Bogeyman: He Was Every Parent's Nightmare

by Steve Jackson

  Not long after that, he first heard the name David Penton, who’d just been arrested for the murder of Nydra Ross in Ohio. A Columbus police detective called the Plano PD about a possible connection between Penton and child murders in Texas. There were some differences between the Ohio case and Christie Proctor that didn’t necessarily shout “serial killer”—the races of the victims and the circumstances around the abductions—but there were also similarities, such as crossing jurisdictional lines and depositing the bodies in remote, wooded creek beds.

  However, the Plano investigators weren’t able to put together a case on Penton at that time. Nor, for that matter, in later years, though several detectives had been assigned to the case and worked it when new information continued to drift in over the years. Although never specifically given the lead in the case, Meeks had gone as backup with Grisham to Ohio in the failed attempt to talk to Sunnycalb, and he’d even spoken briefly to Tiffany Ibarra when the other detective was trying to corroborate her story. Yet, there remained too many missing pieces.

  Meeks was a great addition to the team. He’d grown up in the hard-knocks Dallas neighborhood of Pleasant Grove, where it seemed like the career choices were: cop or criminal. He was the kid who always wanted to be the police officer, whether it was playing cops and robbers with his buddies or when he dreamed of the future. As a detective, he prided himself on always trying to do his best and his work ethic.

  The variety of his experience made him an asset to the Penton investigation. As a detective, he’d been assigned to a variety of units within the Plano detectives bureau—juvenile, property, narcotics, and crimes-against-persons as a homicide investigator. In 1997, he’d been asked to work with FBI and DEA task forces investigating drug-related deaths. With the feds, he’d learned how to integrate multiple agencies to share information and work as a cohesive unit, which helped when he got a call from Sweet and Bradshaw. They said they were looking into the murders of Christi Meeks and Roxann Reyes; they knew that the Christie Proctor case was thought to be connected and wanted to know if he’d consider joining forces. He jumped at the chance and invited them to meet with him in the Plano PD “war room,” used for multi-media strategy sessions. Before they left Plano that day, they all had copies of each other’s files, and a plan on how to proceed as a team.

  Bradshaw and Phillips were particularly busy following up loose ends on the Christi Meeks case. They drove to Oklahoma, where Penton’s now-former brother-in-law, Andrew, still lived. The man described to the detectives how on the way home from work with him, Penton always wanted to drive around schools looking at young girls and fantasizing about raping and then killing them. In particular, he said, they haunted Catholic schools and commented on the short uniform dresses. He said he thought it was all a dark fantasy but apparently more than that to Penton.

  Bradshaw and Phillips also drove to Arkansas to talk to Penton’s sister, Amanda. She confirmed that she and her ex-husband had been living in Oklahoma, near Waynoka, when Christi Meeks disappeared.

  One of the trips taken by the Mesquite detectives only added to some of the confusion when they went to the Fort Hood-Killen area and spoke to Kyong. This time, Penton’s second wife remembered that early in January 1985 she and her ex-husband purchased a Datsun sedan. Her husband had then disappeared for about two weeks; she assumed he’d gone to Fort Bliss in Louisiana to visit his friends.

  The Mesquite detectives used the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) from the title Sweet had in his possession and tried to trace the car. They eventually found it in Kentucky and asked an FBI forensics team to search it for evidence, such as old bloodstains. No evidence was located, but the FBI sent them a photograph of the car. Only it wasn’t gray, it was brown with a yellow racing stripe along the side.

  The discrepancy didn’t rule out that the car had been repainted or that Penton had used a different car. The two young Hispanic boys who reported seeing Christi get in a car with a stranger were confused about the color, one saying it was gray and the other that it was yellow. Also, Kyong said Penton was a good mechanic and often worked on cars owned by his friends and neighbors, sometimes keeping the vehicles for a period of time to use.

  The detectives never got around to pulling the cases apart for Whitaker. Instead, five more months passed between meeting with her and returning to Ohio to get official statements from the informants. And now after all the work they’d put into the investigation, including the time spent on the telephone in almost daily calls from Sunnycalb, the inmate wanted to play games.

  Most of Sunnycalb’s list was a bunch of penny-ante bullshit—small items he and his fellow informants wanted to make their lives more comfortable in prison—but they also wanted to be subpoenaed to Texas to testify before the grand jury. Sweet couldn’t agree to any of it without talking to the prosecutors in Texas, but he wasn’t even inclined to ask.

  Since the day he started talking to Sunnycalb, Sweet had known that the informant’s motivations weren’t altruistic. Sunnycalb was looking out for Sunnycalb. All throughout their dealings, the informant wanted the detective to make telephone calls and write letters on his behalf to the judge and prosecutor from his case and let them know what a great help he’d been. He was clever about it, too, insisting that Sweet write and then send them to him so that he could read what he said before he mailed them.

  Sweet didn’t want to turn the informant down and have him decide not to cooperate, but neither did he want to help a twice-convicted pedophile get out of prison any time soon. So while he wrote the letters and gave them to Sunnycalb to read and mail, he also called the men and explained the circumstances. They laughed and thanked him for the explanation.

  Now, looking at the list of demands Sunnycalb had made in exchange for his cooperation, Sweet shook his head. He tossed the list of demands back to the lawyer. “I’m not even going to ask.”

  Sunnycalb’s attorney agreed with the detective and tried to reason with his client. But Sunnycalb was adamant: Meet his demands or he and his friends weren’t talking.

  With angry Texas lawmen sitting in his office, prison investigator Shea Harris wasn’t taking Sunnycalb’s extortion attempt lightly. He had the three inmates thrown in solitary confinement for hindering an investigation. But it didn’t help Sweet with the issue of going back to his boss with empty hands.

  Later, Sweet would come to look upon Sunnycalb’s recalcitrant behavior as another instance of divine intervention. But at the time, he tried to think of how to recover from the setback by asking Harris a simple question. “Can you think of any other former cellmates we can talk to?”

  Harris thought about it for a moment and then nodded. He picked up the telephone and asked that an inmate named Tony Baker be brought to his office. Baker wasn’t a pedophile or a sex offender; in fact, he was a simple burglar who’d run afoul of a prison gang and had been placed in the Protective Custody unit for his safety.

  As soon as the detectives explained what they wanted, Baker agreed to talk. He didn’t like Penton. In fact, Penton talked so much about raping and killing kids that he’d once grabbed the monster and shoved him up against a wall. “I told him I didn’t want to hear any more.”

  Although he wasn’t as detailed as some of the other inmates were—“I tried not to listen”—Baker did describe what Penton had told him about killing little girls in Texas and added that his former cellmate also discussed killing children in Arkansas and Louisiana. “He’s obsessed with talking about it,” he said.

  Baker was a godsend. Not only was he verifying the same information the three convicts now cooling their heels in the hole had given, he hadn’t come to the detectives with the information. No defense lawyer could say he was trying to make a deal or getting even with Penton for some grudge. Plus, a burglar would come off better in front of a jury than a pedophile.

  The next day, their luck got even better when Harris called again. He’d remembered that prior to Sunnycalb, Penton had shared a cell with a former
cop who had already assisted prison authorities with breaking up drug rings in the prison. The detectives drove back to the prison, this time to meet with Timothy Creighton.

  A non-descript man in his fifties, Creighton was a decorated Vietnam War veteran and had worked for the Bethel, Ohio, police department. According to Harris, the story was that a friend asked Creighton to go with him to a drug house to get some money that was owed to him. Apparently, things went sideways; the friend ended up getting shot, the drug dealer was killed, and Creighton ended up with the money. He was then tried and convicted of murder.

  Former police officers are always at risk in a prison environment, and so Creighton was placed in the Protective Custody Unit. That was when he was stuck in a cell with Penton.

  When Sweet explained why he and his partners were at the prison, Creighton didn’t seem the least bit surprised. “What took you so long?” he asked. “I’ve been wondering when someone would get around to asking me about Penton.” He said that Penton talked about almost nothing else except raping and killing children. Even if the conversation started on another topic, he said, within a short time his former cellmate would turn it to his favorite horrific subject.

  Creighton said he first met Penton when the other inmate approached and asked if he had been a cop. Apparently believing that the “convict code” was stronger than Creighton’s ties to his former occupation, Penton told him that authorities suspected him of murders in Texas and Louisiana. He was worried that some evidence would come back to haunt him; in particular, he wanted to know how long DNA material, such as semen and blood, would remain on a victim’s body.

  “I told him it depended on how they’d been disposed,” Creighton said. “He said he’d dumped some in the open and put others in water.”

  The former police officer said he’d followed old habits and taken notes of his conversations, however he was secretive about it. He’d just listen while Penton talked and then write down what he said when the killer left the cell. Creighton couldn’t find his notes while the detectives were still in Ohio, but he said he would look for them.

  Instead of being a waste of time and money, the trip to Ohio had produced two more good witnesses. And they might not have talked to them if Sunnycalb had cooperated.

  Creighton eventually found his notes and mailed them to Sweet. One mentioned the Driftwood shopping center in Mesquite, where Penton said he would try and pick up young girls. This was important because Driftwood was an obscure, out-of-the-way mall and not a place Creighton would have likely pulled out of thin air.

  The notes also referred to Penton visiting a young woman on a street in Garland called Treeline. Sweet looked up Treeline on a map and went there to look around. He was disappointed to see that it was a new neighborhood, built after Penton was arrested in Ohio.

  Creighton’s information seemed to be wrong. However, Sweet decided to call the prison and ask Harris to get the inmate on the telephone. The former police officer said that it was possible that he misheard Penton. But, he said, he believed that the street would have a name similar to Treeline.

  Sweet hung up and again went to check out a map. Roxann had been abducted from Walnut Street, and he had a hunch. Again, his instincts were right; one block over from Walnut was a street called Timberline. If it was the street that Creighton mentioned in his notes, it placed Penton in the neighborhood where Roxann met the bogeyman.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  August 6, 2002

  The sticky hot days of deep summer had seized the Gulf Coast and immediately assaulted the three detectives like a warm sponge to the face when they stepped out of the car in front of the ramshackle house. The entire dirt-poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the tiny Mississippi town of Bay of St. Louis could have used a coat of paint and a yard-cleaning, but they weren’t there on vacation or to look at the scenery.

  Stiff after riding all day and covering nearly six hundred miles in a mid-size sedan with two other large men, Sweet stretched his long frame and glanced at the unpainted house. The yard was overrun with weeds, the front screen door was partly off its hinges, and the screen was torn. There was no sign of life, and he wondered if anybody was home.

  Three months had passed since the trip to Ohio that had nearly been a bust when Sunnycalb decided to play games and make his demands. It had turned out to be a blessing in disguise because the result was they’d cast the net farther and come up with inmates Tony Baker and Tim Creighton, neither of them pedophiles, who both would make good witnesses.

  Since that trip, two of the three recalcitrant informants had undergone changes of heart; apparently time in the hole could be persuasive. Korecky had been the first to call and apologize; he said he’d cooperate with no more demands. He also offered that “there is another inmate who has information about the cases. He does not really want to talk to you right now, but I’m working on him, and I think he may come around.”

  The former television evangelist Wasmus told prison authorities he didn’t want to talk to the Texas detectives anymore. But a week after Korecky changed his mind, Sunnycalb called to say he, too, was sorry and would cooperate without asking for anything.

  Sweet had no choice but to accept Sunnycalb’s apology and then act like everything was cool between them. Even with the testimony of the other informants, he was the reason they’d gotten as far as they had, and he had the most information—sometimes being the sole link that tied one inmate’s details to another. His testimony would be vital at a trial.

  “Playing nice” with Sunnycalb rankled Sweet. But the incident was a good reminder that the twice-convicted pedophile couldn’t be trusted, even if he could be believed. Sunnycalb was taking a chance exposing a brutal sexual predator who murdered children, but he was doing it for his own ends.

  Now, as Sweet walked up to the house in Bay of St. Louis, his mind was on another witness. Someone who wasn’t a convict and couldn’t be accused by a defense attorney of trying to make a deal in exchange for testifying against Penton. Someone who had actually been in the clutches of the killer and lived to talk about it. He’d finally gotten the okay from his captain to travel to Mississippi to interview Tiffany Ibarra.

  As soon as he received permission, Sweet called Bradshaw to see if he could accompany him. The Mesquite detective had eagerly agreed and brought Phillips with him. Although Ibarra’s story was more important to the Proctor case—both girls were abducted from the same area in Dallas several days apart—the detectives knew that all of their cases were stronger when they were working all three of them together. The Proctor case didn’t directly help the Meeks or Reyes cases, but as part of the whole, it strengthened them all.

  When they left the Dallas area, the detectives didn’t head directly for Bay of St. Louis. First, they drove two hundred and seventy miles to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to talk to one of Penton’s former girlfriends he’d mentioned to Sunnycalb and Creighton. It was a loose end they had to tie up, but she really didn’t have much to say.

  The next day they turned the car around and headed south another five hundred and eighty miles to Bay of St. Louis, a town of about nine thousand inhabitants on the Gulf Coast. Nine hours after they started, they walked up to the Ibarra home, where they were met at the battered screen door by Tiffany’s mom, Theresa. Sweet explained why they had come, but she shook her head. “Honey, y’all just missed her. She moved with her boyfriend to Batesville, Arkansas.”

  The news was deflating. For the second time that summer, Sweet wondered how he was going to explain spending all that money on a road trip with nothing to show for it. He called his supervisor, Lt. Keith Thompson, who to his credit told Sweet to “do what you need to do.” Bradshaw’s supervisors told him the same thing.

  It was too late to start for Batesville, so the detectives decided they’d spend the night in Bay of St. Louis. The extra time gave them a chance to talk to Theresa Ibarra.

  Over the course of several hours, she told them about that day her daughter called her an
d said that a man had kidnapped her on the way to school. She also talked about its sad aftermath. Tiffany had survived, but she’d never been the same, said her mother. She blamed her daughter’s later problems with drug abuse and mental issues on the trauma of that day and then the days that followed when her classmate, Christie Proctor, disappeared. “She used to wake up from nightmares. She said she saw him in her dreams.”

  Tiffany wasn’t the only one in her family haunted by the memory. Her mother could recall almost word for word the statements she and her daughter had given to the police. Aware of the old maxim that it’s easy to remember the truth but difficult to recall a lie, especially after so much time had passed, Sweet knew she was being honest. But he didn’t rely just on his gut instinct as a detective.

  As with so many other aspects of this case, he had worked at linking the pieces so that together they formed an unbreakable chain leading to the conviction of Penton. Part of that was getting rid of the weak links. While the detectives were talking to Tiffany’s mother, her father, Carlos, came home from work. According to what Penton told Sunnycalb, Carlos Ibarra paid him to kidnap his daughter in order to scare her from being friendly to strangers. The detectives didn’t believe it but had to ask Carlos if it was true. As expected, he angrily denied the allegation. “Hell no, I’d never do that to my daughter,” he cursed.

  The detectives left for Batesville the next day. It was getting to be a long trip, cramped in the sedan, eating on the run, and no one had thought to pack enough extra clothing for an extended journey. But finally, they pulled up to another home, this time in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood, where a young woman was waiting for them in the driveway.

  Surprisingly, Sweet recognized Tiffany Ibarra. She looked a lot like her childhood photograph, just older.