Sweet saw that at some point in time—it was difficult to tell exactly when from the disorganized file—the Columbus investigators called the Garland Police Department. But there was nothing more in the file to indicate what, if anything had come of that call. In fact, he couldn’t tell from the file if Penton remained a viable suspect in the Texas murders or had been cleared. Except for the connection to the Columbus murder case and the suspicions raised by Roxann’s grandparents, he was just one of maybe a hundred names in the suspect folder.
The Reyes case intrigued Sweet, but there were six other detectives and a supervisor in his unit, all of who had more experience than he did. Even if he’d wanted to work a cold case, he didn’t think he’d be allowed to or was qualified. So he closed the box on Roxann Reyes and left the murder closet to return to his regular caseload. Justice for the little girl and her family would have to wait.
CHAPTER SIX
July 1998
As the next two years passed, Sweet’s thoughts often turned to Roxann Reyes. Sometimes other crimes against children would bring her to mind. But it wasn’t always something specific. A name or image from the files would come to him out of the blue, as if he was being reminded not to forget that the little girl and her family were waiting. Other cases would come and go, but Roxann’s unsolved murder hovered on the edge of his consciousness like a bad dream.
However, the time wasn’t wasted. He didn’t know it yet, but every day he spent as a detective, each case he solved, every criminal he caught, was preparing him for the day when he would begin to pursue Roxann’s killer.
As a detective in the Garland PD Crimes Against Persons Bureau, his caseload involved a wide spectrum of violent offenses. But of those, murder—the taking of a life—was the ultimate crime, the one that could not be undone or from which the victim could not recover. Yet, even homicides came in shades of gray.
He hated to think of any murder as “routine,” but some were just plain darker than others and would have greater impact on him as a man and as a detective. One of those was the murder of Smiley Johnson, an 80-year-old woman, who was viciously attacked in 1996 shortly after he looked at the Roxann Reyes case files.
The old woman was assaulted in the early morning hours in the bedroom of her house, where she been slashed and stabbed eighteen times in her torso. The onslaught was brutal; blood was everywhere, soaking into the red shag carpet of the room. Her stomach had been sliced open so that her intestines protruded. But Johnson hadn’t died right away.
After her assailant left, she’d staggered out to her living room and called a neighbor, who lived across the street. The woman hurried over and found her friend collapsed in a growing pool of blood but still conscious. It was the neighbor who then dialed 911.
When the dispatcher learned that the victim was still alive, she asked to speak to Smiley Johnson. “Do you know who attacked you?”
“He came to the back door,” Smiley replied. “I thought it was my nephew, so I let him in.” But then she said she wasn’t so sure that it was her nephew; all she knew was that the intruder was a small, white male.
The tough, old woman was taken to the hospital by helicopter, but not in time to save her life. Assigned to the homicide case, Sweet and his partner, John McDonald, didn’t have much to go on, except the general description of the killer. They started by trying to find out everything they could about the victim by talking to her family.
The detectives learned that Smiley had a daughter, who was in prison on drug and forgery charges; and that the old woman had pretty much raised her daughter’s two boys, both of who were also well-known to the Garland Police Department, though mostly for petty crimes. The victim doted on her grandsons and didn’t think much of the police, especially when it came to protecting her family from them. One of the older Garland detectives told Sweet that he’d gone over to her house once to arrest one of the grandsons and the tiny old woman had planted herself between the detective and her boy; so he’d had to arrest her and the young man. Even if one of the grandsons was her killer, the detective warned Sweet, she would have lied to protect him.
Apparently, the grandsons felt the same about her and were devastated by her murder. Or so they said, but they still needed to be cleared. In fact, one of the grandsons was small-statured and had immediately become a potential suspect. Sweet flew to Atlanta, where the man lived, and questioned him, but he had an alibi that crossed him off the list.
The other grandson lived in Florida. He seemed particularly upset over her death and often called Sweet to check on the investigation’s progress. He had given the two detectives an important clue early in the investigation when he told Sweet that his grandmother owned a big, mean dog who wouldn’t have allowed just anybody to come in through the back door. If the killer was a stranger, the dog would have “chewed his ass up,” the grandson assured Sweet.
The presence of a protective dog indicated that the killer was likely to be a member of the family or someone else well-known to the animal. So based on what the grandsons said, as well as what Johnson told the 911 operator, the detectives interviewed several of the woman’s nephews; but they were all decent, law-abiding men, and all of them had alibis. The partners even interviewed two great-grandsons, 17 and15 years old; Sweet talked to the older one and McDonald to the younger, but neither seemed to be a likely suspect.
Making the lack of progress more frustrating, the detectives believed that Smiley Johnson wasn’t the killer’s only victim. A week after Johnson’s murder, a young black woman was also attacked during the early morning hours in her home just a few blocks from Johnson’s house. The assailant stabbed her more than a dozen times, but she’d survived. The timing, location, and nature of the attack, which could only be described as a frenzied bloodbath, suggested a connection to Johnson’s murder. However, the victim in the second case described her attacker as an older black man.
The scenario of two different assailants committing such a similar crime, in such a similar way, in the same general neighborhood, didn’t add up for Sweet and McDonald. What made sense was that there was a single killer on the loose. What’s more, a bloodhound brought in to track the black woman’s assailant followed him back to Johnson’s house, but there the trail grew cold. So did the case.
Then about a year after Johnson’s murder, Sweet got a telephone call from the great-grandson he’d interviewed. He said his younger cousin, Michael Giles, the then-15-year-old whom McDonald had questioned, had just told him that he’d murdered their great-grandmother; in fact, he said, Michael seemed proud of it.
The next day and at Sweet’s urging, the older cousin agreed to wear a wire and speak to the younger boy and get him to talk about the murder again. As Sweet listened in on the conversation, Michael Giles not only admitted attacking his great-grandmother, he bragged about stabbing the young black woman as well.
When Sweet arrested the young man, Michael was living in Johnson’s house and sleeping in the bedroom where she’d been attacked. It was the first clue that his interrogation of the teen at the Garland police station was going to be bizarre.
Sweet had to work the case on his own; after the original interviews with the teens, McDonald had been killed in a plane crash. So he sat the teen down in a sparsely furnished interview room containing within its stark white walls two chairs on opposite sides of a steel table. Taking a seat across from Giles, he studied the short, slight teenager, who favored the “Goth” look, with stringy, dyed-black hair and pale skin. He confronted him, flat-out accusing Giles of being the killer.
To Sweet’s surprise, Giles didn’t try to deny it. In fact, he shrugged and calmly began talking about his despicable acts like someone else might describe a day at the beach. Although revolted, Sweet went with it and let Giles prattle on. Except for the topic, they could have been two guys discussing a ball game over a beer; as he warmed up to the detective, the teenager spoke and acted like they were old friends and that Sweet was someone who really understood him. He seemed to en
joy recalling the lurid details.
Sweet knew from studying the case files that everything Giles said was corroborated by the evidence. For instance, during the initial investigation, crime scene technicians used luminol, a chemical that reacts with iron in blood, to be able to see bloodstains in the red carpeting. They could clearly follow the bloody footprints of the killer as he went from the bedroom to the bathroom, where he washed his hands, and then out the back door. All of that matched Giles’ description of his actions, as he recalled them step-by-step for Sweet.
Giles also explained why the bloodhound had followed his trail from the young, black woman’s home to his great-grandmother’s after the second attack. He said that even before he started living in the house, he liked to go back and climb up on the roof, where he would sit in the moonlight and relive the murder in his mind. Then after attacking the young woman, he’d returned to Johnson’s roof and fantasized about his acts.
Throughout the interview, Giles broke into chants praising Satan, and he kept mentioning a specific time, “2:13,” which Sweet found odd. But of all the twisted, demented things the killer said, one of the oddest was that he had loved his great-grandmother.
“Then why did you do it?” Sweet asked.
Giles shrugged. “I wanted to know what it was like to have sex with a dead person.”
Sweet scowled. He was so familiar with the evidence in the case that he’d known every detail before Giles described them. So he was aware that Smiley had been tested for sexual assault during her autopsy and that the results were negative. “Now I know you’re lying to me, Michael,” he said.
For the first time, Giles’ face flushed in anger. “I damn sure did,” he snarled. “I raped her through one of her stab wounds. I even licked her intestines that were sticking out!”
Nauseated but trying not to react, Sweet was sure at that moment that he was in the presence of true evil; not just a killer, but some wicked monster that prowled beyond the circle of humanity. Giles had no remorse for his actions. He’d wanted to know what it was like to have sex with a dead body, so he’d attacked his great-grandmother, a woman he professed to love. Then he’d stabbed the young black woman for no particular reason, other than a lust for blood, the pleasure of inflicting pain, and the deviant sexual gratification he derived from it.
Sweet was disgusted, listening to the vicious, evil creature that was Michael Giles, as the teen willingly and with a great deal of satisfaction recounted the horrors he’d inflicted on other human beings. But the detective needed to know as much about the suspect as he could, so he controlled his anger and revulsion and acted as if the vile admissions were the sorts of trivial events he heard every day as a law officer.
Even after the confession, Sweet continued trying to understand what made Giles tick. The teen’s mother supplied some of that, even though, as she told the detective, she still loved her son. She brought Sweet her boy’s music collection, most of it from two bands: Cannibal Corpse, a “death metal band” self-described as “the reigning kings of brutality;” and Slayer, a “thrash metal” band.
Sweet brought the recordings home to see if there was anything in the music that would give him some insight into Giles. Just one look at the CD covers and his wife wouldn’t let him bring them into the house. He understood her feelings, especially after he’d already played the audiotape of his interview with Giles for her. She didn’t want any more of Giles’ evil invading her home.
Returning the CD’s to the office, Sweet began studying them to see if there was anything that would explain Giles’ behavior. He was looking at the song list on one Slayer CD, when he noticed a song called “2:13.” He’d suspected at the time of the first interview that Giles was quoting from a song; now he knew which one.
Sweet looked up the lyrics for the song on the internet and discovered that “2:13” was a song about necrophilia.
“Erotic sensations tingle my spine
A dead body lying next to mine
Smooth blue black lips
I start salivating as we kiss.”
Sweet had no idea this was the sort of “music” teens were listening to. He got off the internet, sickened by the thought that music might influence an evil person such as Michael Giles to act out his fantasies.
Inwardly, the detective could not begin to fathom the workings of Giles’ disturbed mind. But it was also hard to understand why Smiley Johnson, who had to have known it was her great-grandson who had done such vile things to her, protected him. Making matters worse, her silence had resulted in at least one more victim, the young black woman.
Then again, the second victim wasn’t a lot of help either. After Giles’ confession, Sweet went to talk to her and ask if she was sure about her description of her assailant. She was adamant; her attacker was an older black man.
It didn’t make sense. Sweet then asked her if she actually saw her attacker’s face. No, she hadn’t. He asked if she’d looked at his hands and that’s how she knew he was a black man. No, she didn’t. Did he say something that gave away his race? No, he never spoke the entire time he was stabbing her over and over again.
Shaking his head in confusion, Sweet asked her on what evidence she’d based her conclusion that her attacker was an older black man. She told him it was because of the neighborhood she lived in, which was 80 percent black. In other words, she was playing the odds. “So what makes you think he was older?” he asked.
“Because I saw his shoes,” the woman replied defiantly. “He was wearing black, high-top canvas basketball shoes. No kid would wear shoes like that.”
Sweet was dumbfounded. He knew what kind of shoes she was talking about: “Chuck Taylor” Converse All-Stars; he’d worn them in high school himself. But more importantly, the familiar tread design had been found in the blood on the floor at both crime scenes, and they were the type of shoes Michael Giles was wearing when Sweet arrested him. Yet, when Sweet told the woman that they’d arrested a young white male wearing those shoes for a murder two blocks away, she still maintained that her original description was correct.
Michael Giles was charged for the murder of his great-grandmother, but because of the second victim’s obstinacy, he was not also charged with attempted murder. Sweet was disappointed he couldn’t make the second case, if only for insurance purposes. If Giles had been an adult, he might have faced the death penalty, but because of his age, he could only get prison time. Adding a second attempted murder charge would have meant more time in prison.
Sweet worried about what would happen if Giles was ever released. He was convinced that the teenager was a serial killer in the making. He’d only been successful once, but he tried a second time. It was obvious he enjoyed killing and felt no remorse; if he got the chance, Sweet was convinced, Giles would kill again.
As the day of the trial approached, Sweet wondered how a jury would react to the shocking details of Giles’ confession and his obsession with necrophilia. However, no jury ever heard the case. Instead of going to trial, Giles agreed at the last minute to plead guilty in exchange for a thirty-year sentence.
Not nearly enough time, Sweet thought, and Giles would still be young enough when he got out to commit more murders. But the judge had only seen a frightened, small-statured, sixteen-year-old boy in front of him at sentencing, not the malevolent killer Sweet knew was lurking beneath the surface. The judge sent Giles to a juvenile facility until age 18, at which point he would be moved to an adult prison to wait for his first parole board in 2014.
Sweet walked away from the case having learned valuable lessons and with greater understanding of his role as a guardian who stood between evil and good, and the burden that placed on him. He knew that he couldn’t really talk about some aspects of the job with anyone but another cop, not even his wife or his civilian friends. Most people couldn’t imagine someone like Michael Giles, or that the real world—a cop’s world—could be worse than even the bloodiest horror movie. Outsiders couldn’t understand what it wa
s like to put aside what he’d seen and heard, or was feeling, and speak to a monster like Giles as if he were a friend. He could talk to another cop about “the job,” or he could internalize it, which he knew wasn’t healthy, but it wasn’t something he could share with anyone else. So he bottled it up, tried to file it away in some dark recess, and forget about it.
The Giles case also taught him that witnesses couldn’t be counted on to tell the truth, not even if it was for their benefit. Whether it was Smiley Johnson protecting her great-grandson, or the young black woman who would rather let her attacker off the hook than admit she was wrong, human beings were motivated by a variety of not necessarily logical factors. He would have to keep that in mind as he went forward with his career.
Dealing with Michael Giles also strengthened Sweet’s belief that he’d been given a special gift with which to combat evil—a knack for disguising his determination to see justice get served behind a calm, friendly persona that convinced even conscienceless monsters like Giles to relax. The point was reinforced about six months after Giles was sentenced when the teen’s mother called him. She said she’d just talked to her son and he wanted to know when Sweet planned to visit him in prison, as if they were friends or connected by some sort of weird bond. The truth was that behind the façade, Sweet would have liked to have reached across the table and strangled Giles during his confession.
It was all part of a detective’s learning process. And for Sweet, it would someday seem that his involvement in the Giles case was part of a journey leading to a confrontation with the kind of evil psychopath who would make Giles seem tame by comparison. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but walking into the Garland Police Department murder closet in 1996 had been the first step along that road, and two years later a simple phone call would be another.
In the summer of 1998, the crimes against persons bureau office was configured as a big open room with the detectives’ desks ringing the walls. When a call from the outside came in to the department receptionist, she would go down the alphabetical list of detectives and pass it to the first detective she got to answer the telephone. Because Sweet was near the end of the list, if he was alone in the office, he’d hear her try one desk, then another, and several more before reaching him.
Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare Page 4
