Bogeyman (9 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

August 16, 2000

A
s he was waiting to hear from Tiffany Ibarra, Sweet got another call from Sunnycalb that would prove to be one of the most significant of their relationship. The informant said the detective might be interested in a certain photo album that Penton kept in his cell.

In it, Sunnycalb said, were several photographs of young girls. And on the back of each photograph, Penton had written one of three letters: V, O, and A. “It’s the code he uses to describe what kind of sex he had with them: V for vaginal; O for oral; A for anal.”

Sickened by the thought of what the letters meant to the children, Sweet was also excited from an investigation point of view because it confirmed, and would to any jury, that Penton was a serial pedophile. But he didn’t want to give Sunnycalb anything to let him know what he was thinking and kept his voice nonchalant as he asked, “What else?”

“There’s pictures of cars.”

Sweet furrowed his brow and thought about what the man on the other end of the conversation had just said. Sometimes Sunnycalb asked questions that made him think that the inmate was fishing for information, rather than trying to give it. And some of his questions were about the types of cars used by the suspect in the abductions of Meeks, Proctor, and Reyes. It was the sort of information a clever inmate might turn around and tell some other detective as if it was something incriminating the suspect had said, hoping to curry favor or make himself look more credible.

Although it wasn’t easy, never forgetting that the informant was a pedophile, Sweet was always friendly when speaking to Sunnycalb. But he was also careful never to feed him any details or respond in a way that would give Sunnycalb, a master at playing off other people’s reactions, a clue as to what he was thinking. But now Sunnycalb was volunteering information about cars in Penton’s photo album that, if true, could provide another piece of the puzzle by linking photographs in the album to what he knew about the cars driven by his suspect.

As soon as he hung up with Sunnycalb, Sweet called the Warren Correctional Facility in Lebanon, Ohio, and asked to speak to someone who could tell him what he’d need in the way of a court order or warrant to seize an inmate’s photo album. He was put in touch with prison investigator Shea Harris.

“That’s easy,” Harris responded. “I don’t know what it’s like in Texas, but in Ohio inmates have no right to expect privacy. Which inmate are we talking about?”

Sweet barely got the words “David Penton” out before Harris laughed. “It just so happens I have Penton’s photo album sitting on my desk,” the investigator said.

Harris explained that it was common practice to keep a close eye on inmates in the protective custody unit. “We want to make sure they’re not smuggling in child porn.”

“Are there any photographs of young girls in Penton’s album?” Sweet asked.

“Yes,” Harris responded.

“Do me a favor and look on the back. Is anything written?” Sweet asked.

After a moment, Harris said, “Yeah, there are some letters: V, O, and A.”

Sweet nodded. Sunnycalb’s credibility was getting better by the minute. “What about photographs of cars?”

Again, Harris confirmed what Sunnycalb had reported. “There’s a photograph of a white van and one of a gray, four-door Nissan or Datsun. … I can’t tell which. There’s some writing on the back, ‘Monrovia and car packed for trip to Texas.’”

At Sweet’s request, Harris made color copies of the photographs and mailed them to Garland. Witnesses said that a gray, four-door sedan was used in the Reyes and possibly Meeks abductions; he had the vehicle title for just such a Datsun registered to Penton in the Reyes case files box. He wasn’t sure what Monrovia meant, possibly someone’s name, but the writing on the back of the photograph indicated that Penton was going to drive it to Texas.

More pieces of the puzzle had snapped into place with the photo album; then a few days later, Sweet’s telephone rang. “Detective Sweet, Garland Police Department,” he answered.

“Hi … this is Tiffany,” a young woman said.

Sitting up in his chair, Sweet asked her if she’d ever lived in the Dallas area.

“Yes,” she said somewhat timidly.

Sweet quickly explained that he was investigating an old case and looking for a Tiffany Ibarra who’d been kidnapped all those years ago.

“That was me,” she replied and, when asked, recounted her story for him.

They talked a few minutes more when Ibarra blurted out, “I’m only alive by the grace of God!”

“You were a very lucky girl,” Sweet agreed.

“Yes, I was because he killed a girl from my school a couple of days later.”

Sweet nearly fell out of his chair. “What? Tell me what you mean?”

“He kidnapped and killed a girl by the name of Christie Proctor from my school,” she replied.

The detective felt his jaw drop. He’d had no idea that Ibarra and Proctor went to the same school. He picked up the Ibarra incident report, and that’s when he saw it; not only were both girls abducted from the same area, the killer grabbed them both on Waterfall Lane. The same street! He felt stupid for having missed it. Then again, so apparently had all the investigators before him.

Tiffany paused and then asked a question that threw him for another loop. “Why are you doing this?”

Sweet was confused. “I’m trying to find out who killed these girls.”

“But I thought you already knew who did it,” Tiffany replied.

Sweet furrowed his brow. This wasn’t making sense. “I don’t understand,” he said.

Tiffany explained that in 1998, a female detective named Martha Sanders from Dallas and a detective from Plano named Keith Grisham had traveled to Mississippi to talk to her about the abduction. They’d shown her a photo lineup, and she’d picked one of the photos as being that of her kidnapper. She never heard from them again and thought that they’d solved the case.

Like fog lifting under the heat of the sun, Sweet suddenly understood why two years earlier Tammy Lopez had called the Garland Police Department saying that she’d heard there was something new about her daughter’s case.
Christie’s mom must have heard about Tiffany and called Tammy,
he thought.

“No, the case hasn’t been cleared,” Sweet said. “Do you think you can remember what the man who kidnapped you looked like?”

There was no hesitation. “I can remember him like it happened yesterday,” she replied. “I still see him in my dreams.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

October 2000

A
fter talking to Tiffany, Sweet felt like the case was coming together. Julia Diaz had mentally blocked the killer’s face from her mind, but Tiffany Ibarra was telling him that she could positively identify him. If she could pick Penton out of a lineup and put him in the area where Christie Proctor was abducted, it was a big plus. It would take more than that, but he knew the case would take a big jump forward.

However, before he could meet with her, “The Job” got in the way and new crimes took precedence over old murders. There was no way around it, but it worried him. Delays, even necessary delays, can throw a wrench into the machinery of working a cold case. There’s already been a long interval between the crime and the renewed investigation, with all the issues that can bring—evidence gets lost, witnesses disappear or die, memories grow hazy, people stop caring. Shelve the investigation again, and old leads that may have had some life breathed into them go back on the shelf.

Still, no matter what case he was required to work on, Sweet kept the injustice of what had happened to three little Texas girls in his mind. He accepted Sunnycalb’s collect calls almost daily, even when the inmate had nothing new to report and just wanted to talk. They’d built a good rapport and he didn’t want to mess it up by distancing himself from the informant. And when he really needed a reminder, he turned to the “inspiration book” on his desk.

Working murder cases over the years, he’d learned to disassociate himself from the person and focus on the crime and crime scene. It was the only way to keep his sanity. That was hard to do after talking to a victim’s family and seeing the deceased as a person who was loved. But while it might sound insensitive to some, that was the way most homicide investigators survived over time.

However, for some reason, Sweet couldn’t do that with Roxann Reyes. Most of the time when he picked up the inspiration book, he’d just look at the photographs of her and only see a little girl, not a body. But in this instance, he believed that staying emotionally involved helped him. Any time he got frustrated with the case, or was thinking that it was getting too difficult to deal with emotionally, he’d look at a photograph of her and consider what she must have been going through when she was with Penton. Was she crying out for her mother and father when he was hurting her? Then he would put aside the frustration and the darkness, and grow even more determined to make her killer pay for what he’d done.

However, that was easier said than accomplished. Penton had a long history of slipping through the cracks. Who knew how many times before he finally came to the attention of law enforcement he’d carried out his monstrous crimes, but investigators hadn’t put two and two together, or missed some clue?

Certainly between the killer’s first victim and his last, opportunities were missed to stop Penton. One chance was lost when the judge in Fort Hood let him out on an appeals bond after he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of his son. It wasn’t to say that a sentence for manslaughter would have put Penton away for life. In fact, he would have been out again while still relatively young, just as evil and just as dangerous; sexual serial killers get caught, or they die, but they don’t stop for any other reasons. Yet, a prison sentence would have saved Christi Meeks, Christie Proctor, Roxann Reyes, Nydra Ross, and God only knew how many others in those years between 1985 and 1988.

In the meantime, a lot could have happened personally to Penton. He certainly would have boasted in prison about other crimes, as he liked to do now. Another inmate might have reported him, as Sunnycalb was doing now, and Penton could have been convicted on that evidence and given a longer sentence. Prisons are also dangerous places, especially for child rapists and murderers, the lowest of the low in inmate hierarchy; he might not have survived.

A break in one of the Texas cases early on might have also saved lives. Even before his arrest for the murder of Nydra Ross, Ohio and Texas law enforcement were communicating about his possible involvement in the Texas murders. But nothing had come of it, and even though he’d immediately become a suspect in the Ross case, he’d remained at large for almost another two years after the girl’s disappearance.

Sweet didn’t know why detectives in Texas didn’t look harder at Penton. What he’d seen in the Roxann Reyes file, even as an inexperienced detective in 1996, made it seem that Penton was a strong suspect. Then he’d talked to Sheasby, the detective in Columbus who’d worked the Nydra Ross case, and he said he’d always believed that Penton was a serial killer and was responsible for the Texas murders.

Tiffany Ibarra’s statements had surprised Sweet on several levels. The first had been the revelation that she’d already picked a suspect from a photo lineup for Grisham. But he also hadn’t realized that Christie Proctor and Tiffany were abducted from the same street in Dallas. Grisham was with the Plano Police Department, and therefore Sweet had assumed Christie was from Plano; without the Proctor or Meeks case files, he’d missed those details.

Sweet called Grisham, who told him that Tiffany Ibarra’s story was essentially correct. Sunnycalb had written a letter to the Plano Police Department about Penton’s claim to have kidnapped Ibarra and set her free. He and Dallas police detective Martha Sanders then contacted Tiffany and she told them her account. But then Grisham interviewed Sunnycalb at the prison and decided that the inmate was an untrustworthy liar.

Even so, Grisham said, he’d presented his case against Penton, which included the Ibarra interview, to the Collin County District Attorney’s Office. However, the assistant district attorney assigned to review the case concluded that the evidence only warranted a kidnapping charge, and even then, it wasn’t a very strong case because he let the victim go. Nor, according to the ADA’s assessment, did it prove he was involved in the murder of Christie Proctor. So the case was dropped.

By October, Sweet was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the Penton investigation. In addition to staying up with his regular case load, Sunnycalb kept feeding him information about all three Dallas-area cases. But without the other case files, he couldn’t check what the informant told him against the details of the cases. He decided he needed help.

So one day Sweet jumped in his car and drove to the Mesquite Police Department planning to talk to Det. Mike Bradshaw about Sunnycalb, and tell him what he’d learned independently from Tiffany Ibarra, Penton’s photo album, and the interview with Penton’s sister. He thought some of it might be interesting enough to get Bradshaw to assist with the investigation.

Sweet knew from their earlier conversations that the Meeks investigation had been stymied by a couple of issues. One was that Bradshaw couldn’t put Penton in the Dallas area at the time Christi Meeks disappeared or in Oklahoma, where her body was found. But Tiffany Ibarra put him in Dallas. And Sweet had learned from his conversation with Penton’s sister, and her interview with the Ohio detective, Doberneck, that she and her husband had moved to Waynoka, Oklahoma, to avoid her brother having contact with their children. She’d later denied making derogatory statements about her brother, but she did admit that he’d visited her several times in Waynoka, which was about three hundred miles from Lake Texoma.

When he arrived at the Mesquite Police Department, Sweet was told that Mike Bradshaw had been transferred to Internal Affairs and that the new sergeant of the Crimes Against Persons Division was Bruce Bradshaw, no relation. So he asked to talk to Bruce Bradshaw. Following introductions, he was pleased that not only was the sergeant interested in what he had to say, Bradshaw and his former partner, Bob Holleman, had been assigned to the case the day Christi Meeks disappeared.

As Sweet quickly learned, it had haunted them ever since.