Bogeyman (6 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

July 12, 2000

T
he next time Sweet spoke to Sunnycalb, he challenged him about his claim that Penton was involved in the Julie Fuller abduction and murder.

“Look at the letter,” Sunnycalb retorted. “I didn’t say he did it, I said, ‘You would do well to consider him.’” He said he’d been trying to check out what Penton was telling him and had found Julie’s name on a list of missing children he’d been able to obtain in spite of his incarceration. He’d noticed some resemblance between her murder and Penton’s other boasts and thought it was worth bringing to the attention of the Fort Worth police.

After getting off the telephone, Sweet called Det. Teft and asked her to send him a copy of Sunnycalb’s letter. When he read it, he saw that the informant had told him the truth; Sunnycalb only suggested that Penton was a possibility due to the similarity and timing of Julie Fuller’s murder to the other Texas cases.

Being right about his letter kept Sunnycalb’s credibility alive with Sweet. It was the beginning of a long series of telephone calls as Sunnycalb fed him information in bits and pieces.

During one of the first calls, Sweet asked Sunnycalb how the topic of murdering children had first come up with Penton. “We were watching the Oprah Winfrey show about the Christie Proctor case,” Sunnycalb recalled. “It was almost like he went into a trance when they started talking about it; then he started correcting the facts that they were getting wrong. That’s when he told me he did it.”

Sunnycalb said that Penton preferred certain kinds of victims. He liked darker-skinned kids—black, Hispanic and Asian—though he would take what was available; and he targeted low-income areas because “no one would give a shit” if those kids disappeared. He called them “throwaway kids.”

Sunnycalb conceded that he knew that Penton was a liar and probably embellished his brutality to impress other inmates. He said that Penton boasted about murdering as many as fifty young girls, beginning in South Korea, where he’d been stationed in the Army, and then throughout the Midwest and South. But judging from the cases in which Penton seemed to know the intimate details, Sunnycalb put the number of Penton’s victims at closer to twenty-five.

Sweet was stunned. Even with as much violence and horror as he’d experienced so far in his career, he had a hard time believing that Penton could have killed twenty-five little girls over a period of years.

The number paled in comparison to the world’s most prolific known serial child killers, such as three South Americans thought to hold that heinous distinction:
Luis “The Beast” Garavito
, reported to have raped and killed more than 400 street children;
Pedro “The Monster of the Andes” Alonson Lopez
, whose victims were said to number more than 300; and
Daniel Barbosa
, believed to have raped and killed 150. However, in the United States, with its modern law enforcement capabilities and inter-agency communication and computers—especially compared to countries where the disappearance of street children might go unnoticed—twenty-five victims was a staggering number. If true, or even on the low side, it meant that Penton was one of the worst, known serial child killers in U.S. history.

What’s more, it meant that Penton committed his crimes at a time when the issue of child abductions and murders was gaining national prominence. In the United States, instigated by infamous child abductions—such as the 1979 kidnapping and murder of six-year-old
Etan Patz
from New York City and the 1981 abduction and murder of six-year-old
Adam Walsh
from a Florida shopping mall—efforts to create a national law enforcement response to child abductions led to the creation in 1984 of the
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
. Paid for largely by the U.S. Justice Department, the purpose of the center was to become a national clearinghouse and resource for parents, law enforcement agencies, schools, and communities to assist in locating missing children and raise public awareness. The main tool was the FBI’s national crime computer to record, track, and share information, which previously were all efforts hampered by jurisdictional lines.

Other cases would make their way into the national consciousness about what had previously been a hidden epidemic, including that of Shannon Sherrill, the six-year-old whose October 1986 disappearance from her mother’s yard in Thorntown, Indiana, had become a national story even in those days before the internet. In Texas, relatives of Christi Meeks worked to bring widespread attention to her disappearance by establishing the Christi Meeks Foundation for Missing Children, which helped get the girl’s picture on billboards, milk cartons, and flyers.

However, some killers were better at flying under the radar than others, and it was difficult to link crimes committed in one state with those in another. Sunnycalb noted that Penton sometimes changed his stories a little bit, or seemed to mix up names, or didn’t always know the name of every victim he claimed to have raped and murdered.

But Penton was consistent and specific about some cases, and for those reasons, Sunnycalb was absolutely convinced that his former cellmate was responsible for the murders of Meeks, Proctor, and Reyes. He told Sweet that Penton referred to the girls by name and knew minute details, such as the clothes they’d been wearing, the dates and locations of their abductions, and where their bodies were left.

Penton bragged about being smarter than the cops, Sunnycalb said. He claimed to be very meticulous when hunting for victims, lurking around schools and areas where children played, waiting for the right opportunity to strike fast, and then be away before anyone noticed. He even scouted the areas where he planned to murder the girls and dump their bodies, taking his victims from one jurisdiction into another to confuse law enforcement efforts. He smirked when he boasted about his crimes and said he would have never been caught except he’d make a mistake in Ohio when he killed Nydra Ross because he knew her uncle and had been seen with her.

It was this tendency to boast, Sweet realized, that was Penton’s fatal flaw. He enjoyed recounting his atrocities, reliving them over and over in graphic detail. No matter what the topic of discussion was in the beginning, Sunnycalb told him, it wouldn’t take Penton long to turn the conversation around to the little girls he’d abducted, raped, and murdered. He liked being the center of attention and seemed to “get off” sexually by regaling other inmates with each horrific detail. Such a proclivity for bragging could come back to haunt him.

When the Sunnycalb described how Penton relished recalling the murders, Sweet was reminded of Michael Giles and how he liked to relive his crimes over and over while sitting on the roof of his great-grandmother’s house. There was a similarity to their evil—the calculated, remorseless infliction of fear, suffering, and death on defenseless victims—though if Sunnycalb was right about the numbers, Penton was much further along in his career as a murderous psychopath.

Penton had never satisfied his deviant bloodlust. He told any inmate who’d listen that he hoped to someday get out of prison and resume his atrocities. Sunnycalb recalled how sometimes they’d be watching television and a young girl would appear on the screen. “He’d make comments like, ‘She better be glad I’m in here, or I would have her.’”

The killer had even decided to change tactics. In the past, he’d sometimes punched his small victims in the stomach to knock the wind out of them and prevent them from screaming or struggling as he carried them to his vehicle. Now if he ever got another chance, he said he’d use an electric stun device to disable them.

Sweet checked with Ohio authorities and found out Penton would be eligible for parole in 2027 for his conviction in the Nydra Ross case, which would make him about 69 years old. He’d still be capable of preying on little girls. Of course, as sometimes happened in an uncertain justice system, he also could be released early or sent to a less-secure facility, where he could escape. If he got out, it might be tough to catch him again, too. After all, he’d disappeared following his conviction for the death of his infant son and avoided detection for four years, during which time, if Sunnycalb’s information was correct, he’d murdered three little girls in Texas and one in Ohio.

At least
, Sweet thought,
and probably many more than that
. He believed it was his responsibility to make sure Penton never got out of prison again. Or better yet, Texas was a state that often sought and carried out the death penalty. He could think of no better end for a child killer than to be strapped to a gurney, pumped full of poison, and put down like a mad dog.

So far in their conversations, Sunnycalb had proved to be reliable, but Sweet still cautioned himself to be skeptical. He asked Sunnycalb about Mesquite Det. Mike Bradshaw’s complaint that sometimes during their telephone conversations he clammed up, or wouldn’t answer a question directly, or he’d start talking completely off the subject. But Sunnycalb had an explanation. The prison telephone he used didn’t allow for any privacy, and he had to be guarded in what he said if other inmates approached.
“Snitches get stitches or end up in ditches”
was not just a saying when living in a penitentiary setting.

Once again, Sunnycalb’s reasoning made sense, and Sweet wondered why so many other officers thought that the informant couldn’t be trusted. He discovered that the main source of the aspersions was Det. Keith Grisham with the Plano Police Department, the agency involved in the Proctor case. So he called and reached the detective. Grisham was nearing retirement, but he said he’d be happy to help, including discussing Sunnycalb and the Proctor case.

When they met, Grisham repeated what he’d been telling other law enforcement officers, including an FBI agent looking into a case in the Midwest. He stated flat out that Sunnycalb was a liar. He said that in 1998, he’d received a letter from Sunnycalb saying he had information about the three Dallas-area murders. So Grisham arranged for Sunnycalb to be transferred into a county jail in Ohio so that they could meet him without other prison inmates knowing. Then he and Det. Billy Meeks, also of the Plano Police Department and no relation to Christi Meeks, had flown to Ohio to interview him.

“He didn’t tell me shit,” Grisham explained to Sweet. “I got my department’s approval and flew all the way up there and had to come back with nothing. He’s a flake, and I think he was just playing with us.” If Sweet wanted to waste his time listening to Sunnycalb, it was up to him.

In spite of his feeling about Sunnycalb, Grisham was helpful. He told Sweet everything he could about the Proctor murder in case it would help. He even took Sweet to the dirt road in a wooded area near Plano where Christie Proctor’s body was found, and then to the field near Murphy, Texas, both of them in Collin County, where Roxann’s body had been dumped.

Later, Sweet asked Sunnycalb about Grisham’s complaints about the interview in Ohio. The informant didn’t try to hide his annoyance. He said that when Grisham asked to interview him, he’d agreed on two conditions: He didn’t want to be videotaped, or for anything to be written down. “I said that I’d tell him everything I knew,” Sunnycalb explained. But worried about being identified as a snitch, he didn’t want anyone to have proof that he’d talked.

Grisham agreed to the conditions, Sunnycalb said, and everything went well with the interview until the detective said he needed a smoke break. He and Meeks then left Sunnycalb alone in the interview room. But they didn’t realize that Sunnycalb was an electrician by trade, and when he saw the coaxial wires used for videotaping coming out of a speaker box in the corner, he knew he’d been betrayed. He got up, walked over to the speaker box and saw the small camera hidden inside. “After I saw the camera, I didn’t tell them shit,” he said to Sweet.

Sweet was amused that the informant had just used the same description of his interview that Grisham had, only in a different context. Without revealing Sunnycalb’s version of what took place at the Ohio prison, he called Grisham and asked if he could view the videotape from the Ohio interview.

Watching the tape was the first time Sweet saw what Sunnycalb looked like—a bald, portly man in his mid-forties who reminded the detective of Mr. Spacely on the old
The Jetsons
cartoon. Just as Sunnycalb had told him, the first part of the interview went off without a hitch. Then when the other detectives left the room, Sunnycalb noticed the speaker box, got up, walked up to the hidden camera and scowled. When the detectives returned, Sunnycalb didn’t tell Grisham and Meeks that he knew he’d been lied to; he just sat sullenly and hardly spoke the rest of the meeting.

Once again, Sunnycalb’s version of events was accurate, but it had torched his credibility with law enforcement. In the years since his falling out with Grisham, Sunnycalb said, he’d been trying to let law enforcement agencies know about Penton’s claims. But no one had responded to his letters and calls until he contacted Diane Teft in Fort Worth. And then, only Sweet had stuck with him.

Still, if Sweet was going to make a case against Penton, he needed a lot more than the word of a pedophile like Jeffrey Sunnycalb. He was going to have to find other witnesses and evidence to corroborate what the informant had to say.

Sweet knew it was going to be a long, hard road. A lot of time had passed; witnesses disappeared, and memories dimmed; evidence that might have existed in the mid- to late-1980s was likely to have been lost or destroyed. Not only that, but whatever he did, he would have to do in his spare time. His caseload of current crimes wasn’t going anywhere, and he couldn’t drop them for murders that had happened so long ago that only their families and maybe a few old-timer cops remembered. Still, if he wouldn’t answer the call to bring these cases to a close for the families and for the victims, who would?