The robbers left without shooting, but Bruce and Gail heard the story that night; when they went to pick up the girls, they were met at the front door by Gail’s mom and their daughters, talking all at once about their frightening experience. When they got home, the girls asked if they could sleep on the floor of their parents’ bedroom. So Bruce and Gail made up beds and then listened while Jodi and Laci repeated their story over and over again. Talking seemed to relieve the fear, and finally they were able to fall asleep, secure in the knowledge that their parents were nearby, which was more than their parents were able to do.
The robbery reminded the Bradshaws of the delicate the balance between life and death. Living with Christi and a trip to the ice cream store with a much-loved grandmother that could have ended horribly taught them to cherish family. The two tragic events actually brought them together and made them the strong, close-knit family they’d become. However, a darkness had entered all of their lives, and it would be many years before they could give it a name or chase it from their nightmares.
The lack of resolution in the case, however, was even tougher on Bob Holleman and his family. He was fixated on finding Christi’s killer, and up until the day he retired, he would call Bradshaw at home to talk about the case or ask him to go along to chase down a lead. As long as he had something to do that might solve the case, he was energized and sharp. He told Molly that as long as he stayed busy, he didn’t hurt.
However, when a lead came to nothing he’d sink down again, only lower. The officer who’d never missed a day now sometimes couldn’t get out of bed or stop crying. Molly believed it was because of the immense guilt he felt because not only had he not returned Christi safely home to her parents, he couldn’t even tell them who killed her. She knew these feelings were exacerbated when he’d come home and see his own children safe. He’d hug them and weep.
Then another tragedy compounded the torment Holleman was going through. About two years after Christi’s murder, he was called to a crisis situation as the department’s hostage negotiator. A distraught 16-year-old had locked herself into a bathroom at her parent’s home with a gun. Holleman stood on one side of the bathroom door and talked to her for several hours, trying to convince her that she had everything to live for. He later told Molly that he thought he had talked her out of killing herself when there was a moment of silence from the other side of the door, and then the sound of a gunshot. As he stood there in shock and horror, a pool of blood crept from beneath the door.
When he got home that night, he kept telling Molly, “I lost another one.” He didn’t have to explain what he meant.
It seemed like every time he turned around, Molly’s husband was absorbing another punch. When Christie Proctor and then Roxann Reyes disappeared, and it became apparent that a single killer was on the loose, he took it personally. He believed he should have caught the guy after Christi’s abduction and was ravaged by guilt that two more little girls were dead because he didn’t. Worse, he told Molly that they had a viable suspect, but couldn’t make a case against him.
Molly was losing her husband, and her children, including Michael, who was born in 1987, were losing their father. A month after Christi’s body was found, he showed up for Emily’s first birthday party, but was gone again as soon as it was over. Yet, he worried to the point of paranoia about their safety. At first he didn’t want them to go outside in the front yard without an adult; then he demanded that they be watched in the backyard, despite a tall, locked security fence. Finally, he bought a large dog to guard them.
Making matters worse, Bob became addicted to the painkiller hydrocodone, a habit that began when he needed dental work and continued afterward. He explained to Molly, “It keeps me from hurting. I don’t want to hurt anymore.”
After the teen’s suicide, Bob asked to be transferred out of the juvenile division and back to radio patrol. Some of that was for Molly’s sake. It wasn’t just the long, unpredictable hours, but also the physical and mental toll from his pursuit of Christi’s killer, along with his normal caseload and work as the hostage negotiator. She longed for some sense of normalcy in the family, and regular hours were a place to start.
Bob was looking forward to it for a different reason. He told her that he knew that he would stay busy for eight hours, every shift, and busy was what helped keep the darkness away. For a time, it seemed to work. But within a year, he was transferred into the narcotics unit, and with that the new normalcy went out the window. He worked day and night trying to catch drug dealers, confiscating their cars and seizing their money and drugs.
There were benefits to the new job. He stopped taking hydrocodone and seemed happier than he’d been since January 19, 1985. Friends and family noticed. He made sergeant while in the narcotics division and led a successful team “crushing crime” throughout the Dallas area.
Still, Christi Meeks continued to haunt him. As he’d explain it to Molly, what did he care if some dope dealer got away with his crimes, he or some other cop would get him eventually. “It doesn’t bother me that some guy sells a bag of marijuana,” he said. “What bothers me is a guy who kills kids.”
If he was having a good day, all it would take is the sight of a little girl who reminded him of the dead child, or sometimes nothing but a memory, and he’d sink like a stone back into depression. If he and Molly went to a restaurant, his eyes would constantly scan the faces of other customers and staff, looking for someone who matched the artist’s sketch of the killer. He even confessed that sometimes he would see a car similar to the description of the car the Meeks suspect was driving, and he’d follow it to see who got out and whether they were stalking children.
Years after the murder he was still looking at faces and following cars. He told his wife that he knew it was silly—the sketch was at best an approximate, and the killer, even if he lived in Texas, wouldn’t look like that anymore or be driving the same car. But he couldn’t help it, he said; he just wanted “that son of a bitch.”
The positive effects of working in the narcotics unit wore off. By Christmas 1989, Molly noticed he was falling back into bouts of depression that were more severe and closer together. He was cynical about the world and the people in it. He was gloomy and withdrawn.
By the beginning of the year, his demons had returned with a vengeance brought on by the approach of the anniversary of Christi’s abduction, the birthday of his own daughter, and a pair of tennis shoes his mother-in-law unwittingly bought for Emily. Pink Cabbage Patch Doll shoes.
Bob said he “hurt,” and again started looking to hydrocodone to numb the pain. Then he started talking about suicide, until one night he confronted Molly with a gun in his hand. She had Michael on her hip as he told her he was going to kill himself and wanted her to watch. Instead, she turned and left the room, shutting the door behind her. She took another step and then there was the sound of a shot. But he’d only done it to make her think he’d killed himself.
Molly didn’t know what to do. He had tried psychiatrists and counseling, but it wasn’t helping. She couldn’t take it anymore, and they separated soon after he threatened to make her watch him shoot himself.
Even after that, the abduction and murder of Christi Meeks continued to insert itself into her life, that of her children, and especially her estranged husband. It permeated everything Bob did, even his time with his children. When Emily and Michael came home from visiting their father on the fourth anniversary of Christi’s abduction, her daughter said they’d gone for a picnic, and then he’d taken them to the cemetery to put flowers on Christi’s grave.
When Molly questioned Bob about it, he told her he’d been going to the cemetery on the anniversary every year. He explained that killers had been known to visit the graves of their victims at such times. In fact, the first year he and Bradshaw had even set a microphone in some flowers at the gravestone in case the killer dropped by to say something to his victim. No one had shown, but Bob had returned every year since, too, hopin
g that someday he’d see the man from the artist’s sketch lurking there.
While other cops, like his partner, Bradshaw, and his supervisor, Lt. Larry Sprague, seemed to have the ability to put the case on a shelf when they came home, Bob couldn’t. It might not have been the only factor in why they finally divorced in 1990, but The Call certainly was a major influence. Even Bob acknowledged that January 19, 1985, was the end of life as he knew it.
On the fifth anniversary of Christi’s murder, Holleman, a gifted, thoughtful writer, wrote “A Letter to Christi’s Killer,” which was published in the January 1990 edition of D Magazine. He knew it was unlikely, he told Molly, but he hoped that somehow the monster who took Christi would see it.
“I think about you often, usually at the oddest moments—driving to the grocery, mowing the lawn, standing in line at the bank,” he wrote. “Your image unaccountably leaps to mind, produced by some randomly firing neuron in that section of my brain normally reserved for recurrent night terrors and childhood bogeymen. Since January 19, 1985, you have never been far from my mind. That day is indelibly etched in my psyche, as it must be in yours, but, of course, for different reasons.
“Let me introduce myself. I am a policeman, maybe you saw me on TV, babbling to some earnest reporter about ‘the incident.’ … Since 1985 I have moved on to different police assignments—three years investigating child sex crimes took an emotional toll that is frankly inexpressible. But there are some cases one never truly relinquishes.”
After describing the events of the day that Christi disappeared, Holleman went on.
“The weeks and months that followed are forever embedded in my memory. You will pardon the cliché ‘emotional roller coaster,’ but I have no other adequate means of describing the false starts, dead-end leads, and blind alleys my colleagues and I encountered during that terrible time. And worn clichés do little to convey the anguish of parents simultaneously consumed with hope, horror, and dread.
“The taking of any human life is tragic. But it is different when a child is killed. I do not know if you understand tragedy in its truest sense: real, visceral tragedy. As yet having been spared the loss of loved ones, I must confess that I possessed only an academic comprehension of the term until January 1985, and the sense of tragedy I feel now is but a pallid approximation of that inflicted upon the parents of Christi Meeks. You have educated me about other extreme emotions as well. As you might reasonably expect, I have a considerable amount of hatred for you.
“While you do not know me, I do know a little about you: your approximate age, height, weight, and hair color. These mundane details recorded on a crime report form the basis of our acquaintance. They represent the raw material, the monochromatic details from which we are expected to compose a completed portrait of you. In any police investigation the ‘canvas’ is added to by degrees. The bold brush strokes represent hard information gleaned from witnesses and physical evidence; the more subtle shadings are the result of experience in dealing with your kind.
“As you are doubtless aware, your portrait is presently far from finished, but
after several years of dealing with individuals who abuse, maim, and kill children, I have some inkling of your background. Laymen, repelled by the horror of these crimes, often have the mistaken impression that people like you bound fully grown from some wellspring of unfathomable evil. Some may even believe that an aberrant twisting of DNA doomed you to commit your offense. I can only speculate as to the horrors of your youth. Perhaps the atrocities you endured fomented a rage so profound that you were compelled to repeat them, to ‘act them out,’ as pop psychologists term it.
“It is easy to be seduced by pity for you, to want to see you only as a product of a disordered and abusive environment. This provides an explanation for your crime. And people desperately seek explanations for such horrific crimes. But an explanation, no matter how rational, does little to alter the brutal reality of your offense. I am deeply sorry for you. But do not expect forgiveness. Forgiveness implies a measure of understanding and mercy I am unable to muster.
“I often wonder how you feel, how you exist. I know you must fear the late-night knock at your door. The consuming dread must tear at you. Do you sleep soundly? Or have you awakened at some early morning hour, sweat-drenched, heart pounding, because of a child’s face thrust into your dreams? Do you remember? The face. That of a five-year-old girl.
“That face will reappear again and again, perhaps sometimes accompanied by another face as well—one you might not recognize, a visage vaguely defined and hazily indistinct. To suggest that your night terrors are caused by simple fear of capture does you an injustice; more sinister devils torture you. You have a conscience, albeit one stunted by abuse, and you know that you will be visited forever by an innocent, open, wondering face, and its avenging companion. Just as you are my nightmare, I am yours.”
Holleman retired from the Mesquite Police Department in 1998 after twenty years of service. Addicted to the painkiller oxycodone and battling depression, he almost didn’t make it that far.
The funny, kind gentleman Molly married, the brilliant, dedicated police officer who walked out of the door after The Call to look for a missing child, was himself missing. Shortly after their divorce, he called her and threatened her. “I’m coming over there, and when I get there, I’m going to blow your motherfucking head off.”
Holleman was arrested by his own department and charged with telephone harassment. He was told to attend anger management classes, which if he completed would result in the charge being dismissed. A class assignment was to write letters of apology to the people he’d wronged. One of the letters was to Molly, in which he took responsibility for their divorce. “I am sorry for all the pain I have caused you over the past 4-5 years,” he wrote. “I often dream about life the way it was before drugs messed me up so badly … like 1987 when Michael was born … you, our home and our kids. … I look back upon our years longingly.”
The letter was the beginning of the healing for Molly; it took some time, but she eventually forgave him. They became friends again, even after she remarried. Once upon a time, she’d fallen in love with him, and he was the father of her children. She decided she wasn’t going to abandon him or push him away. She knew what lay at the heart of his troubles.
Others did, too. Holleman had always loved working for Lt. Sprague, and the feeling was mutual. Loud and occasionally crass, Sprague also had a heart of gold, and he made sure that whatever demons drove Bob Holleman, he was able to retire honorably with his pension.
In 1987, Bradshaw was also promoted to sergeant and transferred to the jail. The effect of the Meeks case on Holleman had been sad to watch; Bob had been one of the most intelligent and empathetic cops he’d ever known.
Bradshaw lost touch with his former partner when Holleman retired, but he didn’t forget the Meeks case. Whenever a lead came in about Christi’s murder, or a similar case would be in the news, the detective assigned to the case would come to him for the history or to run a name past him.
In 1993, he transferred from the jail to the Crimes Against Persons Division. Shortly after the transfer, one of the young detectives who worked for him attended a homicide investigation course put on by Lt. Vernon Geberth, a renowned New York Police Department homicide detective and author. The young detective brought back a placard with an inscription on it from Geberth’s book that Bradshaw hung on the wall. It read: “Remember, we work for God.”
To Bradshaw, it meant that no matter who suffered death at the hands of another and whatever the circumstances, the truth needed to be known. It didn’t matter, he’d tell the detectives who worked for him, if the victim was a drug dealer or a little girl. No one deserved to be murdered or forgotten.
Any time tips came in about Christi’s murder, he and his men would run them down until the leads were exhausted. He maintained a file on the case that took up several drawers in a filing cabinet. And always, always, he prayed that someday t
he person who kidnapped and killed Christi Meeks would be found and brought to justice. Then Gary Sweet decided to drop by the office and dredged up a name from the past that he recognized: David Elliot Penton.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
November 8, 2000
Wearing casual shirts and jeans, the two detectives sat in the large open visiting room of the Warren Correctional Institute trying to look nonchalant. Sunnycalb had made it very clear; they were to dress and act as though they were just visitors, not detectives, or he wasn’t going to meet with them. He wouldn’t even see them in one of the prison’s private interview rooms because, he said, the other inmates would find out and assume that he was talking to the police. He didn’t want to be labeled a snitch.
Bradshaw had at first balked at Sunnycalb’s demands, but he gave in when Sweet pointed out what happened to Plano detectives Grisham and Billy Meeks when he discovered the hidden camera. They either played ball by his rules, or they could lose their star witness. And it wasn’t just Sunnycalb who might refuse to cooperate; two other inmates had come forward and agreed to be interviewed by the detectives, but they were taking their cues from Sunnycalb.
Sweet understood why Bradshaw and Holleman were haunted by the abduction and murder of Christi Meeks. The death of Roxanne Reyes had also been on his mind since the day he walked into the murder closet and looked in the two boxes of disorganized files that represented the extent of justice for a murdered child.
He was a family man, too, with his own daughters, and couldn’t imagine the pain he’d feel if some beast like Penton hurt them. Sometimes he would think about how desperate the parents of Penton’s victims must have felt when they couldn’t find or help their children. He knew the case had affected his own children—that they had less freedom than some of their friends because he always wanted to be able to get to them if they needed him.
Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare Page 10