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
As 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 h
im, 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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
August 16, 2000
As 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 h
ave 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.
Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare Page 8
