Authors: Steve Jackson
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 He was gloomy and withdrawn.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, hoping 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 mother-fucking 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 the 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
W
earing 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.
Other murder cases had come and gone, each with its own sad ending, each deserving of his efforts to find justice. Killers like Michael Giles committed their atrocities and, he’d helped put them behind bars. But the murder of Roxann Reyes and the other two little girls stuck with him like no others. And what made it worse was the thought of Penton sitting in his cell, “getting off” as he relived his depraved cruelty, and nobody holding him accountable for it. But he had more than he could handle alone and felt that partnering with Bruce Bradshaw, who’d been involved in the case from the beginning, was another example of divine intervention.
Sweet found a kindred spirit in Bradshaw. They were both devout Christians and devoted to finding a child killer. Sweet told him about Tiffany Ibarra and asked if he knew that Penton’s sister, Amanda, had moved to Oklahoma and that her brother, David, had visited her there.
“She gave a statement to Columbus PD saying she was afraid when he’d visit and didn’t want her kids around him. She also said she thought he killed the kids in Texas.”
If true, it meant that Tiffany Ibarra could connect Penton to committing crimes in the Dallas area, and Penton’s own sister said he’d visited her in Oklahoma.
Sweet showed him Amanda’s statement and then brought out the photographs from Penton’s album that had been sent to him by Ohio prison investigator Shea Harris. One of the photographs showed Penton standing next to the gray, four-door Datsun, which matched the description of the suspect’s car in the Reyes cases. He then handed Bradshaw the title to a Datsun four-door registered to David Penton. The car driven by the kidnapper in the Meeks case had been described as small and either yellow or gray.
Sweet was obviously excited about the information he’d put together, but Bradshaw was skeptical. He’d investigated numerous other suspects only to be disappointed in the end. Still, the new information put Penton in Oklahoma and possibly the Dallas area; they needed to check it out.
With Sweet present, Bradshaw had talked to Sprague, who was now the assistant chief at the Mesquite Police Department. Sprague was one of the best detectives Bradshaw had ever met, and he wanted his opinion on how to proceed. When Bradshaw and Sweet laid out the story and told Sprague that they wanted to travel to Ohio to talk to Sunnycalb in person, the supervisor didn’t hesitate. “Go,” he said and that’s how they ended up sitting in a prison visiting room, waiting to talk to a pedophile.
Sweet had flown to Ohio the day before with another Garland police detective, Matt Myers, who was a native of Cleveland, which they thought might come in handy for getting around the state, but he’d also once worked for the juvenile division and had some insight on how pedophiles thought. Bradshaw and Don Phillips, a young Mesquite detective who Bradshaw had asked to help him with the Penton case, flew up the next day and met them at the prison. Sweet and Bradshaw would talk to the inmates while Myers and Phillips gathered records from prison investigators on the inmates they were interviewing.
One problem with pretending to be visitors was that Sunnycalb didn’t know what they looked like and yet he was supposed to be acting like they were old friends. So Harris showed Sweet and Bradshaw where to sit, and then the informant was told where to find them so that he could pretend he knew them.
Having seen prison mugshots of Sunnycalb, Sweet recognized the paunchy, balding pedophile when he walked into the room. They all smiled and acted like best buddies who hadn’t seen each other in awhile. Sunnycalb had threatened to hug them so that he could feel for recording devices, and Sweet had told him to go ahead. But the inmate apparently decided it wasn’t necessary, and they all sat down after handshakes.
Sweet had been waiting for this moment since he’d first talked to the informant nearly four months earlier. So far, everything Sunnycalb said had checked out, and he’d recently passed yet another question about his credibility.
Detective Grisham had disparaged Sunnycalb’s information, saying that the inmate’s sister had filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the FBI and received some information about the cases as a result. Following up on the accusation, Sweet asked the FBI what Sunnycalb had seen. If the information he’d been giving Sweet was contained in the paperwork, it would destroy his trustworthiness. However, after looking at the records, it was clear that wherever Sunnycalb got his information, it wasn’t from the records request. For one thing, there was nothing in the paperwork about the Roxann Reyes case; the FBI had declined to send anything about it, stating it was still an “open case” and therefore not available. Why that same reasoning hadn’t applied to the information given to Sunnycalb about the Meeks and Proctor cases, Sweet didn’t know. However, even in those cases, witness names had been blacked out, and more importantly, there wasn’t anything in the papers regarding Tiffany Ibarra. The information could have come from only one source: David Penton.
Sweet asked Sunnycalb during one of their daily telephone calls why he’d requested the information, and once again the informant gave him a logical answer.
“I’m sitting in this cell listening to him talk about killing these little girls, and I wanted to know if he was telling the truth.”
Still, Sweet and Bradshaw wanted to meet Sunnycalb face to face and judge for themselves whether they thought the informant was being honest. There were so many things to watch for in person that couldn’t be done over the telephone, such as eye contact and body language. Most people’s eyes dart away when they lie. And Sunnycalb would not be able to claim that some other inmate had just walked up if he suddenly stopped talking. No good detective would ever completely rely on an interview that wasn’t conducted in person.
Over the next three hours, Sweet led the interrogation of the pedophile’s recollection of what Penton had said, with Bradshaw filling in with questions about the Christi Meeks case. The conversation went well. They bought Sunnycalb a soda from one of the vending machines, and, despite the proximity of other inmates, he seemed to feel comfortable talking. The other inmates seemed focused on their own visitors, and the tables were far enough apart that it would have taken a real, and probably obvious, effort to listen to someone else’s conversation.
In the end, Sweet believed that he was hearing the truth. The informant’s body language and eye contact were good, and more significantly, his story stayed consistent and matched the evidence. Sweet was able to reconfirm what Sunnycalb knew about the Reyes case, plus there was one new bit of information. Sunnycalb said that Penton had told him that he originally planned to abduct Julia Diaz and settled for Roxann only after the older girl got away. That confirmed what Julia had told Sweet about Penton chasing her.
Sweet could also tell that Bradshaw was excited with what he was hearing about the Meeks case. Sunnycalb sold Bradshaw on his credibility when the detective asked if Penton ever described what was written on Christi Meeks’ T-shirt.
“Color Me Rainbow,” Sunnycalb said without hesitating.
Although the description of Christi’s clothing had been made public when she disappeared, the amount of time between her abduction and Sunnycalb’s statement indicated to Bradshaw that he’d heard it from someone else. And the most likely person was the killer.
The interview ended well. The detectives asked if he would take a lie detector test and he quickly agreed.
After Sunnycalb got up and walked out of the room, the detectives met in a private interview room with the first of the two new informants, David Korecky. Another pedophile, Korecky had been convicted of child molestation in 1986 in Sarasota, Florida. He was out of prison again when he was arrested and convicted in 1989 of molesting five children, boys and girls, aged 7 to 12, while baby-sitting and on camping trips working as a church youth counselor. He’d been sentenced to six one-year terms, but was again on the streets in 1994 when he raped two 10-year-old boys in Columbus, Ohio. He fled to Texas, where he kidnapped a young girl but was caught after leading police on a long chase.
A thin, nervous type of about 40, Korecky said he’d met Penton two years earlier. They’d both been in the Army, and that was their initial connection. However, it wasn’t long before Penton began talking about raping and killing little girls. He’d started by savoring every detail of his attack on Nydra Ross. Then he’d moved on to talking about other murders in Texas, as well as Louisiana and Arkansas.
Penton also liked to boast about how smart he was, Korecky said, and how he’d carefully planned his atrocities by scouting out places to take the girls, where he could assault and murder them at his leisure and then dump the bodies. The killer was careful to cross jurisdictional lines after abducting his victims and then throwing them away like broken toys. That way he’d take advantage of the lack of communication between law enforcement agencies. “He likes to brag about how he’d beaten the system and had never been caught,” Korecky said.
If that was true, Sweet asked, how did Penton explain that he’d been convicted of murdering Nydra Ross? He never admitted killing her, Korecky explained, and in Penton’s warped mind, if he didn’t admit it, the police didn’t “get” him.
The detectives were soon convinced that Korecky was also telling the truth. One critical sign that seasoned investigators look for when they have multiple witnesses who could be colluding on their stories are differences in their individual accounts. If they’re exactly the same, it raises a red flag that the stories are rehearsed. In fact, Sweet and Bradshaw had talked about the possibility that Sunnycalb had coached the new informants to make himself appear more credible. However, that didn’t appear to be the case with Korecky.
Calm and confident as he spoke, his recollections of what Penton had told him had enough small differences from Sunnycalb’s accounts to ring true. He’d also described in at least as much detail where the bodies of Roxann Reyes and Christie Proctor had been dumped.
Still, it was the information he didn’t have that made him more believable. He said he’d never heard of Christi Meeks. Even when pressed by Bradshaw, the informant didn’t deviate from his contention that he didn’t know anything about that case. If he was trying to impress the detective, he would have said what he thought Bradshaw wanted to hear. He, too, agreed to take a polygraph test.
After six hours of listening to two child molesters talk about the depredations of a different kind of monster, the detectives called it a day. They met up with detectives Myers and Phillips and then proceeded to a prison office, where they talked to Shea Harris. That’s where the others filled Sweet and Bradshaw in on the details of the inmate informants’ convictions.
The next morning, the detectives returned to the prison to talk to the third informant, another pedophile named William Wasmus. A former televangelist, Wasmus’ arrest and subsequent conviction on seventeen counts of sex with minors, including raping a two-year-old boy, had been a big media story in Ohio. He’d been sentenced to 104 to 269 years in prison for his crimes.
Meek and mousy, Wasmus said Penton had talked about all three Texas murders. He said he’d met the killer three years earlier and immediately started hearing about the details of the killings. He repeated some of what they’d already heard from Sunnycalb and Korecky, with just enough differences and additions to be believable. But for some reason, Sweet found him to be “creepier” than the others.
Leaving the prison, the four detectives thought the trip had been a success, but there was a concern about what sort of witnesses they would make in court. All three had agreed to take lie-detector tests, but the tests weren’t admissible in court. The men were believable, but they were also pedophiles, and there was no telling how a jury would react to testimony from child molesters.
Although finished at the prison, the investigators weren’t done in Ohio. They drove to Columbus Police Department where they were given the Nydra Ross file to review. The similarities to their cases stood out clearly. When they finished with the file, the detectives had one more errand they wanted to accomplish before they went back to Texas. Sunnycalb had told Sweet that Penton once said that if he ever needed to hide something from the police, the best place was under the insulation in an attic.
“They’ll never dig through the insulation,”
Sunnycalb quoted his former cellmate. So with the help of the Columbus Police Department, the Texans obtained a warrant to search his family’s former home.