Bogeyman (8 page)

Penton dropped out of school after failing a grade and realizing he would be in the same class as his sister.
“He couldn’t handle that.”
So he joined the Army.

According to Amanda, her brother’s main male role model from the time he was about six until he left for the Army was a man he met through the Big Brother organization. The man took him camping and even on a trip to see the man’s mother in Washington, D.C. That man, according to Amanda, never married.

Although the Army described Penton as a motivated soldier, Amanda told the detective that his personality continued to change for the worse while in the service. He became more violent and prone to fits of rage. His vicious temper and
“sadistic”
nature carried over to his wife, Katherine.

“David used to beat her in front of me. He did mean things to her. One day it was 110 degrees in Texas, and she was nine months pregnant; he drove her away in the car and forced her out. She had to walk all the way back home, and he locked her out.”

Amanda claimed that her brother molested Katherine’s daughter from her first marriage, and that his wife left him when he molested their own infant daughter. He then married Kyong.

After David Penton was discharged from the Army and on the run from authorities in Texas for the murder of his son, Amanda said, he moved back to Columbus, Ohio, into his mother’s home. Amanda and her husband, Andrew, were also living in Columbus at the time, and the two men worked together. Penton did the driving, and on the way home after work, he liked to cruise past elementary schools and playgrounds to watch the children.
“He would point out various children to Andrew.”

In January 1987, Amanda and her husband moved to Oklahoma and felt relieved to be away from her brother because of concerns about their own children.
“I believe David is capable of hurting children. I believe that David did murder those children in Texas,”
she told Doberneck.
“I just hope you can prove it and get him locked up. I will not take my children to Columbus while David is there. So if you charge him with these murders, and he goes to prison for it, I hope you will let me know so that I can visit Columbus again. I don’t want my children around him; I don’t want them molested.”

Amanda told Doberneck that her mother would never cooperate with the police.
“She will always protect David no matter what.”
She said she was aware that her mother’s husband had been cooperating with the police, but neither of them wanted her mother to know that they were talking to the authorities. However, she told the detective that she would help investigators if she could and would call if she thought of anything else that might be important.

After reading through the transcript, Sweet called Amanda, hoping to ask a few questions of his own. She was back living in Columbus, Ohio, with her mother, and he hoped that with her brother in prison, she wouldn’t be afraid to talk. But she claimed that she couldn’t even remember being interviewed by Doberneck and denied that she’d ever said anything negative about her sibling. Instead, she claimed that her brother had visited her in Oklahoma several times, and there’d been no problems involving children—hers or anybody else’s.

Hanging up, Sweet was again reminded of the Giles case and what it said about human beings and their motivations. He didn’t believe Amanda. Not her claim that she couldn’t remember being interviewed by a police detective. Not her denial of having ever accused her brother of any crimes or deviant behavior towards children.

In Sweet’s opinion, the Doberneck transcript was too detailed with Penton’s personal history that it could have only come from a family member. Nor would it have made sense for the Columbus detective to create a story out of whole cloth and attribute it to a potentially important witness. How would Doberneck have even known enough to make up that Amanda’s husband and brother used to cruise elementary schools to watch children play? Or that Amanda and her husband had moved to Oklahoma to get away from her brother?

Sweet suspected that Amanda’s denials stemmed from the fact that she was living in Columbus. The transcript made it obvious that she was afraid of her brother and wasn’t going to cross her mother, who believed that her son
“could do no wrong.”

Replacing the interview document in the box, Sweet dug up other papers associated with the Ohio case. He found an assessment created by an FBI profiler, who’d labeled Penton a
“sexual sadist”
with a high IQ who collected pornography. He was likely
“to have been sexually abused before the age of ten. … and lives with his mother, parents, or an older woman.”

Penton
“likes Asians because they are from a submissive society and will go along with bizarre sex acts (and children will). … Intimidates women in relationships by threats of violence, instills fear through bizarre sex.”

As a killer, Penton would be
“neat, methodical, premeditated … who sets up the fantasy in his mind and acts when he finds a victim to fit it. But does not stalk the victim—is opportunist. … He will not risk kidnapping a victim who will resist; will entice and lure them quietly away if others are around. ”
He would act alone:
“likes violence, would not share.”

Penton would also engage in anal intercourse and bondage
“because his sexual thrill is fear of the victim.”
He would not kill the victim after one sex act, but instead
“take (the) victim to an area where he would feel secure enough to do it repeatedly.”
A killer of this sort would carry out his attacks
“in a place very familiar to him, such as a friend’s vacant house that he had a key to, (or) a vacant (abandoned) house that he knew about, not a wooded area unless extremely remote.”

When through sexually assaulting his victims, he would
“use methods that leave the least physical evidence—strangulation and suffocation, as opposed to stabbing or gunshot, will not risk cutting the body up unless the place where it is done involves no risk.”
Then he would
“dispose of the body in a preplanned place, not haphazardly dump it. … Will carefully, and methodically, get rid of body, evidence, and cover his tracks.”

There was one piece of evidence Penton might create and keep, according to the profiler. Depending on his finances or access to equipment, he was likely to record or videotape his atrocities in order to re-enact the fantasy.

A clever, pathological liar, Penton would also volunteer to search for the victim
“even to the point of assuming leadership in the search.”
He would stay in close contact with the police to monitor the progress of the investigation.
“When interviewed he will interrogate the interrogator on the progress.”

The profiler’s assessment stopped short of calling Penton a serial killer because he did not
“strike regularly, such as monthly.”

Sweet was not surprised that the report concluded that pursuing a killer like Penton would be
“one of the most difficult cases to investigate and prove.”
But he was convinced that he was working for a higher power and wasn’t about to be deterred.

CHAPTER TEN

July 24, 2000

A
fter talking to Sheasby and reviewing the documents from the Ohio investigation, Sweet’s next step fell closer to home. He decided it was time to interview Julia Diaz, who’d been picking flowers with Roxann and was chased by her abductor. Although thirteen years had passed, he hoped she would be able to pick that man out of a photo lineup, but first he had to find her.

Signing on to the Garland Police Department records computer, Sweet checked to see if someone named Julia Diaz had any sort of contact with the city. There was no guarantee she still went by that name or lived in the area—she could have married or moved—but it was a start. Nothing came up. So he tried LexisNexis, a company that provided computer-assisted legal research assistance and was more up-to-date with current addresses. This time he was in luck; there was a Julia Diaz who was the right age and still living in Garland.

Sweet drove to the address listed. No one answered the door, so he left his business card. A few hours later, he received a call from a woman who said she was Julia’s mother and wanted to know why he was looking for her daughter. After he explained, she said she would have Julia get back to him. It wasn’t long before he heard from the young woman. Yes, she said, she was the same person who’d been playing with Roxann Reyes when the man appeared and offered candy.

The next day, accompanied by her mother, the 19-year-old woman walked into the Garland Police Department reception area. Sweet met them and guided them to an interview room, where he talked a little about the status of the case. He then began to question Julia, first asking her to talk about herself to put her at ease.

Short with long, straight, dark hair, Julia Diaz had survived her brush with a killer to become an intelligent, attractive young woman. She said she was working for an insurance company. She was nervous about discussing what had happened, “but I want to help if I can.”

Julia said she had never forgotten the terror of the bogeyman chasing her or that he took her little friend away forever. She recalled what happened that day almost exactly as she had described it to a police officer when she was six years old.

Sweet brought with him a photo lineup that included a picture of Penton as he’d looked in the late 1980s. He hoped that she’d be able to pick him out, but she warned him that she wasn’t sure she could remember the killer’s face; she’d done her best to block it out of her memory. He hesitated; if he showed her the lineup and she couldn’t identify Penton, it could cause trouble later at trial. So instead he asked if she would be willing to be hypnotized to help her recall that day, and the man, more clearly.

Although uneasy about it, Julia agreed and a few days later she was hypnotized by Det. Keith Prinz. An experienced forensic hypnotist, Prinz took his time. When Diaz was under, he took her back to when she was six years old and had her describe the apartment she lived in and then the complex itself. Sitting in the room, Sweet was amazed at her detailed descriptions. He had no doubt that she was seeing her childhood home.

Slowly, Prinz brought her up to that fateful day in November 1987 when she was outside playing with Roxann. Suddenly, Julia’s mood and demeanor changed; she became visibly upset and didn’t want to talk about what happened next. Gently, carefully, Prinz eased off into a more comfortable memory and then brought her forward again. This time, Julia described picking flowers with Roxann in a field across from the apartment complex when a man slowly drove up in a gray, four-door car and began talking to them. Then he got out of his car and asked if they wanted candy.

Prinz asked her to describe the man, starting with his feet. She recalled that he was wearing black running shoes and a gray jogging suit. The hypnotist asked her to look up at the face of the man. She tried, but then her face contorted. It was painful for Sweet just to watch her struggle to see the face of the monster. Then she broke down and began to sob. It was as far as she could go, and Prinz had no choice but to bring her out of it.

When fully awake, Julia wiped at her tears and apologized for stopping when she did. She said she’d be willing to try again some other day.

Sweet assured her that she’d helped a lot. However, he had another idea and suggested that they drive over to the apartment complex where the man in the gray car abducted Roxann. She could then show him what up to that point he’d only seen in photographs.

Arriving at the apartment complex, Sweet noted that where thirteen years earlier it had been a low-rent, crime-ridden haven for drug dealers and prostitutes, it was worse now (and would be torn down in a couple more years). Julia and her family had moved away shortly after Roxann’s abduction, but she guided Sweet around as if the attack had taken place only the day before.

There, she pointed, was the field where they’d picked flowers to take to Roxann’s mother. And here was the alley where the man in the car had first appeared and then stopped when he saw them. Over there was the small opening between buildings just big enough for a six-year-old girl to run through but not a snarling, angry fiend.

Sweet turned into the alley and drove to the far end from which the man had come that day. When he reached the end, he stopped; they were sitting across the street from an elementary school. He knew in that instant that the killer had once sat there, too, watching the children play, waiting for his chance. On a warm afternoon in November 1987, this had been his hunting ground.

It was good for Sweet to see the scene of the crime as Julia Diaz described the events. He’d discovered that one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome when working a cold case was getting a feel for the environment where the crime occurred. Photos didn’t always show what he needed to see, but now he could visualize what had happened. The visit, however, had been hard on Julia, and she cried as he drove her back to the police station.

He thanked her. “I’ll be in touch,” he said and meant it, though he didn’t know when or under what circumstances. Still traumatized, Julia Diaz had blocked the memory of the bogeyman’s face from her mind, and he didn’t want to risk having his only living eyewitness unable to pick him out of a lineup. Maybe someday she’d be able to get past her mental block, and he might try again.

In the meantime, Diaz had confirmed some of the information she’d given to police investigators as a child, particularly her detailed description of the suspect’s car. Just small pieces of a large puzzle, but they might someday prove invaluable.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

August 2, 2000

A
s the weeks passed following that first telephone call from Det. Teft, Sweet felt himself drawn further and further into the case, as though pulled or pushed by an unseen force. And in the center of it all was Jeffrey Sunnycalb, pedophile and informant, who called sometimes three or four times a day.

Talking to him on the telephone was a frustrating, drawn-out process, with each conversation limited to the ten minutes; prison authorities finally agreed to up it to fifteen, but that still limited their discussions, especially with frequent interruptions. As Mike Bradshaw had noted without understanding why, Sunnycalb was guarded in what he said if other inmates approached while he was on the telephone. Penton was still in the same part of the prison, and there was no telling what he would have done, or asked some other inmate to do, if he found out that his former cellie was talking to the police. And for every question answered or new piece of information divulged, it seemed Sweet had a dozen more questions to ask when the automated voice announced that there was a minute left, then thirty seconds, then ten, and then the line would go dead.

Sometimes he wondered if Sunnycalb was holding information back in order to milk the situation; then again, at times Sweet felt so overwhelmed by it all he didn’t know if he could have handled more. He had to check everything the informant told him and try to corroborate the details—difficult enough to do when a case is fresh, much tougher when more than a dozen years have passed.

And it wasn’t just the three Texas cases Sweet was working on. The more Sweet talked to the informant, the more stories he heard about murders Penton claimed to have committed in other parts of the country. There was a little girl who’d disappeared in Indiana named Shannon Sherrill, and at least two more possible abduction-murders in Texas. In one of the Texas cases, Sunnycalb didn’t have a name or exact location, just that Penton bragged about abducting a young black girl from a mobile home somewhere in East Texas. He also said that Penton claimed to have abducted Angelica Marie Gandara, an eleven-year-old girl from Temple, Texas, who disappeared on July 14, 1985.

Sweet was interested in the other cases. He believed that David Penton was as evil and dangerous a man, at least to children, as he’d ever encountered. Penton’s behavioral patterns placed him firmly in the category of a monstrous serial killer: the careful stalking and planning; abducting in one place, murdering and dumping in another to avoid apprehension; and the multiple rape-and-strangulation murders. He likely had many other victims, as Sunnycalb claimed.

At first, Sweet tried calling other law enforcement agencies when Sunnycalb told him about each new victim. But most never called him back, or if they did talk to him, they’d blow off what he had to say because it was coming from a prison informant.

In the Gandara case, Sweet contacted the Texas Ranger who’d been assigned to the investigation. Temple was only twenty-five miles from Fort Hood, where Penton was stationed at the time of Angelica’s disappearance. Sweet thought that made Penton a good suspect. However, the ranger only sent him his files on the case and wished him “good luck.”

Sweet had to make a choice. He was getting far too much information for him to track down these other cases, and he wasn’t getting any help. So he decided to concentrate on the three abductions from the Dallas area; the goal was to put Penton away permanently, and to do that he needed to focus on Reyes, Meeks, and Proctor. He continued to take notes about the others, but then he’d redirect Sunnycalb back to the three little girls he could do something about.

Trying to keep up with his regular caseload and Sunnycalb was wearing Sweet out. But he kept accepting the collect calls, including on a dog-day in August when the outside temperature in central Texas was cruising past 100 degrees before noon, the air wet as a dog’s tongue, and immense black-and-blue thunderclouds threatened on the horizon.

Sweet was at his desk, appreciating the air-conditioning, when the telephone on his desk jangled. He picked it up and heard the familiar automated voice informing him that he had a collect call from Jeffrey Sunnycalb. “Will you accept?”

“Yes,” Sweet replied. “Hello, Jeff, what’s up?”

“You need to find a girl by the name of Tiffany Ibarra,” Sunnycalb replied.

“Why?”

“Because Penton kidnapped her and then let her go. … He said the girl’s father asked him to do it to scare her. …”

“What?”

“… yeah, so she’d be scared of strangers. I asked him why he didn’t kill her, and he said, ‘She was too damn cute to kill.’”

Sweet didn’t know what to think. He’d check it out, but he didn’t believe the part about the girl’s father wanting to frighten his child by recruiting Penton. And why would a clever, cold-blooded killer like Penton let a victim, and potential witness, go because she was “too cute” to kill?

Still, he was always talking to Sunnycalb about the need to establish his credibility, and obviously the informant believed that this would help. If the story was true, Tiffany Ibarra could help break the case open; it would place Penton in Dallas abducting little girls, and a living victim might be able to identify him. Tiffany Ibarra wasn’t in any of the files Sweet had seen, nor had her name ever appeared in the media as far as his research had uncovered. This was new information that might corroborate or expand on what was known about the cases. He also wondered if there could be more children who survived meeting Penton; if he let one go, maybe he’d done the same with others.

Trying not to let his excitement get the best of him, Sweet immediately began looking into Sunnycalb’s latest revelation. He contacted the Dallas Police Department to see if there was an offense report from 1986 regarding a young girl named Tiffany Ibarra. They told him yes, such a report existed.

Sweet asked the Dallas PD to fax him a copy of the report. When he received it, one of Tiffany’s statements immediately jumped out at him. She’d described the suspect’s vehicle as a white van with brown trim. He’d seen such a van in a photograph taken of Penton’s vehicle after his arrest for the murder of Nydra Ross.

He also noted that Tiffany’s description of her abductor closely matched Julia Diaz’s description of the man who took Roxann. It was pretty generic, just an ordinary-looking, young white man with dark hair, and a thick, neat moustache, but coming from frightened little girls, the description helped establish a link between two living witnesses and two separate crimes.

Whatever tied one case to another was vitally important. It had long been assumed that the same vicious predator murdered Roxann Reyes, Christie Proctor, and Christi Meeks. They’d all been abducted within a ten-mile radius of Dallas, murdered, and their bodies dumped in another jurisdiction. After Mike Bradshaw dropped out of the investigation and Keith Grisham said he simply wasn’t interested in Sunnycalb’s claims, Sweet had taken it upon himself to familiarize himself as much as he could about all three cases so that when Sunnycalb, or anyone else, fed him some new piece of information, he’d know if it was corroborated by any of the other evidence. He didn’t have the case files for Meeks and Proctor—they were still with their respective agencies—but he knew the basics.

Armed with these details, Sweet read Tiffany Ibarra’s statement, given to police fourteen years earlier. He noticed when she described both important similarities
and
differences between the cases. One of the main differences he saw involved the suspect’s vehicle, or vehicles.

In January 1985, two young boys claimed that Christi Meeks got into what they described as a small, gray or yellow car. In February 1986, according to the police report, Tiffany Ibarra told police that the man who grabbed her drove a white van with brown trim. Then a year and nine months later, Julia Diaz told the police in Garland that the man who carried off her friend, Roxann, drove a gray, four-door sedan. Four months after that, in March 1988, Penton raped and murdered Nydra Ross in a white van.

While the vehicle description wasn’t the same for all four abductions, Sweet knew that fact could actually work in his favor. He believed that Penton had used two different vehicles—the van and the sedan. It was a fact that Penton drove a white van when he killed Nydra Ross. And one of the items in the chaotic mess of the Reyes case files was a title made out to David Penton for a gray, four-door Datsun sedan.

Sweet put the Ibarra case report down. He had no more doubts that that Penton was who Sunnycalb said he was: the incarnation of evil, a bogeyman who’d murdered at least five children, including his infant son, over a period of three years. He was in prison now, but these cases weren’t just about making sure Penton stayed in prison the rest of his life, or even received a death sentence for his crimes.

Sweet’s quest wasn’t even all about Penton. The detective believed that every family of an abducted child deserved to know the truth. That the bogeyman who’d struck with such suddenness and seeming impunity had been identified and was paying for his crimes; that he would never harm another child or devastate another family. And, if possible, the families deserved the remains to be given back to them for a decent burial.

To remind him of what this was really about, and the reason he needed to keep pushing on whenever he felt overwhelmed or discouraged, Sweet gathered several photographs of Roxann, as well as news clippings, crime scene photographs, the incident report, and the composite drawing of the kidnapper. Then he created a small scrapbook, but not for any legal reason, not something to refer to in court or use to track his investigation. He called it his “inspiration book,” and every time he needed to, he’d look at one of the photographs of the pretty child with the dark brown eyes, especially the one of her kissing her father, and push on. And if that wasn’t enough, he’d stop and pray for strength and guidance.

Wherever the path was leading, Sweet knew he needed to find Tiffany Ibarra. So once again, he turned to LexisNexis, which had pioneered computer-assisted records searches long before there was such a thing as the internet and search engines. It was a shot in the dark. As with Julia Diaz, he had no idea if she was married and living under a different last name. Or for that matter, if she was still alive and would remember an event with any sort of recall that could help his case, even an experience as frightening as being pulled off the sidewalk by a stranger.

This time, LexisNexis turned up several Tiffany Ibarras. However, there was only one approximately the correct age. According to the computer program, she was living in Bay of St. Louis, Mississippi, about five hundred and fifty miles away. The computer report didn’t contain a telephone number so he went back to old-school detective work and called the local sheriff in Bay of St. Louis.

As it turned out, Tiffany and her family were known to the sheriff, and in a Mississippi Delta accent thick enough to butter cornbread, the lawman said he’d be happy to help. In fact, he said he’d drive out to their place and, if she was around, ask Tiffany to give Sweet a call.

Hanging up, Sweet knew that the only thing he could do now was sweat it out and hope that he’d found the right Tiffany Ibarra.