I would be sitting on death row right now in Texas, and here I might have a chance that someone will listen to me.’”

According to Dean’s story, Penton said he also pleaded guilty to spare his family from going through another murder trial.
“He blamed the crimes on a Jordanian national he says fled the country before authorities could interview him,”
Dean wrote.
“But, he said, ‘If I had been on a jury if the Texas cases went to trial I would have convicted myself.’”
He also told the reporter that he would have convicted himself for the murder of Nydra Ross.

However, Penton said, police agencies and the FBI were conspiring against him in order to clear up old abduction cases across the country.
“‘I’m not a monster,”
Dean quoted him saying,
“though I have been called a monster. But I didn’t go around the country killing little kids.’ He did admit that while in Korea, he solicited prostitutes ‘and some may have been underage. … It wasn’t so much that I fancied the age as it was about cleanliness. I mean there were a lot of diseases out there.’”

Penton blamed his troubles on Sunnycalb and his other former cellmates, who, he said, were just trying to shorten their own prison sentences. When the reporter pointed out that Sunnycalb was still talking to authorities without getting a deal, Penton said it was because his former cellmate had a personal grudge against him.

When Sweet read the article, he wasn’t surprised by Penton’s claims that he was innocent of the Texas murders and only pleaded guilty to escape the possibility of the death penalty. Penton had never intentionally admitted to any of his crimes, from the death of his son to the murder of Nydra Ross; he was a habitual liar, and Sweet expected nothing else except more lies.

A month after Dean’s interview with Penton appeared in the
Tyler Courier-Times-Telegraph
, the Upshur County Sheriff’s Department announced that Penton was a “strong person of interest” in the abduction of Ara Johnson.

“
From the information we are getting, we definitely need to talk to him,”
Upshur Det. Fitzgerald told Dean.
“We have to err on the side of caution, but this information brings hope to a case where hope was all but abandoned.”

While police investigators in Temple and Upshur counties had jumped in with both feet, Sweet didn’t always meet with such enthusiasm. Not every law enforcement agency was willing to even look into the possibility of solving the cold case abduction and murder of a child. He contacted more than a dozen agencies—from Pennsylvania to Arkansas and Louisiana to Indiana and back to Texas—with what he thought was viable information from Sunnycalb. Only a few bothered to call him back, and even fewer did anything about it.

The case that drew Sweet in the most, however, was the October 5, 1986, disappearance of Shannon Sherrill in Indiana. In the fall of 2005, Sunnycalb called to express his frustration that no one seemed interested in his information about the Sherrill case. Having tried unsuccessfully, himself, to get the attention of law enforcement in Thorntown, Sweet suggested that Sunnycalb write a letter to the town marshal.

However, even that failed to get a response until one day in June 2006, Sweet received a telephone call from a reporter, Megan Durbak, with the
Kokomo Tribune
. She introduced herself and said she was working on a story about a 1986 case of a missing child, Shannon Sherrill. He started to pass her off to the Garland PD press information officer, but then something she said something that caught his attention.