On this particular day, Sweet was alone, although not by coincidence as much as habit. Early in his career when he was a school resource officer, he’d started eating lunch at 11 a.m. and then going back to work at 12 o’clock to be with the kids. He’d continued the habit as a detective, eating early and then having the office to himself when the other detectives and supervisors went to lunch at noon. It gave him some quiet time to catch up on work and an extra hour on the computer he shared with another detective.
However, this time habit crossed paths with fate, as the telephone rang at first one empty desk and then the next, until finally reaching Sweet. When he answered, the woman on the other end of the line identified herself as Tammy Lopez. She said she was calling in regard to the murder of her daughter Roxann.
It took a moment for Sweet to realize that he was speaking to Roxann Reyes’ mother, who at the time of her daughter’s disappearance had been Tammy Reyes. But once it clicked, there was no need for her to further explain who she was; even if he hadn’t leafed through the files in the murder closet two years earlier, there wasn’t an officer on the Garland police force who didn’t know the case. Roxann was the first child-abduction murder in the city’s history, and it stuck in every Garland cop’s craw that her killer had never been caught. He immediately let the woman know that he was familiar with what happened to her daughter and asked what he could do to help.
“I heard there was some new information about my daughter’s murder,” Tammy replied hopefully.
Sweet was at a loss. He didn’t know of anything new. But there were six other detectives, plus their supervisors, in the bureau; it was possible, he told her, that he hadn’t heard about a break in the case. “Let me talk to the other detectives,” he said, “and I’ll get back to you.”
When the others returned from lunch, Sweet asked if anybody had new information on the Roxann Reyes case but drew a blank. He called Tammy Lopez back and apologized that there was nothing to report.
After they hung up, Sweet kept hearing the sad, desperate tone of the woman’s voice. More than ten years had passed since some unknown killer had murdered her little girl, but her grief was still palpable, and the lack of resolution hung over her like a poisonous fog. He would never forget the sound of her voice as she asked questions for which he had no answers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
June 27, 2000
Two years later, habit and fate would intersect a second time. Sweet was again sitting alone in the office during the lunch hour when the telephone at one of the other detectives’ desks jingled. Unanswered, it fell silent; then a telephone on another unmanned desk rang.
He was no longer a rookie with the crimes against persons bureau, but a seasoned vet who’d investigated hundreds of violent crimes and dozens of murders and had never lost a case he’d filed with the District Attorney’s Office in Dallas. But no matter how many cases he closed, his desk was always cluttered with files he was currently working on, leaving only enough room for a few photographs of his family.
As the unanswered telephone call jumped back and forth across the room from desk to desk, Sweet found it mildly amusing to check off the names of the detectives who preceded him alphabetically. Whoever was calling obviously hadn’t specifically asked for him, and yet as he waited for the call to make its way inexorably to the telephone on which he rested his right hand, it was as if he was being sought out for some task he’d already been chosen to complete.
“Criminal Investigations, this is Detective Sweet.”
“There’s a Detective Teft from Fort Worth PD on the line,” the receptionist replied.
“Thank you, transfer the call to me.” He had no idea who Detective Teft was or wanted; he assumed the Fort Worth detective might want help locating a suspect or a witness in Garland.
When the call was patched through, a woman introduced herself as Det. Diane Teft. She said she’d been in contact with an Ohio prison inmate named Jeffrey Sunnycalb regarding the case of Julie Fuller, a 14-year-old girl from the Fort Worth area who on June 23, 1983, had been abducted and murdered. Sunnycalb had written her a letter saying that a former cellmate, David Elliot Penton, had indicated that Julie was one of his victims.
Teft said she followed up with a telephone call to Sunnycalb in prison, during which he told her that he and Penton had lived together for three years while incarcerated at Warren Correctional Facility near Lebanon, Ohio. Both men were housed in a segregated section of the prison for sex offenders to keep them safe from other prisoners.
Apparently, Penton liked to spend his time boasting about abducting, raping, and murdering little girls all over the country. One of them was Julie Fuller, but Penton supposedly had also named three other Texas victims: Christi Meeks from Mesquite, Christie Proctor from Plano, and Roxann Reyes from Garland.
Sweet’s detective radar flipped on at the mention of an inmate from Ohio named David Penton and recalled that day he first looked through the Roxann Reyes file boxes in the murder closet and saw Penton’s name on the list of possible suspects. He’d continued to think of Roxann often throughout the two years since her mother called, the heartbroken woman’s voice haunting him. He also recognized the names Christi Meeks and Christie Proctor.
The Fort Worth detective said she’d arranged to speak to Sunnycalb by telephone the next morning and wanted to know if someone from the Garland Police Department wanted to be present. Sweet immediately said he would and thanked her for calling. As soon as his supervisor, Lt. Mitch Bates, returned from lunch, Sweet asked for permission to pursue the lead.
“Shoot, yeah,” Bates replied. “In fact, I’ll go with you.”
The next day, Sweet, Bates, and Det. Charles Rene left early for the forty-mile drive to Forth Worth. A tall, slender officer with sandy blond hair, Bates was smart and a good family man; they were friends and had worked the night shift together and as school resource officers. Rene was a tall, athletic, black officer from Lake Charles, Louisiana, and a devout Christian. Sweet had been one of his training officers, and they often worked together on cases. Two years earlier, a few months after the Tammy Lopez call, Sweet had introduced then-rookie detective Rene to the murder closet and the Reyes case. So now he’d suggested that Rene accompany them to Fort Worth.
On the way, the three officers agreed that because Sweet was the most familiar with the details of the case, he would do the talking for the Garland contingent. After getting Bates’ go-ahead, Sweet had gone down to the murder closet and brought the Reyes case files up to his desk. He’d then spent several hours familiarizing himself with the details of the case, particularly the information about Penton.
Arriving at the Fort Worth Police Department, the three Garland officers were met by Teft, an older detective nearing retirement age who worked in the sex crimes unit. She led them to her desk, where they were discussing their respective cases when the telephone rang. On the other end of the line was Jeffrey Sunnycalb calling collect from the Ohio prison.
The inmate’s time on the telephone was limited to ten minutes, so Teft quickly asked a few follow-up questions about her case and then turned the telephone over to Sweet. He dove right in, asking Sunnycalb if Penton discussed any details about the Reyes case.
Providing details that only the killer and those who investigated the crime should know was the first test of an informant’s reliability. Sunnycalb got Sweet’s attention when he said that Penton told him he’d abducted Roxann from a field behind an apartment complex in Garland. Of course, that had been reported in the media and could have been seen by Sunnycalb or Penton, but it was an obscure detail repeated thirteen years after the incident. Sweet felt his heart start to beat a bit faster.
Then Sunnycalb claimed that his cellmate boasted about keeping the little girl in his van for three days, repeatedly raping her, before he strangled her. After that, Penton told him that he threw her body over a fence into a wooded field near rural Murphy, Texas.
Again, Sunnycalb’s information was acc
urate and noteworthy. Although there were only skeletal remains, the cause of death was “assumed” to be strangulation or asphyxiation because there was no evidence of gun, knife, or blunt trauma wounds. The inmate’s knowledge about the location of the body was even more interesting; the tiny burg of Murphy wasn’t exactly the sort of name someone would draw out of a hat. The informant had even added a detail to what was known; Roxann’s skeletal remains weren’t found for a year after she disappeared, so there was no evidence remaining of sexual assault, but it had been assumed.
“Did he say what she was wearing?” Sweet asked.
“A purple top and pink shorts,” Sunnycalb responded.
Sweet was careful not to react too much. He didn’t want the informant reading his response and adjusting his story accordingly. But the detective was excited; the description of Roxann’s clothing was withheld from the media, but Sunnycalb was spot on.
Sunnycalb said that Penton also bragged about abducting and murdering Christie Proctor and Christi Meeks. That, too, fit with the theory that the Proctor, Meeks, and Reyes cases were connected.
Then the informant added to the intrigue. Penton, he said, also described murdering a fourth child in Van Zandt County in northeast Texas. The Van Zandt County case didn’t ring a bell with Sweet, but he didn’t doubt that when he got a chance to look it up, he’d find it.
Sunnycalb had not missed yet. The question was whether the informant or Penton was making it all up—that one or the other had somehow learned these details through the media or someone on the outside and was using them for his own ends.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to get much more out of Sunnycalb. An automated voice broke into their conversation noting that the call would be terminated in one minute. Sweet gave Sunnycalb his telephone number at the Garland Police Department and asked him to call the next day. The automated voice noted that there were ten seconds left, and then the line went dead.
Placing the receiver down, Sweet turned to the others. “I’m pretty excited,” he admitted. “He knows details about the case that weren’t released to the public.”
Sweet’s enthusiasm rubbed off on Teft; after all, if Sunnycalb was right about the Reyes case, it boded well for her own. She noted that she had DNA evidence taken from her victim that had just been sent off to a laboratory for comparison to Penton’s DNA. If it came back positive, it could break all of the cases wide open.
In the meantime, her agency was sponsoring a meeting among any Texas law enforcement agencies with unsolved cases of missing or murdered children during the period of time Penton might have been in the area. Sweet said he’d be there.
A month later, on July 6, Sweet and Capt. Jody Lay, who headed the Garland PD Criminal Investigations Department, drove back to Fort Worth for the meeting at the Fort Worth Police Academy. Since that first conversation, Sweet had spoken to Sunnycalb a couple of times to clear up a few items. He’d also looked into Sunnycalb’s background, and what he found out nauseated him.
Teft had told him that Sunnycalb was a sex offender, but she hadn’t told him the details. He’d since learned that the would-be informant had “purchased” an eight-year-old girl from her parents for a case of beer and carton of cigarettes. He then brought her to his mobile home and made her his “wife,” even creating a marriage license on his computer. Sunnycalb was eventually caught and convicted for sexual assault on a minor and did a short stint in prison. When he got out, he located the girl again and moved her back in with him. He was caught and convicted again, and this time the judge sentenced him to twenty years.
Knowing that Sunnycalb was a pedophile made Sweet’s skin crawl. But as he’d learned from dealing with the likes of Michael Giles and a long list of other criminals, he had to put aside his true feelings and pretend to be a friend to gain Sunnycalb’s trust and find out what he needed to know.
Walking into an auditorium at the police academy, Sweet wasn’t sure what to expect. He knew that Teft had sent out a teletype to Texas law enforcement agencies regarding the purpose of the meeting, as well as information about Sunnycalb and a timeline of Penton’s known whereabouts as best as could be determined. But he was surprised at the large turnout of lawmen representing city police departments, county sheriff’s offices, and even the Texas Rangers.
Among those attending was Sgt. Mike Bradshaw of the Mesquite Police Department, an experienced detective and someone Sweet considered a friend. He was representing his agency’s interest in the Christi Meeks case. However, as far as Sweet could tell, no one was present from the Plano Police Department regarding the Christie Proctor abduction and murder. He wondered why but thought that perhaps the investigators there knew something he didn’t.
One by one, the officers present stood and spoke briefly about their cases, a sad litany of unsolved child abductions and murders. With the memory of Tammy Lopez’s voice in his head, Sweet knew that each case file represented a family’s torment and the lack of justice. When it was his turn, Sweet gave a quick review of what he knew about the Reyes case, including that David Penton had been listed as a possible suspect. He also noted the details that Sunnycalb had provided that matched the evidence, which he thought made it worth paying attention to what the inmate had to say.
However, he quickly learned, some of the other lawmen present already knew about both Penton and Sunnycalb, and they weren’t impressed. Several said that Penton had once been a suspect in their cases, too, but no one had been able to make a case against him or place him in the area at the time of the abductions.
The meeting concluded with Teft informing the others that she would let them know the results of the DNA testing as soon as they came in. If it came back a positive match for Penton, then Sunnycalb’s credibility would improve. If not, perhaps the description of him as untrustworthy was accurate.
Five days later, Detective Teft called with bad news. The DNA comparison was negative. Penton was not her killer. “We’re done,” she said. She wasn’t going to take Sunnycalb’s calls anymore.
Mike Bradshaw also called Sweet to say he was dropping out. He said he’d questioned Sunnycalb in the past, and he just didn’t trust the guy. For one thing, he said, sometimes they’d be talking and suddenly Sunnycalb would clam up, or it would take him awhile to answer a question, as if he had to think it through. But more damning was that Bradshaw had learned that Sunnycalb had put in an “open records” request to obtain information about the Texas cases. “The guy read about all this stuff he’s telling us. I’m just not dealing with him anymore.”
Sweet thought about what Bradshaw said. The sergeant was older and more experienced, as were many of the investigators from the other agencies who believed that Sunnycalb was just another lying convict. Maybe they were right; between being wrong about the Julie Fuller case and the open records revelation, it didn’t look good.
Still, Sweet wasn’t quite ready to give up. Maybe it was his inexperience; maybe he was just being naïve and hoping that the information would turn out to be true so that he could bring some closure to Roxann’s family. But it also felt like it was something he had to see to the end, that a greater power was pushing him, and he couldn’t let it go.
“I think I’m going to keep talking to him,” Sweet told Bradshaw.
There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then Bradshaw said, “Good for you. Go for it; it will be a good learning experience.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
July 12, 2000
The next time Sweet spoke to Sunnycalb, he challenged him about his claim that Penton was involved in the Julie Fuller abduction and murder.
“Look at the letter,” Sunnycalb retorted. “I didn’t say he did it, I said, ‘You would do well to consider him.’” He said he’d been trying to check out what Penton was telling him and had found Julie’s name on a list of missing children he’d been able to obtain in spite of his incarceration. He’d noticed some resemblance between her murder and Penton’s other boasts and thought it was worth
bringing to the attention of the Fort Worth police.
After getting off the telephone, Sweet called Det. Teft and asked her to send him a copy of Sunnycalb’s letter. When he read it, he saw that the informant had told him the truth; Sunnycalb only suggested that Penton was a possibility due to the similarity and timing of Julie Fuller’s murder to the other Texas cases.
Being right about his letter kept Sunnycalb’s credibility alive with Sweet. It was the beginning of a long series of telephone calls as Sunnycalb fed him information in bits and pieces.
During one of the first calls, Sweet asked Sunnycalb how the topic of murdering children had first come up with Penton. “We were watching the Oprah Winfrey show about the Christie Proctor case,” Sunnycalb recalled. “It was almost like he went into a trance when they started talking about it; then he started correcting the facts that they were getting wrong. That’s when he told me he did it.”
Sunnycalb said that Penton preferred certain kinds of victims. He liked darker-skinned kids—black, Hispanic and Asian—though he would take what was available; and he targeted low-income areas because “no one would give a shit” if those kids disappeared. He called them “throwaway kids.”
Sunnycalb conceded that he knew that Penton was a liar and probably embellished his brutality to impress other inmates. He said that Penton boasted about murdering as many as fifty young girls, beginning in South Korea, where he’d been stationed in the Army, and then throughout the Midwest and South. But judging from the cases in which Penton seemed to know the intimate details, Sunnycalb put the number of Penton’s victims at closer to twenty-five.
Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare Page 5