Bogeyman (2 page)

She was slammed by that fact one day when she came home from work. She saw his car in the driveway and knew he was home, but she couldn’t find him, and he wouldn’t answer her calls. The last place she looked was the closet in their bedroom, and there was her strong, smart, funny police officer husband curled up on the floor, crying in the dark with a gun in his hand.

CHAPTER TWO

February 12, 1986

T
he darkness sat in the driver’s seat of his white van waiting patiently as the little girl walked towards him on her way to the nearby elementary school. Like any predator, he’d scouted the lay of the land, checked for hidden dangers—such as police cars and potential witnesses—sized up the pretty, brown-eyed, dark-haired child, and now he waited for her to move to within striking distance.

Metaphorically, as a predator, he was no lion willing to take on prey larger than himself or capable of harming him in the process. A base coward, he relied on stealth and cunning to surprise and ambush victims much smaller than him and unable to put up any sort of defense. He was persistent; if he missed, or his intended victim got away, he kept hunting until he succeeded.

With pale blue eyes, a thick but neatly trimmed moustache, and brown hair with long bangs swept left to right, he didn’t look like a monster. His most distinguishing feature was a large mole above his right eyebrow; otherwise he was just an unexceptional-looking, young white man of average height and weight. But beneath the exterior he was much more than that.

For years, he’d stalked elementary schools, neighborhoods, and playgrounds looking for young girls to abduct, rape, and murder. With some exceptions, he concentrated on black, Asian, or Hispanic girls living in low-income areas. He thought of them as “throwaway kids”—hardly missed and soon forgotten, except by those who loved them; just sad cold case files gathering dust in police records rooms.

As though invisible, he brazenly struck in broad daylight, pulling children into his van or cars, or he crept into homes in the dead of night to carry away little girls while their families slept. He was every parent’s worst nightmare: the bogeyman they warned their children about, disguised as the friendly stranger who offered candy, cookies, and ice cream to entice his victims close enough to grab; the fiend who lurked in the shadows outside of bedroom windows.

Then, when he was finished with his atrocities, he’d dump the tiny bodies in remote areas, crossing jurisdictional lines in order to confuse the efforts of law enforcement agencies. Weeks, months, even years passed before someone would find the remains … if they were found … during which time the grieving families wondered what had become of their little girls. And even if their horrific fates became known, time passed agonizingly slow with no answer to the question of who could have done such vicious things to a child.

The bogeyman hunted with impunity while authorities scattered across multiple states weren’t even aware that a single killer was responsible for so many child-abduction murders. It gave him a sense of invincibility. He believed that he was smarter than the police, that they’d never catch him. And so far, he was right. Hell, he’d had that little blonde, Christi Meeks, in the trunk of his car when that Mesquite police officer pulled him over on the way out of town. But he’d talked his way out of it and was soon on his way to Lake Texoma to enjoy his prize.

On this day, he was parked on Waterfall Lane in a lower-income, working-class neighborhood in North Dallas, Texas, near Dobie Elementary School when he spotted ten-year-old Tiffany Ibarra. With her dark hair and olive complexion—her father was Hispanic and her mother Caucasian—she fit the physical profile of his preferred victims.

However, Tiffany’s appearance wasn’t all that put her in danger. Far more perilous was that she was alone, though that was not by choice or her parents’ lack of oversight. Normally, she would have walked to school with several friends. However, a bird had defecated on her clothes that morning, so she’d returned home to change and then had to walk back to school by herself.

Now, as the little girl approached the van, the killer climbed out and moved towards her. Although he was smiling, something about him warned her to run. She bolted, but it was too late. He caught her within ten feet, grabbing her by her backpack. He then wrapped his arms around the struggling child and carried her back to the van. Opening the side door and pushing her in, he climbed up behind her.

The killer planned to take Tiffany to a secluded wooded area in the country he’d already picked out. There, he could sexually assault the terrified little girl at his leisure before choking the life out of her. Then he’d throw her away like so much garbage and be on his way, satiated for the moment, laughing to himself about how he’d once again struck while the stupid police were helpless to prevent him from hunting wherever and whenever he wanted.

However, on this day something was different. The killer stared at Tiffany for several minutes before asking her for her home telephone number. When she told him, he called the number on an early version of a cellular telephone known as a “bag phone,” a new technological marvel in 1986, and then handed it to her.

“Tell your mother you’ve been kidnapped,” he demanded.

Tiffany did as told when her mother answered. But before she could say anything else, the killer grabbed the phone back and hung up.

“You better not walk to school alone again,” he warned the girl. “I’ve been watching you, and the next time I won’t let you go.” He then opened the door of the van and told her to get out.

Tiffany ran home terrified and in tears. The killer followed in his van until she reached the driveway of the apartment complex where she lived. He then sped away.

When her daughter burst through the front door screaming, Theresa Ibarra was getting dressed to go out and look for her. She thought Tiffany had made up the story she told her on the telephone as an excuse to get out of going to class and was more angry than worried. However, the girl insisted that she was now telling the truth so they drove through the neighborhood looking for a white van. When the search proved fruitless, they went to the school, where Theresa had her daughter tell her story to the principal, who then called the Dallas Police Department.

The officers arrived and took statements from Tiffany and her mother. But with nothing else to go on, they returned to their other duties. Who knew if the little girl was telling the truth or wanted to skip school, as her mother thought possible? No one else had reported a suspicious white van and a man stalking children. And why make the effort to grab her from a sidewalk just to warn her and then let her go?

Tragically, Tiffany wasn’t a liar. Three days later, on February 15, the day after Valentine’s Day, Christie Proctor was walking home from a friend’s house on Waterfall Lane when the bogeyman struck again. No one saw him take the little dark-haired girl who was just a few days shy of her tenth birthday and dressed in a pink-and-white sweater, blue jeans, and old white tennis shoes. The only clue left behind to indicate that she had passed that way was a crushed heart-shaped plastic box given to her by her aunt for Valentine’s Day. Searching for her daughter, Laura Proctor saw it lying on the ground and knew that was where her daughter had been taken. She’d felt in that moment, the terror her daughter had experienced.

However, there was only one witness. A resident of the neighborhood, Alberta Abundis, told police that she noticed a strange man driving a white van with brown stripes slowly through the neighborhood. She’d got a pretty good look at him, too—a white man with a large mole on the right side of his face.

The Dallas Police Department investigators realized that a predator was hunting the area around Dobie Elementary. They returned to the Ibarra house and this time interviewed Tiffany more thoroughly. A police artist created a sketch from her description of her kidnapper, an ordinary-looking, young white man with dark hair parted in the middle, and a thick, neat moustache.

Now the police knew Tiffany was telling the truth; only it was too late. This time, the bogeyman did not release the pretty little maiden.

CHAPTER THREE

October 5, 1986

D
orothy Sherrill stepped outside her home in tiny Thorntown, Indiana, to call her children in for lunch. It was an unseasonably warm and sunny afternoon for that time of year, and the children in the small trailer court they lived in were making the most of it, playing hide-and-seek.

Six-year-old Shannon and two-year-old David had spent the weekend with Dorothy’s estranged husband, but now they were back home. She immediately spotted David in the front yard and some of the other children running through the neighborhood. But she didn’t see her daughter.

“Where’s Shannon?” she asked her son.

“Sissy went behind the trailer.”

Dorothy walked over to where her son pointed, but Shannon wasn’t there. Twenty more minutes of calling for her and hunting around the neighborhood also came up empty. Shannon’s playmates didn’t know where she’d gone. And although many people were out working in their yards and enjoying the pleasant Sunday afternoon, no one had seen the little barefoot girl in the white sundress with blue trim.

Starting to panic, Dorothy contacted the town marshal, Gary L. Campbell, who responded at 1:53 p.m. and talked to some of the other children and neighbors. He figured she’d just wandered off and surely someone would have seen her. But when that line of questioning didn’t result in any answers, he really began to worry and knew he needed help. Campbell only had one other officer working for him in Thorntown, a small, farming community forty miles northwest of Indianapolis with a population at the time of maybe fifteen hundred, so he called for assistance.

Typical of a small, rural county, the various police agencies in Boone County, where Thorntown was located, often covered for each other, monitoring each other’s radio calls and responding with assistance. And that’s what happened when the call for help went out: The Indiana State Patrol and Boone County Sheriff’s Office soon had officers at the scene. By 2:30, members of the volunteer fire department, the various law enforcement agencies, and a volunteer group of more than one hundred and fifty citizens began combing the area.

They checked wooded areas and creek beds, inside sheds, and under porches, and went door to door, asking if anyone had seen Shannon. One volunteer even flew his private plane over the town and surroundings. But the sun set, and still there was no sign of her.

The ground search continued throughout the night, and the next morning the hunt for Shannon ramped up. Helicopters flew over the area, and lawmen from more outside agencies, including the FBI and the Indianapolis Police Department, arrived to help. Children on bicycles distributed copies of her photograph from house to house.

Bloodhounds were brought in, and they quickly hit on a scent trail that led searchers to a field where they found what they believed to be her footprints. The prints headed towards the town cemetery. Two more sets of tracks belonging to men were also located near the child’s prints, but there was no telling if they were all connected, and they all ended in the cemetery.

As the day passed with still no sign of Shannon, there was a growing sense of helplessness among the law enforcement officers and the community. They’d done everything they knew how to do and come up empty. It was clear that Shannon had not just wandered off—someone had taken her, and they all knew that the more time that passed, the less chance they had of finding her unharmed and alive.

Fear gripped the townspeople. A monster who took children from their yards in the middle of the afternoon was loose, and everybody was on edge. This sort of thing didn’t happen in Thorntown. It wasn’t the big city with those kinds of crimes; the entire county only had a population of 35,000. Fear fueled anger and paranoia. There were instances in which volunteers going house to house attempted to break into residences when the inhabitants were slow to answer the doorbell.

As night fell on the second day of Shannon’s abduction, the ground search was called off. No amount of shouting her name or hoping for the sight of her was going to locate the little girl; she was gone.

In the days that followed, the investigation changed from searching for Shannon to looking for a suspect. The children who were playing with Shannon were also hypnotized to see if they’d remember anything or anyone, but there was nothing of any substance. Detectives questioned Dorothy and Mike Sherrill. It wouldn’t have been the first time that a child had disappeared during a divorce, even if, as in their case, there was no animosity between the parents or a custody dispute. They then took lie detector tests and passed.

There was just so little for investigators to work with. It was hard to believe that no one in the neighborhood of the trailer court had seen anything. People were out taking care of their lawns, or working on their cars; one guy was roofing. Yet, there were only three reports of anything even remotely unusual. One man said he glimpsed a little girl riding in a red pickup truck. Two other people reported seeing a white van they didn’t recognize driving slowly through the neighborhood.

But even if the truck or the van was the suspect’s vehicle, where had he gone? Thorntown was just a few miles from Interstate 65, which ran a hundred and fifty miles north to Chicago, and forty miles the other direction to Indianapolis, and then on to Louisville, Kentucky, and other points south. Or Shannon’s abductor could have turned onto Interstate 70 in Indianapolis and headed to Ohio towards Columbus, two hundred miles east, or west to St. Louis.

In the time it took between Dorothy Sherrill noticing that Shannon was gone and contacting the town marshal and the additional half hour it took for other officers to respond, the bogeyman could have driven a hundred miles. Or he might have simply taken Shannon to any one of a number of isolated parks and woodlands in that rural part of western Indiana before disappearing down the web of interconnected highways and interstates.

No one realized it at the time, but the disappearance of Shannon Sherrill would haunt the community of Thorntown, including the police officers who investigated the case, long after her friends had grown up, graduated high school, married, had children of their own.

One of those officers was a young Indiana State trooper named Jeff Heck, who’d been home with his wife and two-year-old son in Lebanon, the Boone County seat, when he got called in to help. As a uniformed trooper, Heck’s responsibilities consisted of searching the area, doing neighborhood checks, and interviewing possible witnesses.

When he returned home that night, Heck drew his family close. His wife was a school teacher, and with their occupations and the sometimes dark ways of the world, over the years there would be many instances when they would feel the need to hug their children a little tighter. This was one of those times, albeit without knowing that someday, many years in the future, he would again be asked to help find the man who took Shannon Sherrill.