Other murder cases had come and gone, each with its own sad ending, each deserving of his efforts to find justice. Killers like Michael Giles committed their atrocities and, he’d helped put them behind bars. But the murder of Roxann Reyes and the other two little girls stuck with him like no others. And what made it worse was the thought of Penton sitting in his cell, “getting off” as he relived his depraved cruelty, and nobody holding him accountable for it. But he had more than he could handle alone and felt that partnering with Bruce Bradshaw, who’d been involved in the case from the beginning, was another example of divine intervention.
Sweet found a kindred spirit in Bradshaw. They were both devout Christians and devoted to finding a child killer. Sweet told him about Tiffany Ibarra and asked if he knew that Penton’s sister, Amanda, had moved to Oklahoma and that her brother, David, had visited her there. “She gave a statement to Columbus PD saying she was afraid when he’d visit and didn’t want her kids around him. She also said she thought he killed the kids in Texas.” If true, it meant that Tiffany Ibarra could connect Penton to committing crimes in the Dallas area, and Penton’s own sister said he’d visited her in Oklahoma.
Sweet showed him Amanda’s statement and then brought out the photographs from Penton’s album that had been sent to him by Ohio prison investigator Shea Harris. One of the photographs showed Penton standing next to the gray, four-door Datsun, which matched the description of the suspect’s car in the Reyes cases. He then handed Bradshaw the title to a Datsun four-door registered to David Penton. The car driven by the kidnapper in the Meeks case had been described as small and either yellow or gray.
Sweet was obviously excited about the information he’d put together, but Bradshaw was skeptical. He’d investigated numerous other suspects only to be disappointed in the end. Still, the new information put Penton in Oklahoma and possibly the Dallas area; they needed to check it out.
With Sweet present, Bradshaw had talked to Sprague, who was now the assistant chief at the Mesquite Police Department. Sprague was one of the best detectives Bradshaw had ever met, and he wanted his opinion on how to proceed. When Bradshaw and Sweet laid out the story and told Sprague that they wanted to travel to Ohio to talk to Sunnycalb in person, the supervisor didn’t hesitate. “Go,” he said and that’s how they ended up sitting in a prison visiting room, waiting to talk to a pedophile.
Sweet had flown to Ohio the day before with another Garland police detective, Matt Myers, who was a native of Cleveland, which they thought might come in handy for getting around the state, but he’d also once worked for the juvenile division and had some insight on how pedophiles thought. Bradshaw and Don Phillips, a young Mesquite detective who Bradshaw had asked to help him with the Penton case, flew up the next day and met them at the prison. Sweet and Bradshaw would talk to the inmates while Myers and Phillips gathered records from prison investigators on the inmates they were interviewing.
One problem with pretending to be visitors was that Sunnycalb didn’t know what they looked like and yet he was supposed to be acting like they were old friends. So Harris showed Sweet and Bradshaw where to sit, and then the informant was told where to find them so that he could pretend he knew them.
Having seen prison mugshots of Sunnycalb, Sweet recognized the paunchy, balding pedophile when he walked into the room. They all smiled and acted like best buddies who hadn’t seen each other in awhile. Sunnycalb had threatened to hug them so that he could feel for recording devices, and Sweet had told him to go ahead. But the inmate apparently decided it wasn’t necessary, and they all sat down after handshakes.
Sweet had been waiting for this moment since he’d first talked to the informant nearly four months earlier. So far, everything Sunnycalb said had checked out, and he’d recently passed yet another question about his credibility.
Detective Grisham had disparaged Sunnycalb’s information, saying that the inmate’s sister had filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the FBI and received some information about the cases as a result. Following up on the accusation, Sweet asked the FBI what Sunnycalb had seen. If the information he’d been giving Sweet was contained in the paperwork, it would destroy his trustworthiness. However, after looking at the records, it was clear that wherever Sunnycalb got his information, it wasn’t from the records request. For one thing, there was nothing in the paperwork about the Roxann Reyes case; the FBI had declined to send anything about it, stating it was still an “open case” and therefore not available. Why that same reasoning hadn’t applied to the information given to Sunnycalb about the Meeks and Proctor cases, Sweet didn’t know. However, even in those cases, witness names had been blacked out, and more importantly, there wasn’t anything in the papers regarding Tiffany Ibarra. The information could have come from only one source: David Penton.
Sweet asked Sunnycalb during one of their daily telephone calls why he’d requested the information, and once again the informant gave him a logical answer. “I’m sitting in this cell listening to him talk about killing these little girls, and I wanted to know if he was telling the truth.”
Still, Sweet and Bradshaw wanted to meet Sunnycalb face to face and judge for themselves whether they thought the informant was being honest. There were so many things to watch for in person that couldn’t be done over the telephone, such as eye contact and body language. Most people’s eyes dart away when they lie. And Sunnycalb would not be able to claim that some other inmate had just walked up if he suddenly stopped talking. No good detective would ever completely rely on an interview that wasn’t conducted in person.
Over the next three hours, Sweet led the interrogation of the pedophile’s recollection of what Penton had said, with Bradshaw filling in with questions about the Christi Meeks case. The conversation went well. They bought Sunnycalb a soda from one of the vending machines, and, despite the proximity of other inmates, he seemed to feel comfortable talking. The other inmates seemed focused on their own visitors, and the tables were far enough apart that it would have taken a real, and probably obvious, effort to listen to someone else’s conversation.
In the end, Sweet believed that he was hearing the truth. The informant’s body language and eye contact were good, and more significantly, his story stayed consistent and matched the evidence. Sweet was able to reconfirm what Sunnycalb knew about the Reyes case, plus there was one new bit of information. Sunnycalb said that Penton had told him that he originally planned to abduct Julia Diaz and settled for Roxann only after the older girl got away. That confirmed what Julia had told Sweet about Penton chasing her.
Sweet could also tell that Bradshaw was excited with what he was hearing about the Meeks case. Sunnycalb sold Bradshaw on his credibility when the detective asked if Penton ever described what was written on Christi Meeks’ T-shirt.
“Color Me Rainbow,” Sunnycalb said without hesitating.
Although the description of Christi’s clothing had been made public when she disappeared, the amount of time between her abduction and Sunnycalb’s statement indicated to Bradshaw that he’d heard it from someone else. And the most likely person was the killer.
The interview ended well. The detectives asked if he would take a lie detector test and he quickly agreed.
After Sunnycalb got up and walked out of the room, the detectives met in a private interview room with the first of the two new informants, David Korecky. Another pedophile, Korecky had been convicted of child molestation in 1986 in Sarasota, Florida. He was out of prison again when he was arrested and convicted in 1989 of molesting five children, boys and girls, aged 7 to 12, while baby-sitting and on camping trips working as a church youth counselor. He’d been sentenced to six one-year terms, but was again on the streets in 1994 when he raped two 10-year-old boys in Columbus, Ohio. He fled to Texas, where he kidnapped a young girl but was caught after leading police on a long chase.
A thin, nervous type of about 40, Korecky said he’d met Penton two years earlier. They’d both been in the Army, and that was t
heir initial connection. However, it wasn’t long before Penton began talking about raping and killing little girls. He’d started by savoring every detail of his attack on Nydra Ross. Then he’d moved on to talking about other murders in Texas, as well as Louisiana and Arkansas.
Penton also liked to boast about how smart he was, Korecky said, and how he’d carefully planned his atrocities by scouting out places to take the girls, where he could assault and murder them at his leisure and then dump the bodies. The killer was careful to cross jurisdictional lines after abducting his victims and then throwing them away like broken toys. That way he’d take advantage of the lack of communication between law enforcement agencies. “He likes to brag about how he’d beaten the system and had never been caught,” Korecky said.
If that was true, Sweet asked, how did Penton explain that he’d been convicted of murdering Nydra Ross? He never admitted killing her, Korecky explained, and in Penton’s warped mind, if he didn’t admit it, the police didn’t “get” him.
The detectives were soon convinced that Korecky was also telling the truth. One critical sign that seasoned investigators look for when they have multiple witnesses who could be colluding on their stories are differences in their individual accounts. If they’re exactly the same, it raises a red flag that the stories are rehearsed. In fact, Sweet and Bradshaw had talked about the possibility that Sunnycalb had coached the new informants to make himself appear more credible. However, that didn’t appear to be the case with Korecky.
Calm and confident as he spoke, his recollections of what Penton had told him had enough small differences from Sunnycalb’s accounts to ring true. He’d also described in at least as much detail where the bodies of Roxann Reyes and Christie Proctor had been dumped.
Still, it was the information he didn’t have that made him more believable. He said he’d never heard of Christi Meeks. Even when pressed by Bradshaw, the informant didn’t deviate from his contention that he didn’t know anything about that case. If he was trying to impress the detective, he would have said what he thought Bradshaw wanted to hear. He, too, agreed to take a polygraph test.
After six hours of listening to two child molesters talk about the depredations of a different kind of monster, the detectives called it a day. They met up with detectives Myers and Phillips and then proceeded to a prison office, where they talked to Shea Harris. That’s where the others filled Sweet and Bradshaw in on the details of the inmate informants’ convictions.
The next morning, the detectives returned to the prison to talk to the third informant, another pedophile named William Wasmus. A former televangelist, Wasmus’ arrest and subsequent conviction on seventeen counts of sex with minors, including raping a two-year-old boy, had been a big media story in Ohio. He’d been sentenced to 104 to 269 years in prison for his crimes.
Meek and mousy, Wasmus said Penton had talked about all three Texas murders. He said he’d met the killer three years earlier and immediately started hearing about the details of the killings. He repeated some of what they’d already heard from Sunnycalb and Korecky, with just enough differences and additions to be believable. But for some reason, Sweet found him to be “creepier” than the others.
Leaving the prison, the four detectives thought the trip had been a success, but there was a concern about what sort of witnesses they would make in court. All three had agreed to take lie-detector tests, but the tests weren’t admissible in court. The men were believable, but they were also pedophiles, and there was no telling how a jury would react to testimony from child molesters.
Although finished at the prison, the investigators weren’t done in Ohio. They drove to Columbus Police Department where they were given the Nydra Ross file to review. The similarities to their cases stood out clearly. When they finished with the file, the detectives had one more errand they wanted to accomplish before they went back to Texas. Sunnycalb had told Sweet that Penton once said that if he ever needed to hide something from the police, the best place was under the insulation in an attic. “They’ll never dig through the insulation,” Sunnycalb quoted his former cellmate. So with the help of the Columbus Police Department, the Texans obtained a warrant to search his family’s former home.
Penton’s mother had moved out several years earlier, and another woman answered the door when the detectives dropped by. Sweet said that they were there to search the attic and explained why. “You go right ahead,” she agreed.
Phillips, Myers, and Sweet went up into the attic while Bradshaw talked to the homeowner. Oddly enough, the woman’s husband was in a back room watching television and never put in an appearance, even with three large men crawling around in his attic, pulling up the floorboards.
The woman told Bradshaw that she and her husband had heard rumors about David Penton and knew he’d lived there once. He decided to canvass the neighborhood to see if he could find anyone else who remembered the killer who’d lived among them.
At one point, the three detectives decided to take a break and came downstairs to find Bradshaw talking to a very pretty young woman and the older woman with her. During the conversation in the prison, Sunnycalb said that Penton told him that he’d lusted after a young Catholic school girl who lived on the same street as his mother’s house. Bradshaw now introduced the visitors as that girl, now grown up, and her mother.
Both women said they thought Penton was “creepy” back then. “I told her,” the older woman said, nodding towards her daughter, “to never be alone with him.”
“She didn’t have to,” the younger woman added, “even as a kid I knew he was bad news.”
The search of the attic took several hours. Finally, Phillips got down on his knees and reached under one of the floorboards. He pulled his hand back and held up what appeared to be just rags; however, they’d been neatly tied together with a piece of yarn that indicated there might be something inside. There wasn’t, but they could see stains on the cloth and confiscated them. The rags were given to Bradshaw and Phillips, who were flying out the next day, to take to a DNA analysis laboratory in Dallas.
On the flight back to Dallas, Sweet looked out of the window as the brown fields and leafless trees of winter passed beneath and thought about the coincidences, or divine intervention, that had brought him to this point, faced with the task of making an evil child killer account for his crimes. What were the chances that the only detective in the Garland office the day Det. Diane Teft of the Fort Worth Police Department called would be the one who would recognize Penton’s name? And why would he know the name? Because during a lunch break several years earlier, he’d wandered into the “murder closet” and discovered the Reyes case file gathering dust.
Who knew if another detective would have accepted Teft’s invitation to question Sunnycalb? Or, if another detective would have realized that the informant knew details about the crimes contained in the files?
Yet, it wasn’t another detective. It was Sweet who got the call. It was Sweet who stuck with it after others had given up. And it was Sweet who followed his gut instinct about Sunnycalb when others labeled the informant untrustworthy and a liar.
Now, it was Sweet who also could hear the plaintive voice of Roxann’s mother asking if there was any news about the daughter she’d lost. As the jet touched down in Dallas, he was more convinced than ever that God had given him the task of making the bogeyman pay for what he’d done.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
May 9, 2001
The first time Sweet talked to Roxann’s mother, Tammy Lopez, he had to disappoint her by saying there was nothing new with the case. Almost three years after that telephone call and six months after returning from Ohio and his face-to-face meeting with Sunnycalb, he decided it was time to let her know that things had changed.
As usual, he’d been delayed by his current caseload. Within days of getting back from Ohio, he was assigned to investigate an officer-involved shooting that had quickly erupted into a media firestorm. Early on the morning in question, the
911 dispatcher at the Garland Police Department received a call that a fifteen-year-old black male was tearing up his parents’ house after getting into an argument with his sister. The parents were gone; the youth was throwing belongings out onto the front yard and making threats.
When officers arrived on the scene, the young man, Justin Sanders, grabbed two large butcher knives. Bulling his way past the officer, D.S. Weands, the first responder to reach the front door, the teen ran outside. The officer followed Sanders at a safe distance, demanding that he put the knives down. The slow, foot pursuit circled the block and ended up back at its starting point, with Sanders declaring, “You might as well shoot me.” That’s when Weands shot and killed the youth, who, he said, had refused to drop the knives and had come at him.
The shooting immediately became sensationalized when the media picked up on the parents of Justin Sanders claiming that the shooting was unnecessary and racially motivated. It wasn’t enough that Weands could be heard three times on a dispatcher’s recording of the confrontation ordering the youth to drop the knives before he pulled the trigger. The media barrage aimed at the Garland Police Department portraying Sanders as an innocent teen and the officer as a trigger-happy killer lasted for several days. There were daily interviews with the family, who erected a huge sign in their yard stating: “The Garland Police Killed Justin Sanders.”
Although they did not say so publicly, the Garland Police Department knew that Sanders was no angel. A week before the shooting, his own family had reported that he’d held a knife to another teen’s throat, and he had a record for other crimes. However, that didn’t excuse the officer if he’d shot him without cause, and Sweet, who’d been assigned as lead investigator, was busy assembling the evidence to be taken to a grand jury.
Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare Page 11
