Bogeyman (12 page)

Penton’s mother had moved out several years earlier, and another woman answered the door when the detectives dropped by. Sweet said that they were there to search the attic and explained why. “You go right ahead,” she agreed.

Phillips, Myers, and Sweet went up into the attic while Bradshaw talked to the homeowner. Oddly enough, the woman’s husband was in a back room watching television and never put in an appearance, even with three large men crawling around in his attic, pulling up the floorboards.

The woman told Bradshaw that she and her husband had heard rumors about David Penton and knew he’d lived there once. He decided to canvass the neighborhood to see if he could find anyone else who remembered the killer who’d lived among them.

At one point, the three detectives decided to take a break and came downstairs to find Bradshaw talking to a very pretty young woman and the older woman with her. During the conversation in the prison, Sunnycalb said that Penton told him that he’d lusted after a young Catholic school girl who lived on the same street as his mother’s house. Bradshaw now introduced the visitors as that girl, now grown up, and her mother.

Both women said they thought Penton was “creepy” back then. “I told her,” the older woman said, nodding towards her daughter, “to never be alone with him.”

“She didn’t have to,” the younger woman added, “even as a kid I knew he was bad news.”

The search of the attic took several hours. Finally, Phillips got down on his knees and reached under one of the floorboards. He pulled his hand back and held up what appeared to be just rags; however, they’d been neatly tied together with a piece of yarn that indicated there might be something inside. There wasn’t, but they could see stains on the cloth and confiscated them. The rags were given to Bradshaw and Phillips, who were flying out the next day, to take to a DNA analysis laboratory in Dallas.

On the flight back to Dallas, Sweet looked out of the window as the brown fields and leafless trees of winter passed beneath and thought about the coincidences, or divine intervention, that had brought him to this point, faced with the task of making an evil child killer account for his crimes. What were the chances that the only detective in the Garland office the day Det. Diane Teft of the Fort Worth Police Department called would be the one who would recognize Penton’s name? And why would he know the name? Because during a lunch break several years earlier, he’d wandered into the “murder closet” and discovered the Reyes case file gathering dust.

Who knew if another detective would have accepted Teft’s invitation to question Sunnycalb? Or, if another detective would have realized that the informant knew details about the crimes contained in the files?

Yet, it wasn’t another detective. It was Sweet who got the call. It was Sweet who stuck with it after others had given up. And it was Sweet who followed his gut instinct about Sunnycalb when others labeled the informant untrustworthy and a liar.

Now, it was Sweet who also could hear the plaintive voice of Roxann’s mother asking if there was any news about the daughter she’d lost. As the jet touched down in Dallas, he was more convinced than ever that God had given him the task of making the bogeyman pay for what he’d done.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

May 9, 2001

T
he first time Sweet talked to Roxann’s mother, Tammy Lopez, he had to disappoint her by saying there was nothing new with the case. Almost three years after that telephone call and six months after returning from Ohio and his face-to-face meeting with Sunnycalb, he decided it was time to let her know that things had changed.

As usual, he’d been delayed by his current caseload. Within days of getting back from Ohio, he was assigned to investigate an officer-involved shooting that had quickly erupted into a media firestorm. Early on the morning in question, the 911 dispatcher at the Garland Police Department received a call that a fifteen-year-old black male was tearing up his parents’ house after getting into an argument with his sister. The parents were gone; the youth was throwing belongings out onto the front yard and making threats.

When officers arrived on the scene, the young man, Justin Sanders, grabbed two large butcher knives. Bulling his way past the officer, D.S. Weands, the first responder to reach the front door, the teen ran outside. The officer followed Sanders at a safe distance, demanding that he put the knives down. The slow, foot pursuit circled the block and ended up back at its starting point, with Sanders declaring, “You might as well shoot me.” That’s when Weands shot and killed the youth, who, he said, had refused to drop the knives and had come at him.

The shooting immediately became sensationalized when the media picked up on the parents of Justin Sanders claiming that the shooting was unnecessary and racially motivated. It wasn’t enough that Weands could be heard three times on a dispatcher’s recording of the confrontation ordering the youth to drop the knives before he pulled the trigger. The media barrage aimed at the Garland Police Department portraying Sanders as an innocent teen and the officer as a trigger-happy killer lasted for several days. There were daily interviews with the family, who erected a huge sign in their yard stating: “The Garland Police Killed Justin Sanders.”

Although they did not say so publicly, the Garland Police Department knew that Sanders was no angel. A week before the shooting, his own family had reported that he’d held a knife to another teen’s throat, and he had a record for other crimes. However, that didn’t excuse the officer if he’d shot him without cause, and Sweet, who’d been assigned as lead investigator, was busy assembling the evidence to be taken to a grand jury.

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?”