When he returned home that night, Heck drew his family close. His wife was a school teacher, and with their occupations and the sometimes dark ways of the world, over the years there would be many instances when they would feel the need to hug their children a little tighter. This was one of those times, albeit without knowing that someday, many years in the future, he would again be asked to help find the man who took Shannon Sherrill.
CHAPTER FOUR
November 3, 1987
As he drove down the alley away from the elementary school where he’d been lurking, the killer spotted the two little girls picking wildflowers in the field across from a large apartment complex. The younger child was hardly more than a toddler—petite, pretty, black-haired, and doe-eyed. But he had his eye on the other girl who also looked Hispanic and appeared to be about five years old.
He pulled his gray sedan over to the curb near them. Getting out of the car, he called out. “I have some candy for you,” he said with a smile.
The older girl, Julia Diaz, looked at the young white man as he approached and shook her head. “He’s lying,” she said to her little friend, Roxann Reyes. She then screamed and dodged as the man lunged for her.
The killer chased Julia across the street, but she slipped through a narrow opening between two of the apartment buildings where he couldn’t follow. Snarling, he ran around the building, hoping to intercept her on the other side. Instead, he nearly bumped into an older woman named Wanda Huggins. For a moment they locked eyes then he turned and ran back to his car where he discovered the younger child was still standing next to his vehicle.
Just three years old, Roxann didn’t know what to make of her friend’s reaction or the stranger who’d offered candy. Trusting, innocent she waited in her light pink shorts and purple top and didn’t attempt to flee when the man returned. Her world changed, however, when he punched her hard in the stomach and, as the terrified child gasped for air, threw her in the car. A moment later, he was in the driver’s seat and speeding from the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, having narrowly escaped the stranger, Julia Diaz ran in terror for the apartment manager’s office on the far end of the complex. Roxann’s mother, Tammy, was the manager and Julia thought she’d find her there.
However, Julia actually ran past where Roxann’s mother and father, Sergio Reyes, were working to get an apartment ready to rent. Tammy was inside the apartment cleaning and making small repairs. Sergio was out in front cutting carpet to replace the old, worn-out remnants. Each believing that their daughter was with the other, neither parent knew that Roxann had wandered across the street to pick wildflowers with her friend Julia.
The first clue that something was wrong wasn’t even perceived as a threat. Sergio heard a car door slam and a vehicle race off on the other side of the building from where he was working, but that wasn’t uncommon. Nor did he notice Julia Diaz squeeze out from an opening between the buildings and race for the manager’s office.
By the time Julia found someone to tell about the strange man who chased her, and for concerned adults to then tell Roxann’s parents, it was too late. The bogeyman and his three-year-old victim were gone.
In Ohio, Joyce Davis had just returned from visiting one of her daughters near her home in Minford when a neighbor hurried up to her. “Something’s happened in Texas,” the woman said. “Tammy wants you to call.”
Davis hurried into her home to call her daughter. Tammy was her first born of nine children—eight girls and one boy. Only fifteen when she delivered Tammy, Davis married Tammy’s father, and together they’d conceived the rest of the kids over a twelve-year span. It was a lot of children for a young mother, but the rural acreage where they were raised provided plenty of room, and the girls grew up as rough-and-tumble as their brother.
Headstrong and tough, Tammy was also married and pregnant in her teens. She bore two daughters, but she wasn’t ready to take care of kids on her own, so Joyce raised them.
After divorcing her first husband and looking for a fresh start, Tammy left Ohio with a girlfriend and moved to Texas. There, she met and married Sergio Reyes. Their little girl, Roxann, was born in January 1984. This time, Tammy, who felt that she’d “missed out” on her first two daughters, wasn’t giving up her child. In fact, after she got settled in Texas, she even thought about sending for the other two but realized that they’d grown up counting on Joyce; and it would break their hearts, and her mother’s, to split them up now. So she left them in Ohio and compensated with the affection she and her husband showered on Roxann.
Unlike her country-girl mother, Roxann was a little princess who liked dresses and all the traditionally “girlie” things. She was petite, even for her age, and smart; somehow both spoiled rotten and well-mannered.
The family didn’t have much money. Tammy worked as the manager of the low-rent apartment complex in Garland, and Sergio helped as the maintenance man, as well as working odd jobs. The run-down neighborhood was known for its drug dealing, prostitution, and criminal element, but Tammy was a hard worker, and she had plans to better her life and that of her family.
Those plans disappeared in the first waves of terror after she was told that Roxann was missing. When her mother called, she sobbed. “Mom, Roxann’s missing. Some man took her.”
Joyce told her daughter that she’d be there as quickly as possible. She then hung up and called her mother in Cincinnati and told her what had happened. Twelve hours later, they were in Garland, Texas; other than for gas and to run to the service station restroom, they had not stopped nor had anything to eat or drink.
When they pulled up to the apartment complex, Joyce’s mom broke down and wouldn’t get out of the car. Nor would she leave the vehicle for the next three days as she holed up, watching the entrance to the complex for Roxann to come home.
Joyce felt as if she were living a nightmare, unable to wake up or do much to comfort her crumbling daughter. Along with other family members, who had driven to Garland, and Tammy’s neighbors, they searched everywhere, every culvert, every field. They distributed flyers with the police artist’s sketch of the suspect as he’d been described by Julia Diaz: a young, white man with the brown moustache, dark hair with long bangs swept to the side, and a large mole on the right side of his face above the eyebrow.
Tammy beat herself up. “I should have never let her go out and play,” she cried over and over to her mother. “I should have watched her more carefully.” And in the cruel way of such tragedies, she and Sergio looked at each other with accusations in their eyes.
Other people said cruel things, too, or gave sideways glances that said more than words ever could have: they’d failed to protect their daughter; they weren’t fit parents. But the cruelest were the prank callers who pretended to be kidnappers.
As the FBI listened in, the first of those told Tammy to put ten thousand dollars in an envelope and deliver it where they said. “Or we’ll cut off her ear.”
Another caller went so far as to demand a ransom and arrange for the drop-off at the airport. As she’d been coaxed by the federal agents, Tammy asked, “How do we know you have her?”
“We’ll send you her finger in the mail!”
Tammy screamed and dissolved into hysterical tears. But there was hope. If Roxann had been kidnapped for a ransom then, perhaps, they’d still get her back.
On the morning of the drop-off, the FBI and local law enforcement officers sealed off the airport and flooded it with their own agents and officers. But the kidnapper never showed up, nor did some grisly token arrive in the mail.
Roxann’s kidnapper didn’t want money. He wanted something far more precious and didn’t care about the damage done when he cast this stone into a dark pond of nightmares without end.
PART II
A Case of Divine Intervention
CHAPTER FIVE
June 1996
Gary Sweet opened the door of the “murder closet” and stepped inside. The small, windowless room in the ba
sement of the Garland Police Department held the agency’s files for unsolved murders stacked in row after row, from floor to ceiling, in bankers’ boxes. Contained within each were the ghosts of justice interrupted, of nightmares without end, and of tears uncounted. Waiting for someone to care.
The thirty-seven-year-old detective was on his lunch hour and had decided to spend it looking through the old files, mostly out of curiosity. It wasn’t as if he had nothing else to do. A satellite of Dallas, Garland was actually the tenth largest city in Texas, bigger than Amarillo. Working in the crimes against persons unit, which included felonies from harassment to murder, his caseload averaged sixty-five to seventy cases a month. Killers, thugs, robbers, and rapists did not take holidays so that he would have time to solve old homicide cases.
Still, he was relatively new to detective work after serving nine years as a late-night patrolman and another two as a school resource officer, and cold cases fascinated him. Part of it was the challenge of putting the pieces together to find, arrest, and convict killers when the original investigators had failed. But more importantly, it troubled him that killers were living out their lives thinking they’d gotten away with murder while the families of the victims suffered without resolution.
Tall and athletic with a soft Texas drawl, Sweet never intended to be a police officer, much less a detective. He was the son of a stay-at-home mom and a milk deliveryman who had worked for the same dairy for forty years. With two older sisters and one younger brother, his childhood was normal for a boy raised in a working-class neighborhood of Dallas; nothing in his upbringing would have predicted a future in law enforcement. He’d been very involved in high school sports, particularly football and basketball, and in martial arts. In fact, he’d once dreamed of being the world heavyweight champion in kickboxing, but that dream derailed at age 19 when he married his high school sweetheart, Julie Miller. He fought his last tournament two weeks following his wedding, but then the exigency of taking care of his wife and, two years after the wedding, their first daughter meant an end to his aspirations as a professional fighter.
So Sweet got a job unloading railroad cars. It paid well and he had no other plans, but that changed in 1983 when he was laid off.
Initially, he applied to join the Garland Police Department only to qualify for an unemployment check. However, his best friend was a cop and invited him to ride along on his patrol one evening, which was enough to at least interest him in the possibility of becoming an officer. So he signed up for the entrance exam.
When he arrived to take the test and discovered there were three hundred other applicants for fifteen positions, he almost turned around and left. But he had nothing else to do, plus a wife and child to take care of, so he stayed and passed the written test, as well as the physical agility test the next day. Even then, it was several months before he learned he’d been accepted to the police academy, which he had to graduate from to work for the Garland Police Department.
Sweet excelled at the academy, was hired by the Garland PD, and two years after starting as a night patrolman who loved the “late night action,” he was teaching self-defense courses to other officers. However, it was more than a paycheck and more than the adrenaline of battling criminals that convinced him he was meant to be a cop.
In 1978, he’d become a Christian and started praying for guidance on what to do with his life. As he’d passed each test and then was accepted into the academy and finally hired, he’d come to believe that God’s plan was for him to work in law enforcement. He even applied his faith to his work. He’d discovered soon after starting as a police officer that he had a gift for talking to people and a knack for getting criminals to trust him and even break down and confess their crimes. Those who protested their innocence by saying how godly they were would get a dose of Biblical verse from him, particularly Proverbs 28:13: “Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them, finds mercy.” And it often worked.
When his former employer called and asked him to return to the rail yard, he declined, though it meant living with the large pay cut to continue on his road to a career in law enforcement. He’d never regretted the decision and believed he’d been given a sign that his path was preordained when his former employer subsequently went out of business.
Although he’d surprised her when he said he was going to try to get onto the Garland police force, Julie supported his decision. She wasn’t worried even after she attended a seminar at the academy for wives and girlfriends of the cadets in which they were told what to expect—the long hours, the dangers, the emotional toll of dealing with all the misery and suffering created by criminals, even other women who were attracted to police officers, married or not. The divorce rate for police officers, they were warned, was horrendous. However, Julie didn’t worry about her husband’s faithfulness or his ability to deal with the pressures of the job. She was proud of him and knew he loved his work.
In fact, if there was one thing that bothered him, it was when there was no action. He wanted to protect people and “save the world,” and he’d get antsy if at any particular moment it didn’t need saving.
Thirteen years after he got his first paycheck as a police officer, he entered the “murder closet.” Later he would come to believe that divine providence had moved him that day when alone in that small, sad room, Sweet began looking through the file boxes. He found one in which three young black children had been found dead in an abandoned freezer. The original investigator concluded that they’d crawled in and were accidentally trapped. But looking at the photographs of their bodies—packed into the small space like sardines—Sweet thought there was no way they got in by themselves. Someone just hadn’t cared enough about those children to look any further.
He was still thinking about that case when he noticed a box labeled with a name he recognized: Roxann Reyes. Even before he opened it, he was aware of some of what it would contain. He’d been working the late shift as a patrol officer in the same area of Garland where she’d last been seen and was briefed about the case before he went out on patrol that night. He knew that Roxann was a three-year-old girl who’d been abducted and murdered in November 1987. With two little girls of his own, the crime had struck him harder than many others and still weighed on his heart now as he opened the box and pulled out the first file.
The exact elements of the case had blurred in the time since he first heard about the child’s disappearance. But now as he read, they returned in vivid detail. Roxann had been picking wildflowers one afternoon with her friend, six-year-old Julia Diaz, when a man approached them on a street behind the low-rent, crime-ridden apartment complex Roxanne’s mother, Tammy, managed. The monster took Roxann fifteen miles to a remote location near the small town of Murphy, Texas, where he raped and strangled her. He then dumped her body in the woods where her remains were found a year later.
At the time it occurred, Roxann’s abduction had reminded Sweet of a similar case two years earlier: the January 1985 disappearance of five-year-old Christi Meeks, who disappeared in Mesquite, Texas while playing hide-and-seek outside of an apartment complex, and the February 1986 abduction of Christie Proctor whose body had been found in a field beneath an old, burned mattress near Plano, Texas.
Sweet and his young family had been living in Mesquite at the time of Meeks’ kidnapping, and like any parent, especially one with young daughters, the case had resonated with him. After Roxann was abducted, he’d wondered if the three cases were connected, but he’d never heard anything more about them.
Nine years had now passed since Roxann’s murder. Sweet’s three daughters were sixteen, eleven, and three, happy and safe, a joy to him and his wife. Picking up and reading the Reyes case report, he recalled how sorry he’d felt for Roxann, whose fate it had been to be raised in a neighborhood rife with drug dealers and prostitutes, and then murdered by a cold-blooded monster. But he also couldn’t imagine the devastation heaped upon the girl’s mother a
nd father, Tammy and Sergio Reyes, or their lingering sorrow, exacerbated by the lack of resolution. It troubled him that justice for Roxann and her parents moldered in the murder closet of the Garland Police Department.
Glancing through the Reyes case evidence, Sweet was appalled to find that it was mostly an unorganized collection of papers, photographs, notepads, and sticky notes with undecipherable messages on them, newspaper clippings, and a few recordings. It would take more time to make sense of it than he had during his lunch hour, but one folder caught his eye; it contained records pertaining to a long list of possible suspects.
Some of the records had little more than a name and a few notes in them. Others had a bit more, and one of those was labeled “David Elliot Penton.” Sweet read that in April 1991 Penton was convicted in Columbus, Ohio, for the murder of Nydra Ross, a nine-year-old black girl, who’d disappeared in March 1988 and whose remains were discovered in September of that year in a heavily wooded creek bed. According to a Columbus newspaper story in the file, Penton, then thirty-two years old, was a fugitive from Texas, where he’d been convicted in 1985 of involuntary manslaughter after shaking his own infant son to death in Fort Hood. He’d been sentenced to five years but had been released on a bond pending appeal and subsequently fled the state. Nydra had been murdered by Penton while he was a fugitive.
What got Sweet’s attention was that Roxann’s mother, Tammy Reyes, was also from Ohio and that her parents, Joyce and Paul Davis, lived in Minford, near Columbus. Apparently, Paul had seen the newspaper article about the Ross case and noticed that Penton’s mug shot closely resembled the composite police sketch from Julia Diaz’s description of the man who’d abducted Roxann and that he was a fugitive from Texas. Davis had driven to the Columbus Police Department and told them about his granddaughter’s murder in Texas.
Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare Page 3