Bogeyman (7 page)

CHAPTER NINE

A few days later …

W
alking down the stairs to the murder closet, Sweet pulled the Reyes case file boxes from the shelves. He knew the first time he’d looked in the boxes that the contents were a disorganized mess. He loaded them into his car and drove to the small town where he and his family lived in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of brick homes, many of them owned by cops and firefighters.

In his living room, Sweet turned the boxes over and dumped them on the floor. Out of curiosity, his wife, Julie, began looking through some of the photographs and came across one of a clump of dark hair with a little girl’s hair clasp still attached. It was a horrible reminder of what had happened to the child, and she had to walk away.

It was a photograph that got to Sweet: an image of little Roxann sharing a kiss with her father as they played on the living room floor of their home. He couldn’t help but put himself and his three daughters into that photograph and choked up. The case had become personal.

Sweet set the photograph of Roxann and her father aside and looked down at the jumbled piles of paper that represented the Roxann Reyes homicide investigation as it had been left by the detective originally assigned to the case. He had tried talking to the now-retired detective, but he wasn’t interested in helping and didn’t have much to say. He’d just given up and dumped it all in the two boxes to be stored in the murder closet.

Getting down on his hands and knees, Sweet picked up a sheet of paper, read it, and placed it on a clear spot on the carpet. In that manner, he scanned every single note, receipt, and telephone message, every photograph and sketch. Then, he organized them. Items that at least
seemed
important to him—such as statements from several people, including Penton’s sister, taken by the Columbus Police Department, and a car title for a gray, four-door Datsun sedan—he placed in separate files according to subject matter; they would go into one of the boxes. The items that didn’t make sense to him he filed and consigned to the second box, unless, and until, they became relevant.

Sometimes it was difficult to tell which box some bit of information belonged in. For instance, when he read the offense report for the Roxann Reyes case, a potential witness by the name of Wanda Huggins who lived in the same apartment complex was mentioned. She’d told police that she’d seen a man matching the description given by Roxann’s friend, Julia Diaz, wandering through the complex. She said that when she made eye contact with the stranger, he turned and ran. If true, Huggins might have been able to identify the attacker from a photo lineup, but there was nothing in the file to indicate if anyone had followed up on her report.

When he was done organizing, Sweet went back and read it all again, this time more carefully. He wanted to learn every detail he could about the Reyes case so that when Sunnycalb told him new information, he’d know whether the evidence corroborated it.

Like a hunter sizing up the animal he intended to pursue, Sweet also wanted to know everything he could about Penton. He learned that David Elliot Penton was born Feb. 9, 1958, and raised in Columbus, Ohio, and that his father had walked out on him, his mother, and sister when Penton was a child.

After dropping out of high school in 1977, he joined the Army, arriving at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas, in Bell County in the fall. He soon married a young woman from Ohio named Katherine, who happened to be the daughter of the man married to Penton’s mother. Katherine, who had a young daughter from a previous relationship, moved with him to Killeen, where she gave birth to another girl.

While stationed at Fort Hood, they owned a brown Fury two-door sedan and white Plymouth van. The marriage didn’t last, and the couple divorced in 1979. When they parted, Penton kept the van with its distinctive brown stripes on the side.

In February 1980, Penton married his second wife, a Korean national named Kyong, and three months later was transferred to Korea. Trained as a track vehicle mechanic, he was also an expert marksman and deemed “highly motivated” by his superiors, who promoted him to sergeant. However, he was charged with storing alcohol in his foot locker, then a few months later with lying about his marital status to obtain unearned benefits, and was demoted to specialist.

In June 1981, the Army transferred Penton back to Fort Hood for a year before shipping him off to Korea again. When his tour was up in September 1983, Penton returned to Texas with his wife and their baby girl; a year later, the couple had a baby boy they named Michael.

In November 1984, Penton was arrested for killing his two-month-old son. The county medical examiner determined that he violently shook the child in a “fit of rage” because the infant would not stop crying.

In May 1985, Penton pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was discharged from the Army. But he appealed for a delay in his sentencing and was allowed out on bond. He then fled Texas, and disappeared, until he was arrested in Ohio three years later for the murder of Nydra Ross.

It was during those three years between Penton being charged with his son’s death and his arrest for the murder of Nydra that three little girls were abducted and murdered in the Dallas area: Christi Meeks in January 1985; Christie Proctor in February 1986; and Roxann Reyes in November 1987. There was nothing in the evidence box that indicated they knew the man who took them. However, nine-year-old Nydra had met the bogeyman before he killed her.

Penton worked with her uncle, who she’d gone to visit in Columbus, and he’d been at that home on the evening of March 30, 1988. The next day, when no one was looking, he forced Nydra into his van, where he drove her to a remote location, then raped and strangled her. He then drove across the county line into a rural part of Marion County east of the small town of Waldo. He’d been there before, scouting the lay of the land and picking a spot where a small creek cut through a heavily wooded ravine running parallel to the dirt road he drove down. He stopped, then after making sure no one was around, he pulled the body from his van and threw her into the dense brush. Satisfied for the moment, he drove back to Columbus.

Nydra’s uncle reported her missing, and a search was launched. Penton even helped, but it didn’t take long for him to become a suspect. He’d made a mistake; instead of driving somewhere far away and abducting a child he didn’t know, he’d struck too close to home and was seen with Nydra before she disappeared.

Even more damning, a large bloodstain was discovered on the carpet beneath one of the seats in Penton’s van. However, DNA blood-typing was still in its infancy and not available at the time to the investigators with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. So while it was highly suspicious—and not something Penton could
easily explain away—it wasn’t enough to arrest him. Not yet.

Taken from her family, brutalized and murdered by a monster, and then disposed of like trash, Nydra Ross went missing for six months. Then that fall, a hunter stumbling through the foliage near the stream happened upon a human skeleton.

The Marion County coroner quickly determined that the remains had been exposed to the elements as long as six months and that they belonged to a black girl, around ten years old, who stood four foot six inches. Investigators with the county sheriff’s office surmised that at long last, Nydra had been found. But to be sure, they took bone marrow and blood samples from Nydra’s mother and sent them to a lab in New York to be compared to the remains. It took until January 1989 to get the results, but they were conclusive: The murdered child was Nydra Ross.

Even then, Penton wasn’t indicted and charged with aggravated murder and kidnapping until May 1990, as the Columbus PD homicide detectives meticulously put their case together. Penton’s trial started April 4, 1991, more than three-and-a-half years after Nydra’s body was found. He faced the death penalty in Ohio’s electric chair if convicted.

Prosecutors in the case had several pieces of evidence to work with, including that he was the last person seen with her and the bloodstain found in his van. But the most critical, perhaps, was the testimony of several men who were in jail with Penton after he was arrested. Each took the stand and testified about what the suspect told them; their stories were similar enough to corroborate one another and yet different enough to not sound rehearsed. One said Penton told him that he’d talked Nydra into climbing into his van, where he then raped and strangled her. The other testified that Penton told him that when he attempted to have sex with the child, she resisted, so he’d struck her. At that point, Penton realized he couldn’t let her go, so he killed her.

A little more than two weeks after the trial began, it ended with the jurors convicting Penton for aggravated murder and kidnapping. He then faced a second trial to determine if his crime met the legal justifications for him to be put to death.

As with most states that have the death penalty, Ohio law required the second trial so that jurors could weigh so-called “aggravating factors” against “mitigating factors.” Presented by the prosecution through witness testimony and evidence, aggravating factors are circumstances about the crime that raise it to a level above other similar crimes, such as premeditation, evidence that the crime was committed to cover-up another crime, like rape, or that the murder was particularly “cruel, heinous, or depraved.” Oftentimes, evidence prohibited at the guilt/innocence trial—such as the defendant’s previous criminal history, or “victim impact” statements from family members—will come into play. Among those who testified against Penton in this phase were his two ex-wives, who said that he’d sexually molested his own daughters.

After the prosecution has presented the aggravating factors, the defense then presents any mitigating circumstances. These can range from whether the defendant was using drugs or alcohol at the time of the crime, suffered from a brain injury or was mentally deficient, or was subjected to a particularly difficult childhood that impacted his ability to control himself or judge right from wrong. The jurors are then asked to determine if the mitigating circumstances outweigh the aggravating factors, and if not, whether the defendant “deserves” to die for the crime.

Unlike some states, such as Texas, where the death penalty is a realistic possibility, prosecutors in Ohio didn’t often win those fights. In the end, the Penton jury decided that the aggravating factors did not outweigh the mitigating circumstances, thus Penton escaped the electric chair. Instead, he was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, which he began serving at the Marion Correctional Institute.

As he familiarized himself with the Ross case, Sweet noted the similarities to his investigation, not just the
modus operandi
of the crime—the pattern of Penton’s kidnapping, rape, and strangulation of young girls—but also his behavior afterwards. In the Nydra Ross case, Penton had crossed jurisdictional lines, abducting the child in Columbus and then driving all the way into a rural part of Marion County before leaving the body in a wooded area, where it wasn’t found for months. If, as Sweet suspected, Penton was the killer in Texas, he’d followed the same pattern: taking his victims from one place and leaving them in another remote area, where the possibility of immediate discovery was remote.

The Ross case also corroborated Sunnycalb’s assertion that Penton was obsessed with talking about his crimes. Instead of keeping his mouth shut, he’d almost immediately started bragging to other inmates in the Marion County jail. Sweet hoped that if he’d been so eager to boast about the Ross case and then to discuss other murders with Sunnycalb, Penton may have also discussed the Texas cases with other Ohio inmates. He put that aside as something to follow up on.

Hoping to locate someone in law enforcement who could further shed some light on Penton’s possible connection to the Texas cases, Sweet called the police department in Columbus, Ohio. Detective Rick Sheasby had retired, but another detective gave Sweet his home telephone number to call.

Sheasby was more than happy to talk to him about Penton. “I know he’s good for more than the Nydra Ross murder,” he said. He’d pegged Penton as a serial killer from the start, and Roxann’s grandparents had confirmed it, as far as Sheasby was concerned. Penton, of course, had denied it.

Although he’d contacted Texas police agencies several times about his suspicions, Sheasby said it never went anywhere. He told Sweet he should look at the transcript of the interview between Penton’s then-28-year-old sister, Amanda, and Columbus PD Det. Rita Doberneck. The interview was conducted at Amanda’s home in Waynoka, Oklahoma, on August 11, 1988, more than a month before Nydra Ross’s body was found.

Sweet was aware of the transcript, which he’d spotted in the Reyes case files. After speaking to Sheasby, he went back to review it. According to the document, Amanda told Doberneck that their father, Lathern Penton, disappeared two months before she was born.
“He left for work and was never heard from again.”
Her grandmother then moved in with the family and helped raise the children until her death in 1976; her mother then remarried a year later.

Amanda told the detective that her brother, who was two years older, was her mother’s favorite. She said he’d been thrown out of a car in an accident when he was six months old and was in a coma for a time. He made a slow recovery and needed special care for so long that her mother once told her it was like raising two babies at once after Amanda was born. She attributed her brother’s higher place in her mother’s affections to his special needs.
“David could do no wrong in my mother’s eyes, and if it was between me and David, I could do no right.”

At first, her brother was behind other children in school, but soon caught up and became an “A” student. However, it didn’t last.
“Almost overnight”
his personality changed when he became a teenager; he began skipping school, and his grades dropped. He turned violent and was abusive towards his sister; his moods fluctuated wildly and without warning—calm one moment, agitated the next. Amanda recalled an incident when she’d come home from school and was standing at the top of the stairs in their home when her brother entered
. “He looked at me with a wild look in his eyes. Then, he ran up the stairs and grabbed me and hung me over the banister. He did these things to me often.”
She said that although Penton abused her physically, he never sexually molested her.