Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare

by Steve Jackson

  “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

  After 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.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The past …

  In the year following Christi Meeks’ disappearance, the two Mesquite detectives spent thousands of hours running down leads. They were both determined to find the killer, though their efforts often felt as if they were chasing their own tails. Then the nightmare was repeated … twice.

  In February 1986, Christie Proctor was abducted in Dallas, followed by Roxann Reyes’ kidnapping from Garland in November 1987. Bruce said he and Holleman were soon meeting with detectives in the other jurisdictions to discuss similarities in the abductions, and then, when the other girls’ bodies were discovered, their murders. They were all convinced that a single killer had been stalking the Dallas area, but although they tracked down several potential suspects, none of them checked out.

  In 1988, Bradshaw said, he received a call from Det. Sheasby in Columbus, who’d been contacted by the grandparents of Roxann Reyes, which had, in turn, led to a possible suspect in the three Texas cases. His name was David Penton, who Sheasby believed was responsible for the abduction and murder of a girl named Nydra Ross in Columbus. Sheasby filled him in on the Ohio case and what they’d learned about Penton, including the murder of his infant son. The Ohio detective said he thought Penton was good for the Dallas-area cases and was adamant that he believed Penton was a serial killer.

  Holleman was undergoing medical treatment for a thyroid problem at the time, so it was left to Bradshaw to follow up on the information. He spoke to the detective in Garland who was looking into Roxann’s murder and subpoenaed Penton’s military and criminal history. He then drove to Fort Hood and talked to Penton’s second wife, Kyong, who was still working on the base, but she didn’t tell him anything that helped.

  Bradshaw told Sweet that he also thought Penton was a good suspect but wasn’t able to connect him to the Dallas area or Oklahoma during the time of the Texas abductions. Without that connection, he and Holleman couldn’t justify the expense to travel to Ohio to talk to Penton.

  In 1991, Penton was convicted of the murder of Nydra Ross and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, but the three Texas cases went unresolved. However, it didn’t mean that Bradshaw or Holleman ever forgot Christi Meeks. Suspects and leads would come and go; some looked promising, and many hours were spent investigating them, only to end in disappointment. Sometimes embittered ex-wives would call and point to their former husbands as good suspects, only for the detectives to find out their motives were revenge, not the truth.

  Working child sexual assault cases, many times they came across suspects they thought might fit the profile of Christi’s kidnapper and dared to hope that at long last, they’d found their man. One in particular, Paul Harvey Andrews, made them wonder if he was the bogeyman who’d carried off Christi Meeks.

  Andrews had been convicted of rape in the 1970s, sent to prison, and then was paroled back to Dallas County. In June 1985, he was identified as a suspect in another child sexual assault case that occurred not far from where Christi was abducted. The victim was twelve years old when she was attacked at a park in Mesquite.

  They learned that Andrews was living in Garland, and detectives from Garland and Mesquite watched him for several days, thinking he would attempt to commit another crime. They seemed to be on to something, as he drove around elementary schools in Garland and stopped in shopping center parking lots, where he just sat in his car.

  The young victim in the park case was able to identify Andrews from a photo lineup, and he owned a motorcycle similar to what she’d described her assailant driving that day. When Bradshaw and Holleman went to arrest him, Andrews met them at the door. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

  Before they got him back to the police station, he confessed to the sexual assault in Mesquite. But even though they then questioned him for several hours, trying to link him to Christi’s death, he denied responsibility. They even took him to the apartment complex where Christi was abducted to gauge his reaction, but he just shrugged and said he didn’t recognize the place. The detectives finally had him polygraphed, and he passed.

  Andrews’ arrest didn’t lead them to Christi Meeks’ murderer, but they did learn from it. When he confessed to the sexual assault, Andrews explained that while he was driving around the schools and stopping in the parking lots, he was watching children and masturbating. Listening to him talk about how he targeted children helped the detectives understand the thinking of the sort of person who would abduct a child and then rape and murder her.

  The investigation took its psychological toll on the detectives and their families. Bruce Bradshaw often thought about what had happened and the terror Christi must have been put through by the monster who took her. He would watch his children playing and enjoying life in all their sweet innocence, and think about the joy they brought to him and Gail. And yet that would remind him that the killer stole the joy of watching Christi play and grow from her parents.

  As a police officer, Bradshaw viewed his job as a battle between good and evil, and in no instance was that more clear than the search to find Christi Meeks’ killer. And yet, as the years passed and justice for Christi eluded him and his partner, it seemed that evil had triumphed. He became very distrusting of other people and avoided contact with the outside world, except his family, close friends, and fellow officers. He spent a lot of time trying to learn all he could about the sort of person who would commit such a crime and came to view the world cynically. Maybe he was just more conscious of it, but it seemed like a lot of kids disappeared during those years in Texas.

  It affected his family, too, but not always in the way he and his wife could have foreseen. Jodi and Laci were very young when Christi disappeared. As they grew older, they became more aware of the time their dad spent trying to find the evil man who had taken her. They didn’t question why he spent so much time away, or why he missed one of their school functions; they knew. He could tell it affected his daughters; they wer
e very wary of strangers and developed the skill of reading people much the same way as a criminal investigator. Many times after meeting someone, they’d say something to the affect of “that guy’s a pervert.”

  About a year after Christi’s murder, Gail said to her husband, “Christi Meeks came to live with our family on January 19, 1985, and she never left.” At times, it wore on her, avoiding the never-ending questions from family and friends. She’d never believed in sharing her worries and problems with others, except for her husband; sharing only made her issues theirs, too. She’d kept to herself the loneliness of losing so much of Bruce to his job, especially the Meeks investigation; even when he was physically at home, his thoughts and emotions would be focused elsewhere, as he tried to piece together the horrible puzzle. She became aware that there was a large part of Bruce’s life, the heart of the Meeks case, that she couldn’t be a part of, or share the burden of, until it was over.

  She also bottled up her own fears that came from knowing some of what happened to Christi and dealing with the evil and darkness that had invaded her home when the child disappeared. She couldn’t tell her friends or her family; she couldn’t pass that evil on to someone else.

  Yet, they found a way to get through it. Their Christian faith held the family together and protected them from the darkness. They learned to live with the ghost of a child in their home and move forward. She and Bruce even learned from Christi. They raised their girls to have faith, to enjoy living. Life, family, friends were all good things, but also be aware that evil existed in the world and guard against it.

  A few years after Christi’s abduction, their girls learned firsthand about evil when darkness once again threatened their family. Bruce and Gail were away, attending the State Fair. The girls were in Dallas, visiting her mom, who took the girls to a local ice cream shop. While enjoying their time with their grandmother, two armed men entered the shop, forcing everyone at gunpoint to lie on the floor while they robbed the registers. Bad enough almost turned worse when the robbers threatened to shoot a man and his wife, who were lying next to Jodi and Laci.