Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare

by Steve Jackson

  Taken from her family, brutalized and murdered by a monster, and then disposed of like trash, Nydra Ross went missing for six months. Then that fall, a hunter stumbling through the foliage near the stream happened upon a human skeleton.

  The Marion County coroner quickly determined that the remains had been exposed to the elements as long as six months and that they belonged to a black girl, around ten years old, who stood four foot six inches. Investigators with the county sheriff’s office surmised that at long last, Nydra had been found. But to be sure, they took bone marrow and blood samples from Nydra’s mother and sent them to a lab in New York to be compared to the remains. It took until January 1989 to get the results, but they were conclusive: The murdered child was Nydra Ross.

  Even then, Penton wasn’t indicted and charged with aggravated murder and kidnapping until May 1990, as the Columbus PD homicide detectives meticulously put their case together. Penton’s trial started April 4, 1991, more than three-and-a-half years after Nydra’s body was found. He faced the death penalty in Ohio’s electric chair if convicted.

  Prosecutors in the case had several pieces of evidence to work with, including that he was the last person seen with her and the bloodstain found in his van. But the most critical, perhaps, was the testimony of several men who were in jail with Penton after he was arrested. Each took the stand and testified about what the suspect told them; their stories were similar enough to corroborate one another and yet different enough to not sound rehearsed. One said Penton told him that he’d talked Nydra into climbing into his van, where he then raped and strangled her. The other testified that Penton told him that when he attempted to have sex with the child, she resisted, so he’d struck her. At that point, Penton realized he couldn’t let her go, so he killed her.

  A little more than two weeks after the trial began, it ended with the jurors convicting Penton for aggravated murder and kidnapping. He then faced a second trial to determine if his crime met the legal justifications for him to be put to death.

  As with most states that have the death penalty, Ohio law required the second trial so that jurors could weigh so-called “aggravating factors” against “mitigating factors.” Presented by the prosecution through witness testimony and evidence, aggravating factors are circumstances about the crime that raise it to a level above other similar crimes, such as premeditation, evidence that the crime was committed to cover-up another crime, like rape, or that the murder was particularly “cruel, heinous, or depraved.” Oftentimes, evidence prohibited at the guilt/innocence trial—such as the defendant’s previous criminal history, or “victim impact” statements from family members—will come into play. Among those who testified against Penton in this phase were his two ex-wives, who said that he’d sexually molested his own daughters.

  After the prosecution has presented the aggravating factors, the defense then presents any mitigating circumstances. These can range from whether the defendant was using drugs or alcohol at the time of the crime, suffered from a brain injury or was mentally deficient, or was subjected to a particularly difficult childhood that impacted his ability to control himself or judge right from wrong. The jurors are then asked to determine if the mitigating circumstances outweigh the aggravating factors, and if not, whether the defendant “deserves” to die for the crime.

  Unlike some states, such as Texas, where the death penalty is a realistic possibility, prosecutors in Ohio didn’t often win those fights. In the end, the Penton jury decided that the aggravating factors did not outweigh the mitigating circumstances, thus Penton escaped the electric chair. Instead, he was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, which he began serving at the Marion Correctional Institute.

  As he familiarized himself with the Ross case, Sweet noted the similarities to his investigation, not just the modus operandi of the crime—the pattern of Penton’s kidnapping, rape, and strangulation of young girls—but also his behavior afterwards. In the Nydra Ross case, Penton had crossed jurisdictional lines, abducting the child in Columbus and then driving all the way into a rural part of Marion County before leaving the body in a wooded area, where it wasn’t found for months. If, as Sweet suspected, Penton was the killer in Texas, he’d followed the same pattern: taking his victims from one place and leaving them in another remote area, where the possibility of immediate discovery was remote.

  The Ross case also corroborated Sunnycalb’s assertion that Penton was obsessed with talking about his crimes. Instead of keeping his mouth shut, he’d almost immediately started bragging to other inmates in the Marion County jail. Sweet hoped that if he’d been so eager to boast about the Ross case and then to discuss other murders with Sunnycalb, Penton may have also discussed the Texas cases with other Ohio inmates. He put that aside as something to follow up on.

  Hoping to locate someone in law enforcement who could further shed some light on Penton’s possible connection to the Texas cases, Sweet called the police department in Columbus, Ohio. Detective Rick Sheasby had retired, but another detective gave Sweet his home telephone number to call.

  Sheasby was more than happy to talk to him about Penton. “I know he’s good for more than the Nydra Ross murder,” he said. He’d pegged Penton as a serial killer from the start, and Roxann’s grandparents had confirmed it, as far as Sheasby was concerned. Penton, of course, had denied it.

  Although he’d contacted Texas police agencies several times about his suspicions, Sheasby said it never went anywhere. He told Sweet he should look at the transcript of the interview between Penton’s then-28-year-old sister, Amanda, and Columbus PD Det. Rita Doberneck. The interview was conducted at Amanda’s home in Waynoka, Oklahoma, on August 11, 1988, more than a month before Nydra Ross’s body was found.

  Sweet was aware of the transcript, which he’d spotted in the Reyes case files. After speaking to Sheasby, he went back to review it. According to the document, Amanda told Doberneck that their father, Lathern Penton, disappeared two months before she was born. “He left for work and was never heard from again.” Her grandmother then moved in with the family and helped raise the children until her death in 1976; her mother then remarried a year later.

  Amanda told the detective that her brother, who was two years older, was her mother’s favorite. She said he’d been thrown out of a car in an accident when he was six months old and was in a coma for a time. He made a slow recovery and needed special care for so long that her mother once told her it was like raising two babies at once after Amanda was born. She attributed her brother’s higher place in her mother’s affections to his special needs. “David could do no wrong in my mother’s eyes, and if it was between me and David, I could do no right.”

  At first, her brother was behind other children in school, but soon caught up and became an “A” student. However, it didn’t last. “Almost overnight” his personality changed when he became a teenager; he began skipping school, and his grades dropped. He turned violent and was abusive towards his sister; his moods fluctuated wildly and without warning—calm one moment, agitated the next. Amanda recalled an incident when she’d come home from school and was standing at the top of the stairs in their home when her brother entered. “He looked at me with a wild look in his eyes. Then, he ran up the stairs and grabbed me and hung me over the banister. He did these things to me often.” She said that although Penton abused her physically, he never sexually molested her.

  Penton dropped out of school after failing a grade and realizing he would be in the same class as his sister. “He couldn’t handle that.” So he joined the Army.

  According to Amanda, her brother’s main male role model from the time he was about six until he left for the Army was a man he met through the Big Brother organization. The man took him camping and even on a trip to see the man’s mother in Washington, D.C. That man, according to Amanda, never married.

  Although the Army described Penton as a motivated soldier, Amanda told the detective that his personality continued to change for the worse
while in the service. He became more violent and prone to fits of rage. His vicious temper and “sadistic” nature carried over to his wife, Katherine.

  “David used to beat her in front of me. He did mean things to her. One day it was 110 degrees in Texas, and she was nine months pregnant; he drove her away in the car and forced her out. She had to walk all the way back home, and he locked her out.”

  Amanda claimed that her brother molested Katherine’s daughter from her first marriage, and that his wife left him when he molested their own infant daughter. He then married Kyong.

  After David Penton was discharged from the Army and on the run from authorities in Texas for the murder of his son, Amanda said, he moved back to Columbus, Ohio, into his mother’s home. Amanda and her husband, Andrew, were also living in Columbus at the time, and the two men worked together. Penton did the driving, and on the way home after work, he liked to cruise past elementary schools and playgrounds to watch the children. “He would point out various children to Andrew.”

  In January 1987, Amanda and her husband moved to Oklahoma and felt relieved to be away from her brother because of concerns about their own children. “I believe David is capable of hurting children. I believe that David did murder those children in Texas,” she told Doberneck. “I just hope you can prove it and get him locked up. I will not take my children to Columbus while David is there. So if you charge him with these murders, and he goes to prison for it, I hope you will let me know so that I can visit Columbus again. I don’t want my children around him; I don’t want them molested.”

  Amanda told Doberneck that her mother would never cooperate with the police. “She will always protect David no matter what.” She said she was aware that her mother’s husband had been cooperating with the police, but neither of them wanted her mother to know that they were talking to the authorities. However, she told the detective that she would help investigators if she could and would call if she thought of anything else that might be important.

  After reading through the transcript, Sweet called Amanda, hoping to ask a few questions of his own. She was back living in Columbus, Ohio, with her mother, and he hoped that with her brother in prison, she wouldn’t be afraid to talk. But she claimed that she couldn’t even remember being interviewed by Doberneck and denied that she’d ever said anything negative about her sibling. Instead, she claimed that her brother had visited her in Oklahoma several times, and there’d been no problems involving children—hers or anybody else’s.

  Hanging up, Sweet was again reminded of the Giles case and what it said about human beings and their motivations. He didn’t believe Amanda. Not her claim that she couldn’t remember being interviewed by a police detective. Not her denial of having ever accused her brother of any crimes or deviant behavior towards children.

  In Sweet’s opinion, the Doberneck transcript was too detailed with Penton’s personal history that it could have only come from a family member. Nor would it have made sense for the Columbus detective to create a story out of whole cloth and attribute it to a potentially important witness. How would Doberneck have even known enough to make up that Amanda’s husband and brother used to cruise elementary schools to watch children play? Or that Amanda and her husband had moved to Oklahoma to get away from her brother?

  Sweet suspected that Amanda’s denials stemmed from the fact that she was living in Columbus. The transcript made it obvious that she was afraid of her brother and wasn’t going to cross her mother, who believed that her son “could do no wrong.”

  Replacing the interview document in the box, Sweet dug up other papers associated with the Ohio case. He found an assessment created by an FBI profiler, who’d labeled Penton a “sexual sadist” with a high IQ who collected pornography. He was likely “to have been sexually abused before the age of ten. … and lives with his mother, parents, or an older woman.”

  Penton “likes Asians because they are from a submissive society and will go along with bizarre sex acts (and children will). … Intimidates women in relationships by threats of violence, instills fear through bizarre sex.”

  As a killer, Penton would be “neat, methodical, premeditated … who sets up the fantasy in his mind and acts when he finds a victim to fit it. But does not stalk the victim—is opportunist. … He will not risk kidnapping a victim who will resist; will entice and lure them quietly away if others are around. ” He would act alone: “likes violence, would not share.”

  Penton would also engage in anal intercourse and bondage “because his sexual thrill is fear of the victim.” He would not kill the victim after one sex act, but instead “take (the) victim to an area where he would feel secure enough to do it repeatedly.” A killer of this sort would carry out his attacks “in a place very familiar to him, such as a friend’s vacant house that he had a key to, (or) a vacant (abandoned) house that he knew about, not a wooded area unless extremely remote.”

  When through sexually assaulting his victims, he would “use methods that leave the least physical evidence—strangulation and suffocation, as opposed to stabbing or gunshot, will not risk cutting the body up unless the place where it is done involves no risk.” Then he would “dispose of the body in a preplanned place, not haphazardly dump it. … Will carefully, and methodically, get rid of body, evidence, and cover his tracks.”

  There was one piece of evidence Penton might create and keep, according to the profiler. Depending on his finances or access to equipment, he was likely to record or videotape his atrocities in order to re-enact the fantasy.

  A clever, pathological liar, Penton would also volunteer to search for the victim “even to the point of assuming leadership in the search.” He would stay in close contact with the police to monitor the progress of the investigation. “When interviewed he will interrogate the interrogator on the progress.”

  The profiler’s assessment stopped short of calling Penton a serial killer because he did not “strike regularly, such as monthly.”

  Sweet was not surprised that the report concluded that pursuing a killer like Penton would be “one of the most difficult cases to investigate and prove.” But he was convinced that he was working for a higher power and wasn’t about to be deterred.

  CHAPTER TEN

  July 24, 2000

  After talking to Sheasby and reviewing the documents from the Ohio investigation, Sweet’s next step fell closer to home. He decided it was time to interview Julia Diaz, who’d been picking flowers with Roxann and was chased by her abductor. Although thirteen years had passed, he hoped she would be able to pick that man out of a photo lineup, but first he had to find her.

  Signing on to the Garland Police Department records computer, Sweet checked to see if someone named Julia Diaz had any sort of contact with the city. There was no guarantee she still went by that name or lived in the area—she could have married or moved—but it was a start. Nothing came up. So he tried LexisNexis, a company that provided computer-assisted legal research assistance and was more up-to-date with current addresses. This time he was in luck; there was a Julia Diaz who was the right age and still living in Garland.

  Sweet drove to the address listed. No one answered the door, so he left his business card. A few hours later, he received a call from a woman who said she was Julia’s mother and wanted to know why he was looking for her daughter. After he explained, she said she would have Julia get back to him. It wasn’t long before he heard from the young woman. Yes, she said, she was the same person who’d been playing with Roxann Reyes when the man appeared and offered candy.

  The next day, accompanied by her mother, the 19-year-old woman walked into the Garland Police Department reception area. Sweet met them and guided them to an interview room, where he talked a little about the status of the case. He then began to question Julia, first asking her to talk about herself to put her at ease.

  Short with long, straight, dark hair, Julia Diaz had survived her brush with a killer to become an intelligent, attractive young woman. She said she was
working for an insurance company. She was nervous about discussing what had happened, “but I want to help if I can.”

  Julia said she had never forgotten the terror of the bogeyman chasing her or that he took her little friend away forever. She recalled what happened that day almost exactly as she had described it to a police officer when she was six years old.

  Sweet brought with him a photo lineup that included a picture of Penton as he’d looked in the late 1980s. He hoped that she’d be able to pick him out, but she warned him that she wasn’t sure she could remember the killer’s face; she’d done her best to block it out of her memory. He hesitated; if he showed her the lineup and she couldn’t identify Penton, it could cause trouble later at trial. So instead he asked if she would be willing to be hypnotized to help her recall that day, and the man, more clearly.

  Although uneasy about it, Julia agreed and a few days later she was hypnotized by Det. Keith Prinz. An experienced forensic hypnotist, Prinz took his time. When Diaz was under, he took her back to when she was six years old and had her describe the apartment she lived in and then the complex itself. Sitting in the room, Sweet was amazed at her detailed descriptions. He had no doubt that she was seeing her childhood home.

  Slowly, Prinz brought her up to that fateful day in November 1987 when she was outside playing with Roxann. Suddenly, Julia’s mood and demeanor changed; she became visibly upset and didn’t want to talk about what happened next. Gently, carefully, Prinz eased off into a more comfortable memory and then brought her forward again. This time, Julia described picking flowers with Roxann in a field across from the apartment complex when a man slowly drove up in a gray, four-door car and began talking to them. Then he got out of his car and asked if they wanted candy.

  Prinz asked her to describe the man, starting with his feet. She recalled that he was wearing black running shoes and a gray jogging suit. The hypnotist asked her to look up at the face of the man. She tried, but then her face contorted. It was painful for Sweet just to watch her struggle to see the face of the monster. Then she broke down and began to sob. It was as far as she could go, and Prinz had no choice but to bring her out of it.