After three days of the media bashing his department, however, Garland Police Chief Larry Wilson called a press conference, at which time he showed the assembled reporters and photographers a video. As it turned out, one of the other responding officers had parked his vehicle in the middle of the street with its emergency lights on, which automatically starts the car’s dashboard camera. The camera caught the action just as Sanders walked in front of the car and then turned and came at the officer, raising the knives. At a distance of only six feet, Weands fired a single shot that struck the youth in the chest, killing him; the teen had literally fallen with his head on the officer’s shoe.
It was clear to Sweet that Weands had waited until the last second to defend himself, even ignored his training to do so. Police officers are taught that even at seven yards—three times the distance Sanders was when he turned on Weands—an assailant with a knife can close the space between them before an officer can stop him with a bullet.
When the Sanders family was shown the video by the media, they still insisted the shooting was unnecessary because the teen “didn’t lunge” at the officer. Other armchair “experts” in the public opined that at that distance, the officer could have just “wounded” Sanders by shooting him in the arm or leg. Obviously they had no real world experience in the difficulty of hitting a small, moving target, which, even if successful, wouldn’t necessarily stop an attack. But they, of course, all knew better.
However, the media understood what they were seeing and the criticisms aimed at the Garland Police Department went away. They’d just assumed that the police were in the wrong, but when shown the evidence, they changed their tune. There were no more interviews with the family. Sweet noted the irony that when the press saw that the shooting was justified, it simply wasn’t a good story anymore.
The Sanders case was followed in December by the murder of Keith Calloway, a homosexual black male who had been hog-tied and had his throat cut several times. Investigating the case was an eye-opener for Sweet, who found himself spending a lot of time in gay bars interviewing possible witnesses. It was a slice of life he’d never been exposed to, but he knew that Calloway liked going to the clubs, and Sweet believed that he had been killed by someone he picked up. He hoped that someone might have seen him with the suspect.
As much as he tried to look at the investigation as “just the job,” it was yet another murder that affected him personally. Meeting Calloway’s mother and stepfather, who’d raised him from the time he was a baby, and his brother, he knew they loved the victim, and their grief made it tough to disassociate himself. He never found the killer, though he had good DNA evidence that he entered into the national database in the hope that someday there would be a match. But he promised Calloway’s stepfather that he wouldn’t quit looking for Keith’s killer. Instead of the department’s “murder closet,” he kept the case file on his desk, next to Roxann’s inspiration book.
In May, Sweet decided it was time to find Roxann’s mother. He’d waited because he didn’t want to get her hopes up until he felt like he really had something. In fact, he would have waited longer still, but he needed something from her.
DNA analysis of the stains on the bundle of rags taken from the attic of Penton’s family home had revealed minute traces of blood, semen, saliva, and hair. The lab wanted genetic material from Roxann for comparison, but in 1988 DNA was virtually unknown, and the girl’s remains had been buried. The next best thing, however, would be a sample taken from her mother.
Tracking her by her social security number, Sweet learned that Lopez was working at a nursing home in Kaufman, Texas, about forty miles south of Garland. He drove to the nursing home, but she wasn’t there; however, the manager gave him her home address in Kemp, which was another ten miles to the southeast.
When he drove up to the single-wide trailer, Sweet was stunned to see a young girl of six or seven playing in the front yard. She looked like how he would have imagined Roxann to look at the same age. He realized that he was looking at a sister who’d been born after Roxann was abducted.
Sweet hadn’t called ahead, and Tammy Lopez seemed stunned when she answered the door and he introduced himself. He asked if she remembered calling him nearly three years earlier. She did, and then when he explained what was going on, she broke down and began to cry before inviting him into her home.
When she was able to pull herself together, Tammy said she was happy that someone was looking at the case again and seemed to be making progress. The rest of the world might have forgotten her little girl, but she had not. She lamented that she’d lost most of her photographs of Roxann in a fire and was grateful when Sweet said that there were several in the file at his office, including those he had in his inspiration book. “I’ll make you copies,” he promised.
They talked for a long time. As Lopez recalled the day her daughter disappeared, Sweet could tell that the abduction had changed her life, and not in a good way. She seemed … empty … and had obviously never recovered from the loss. However, she then surprised him by saying that she wasn’t convinced that the remains of the child found in a wooded field near Murphy, Texas, belonged to her daughter.
“What do you think happened to her?” Sweet asked.
“I think her father had her kidnapped and taken to Mexico,” Lopez replied.
Indecision troubled Sweet as he looked at the woman’s distraught face. She’d sounded hopeful and obviously wanted to believe that her daughter was alive somewhere so badly that she couldn’t accept the truth. She was a mother waiting for a miracle, and who was he to destroy that? But she couldn’t be insulated from reality if and when Penton was brought to trial for Roxann’s murder. She needed to accept the truth now, while she could deal with it away from a courtroom, away from the press. He shook his head and looked in her eyes as he quietly said, “No, she’s dead, and her father didn’t take her.”
Still, she resisted. Sweet understood. She was no different than all those families of missing children who set a place in front of the empty chair at the dinner table, who left the light on every night as a beacon for the lost, who refused to put away the stuffed animals and toys, or take the posters down from the walls of a child’s bedroom.
It didn’t matter that there never had been much hope the day a stranger changed her life. In 1999, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children released a report that every year 800,000 children were reported missing in the United States. Most, 97 percent, were taken by a parent, family member, or acquaintance, and 98 percent of those eventually returned home. The majority of those who didn’t were believed to be runaways.
However, a little more than one hundred children very year were considered the victims of a “stereotypical kidnapping” by a stranger, and most of those ended tragically with the victim exploited by the child sex-trafficking industry, or sexually assaulted and murdered. In the cases in which the perpetrator intended to rape and kill the child, time was of the essence for law enforcement to intervene. A Washington state study concluded that in 76 percent of the murders of an abducted child, the victim was killed within three hours; in 89 percent of the cases, the victim was murdered within twenty-four hours. But tragically, in 60 percent of the cases, more than two hours passed between someone realizing a child was missing and the police being notified. And by then, it was almost always too late.
Although Sweet was aware that one child, Tiffany Ibarra, abducted by Penton had lived to tell the story, she was the only known survivor of an encounter with him. Little Roxann had not been so lucky; her remains had been found in a field and identified by law enforcement. But for fourteen years, her mother had waited for her to come home; she needed proof.
So Sweet offered to show her the video of the steps the crime lab used to identify her remains in an era before DNA testing. She said she wanted to see it, but she also wanted her mother to be with her, so they postponed the viewing until her mother and stepfather could drive down from Ohio to support her.
In
July, Tammy, and her mom, Joyce, arrived at the Garland Police Department. Sweet and a crisis counselor escorted them to a conference room to view the video.
Fourteen years after her daughter broke down into a weeping mess when no kidnapper showed up at the airport with his hostage, Joyce Davis approached this meeting with both hope and trepidation. Hope because, according to her daughter, a detective was back working on the case, and trepidation because of what it might do to Tammy. Her tough, hard-working firstborn had never been the same after Roxann disappeared.
Joyce’s husband, Paul Davis, was the one who’d pointed out the connection between Penton and Roxann’s murder. In 1990, he’d been driving back to Minford from a job in Columbus, when he stopped to get gas and saw a somehow-familiar face of a man staring out at him from the front page of a Columbus newspaper. There, in black and white, was the spitting image of the sketch the police artist had drawn from Julia Diaz’s description of Roxann’s kidnapper. Only it was a photograph of David Penton, who the story said had been arrested for the murder of Nydra Ross and was a fugitive from Texas for shaking his son to death. Paul turned around and drove to the Columbus Police Department headquarters and told the detectives investigating the Ross murder about Roxann and pointed out the similarities between Penton’s mugshot and the sketch.
That had been a long time ago, so long that Joyce had given up any hope that something would come of it. Every day, she looked at her photograph of Roxann and prayed for her. Now, she and Tammy were at the Garland Police Department talking to a detective, who had seen the Columbus newspaper articles and was connecting the dots back to her granddaughter’s murder.
The crime destroyed Tammy’s marriage to Sergio Reyes. Sometimes tragedies draw couples closer to deal with it together, but others are torn apart. The Reyes’ heard the whispers from others, saw the letters to the editor of the newspaper blaming them for what happened, even suggesting that one and/or the other had something to do with it. But what they couldn’t overcome was the blame they placed on each other, and that led to divorce.
Tammy had since remarried, and she and her husband, Jesus Lopez, had two children, a boy and the girl who made Sweet do a double-take when he saw her playing in the yard. However, Tammy had changed. She was no longer motivated to do anything with her life; she couldn’t hold a job and didn’t care. She cried a lot for her lost child.
After Roxann’s remains were found scattered in the field where she’d been discarded, Tammy refused to accept them as her daughter’s. Not even the long dark hair with the clip that Roxann had worn in it convinced her. At the funeral services, she wanted to open the casket containing her daughter’s skeleton. “That’s not my baby in there,” she’d insisted.
Tammy couldn’t bear the thought of Roxann’s murder. So she came up with a different theory: that her former husband, Sergio Reyes, had spirited their daughter back to Mexico and that she still lived; that someday there would be a joyous reunion.
Now, Det. Sweet was going to prove to her that the remains were Roxann’s, and Joyce was worried about how her daughter would react. But if that’s what it took to make this monster—this David Penton, if he was the guy—pay for what he did to Roxann, then Tammy was going to have to be brave and come to grips with the truth.
After everyone had settled into a seat, Sweet showed the video that had been taken of the examination of Roxann’s remains. Some of the identification process was a visual inspection of the skeleton. Searchers found most of her bones, as well as her long dark hair with a hair clip still in place; the skull still had all of its teeth intact, revealing a distinctive space between the two top front teeth, which matched Roxann’s dental history.
However, the main method of identification was through photo superimposition. Basically, the technique involved superimposing a photograph of the victim, in this case Roxann, over a photograph of the skull found in the field. By matching certain features of the skull with those on the photograph, an analyst could say whether it was a match to a high degree of certainty—enough certainty that the technique was widely accepted for identification in most courts in the world.
As they watched the video, Tammy Lopez and her mother both began to cry. It was difficult for Sweet to see, and he felt guilty knowing that he was destroying whatever hopes she had that her daughter was still alive. But he also believed that she needed to know the truth. He would have wanted to know if their positions were reversed, and she deserved that, too. And it could be important if Penton was brought to trial.
When the video finished, Tammy Lopez wiped her tears off her face and nodded to Sweet. “I believe you,” she said, her voice hoarse and subdued.
“I don’t understand why you weren’t shown this video before,” Sweet said.
Lopez shrugged. “I guess they were trying to spare my feelings.”
“I don’t agree with that philosophy,” he replied. “I think you have the right to see anything involving your child. Is there anything else you’d like to see now?”
Tammy thought about it for a moment. “I’d like to see the composite drawing,” she said. “I was in the room when it was done, and I want to see it again.”
Sweet opened his “inspiration” notebook to the sketch of the suspect. Lopez reached over and touched the face above the right eye. “I remember the mole that Julia described.”
The detective looked where she was pointing. He hadn’t noticed the mole before, but he could see that the artist had, indeed, drawn one.
The only photograph he had of Penton was his booking mugshot from his 1989 arrest in Ohio; his hair covered his forehead in that picture. Sweet excused himself, and while Lopez talked to the crisis counselor, he ran to his computer and pulled up a more recent photograph taken of Penton from his Ohio prison record. Sure enough, a distinctive mole stood out above his right eyebrow.
Sweet called Bradshaw in Mesquite and told him about the mole. Bradshaw immediately recalled what Tiffany Easter had said about a mole on the suspect’s cheek. She was only nine years old at the time and severely traumatized; it wouldn’t have been unusual for her to remember the mole without recalling exactly where it had been on the suspect’s face three months after the kidnapping. He looked in his files at the mugshots he had of Penton, but hair covered the area above his right eye. Then he called up the same photograph from the Ohio prison that Sweet was looking at, and sure enough, the mole stood out on the killer’s face like the mark of Cain.
It was an important detail, and one that Sweet had almost missed. Once again, fate or divine providence had intervened so that Tammy Lopez wanted to see an old composite drawing and pointed out the mole. It was a distinctive physical characteristic that eyewitnesses, Julia Diaz and Tiffany Easter, had described, even if Easter had described the mole being on his cheek. After all, she’d been a frightened nine-year-old child.
Sweet would later track down the police artist who did the sketch from Julia’s description. She, too, remembered the nine-year-old child’s description of the man with the mole on his face. It was no accident she’d drawn it above his right eyebrow.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
June 2002
Sweet couldn’t believe his ears. Along with Bradshaw and polygraph operator Bill Parker, a retired police officer who was now in business for himself, he’d flown to Ohio to take final statements from Sunnycalb, Korecky, and Wasmus. The statements were necessary in case any of the informants were called to the witness stand and then reneged on what they’d said or changed their stories. But there was a hitch. Through his attorney, Sunnycalb had just presented a list of demands that he wanted met or, he said, he and the other two weren’t going to cooperate.
Furious, Sweet would have kicked Sunnycalb’s flabby ass right then and there if he could have gotten away with it. They were paying Parker a hundred and fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses, and Sweet was thinking about how he would now have to explain to his supervisors why all that money was spent and he had nothing to show for it.
Although disappointed, Sweet still felt like they had enough of a case to charge Penton when he met that same month with Dallas assistant district attorney Jane Whitaker to discuss the case. Whitaker was what they called an “intake ADA,” who was responsible for the initial assessment of a case before it was assigned to a prosecuting assistant district attorney to be taken before a grand jury. It was her job to review the evidence, make sure the detectives had crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s, and if necessary go back out and get more evidence. She was a matter-of-fact professional with a reputation for being tough but fair.
After Sweet talked about the cases, Whitaker agreed that there was probably enough evidence to go to the grand jury. But, she added, there was more work for the detectives to do before she’d recommend it; she wanted them to pull the cases apart so she could judge each on its separate merits.
So Sweet and the others went back to tie up loose ends, working together due to the intertwined nature of the investigation, but each handling the details associated with their respective cases: Sweet taking care of Reyes; Bradshaw and Phillips handling Meeks; and a newly invited member of the team, Plano police Det. Billy Meeks, to work the Proctor case.
Meeks, who’d joined the Plano department in 1980 and made detective five years after that, had off and on been part of the Proctor investigation since 1988, when her skeletal remains were discovered under a burned mattress. He’d helped process the crime scene, including the painstaking job of sifting the ground looking for bones and related evidence two years after her abduction near Dobie Elementary School.
Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare Page 12