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Speaker 7: You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking
Speaker 7: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 7: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The night Stalker BTK
Speaker 7: Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 7: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 7: your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 2: For years, David Elliott Penton stocked elementary schools and playgrounds
Speaker 2: looking for young girls from low income neighborhoods to abduct, rape,
Speaker 2: and murder. He thought of them as throwaway kids, hardly
Speaker 2: missed and soon forgotten except by those who loved them.
Speaker 2: He was every parent's worst nightmare, the boogieman. They warned
Speaker 2: their children about, the fiend who lurked outside bedroom windows.
Speaker 2: Christy Meeks disappeared during a game of hide and seek
Speaker 2: outside her mother's Mesquite apartment complex in January nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: five and was found dead less than three months later
Speaker 2: in Lake Texoma. Christy Procter's body was found in a
Speaker 2: South Plain O field in April nineteen eighty eight, more
Speaker 2: than two years after the fourth grader was last seen
Speaker 2: walking from her North Dallas apartment to a friend's home
Speaker 2: and Roxan Reyis was snatched from an alley while playing
Speaker 2: outside her Garland apartment in November nineteen eighty seven. This
Speaker 2: story focuses on the work of a team of police detectives,
Speaker 2: starting with Garland police detective Gary Sweet, who picked up
Speaker 2: the cases of the three missing girls after they've done
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety six. Years after the murders, he found
Speaker 2: the girl's files and information on suspect David Elliott Pentin.
Speaker 2: For some reason, out of all the stuff that was
Speaker 2: in those two boxes, I pulled out a file and
Speaker 2: started reading about him. Sweet said Penton was in jail
Speaker 2: in Ohio for killing nine year old Nidra Ross. What
Speaker 2: followed was a series of faithful twists, from reviewing old
Speaker 2: tips to conducting new interviews and gathering information shared by
Speaker 2: Penton's cellmates. By two thousand and three, Sweet and the
Speaker 2: team had enough to indict Pentin. The title of the program,
Speaker 2: This evening is true Detective from the detective's perspective, with
Speaker 2: my special guest, Detective Gary Sweet. Welcome to the program,
Speaker 2: and thank you for agreeing to this interview, Gary Sweet,
Speaker 2: Good evening, Gary, thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Speaker 6: Oh, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Now you are the real life
Speaker 2: hero for lack of a better word, of the Steve
Speaker 2: Jackson's book Boogie Man, in which we covered about three
Speaker 2: months ago on this program. Now we're going to be
Speaker 2: talking from like the program title has been titled, from
Speaker 2: the detectives perspective, So we're going to talk about the
Speaker 2: cold case, how it seemed that fate intervened on behalf
Speaker 2: of these victims and yourself to be able to be
Speaker 2: involved in this extraordinary case and bring this killer to justice.
Speaker 2: So let's give our audience a little bit of the
Speaker 2: background on yourself.
Speaker 6: Steve.
Speaker 2: I've introduced basically and talked quite a bit about who
Speaker 2: you were as a policeman. But tell us how you
Speaker 2: got involved in being a detective. We'll start there and
Speaker 2: tell us how you began to Again, tell us a
Speaker 2: little bit about your background and how you became a
Speaker 2: detective before we start talking about this involvement in this
Speaker 2: cold case.
Speaker 6: Okay, and our police department, we had a program that
Speaker 6: it was basically called a rotational program where for six
Speaker 6: months they would have a position that you could go
Speaker 6: and work in the criminal investigation division. And in nineteen
Speaker 6: eighty nine. I put in for that program and went
Speaker 6: and worked. You're basically given mostly theft and criminal mischief
Speaker 6: offenses to investigate. But I did that for six months
Speaker 6: and really enjoyed it, so I knew that was something
Speaker 6: I kind of wanted to do. But after the six months,
Speaker 6: I had to go back to patrol and worked a
Speaker 6: couple of more years, or actually about another year, and
Speaker 6: then I went into the School Resource Officer program and
Speaker 6: worked in a high school for about two and a
Speaker 6: half years, and then an opening came available in the
Speaker 6: criminal investigation division and I put in for that and
Speaker 6: was accepted in there, and I got I guess maybe
Speaker 6: the buy an intervention here again. But there were several
Speaker 6: openings in just about every unit in the police department,
Speaker 6: and there were thefts, auto theft, burglary investigations, juvenile crime investigations,
Speaker 6: and the crimes against persons, crimes against persons being probably
Speaker 6: the hardest one to get into. And I thought, what
Speaker 6: the heck, I'll put in for that, and if I
Speaker 6: don't get it, I'll put it on another one form
Speaker 6: my second choice. Well, I put in for it and
Speaker 6: actually got it, so I was kind of lucky to
Speaker 6: get in there right away.
Speaker 2: Now you say that's about nineteen ideas, so in.
Speaker 6: Your when I actually got inside.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, that that far okay, So so tell us
Speaker 2: a little bit about what you did learn in h
Speaker 2: and the kind of cases that you did involve yourself
Speaker 2: with with these crimes against persons. Tell us kind of
Speaker 2: cases that you encountered.
Speaker 6: We work generally everything from harassment cases up to homicide
Speaker 6: cases involving adults. Now we do work murder cases if
Speaker 6: it involved any murder cases juvenile or not. But if
Speaker 6: from harassment to assaults to felling, the assaults to robberies,
Speaker 6: sexual assaults up to murder, that's that's our prime And what.
Speaker 2: And what kind of tell us what the environment was
Speaker 2: like in terms of, say comparison to other cities that
Speaker 2: you would know of in terms of nationally in America.
Speaker 2: What was Garland, Texas like?
Speaker 6: Garland, Texas is a really it's a I would classified
Speaker 6: as a blue collar working town. The crime there is
Speaker 6: not it's not a bad it's really not a bad
Speaker 6: city to live in. I don't live there, but it's
Speaker 6: not a bad city for a person to live in.
Speaker 6: The crime rate is I guess I would classify it
Speaker 6: as normal for that type of city of about two
Speaker 6: hundred and fifty thousand populations somewhere in the area. We
Speaker 6: probably the homicide rate is I think is relatively low
Speaker 6: for that size of the town. We're on just east
Speaker 6: of Dallas. We connect to Dallas on the east side.
Speaker 2: And it's but it's not considered a suburb.
Speaker 6: We'll say it's not. Yes day, I would have it's
Speaker 6: a sub Dallas our border. I mean, you can be
Speaker 6: driving along in one minuture in Garland, the next you're
Speaker 6: in Dallas. We are actually we I guess it would
Speaker 6: be considered a suburb. It's just I believe we're the
Speaker 6: tenth largest city in Texas, so it's a relatively large suburb.
Speaker 6: Mesquite connects to us on the south side. It just
Speaker 6: covers a lot of ground. I think Garland is about
Speaker 6: sixty square miles relatively roughly speaking, sixty square miles I
Speaker 6: think a pretty good distance spread out, and the population
Speaker 6: I'm not really sure how accurate that is. I think
Speaker 6: we have a lot of unreported citizens also, I suppose.
Speaker 2: Okay, so now tell us what happens in terms of
Speaker 2: you being in a position where when is it that
Speaker 2: you're in a position to first talk about this faithful
Speaker 2: event where you are on a lunch. Steve talks about it.
Speaker 2: You're on a lunch, You're you're looking through some cold
Speaker 2: cases just for the heck of it, and what do
Speaker 2: you find. Tell us about that first faithful event connected
Speaker 2: to these for missing women girls.
Speaker 6: Okay, I when I was working in the school program,
Speaker 6: I always took my lunch relatively early, again, so I
Speaker 6: could be in the lunch room when the kids were
Speaker 6: in there. The job was more of a rapport building,
Speaker 6: wasn't really security necessarily. We were kind of there to
Speaker 6: build a good rapport with the kids, and it was
Speaker 6: a large high school, so I like to hang out
Speaker 6: in the lunch room with them and just kind of,
Speaker 6: you know, hang out with the kids. But I got
Speaker 6: used to doing the lunch early so I could be
Speaker 6: in the lunch with them. So that habit kind of
Speaker 6: carried over when I went into the investigation division, and
Speaker 6: so about eleven o'clock I would take lunch. And also
Speaker 6: the other benefit to it was we had at that
Speaker 6: time it's not like that anymore, but we had one
Speaker 6: computer per two detectives, and we shared a computer, and so, uh,
Speaker 6: I was not that computer savvy at that time, and uh,
Speaker 6: not that I am now, but the U I found
Speaker 6: that extra hour when everyone went to lunch and I
Speaker 6: could have the office to myself, give me a little
Speaker 6: bit more time on the computer. So I liked to
Speaker 6: hang around in there quiet by myself. And this one
Speaker 6: particular that I don't think I had anything pressing, so
Speaker 6: I just kind of wandered into the We called it
Speaker 6: the murder closet. It there was a stacks of boxes
Speaker 6: of unsolved murders, and I went in there and started
Speaker 6: looking through them, just out of curiosity more than anything.
Speaker 6: No one was around, so uh and I saw the
Speaker 6: Roxanne Reis file, and I remembered that case because I
Speaker 6: was a late night patrol officer and I worked the
Speaker 6: area of town. My beat was in the area very
Speaker 6: close to where Roxanne's disappearance curd so and I remembered it.
Speaker 6: And I just picked that box up and pulled it
Speaker 6: out and set it at my desk and opened it up.
Speaker 6: And I think, as you were explaining before, I picked
Speaker 6: the file out of it, just I think the first
Speaker 6: file I grabbed out of it was David Penton and
Speaker 6: it had several newspaper clippings, it had the composite drawing,
Speaker 6: it had several things. I started reading about him and
Speaker 6: thought to myself, boy, this guy really sounds like a
Speaker 6: good suspect on this and looks like a good suspect.
Speaker 6: He matches the picture that was drawn the composite, and
Speaker 6: I thought to myself, I'm sure they looked him over
Speaker 6: really well. You know, I didn't know what had been
Speaker 6: done in the investigation by just you know, looking in
Speaker 6: that file that quick, so I just kind of assumed
Speaker 6: that I'm sure they looked at this guy pretty good.
Speaker 6: And after the probably twenty five to thirty minutes of
Speaker 6: going through reading about him, I ended up putting it
Speaker 6: back up and going back to work basically, and I
Speaker 6: ventured back in there every now and then, and even
Speaker 6: took one of a new detective that came in there too.
Speaker 6: I took him in there and showed him around. We
Speaker 6: were both kind of fascinated with the cold cases, so
Speaker 6: just was an interest to mine, and that case stayed
Speaker 6: in my mind for some reason.
Speaker 2: Well, how much time transpires and what are the circumstances
Speaker 2: for their year next? Again? We can only chuck it
Speaker 2: up to again another faithful event you're at the right place,
Speaker 2: at the right time, with the right information. Tell us
Speaker 2: about that. How many How long is it after this time?
Speaker 6: Oh, I'm guessing between two and three years. I'm again
Speaker 6: in there at lunch and the phone start ringing around
Speaker 6: the room. I think Steve puts it pretty well in
Speaker 6: the book We were the phone List. We always knew
Speaker 6: when the secretary was trying to reach one of us
Speaker 6: because the first letter of the alphabet detective, with the
Speaker 6: closest letter to the front of the alphabet. His phone
Speaker 6: would ring first. If he wasn't there, the second one
Speaker 6: would ring, the third one ring, and it would just
Speaker 6: kind of work its way around the room. And Sweet
Speaker 6: was the second to the last name. Thompson was one
Speaker 6: behind me, so I always knew, here it comes, mine's
Speaker 6: about to be next. And when it rang, I picked
Speaker 6: it up and it was Tammy Lopez. I didn't snap
Speaker 6: on the name because Roxanne Res her name was Tammy
Speaker 6: Reyes at the time. But she started explaining to me
Speaker 6: that she had heard there was some new information about
Speaker 6: her daughter's case, and that's, well, who's your daughter? And
Speaker 6: she's Roxane Res. And then it hit me who this was,
Speaker 6: and I at that time, I had not heard anything
Speaker 6: about it. So I told her, I don't know anything,
Speaker 6: but there's six other detectives in here, and when they
Speaker 6: get back from much, I'll ask them and check with
Speaker 6: my supervisor and see because there could have been something
Speaker 6: I didn't know about it. So I told her i'd
Speaker 6: call her back. And when they all got back and
Speaker 6: I asked each one of them, no one knew anything
Speaker 6: about it. So I had to call her and tell
Speaker 6: her that, Nae, no one has heard anything. We don't
Speaker 6: know anything new, and she sounded pretty disappointed, and that
Speaker 6: kind of stuck with me. I think the worst thing
Speaker 6: about those cases was just thinking about what the parents
Speaker 6: must have been going through, because I had at that
Speaker 6: particular time, I had two daughters myself, and I just
Speaker 6: couldn't imagine what horrible things that was prepared to have
Speaker 6: to deal with.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, So now that conversation just again is just
Speaker 2: you remember the case. Initially, you look through the box.
Speaker 2: For some reason, Penton's name comes up, and you look,
Speaker 2: you're bringing someone else looking into the murder closet, a
Speaker 2: fellow officer, now Tammy Lopez. So what happens after that? Again?
Speaker 2: You asked the six officers, any news. Nothing so And
Speaker 2: in this interim, this three year period, and after this
Speaker 2: call from Tammy Lopez, as we discussed with Steve Jackson,
Speaker 2: what are the kind of cases? There are a couple
Speaker 2: of cases that really stuck out that you actually are
Speaker 2: involved with that, for lack of a better word, I
Speaker 2: guess prepare you for your inevitable work that you're going
Speaker 2: to have to do with Penton and to get Penton.
Speaker 6: I think every probably every case that I worked had
Speaker 6: probably had a little bit. I learned something every time
Speaker 6: I do. I've been doing it now for nineteen years
Speaker 6: and they're doing those cases, and I think I learned
Speaker 6: something every time I work on. But probably the one
Speaker 6: the just just as far as pure evil. Not to
Speaker 6: categorize murders because like they're all wrong, but some are.
Speaker 6: You know, when one drug dealer is a dispute over
Speaker 6: drugs and they end up shooting each other, you know
Speaker 6: that person that was murdered. Not saying they deserve to
Speaker 6: be murdered by any means, when I'm saying they put
Speaker 6: themselves in a place that you know that it was
Speaker 6: a probably not a it was a possibility, maybe not
Speaker 6: a probability, but some people just put themselves into place
Speaker 6: to be a higher risk. These were a person who
Speaker 6: is just mining their own business, and they're what I
Speaker 6: would I I don't want to say true victim, because
Speaker 6: they're all true victims, but some of them are like
Speaker 6: the one, particularly one I'm leading up to. I guess
Speaker 6: this case of Smiley Johnson. This was an elderly woman
Speaker 6: about eighty years old, and she was murdered in her home.
Speaker 6: She was stabbed repeatedly, brutally stabbed, and didn't die right
Speaker 6: away and was able to talk to the nine one
Speaker 6: one operator a little bit. She called a friend first
Speaker 6: instead of calling the police, and the friend ran across
Speaker 6: the street to her house, and this lady called nine
Speaker 6: one one and they were able to talk to her
Speaker 6: for a few minutes on the phone, and I was
Speaker 6: able to get that recording and she she described her
Speaker 6: attacker as a young, small white male. She said, I
Speaker 6: thought it was my nephew, so I let him in,
Speaker 6: and you know, obviously it wasn't her nephew, she the
Speaker 6: way it sounded. And working on that, that case became
Speaker 6: a cold case. After a while, we followed up tons
Speaker 6: of leads. I traveled to Atlanta, and interviewing one of
Speaker 6: her grandsons. We talked to every nephew just because she
Speaker 6: mentioned nephew, we talked to. I traveled to Oklahoma one
Speaker 6: time and interviewed a bankerby's suspect who had lived across
Speaker 6: the street from her that it was actually a young female,
Speaker 6: but when she robbed this bank, they described her as
Speaker 6: a young, small white male, and that just stuck out
Speaker 6: to me. So I went to Muscogie, Oklahoma and interviewed
Speaker 6: her and thinking maybe she had come across the street
Speaker 6: and done this, but there was a lot of dead
Speaker 6: end leaves and then I don't remember the exact amount
Speaker 6: of time that had gone by off the top of
Speaker 6: my head, but we got a call we'd interviewed a
Speaker 6: great grandson and his cousin. I guess they were both
Speaker 6: great grandsons, but different mothers or fathers. I don't remember
Speaker 6: the exact relation, but they were two people that had
Speaker 6: access to this lady. It had been over there several times.
Speaker 6: And uh. We also knew through talking to one of
Speaker 6: Smiley's grandsons, not great grandsons, but one of her grandsons,
Speaker 6: that she had a dog that was her grandson said
Speaker 6: this dog would bite anyone that tried to come in.
Speaker 6: There was not a nice dog. It would bite you.
Speaker 6: And if this person went in the back door, he
Speaker 6: was convinced that it was someone that knew her or
Speaker 6: that dog would have attacked him. So we interviewed everybody
Speaker 6: we thought might know her, and we interviewed this young man,
Speaker 6: Michael Giles, and another young man, and really weren't able
Speaker 6: to get anything out of him. But maybe a little
Speaker 6: over a year later, the other gentleman, and I can't
Speaker 6: think of his name off the top of my head,
Speaker 6: but he had called us and said that Michael told
Speaker 6: him that he killed his grandmother or his great grandmother,
Speaker 6: and so we had basically wired him and he went
Speaker 6: and we ended up arresting Michael Giles, and he did confess.
Speaker 6: We developed a little bit of a rapport talking and
Speaker 6: he he confessed to that murder pretty easily. I mean,
Speaker 6: it wasn't like a hard interrogation. He was quite proud
Speaker 6: of it. And I asked him why, and he pretty
Speaker 6: much told me he wanted to know what it was
Speaker 6: like to have sex with a dead person. And that point,
Speaker 6: right there, I knew everything he had told me, what
Speaker 6: he had done followed every step I had. Him described
Speaker 6: the offense that he attacked her in a back bedroom,
Speaker 6: and I knew that was true because we had luminol
Speaker 6: the house we had and it was red shag carpet,
Speaker 6: so you couldn't see any blood prints necessarily, but the
Speaker 6: luminol brings the blood out, makes it glow in the dark.
Speaker 6: And we'd done this at night, and we knew the
Speaker 6: footprints led into the bathroom, so we assumed the killer
Speaker 6: went in and washed up. We even checked the sink
Speaker 6: and found blood residue in the sink, so we knew
Speaker 6: he had washed up and before he left. So he
Speaker 6: described that he went to He told us everything and
Speaker 6: everything matched until he come to that sexual assault part.
Speaker 6: And I said, well, then why didn't you raperr if
Speaker 6: you killed her? And want to know what it was like?
Speaker 6: He says, I did raper. I said, Michael, you're lying
Speaker 6: because we had a rape exam done at the medical
Speaker 6: exam in his office and she wasn't sexually assaulted. And
Speaker 6: he got kind of upset with me and said, I
Speaker 6: did rape her. I raped her through one of the
Speaker 6: stab wounds. And he told me that he licked her
Speaker 6: intestines and a couple of times during this he'd break
Speaker 6: out into chance praising, and I knew what I was
Speaker 6: talking to him. This is an evil person. I mean,
Speaker 6: this was a sick guy. But you know, we we
Speaker 6: kept a pretty good report. He gave me a statement
Speaker 6: and this ended up not going to court. He was
Speaker 6: a juvenile that was certified as an adult and he
Speaker 6: was sentenced to thirty years. I think he's eligible for
Speaker 6: pro this year. Hopefully he's not gonna get it. But anyway,
Speaker 6: dealing with him kind of let me know that they're
Speaker 6: even in the wildest craziest movies that you see, they
Speaker 6: don't really reflect what is really really out there, and
Speaker 6: that is there are some sick people. Uh you know
Speaker 6: these Friday the thirteenth and all those slasher movies. They
Speaker 6: don't show reality. And I started kind of getting a
Speaker 6: grip on reality. What really is out there. There's some
Speaker 6: crazy people out there.
Speaker 2: Now you used crazy in terms of the crime. But
Speaker 2: we talked about her with Steve Jackson. I spoke about
Speaker 2: it a both the psychopathic killer, just without a conscience,
Speaker 2: and he noted that he called it not human because
Speaker 2: it seems that's what what makes us human is the
Speaker 2: empathy and sympathy. If you don't have that, then really
Speaker 2: you're subhuman anyway. Certainly so when you talked to this
Speaker 2: fifteen year old, was the fifteen year old insane or
Speaker 2: was it the fifteen year old the psychopathic killer?
Speaker 6: Or he was he was a little older when we
Speaker 6: actually talked to him then. But no, he wasn't insane.
Speaker 6: He was just When I say crazy, his actions were crazy,
Speaker 6: I mean I don't guess, I mean literally crazy. He
Speaker 6: was very aware of what he had done, very aware
Speaker 6: of what he wanted to do. I don't think he
Speaker 6: had attacked another woman on the next street over and
Speaker 6: brutally stabbed her multiple times, and she survived. She wasn't
Speaker 6: able to identify him or wouldn't identify him, and so
Speaker 6: I knew this guy is he's a He is a
Speaker 6: potential serial killer. He the only reason he's not a
Speaker 6: serial killer is he hasn't wasn't out long enough to
Speaker 6: kill multiple times. But I think he was killing for
Speaker 6: the thrill of it, and that I mean not even
Speaker 6: I don't think there's even animals in the animal kingdom
Speaker 6: that just kill for the thrill of it. They kill
Speaker 6: for food, they kill for I think humans are the
Speaker 6: only ones that may do that. But this guy was
Speaker 6: a thrill killer, I think, not a psychiatrist guy.
Speaker 2: It sounds like all the hallmer Yeah, all the hallmarks
Speaker 2: for sure, certainly. Yeah. And then that's a that's a
Speaker 2: pretty good preparation because if you have any naivety about
Speaker 2: of those kinds of major issues, well you don't have
Speaker 2: any more, and that certainly can compare you. Now, now
Speaker 2: they tell us about that, what happens again, I'm not
Speaker 2: sure the time frame of when you're next again, So
Speaker 2: I apologize to the audience, but your next faithful event
Speaker 2: is what and tell us what happens the.
Speaker 6: Next faithful event is basically my first encounter was probably
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety six. I'm thinking in my head the dates,
Speaker 6: and that was when I looked into the murder closet
Speaker 6: and saw the file, looked at it, and I want
Speaker 6: to say it was probably about nineteen ninety eight, so
Speaker 6: it may have been about two years that Tammy Lopez
Speaker 6: had called me. And then in two thousand and I
Speaker 6: don't remember specifically that they don't have my notes in
Speaker 6: front of me, but somewhere in two thousand I was
Speaker 6: again at During that between eleven and twelve o'clock hour.
Speaker 6: I'm sitting there in the phone starts ringing around the
Speaker 6: room again, which is not really that uncommon a thing.
Speaker 6: So I sat and waited for it to hit my
Speaker 6: line and answered, and the secretary told me that there
Speaker 6: was a Fort Worth detective on the phone that wanted
Speaker 6: to speak to an investigator, in which that's relatively common thing,
Speaker 6: nothing out of the ordinary about that. Usually want help
Speaker 6: with something, and you know, we try to do everything
Speaker 6: we can to help each other out. So I told
Speaker 6: her to transfer her back, and the lady got on
Speaker 6: the phone as a detective Diane Teff from Fort Worth
Speaker 6: Police Department, and she explained to me that she had
Speaker 6: received a letter from an inmate in a prison in
Speaker 6: Ohio about a child homicide that they had there, and
Speaker 6: she was explaining to me this was a little girl
Speaker 6: by the name of Julie Fuller, I think was maybe
Speaker 6: twelve or fourteen or something like that, and that this
Speaker 6: inmate was telling her that he had a suspect. And
Speaker 6: I'm still not snapping on Pennon or anything, even having
Speaker 6: read that, until she mentions that this guy says that
Speaker 6: his sellmate also mentioned killing a little girl in Garland
Speaker 6: by the name of Roxanne Reyes, and then my lights
Speaker 6: went off. I thought, oh hey, and she said, I
Speaker 6: have an appointment for him to call me in the
Speaker 6: morning at eight or eight thirty, I don't remember this
Speaker 6: exact time. And she said, if you would like to
Speaker 6: be here, I'm offering that to you to come here
Speaker 6: and talk to him. And I said, oh, absolutely, Well,
Speaker 6: my supervisor at the time was at lunch, and when
Speaker 6: he came back in I asked him about it, and
Speaker 6: he goes, oh, shoot you out. He said, let's go.
Speaker 6: He said, I'll go with you and and him, the
Speaker 6: other detective I was talking about that like to go
Speaker 6: into murder clause with me, is Charles Rena. We were
Speaker 6: good friends. We all three. Next morning drove the fort
Speaker 6: Worth and waited on that phone call, and he called
Speaker 6: right on time, exactly when he said he would, and
Speaker 6: she spoke with him for several minutes and then got
Speaker 6: what she wanted and handed the phone to me, and
Speaker 6: I was able to question him about a few things
Speaker 6: about the case that I knew I had I had
Speaker 6: actually pulled it out and read a little bit more
Speaker 6: so i'd know more facts like what she was wearing,
Speaker 6: just a few things that we wanted to know and
Speaker 6: see how much he could tell me. And everything he
Speaker 6: told me was exactly correct, so it you know, it
Speaker 6: did give me a lot of hope. I mean, I
Speaker 6: was excited about the information. But we were only able
Speaker 6: to talk for just a few minutes before he had
Speaker 6: ten minutes on a recorded on a line before it
Speaker 6: would cut off. So we talked maybe four or five minutes.
Speaker 6: But I did give him my phone number. He was
Speaker 6: still in contact with Detective Teft. But after we got
Speaker 6: off the phone, you know, we were pretty pumped up.
Speaker 6: She was pumped up about her case. She set up
Speaker 6: a meeting with every agency in Texas basically that had
Speaker 6: a case of a missing child in the time frame
Speaker 6: they had done a timeline on him, I think from
Speaker 6: nineteen eighty four through eighty nine, I believe, or eighty eight,
Speaker 6: whenever it was he was arrested. I think it was
Speaker 6: eighty eight. They had done a timeline to you know,
Speaker 6: in any case between that time frame. They invited to
Speaker 6: come to forth and speak about the case. And that
Speaker 6: was our next step was to make that meeting.
Speaker 2: Okay, so how many you only had the one conversation
Speaker 2: with Sonny COALB and then you have this meeting that's
Speaker 2: organized to look at other missing children cases in Texas
Speaker 2: and other jurisdictions.
Speaker 6: I believe I may have. I think I may have
Speaker 6: spoke to him of maybe another time, don't I really
Speaker 6: don't remember for sure, but I think I did talk
Speaker 6: to him. I gave him my number, and I think
Speaker 6: I did talk to him maybe once or twice before
Speaker 6: that meeting, right, and was able to get a little
Speaker 6: bit more information, But they were not really ventful conversations.
Speaker 6: But we did have a meeting. I was surprised at
Speaker 6: the turnout of how many cases there was out there
Speaker 6: in Texas, and then after we all anywhere that case. Oh,
Speaker 6: you would have to ask me that there were probably
Speaker 6: maybe twelve to fifteen different agencies represented there. I want
Speaker 6: to guess that many there were. There were there were
Speaker 6: quite a few between I would say around twelve and
Speaker 6: now I'm guessing, but I remember a few of them specifically,
Speaker 6: but there were others that ended up not being closely
Speaker 6: related at all. And I know there's some that weren't
Speaker 6: there that had cases that later we were able to find.
Speaker 6: But after that meeting, we were adjourned and Diane said
Speaker 6: that they had DNA on the Julie Fuller case, and
Speaker 6: she said they were having Penton's DNA compared to that
Speaker 6: and when that result came back, she would let me
Speaker 6: know and they would go from there. Well, the few
Speaker 6: days later she called and said the DNA came back
Speaker 6: and it is not Penton. And so I was felt
Speaker 6: really like, oh, you know, let down. But we I
Speaker 6: told she said, Sonny Cap, she's gonna drop the I'm
Speaker 6: sorry that our informant. She said, we're going to drop
Speaker 6: him and not talk to him anymore. And uh, I said, well,
Speaker 6: tell him to call me. I'll I'll talk to him
Speaker 6: a little bit more because I just wasn't didn't feel
Speaker 6: like I wanted to give it up that easy because
Speaker 6: he had so much information about ours. And so he
Speaker 6: did call me, and uh, I was able to ask him.
Speaker 6: I said, why is this information you're giving turning out
Speaker 6: to be false?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 6: You know you you sounded so credible on your Uh
Speaker 6: this is not good information. He says. I didn't say
Speaker 6: that David Pinton killed Julie Ford. He says, I told
Speaker 6: her in my letter that you would do well to
Speaker 6: look at him as a suspect. And uh, that's not
Speaker 6: what I was told originally, but I had. I called
Speaker 6: Diane tep back and I said, would you send fax
Speaker 6: me a copy of that letter? And she did, and
Speaker 6: that's exactly what the letter said. And I asked him
Speaker 6: why did he do that? And he says, well, he's
Speaker 6: bragged about killing kids so much that he says, I
Speaker 6: have done some research. And I I thought that was
Speaker 6: one that sounded like he would have done. He says,
Speaker 6: I know for a fact he did, and he named
Speaker 6: off several and and Roxane Rens was one of them.
Speaker 6: I said, why do you know that he goes? Because
Speaker 6: he mentions him by name, He knows him, and he
Speaker 6: knows too much about him. And I was still a
Speaker 6: little bit skeptical, but I had to listen to him.
Speaker 2: Did he mention besides Roxane Res, did he mention Christy
Speaker 2: Meeks or Christy Christie.
Speaker 6: Procter at all? Yes, he mentioned both. He mentioned all
Speaker 6: three of those girls. I was in touch. Yes, I'm sorry,
Speaker 6: go ahead, go ahead, I was. I was in touch
Speaker 6: with a Mosquite investigator at the time. We were we
Speaker 6: were talking back and forth, and he also was talking
Speaker 6: to Sonny cab Too, our informant. He was. We were
Speaker 6: both dealing with him on the phone, and and after
Speaker 6: a while we started hearing things about him that maybe
Speaker 6: other investigators had dealt with him in the past, and
Speaker 6: he was not a very credible person, not a not
Speaker 6: trustworthy and and then we even found out that he
Speaker 6: had filed for open records and gotten open records on
Speaker 6: these cases. And and now the investigator that I was
Speaker 6: dealing with told me, he says, I don't trust him,
Speaker 6: and uh, since the information he gave to fort Worth
Speaker 6: wasn't any good, because I don't think I'm gonna talk
Speaker 6: to him anymore. And I was pretty much almost feeling
Speaker 6: the same way. But I told him, I I think
Speaker 6: I'm gonna keep talking to him for a while. I
Speaker 6: just I don't. I mean, it was just that unseene
Speaker 6: driving force, call it what you want. I felt like
Speaker 6: it was God pushing me to go I don't to
Speaker 6: not give this up. Something was definitely telling me not
Speaker 6: to give it up. My common sense was telling me
Speaker 6: to give it up. But my spirit inside of me
Speaker 6: was telling me to go push, go, go forward. And
Speaker 6: so I said, I'm gonna keep talking to him for
Speaker 6: a while, and I would I questioned him, I said,
Speaker 6: why did you file open records? You your credibility is
Speaker 6: worthless with us. You you everything you've told you read
Speaker 6: in a file. You know this is worthless information. Now
Speaker 6: I can't trust anything you said. And he said, well,
Speaker 6: if you lived in a twelve x twelve room with
Speaker 6: a guy that does nothing about but brag about killing people,
Speaker 6: he says, you'd want to know if he's telling the truth.
Speaker 6: He said, I pulled those so I could see this
Speaker 6: guy's telling me the truth. And he said, he is
Speaker 6: telling me the truth. He did these, and so we
Speaker 6: filled we sent away for the open records that he
Speaker 6: got to see what he got. And I found out
Speaker 6: he did not get all of the open records that
Speaker 6: we thought. He didn't have the information. So the rest
Speaker 6: of the there's almost a maybe a year spent just
Speaker 6: trying to build this guy's credibility up in my own mind,
Speaker 6: not in anybody else, that's just my own mind. I
Speaker 6: was having to try to convince myself that he was credible,
Speaker 6: and everything he told me that I checked on proved
Speaker 6: to be true. I couldn't. I couldn't disprove anything, so
Speaker 6: he you know, I just had to keep listening to him.
Speaker 2: Now you obviously asked him in interviews, in these ten
Speaker 2: minute interviews, exactly how he came to talk like he said, Well,
Speaker 2: he always mentioned you asked him, how well, how do
Speaker 2: you know well, because he mentioned these murder victims by name,
Speaker 2: tell us what gradually, little tidbits of information you did
Speaker 2: gather to corroborate to some degree that certainly you thought
Speaker 2: that Penton had actually done these murders with Christy Meeks,
Speaker 2: Christy Proctor, and Roxane Reees.
Speaker 6: The biggest thing that helped me was that on the
Speaker 6: open records, he did not get Roxane Rees's file. They
Speaker 6: would not give that one to him for some reason.
Speaker 6: And I don't know why they gave him the other ones.
Speaker 6: They gave him the other ones, but they were blacked out.
Speaker 6: Almost all the pertinent information was marked out before he
Speaker 6: couldn't read it. Any names were marked out. He got
Speaker 6: very little information. And when I saw what he got,
Speaker 6: I thought, you know, he could get enough out of
Speaker 6: it to develop enough information to convince someone he knew something.
Speaker 6: But he got nothing on Rocks and Rest. They wouldn't
Speaker 6: give him that file. They said it's still open, And
Speaker 6: so I knew that what he was telling me about
Speaker 6: that when he couldn't get it from those open records,
Speaker 6: so he had to be hearing it from somewhere. And
Speaker 6: I checked with the prison to see if he got
Speaker 6: access to the internet, and he did not. He didn't
Speaker 6: have access to get it anywhere other than hearing it.
Speaker 6: So that was the biggest thing that kept my hopes alive.
Speaker 6: That and then he brought up I guess what he
Speaker 6: knows that I'm digging for credibility from him? And I
Speaker 6: guess he got a brainstorm one day and he told me,
Speaker 6: he goes, you need to find the little girl by
Speaker 6: the name of Tiffany Ibera, And I said, well, who
Speaker 6: is she? And he said, that's a little girl that
Speaker 6: he kidnapped and he let go. And I thought, well,
Speaker 6: why would he let her go? He first tells me
Speaker 6: that Pentton told him a crazy story about the little
Speaker 6: girl's dad wanting him to kidnap her to scare her.
Speaker 6: And he didn't believe that story, and I didn't either
Speaker 6: after a while of listening to it. Why would this
Speaker 6: guy hire a child pedophile to could have his daughter
Speaker 6: to scare her, and especially a guy that didn't even
Speaker 6: live around there. But that we did look and find
Speaker 6: Tiffany Ibera and she was living in Bay Saint Louis,
Speaker 6: Mississippi at the time, which was pretty good distance away.
Speaker 6: But it took me a while to get contact with
Speaker 6: her because I couldn't find a phone number, had to
Speaker 6: actually have the sheriffs department drive to her house and
Speaker 6: have her call me in It was probably maybe a
Speaker 6: week a week and a half later she called and
Speaker 6: I talked to her over the phone and she said
Speaker 6: that she was the Tiffany Iberta that was abducted in
Speaker 6: this neighbor in Dallas back then. And she I said,
Speaker 6: do you think you'd remember him? And she said absolutely,
Speaker 6: I'd never forget his face. And that was she was
Speaker 6: kind of getting me a little bit optimistic, and then
Speaker 6: she dropped a bombshell on me. She told me I
Speaker 6: actually had pulled the report from Dallas too. I had
Speaker 6: the report sent to me and had it sitting in
Speaker 6: front of me, and her memory was outstanding what she
Speaker 6: was telling me, and she said, I'm alive, by the
Speaker 6: grace of God. And I said, yeah, you were a
Speaker 6: very lucky girl, because he you know, he's a bad guy,
Speaker 6: and she said, yeah, he kidnapped a little girl from
Speaker 6: my school three days later and killed her. And I'm like,
Speaker 6: what I did. I had not put the pieces together.
Speaker 6: I didn't have the files on Christie Meeks or Christie Proctor.
Speaker 6: I just had rocks and raised files. I didn't know
Speaker 6: any really details about their cases. Knew, you know, I
Speaker 6: knew some basic facts, but not any details. And she said, yeah,
Speaker 6: that Christi Proctor went to school with her, and I'm
Speaker 6: kind of floored by that. And I looked at the
Speaker 6: report where she was abducted. She was abducted on Waterfall
Speaker 6: Lane is where Tiffany was, And I looked I did
Speaker 6: have some information about Christie Proctor and found out she
Speaker 6: was also abducted on Waterfall They were off taken from
Speaker 6: the same street. And I had not seen that until
Speaker 6: she said it. That was just something I had overlooked.
Speaker 6: It didn't dawn on me. And so now I'm very
Speaker 6: interested three days apart on the same street, that's putting
Speaker 6: him in the area, if that's him. And that was
Speaker 6: a huge piece movie.
Speaker 2: The question the audience might have right now is, of
Speaker 2: course Tiffany Iberia. And we didn't say what age she was.
Speaker 2: She was a little bit older, like say nine, I believe,
Speaker 2: and you cracked me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm off the top of my head, I can't
Speaker 6: remember either out nine ten somewhere in the area.
Speaker 2: You're a little bit older compared to Rocks. And so
Speaker 2: the thing is that, of course the police were notified
Speaker 2: there was a report or was.
Speaker 6: There, Yes, there was a report on Tiffany's case. I
Speaker 6: was told when I talked to some investigators later about
Speaker 6: that that in the very beginning, they somewhat maybe didn't
Speaker 6: believe her she had They thought maybe she was just
Speaker 6: trying to get out of school or something, which is
Speaker 6: I don't have anything to confirm this as a fact.
Speaker 6: What he did when he kidnapped her was he grabbed her.
Speaker 6: She was walking, she'd headed to school, and a bird
Speaker 6: had defecated on her clothes, and she went home and
Speaker 6: changed clothes, and all her friends that she walked to
Speaker 6: school with had already gone, so she was alone. And
Speaker 6: she saw this man walking towards her in a get
Speaker 6: out of a van, and and something in her told
Speaker 6: her this wasn't good, and she tried to run, and
Speaker 6: he grabbed her by her backpack and drug her into
Speaker 6: the van. And according to her, according to Tiffany, all
Speaker 6: he did was he took out a cell phone, which
Speaker 6: is an old phone. We called him bagphones. It was
Speaker 6: just a big bag you had to carry with a
Speaker 6: suction antenna that stuck on the window, but that was
Speaker 6: the early cell phones. And told her to call her
Speaker 6: mother and tell her she's been kidnapped, and so she did,
Speaker 6: and then he took the phone away from her and
Speaker 6: hung it up, and he ended up telling her to
Speaker 6: get out and that if he ever sees her again,
Speaker 6: she won't be so lucky that he'll kill her. And
Speaker 6: she ran home. He followed her home, and the mother
Speaker 6: I think maybe probably believed her because she had gotten
Speaker 6: a phone call, but she wasn't real sure. They drove
Speaker 6: around and looked for this van, didn't see anything, and
Speaker 6: then they took her to school, and I'm not sure
Speaker 6: how much the school believed or not, but they did
Speaker 6: call the police and the report was made. And then
Speaker 6: three days later, I think when Christy Frocter came up missing,
Speaker 6: they went back to Tiffany and had her do a composite.
Speaker 6: They got a little bit more interested in her story
Speaker 6: later because they knew for absolute sure this was probably
Speaker 6: the same guy. I guess absolute sure, and probably don't
Speaker 6: go together, but they assumed it could be the same guy.
Speaker 2: And now looking at that composite, how close of a
Speaker 2: was that composite to what Penton looked like?
Speaker 6: That was probably not a great one. I'm not a
Speaker 6: big fan of those, I just in my career they've
Speaker 6: not ever really been that effective until this case. And
Speaker 6: there were two composites done, one on the mesquite one
Speaker 6: and one on ours that were just dead ringers for
Speaker 6: him at that time, the Tiffany Iberie, I didn't think
Speaker 6: it was a very good one, just put it that way.
Speaker 6: It had the basics then now, but.
Speaker 2: Now that really obviously confirms that you have your man
Speaker 2: in terms of Sunny Cow, and you have that information corroborated.
Speaker 2: So how do you proceed now with what you believed
Speaker 2: to be some really good, strong evidence against Penton.
Speaker 6: Well, a lot of this had been going on over
Speaker 6: a pretty good period of time, and I was basically
Speaker 6: doing this in my spare time. I still had my
Speaker 6: regular cases coming in daily, I was still working everything
Speaker 6: I normally work, and I was doing this in my
Speaker 6: spare time basically, so someone and Sunny Keb was giving
Speaker 6: me so much information At times I tried to take
Speaker 6: notes and keep up with it. But it got it
Speaker 6: really got overwhelming, Uh, to try to keep up with everything.
Speaker 6: He was telling me about cases all over the country.
Speaker 6: And at first I tried to to you know, I
Speaker 6: I you know, I didn't wanna let any child case go.
Speaker 6: I I mean, I thought I need to I need
Speaker 6: to be on top of all this. Well, it got
Speaker 6: to the point where I couldn't keep up with all
Speaker 6: of it. Just it would be confusing on the phone.
Speaker 6: I wouldn't know really which one he's taught. It just
Speaker 6: got too much to handle. So I basically told myself,
Speaker 6: we're gonna focus on the ones here and we'll come
Speaker 6: back to those when we're done. We'll just I have
Speaker 6: to just stick to my case. And of course my
Speaker 6: case I felt like involved, uh CHRISTI mex and Christy
Speaker 6: Proctor because we all felt they were connected. But I
Speaker 6: I went to Mosquite. Uh. Mike Bradshaw was the investigator
Speaker 6: that I originally dealt with, and Mike is a friend
Speaker 6: of mine, and I was gonna go talk to him
Speaker 6: and see if I could get him back interested in it.
Speaker 6: And he told me before that the biggest problem they
Speaker 6: had with Penton in the beginning was that they couldn't
Speaker 6: put him in Oklahoma and where Christy Mack's body was
Speaker 6: dumped at Lake Texoma, and they really couldn't put him
Speaker 6: in the area here. There was just a lot of
Speaker 6: things wrong, and he didn't really trust Sunnycap. And I
Speaker 6: agreed with him on Sunny Cap pretty much. But I'd
Speaker 6: found in our file a statement that had been taken
Speaker 6: from Penton's sister that she was basically saying she would
Speaker 6: not ever be around him again because she didn't want
Speaker 6: her children around him, because she felt like he was dangerous.
Speaker 6: And even she even said in the statement, I feel
Speaker 6: like he did kill those girls in Texas. And that
Speaker 6: was literally in her written statement that the Ohio investigators
Speaker 6: had taken. And I noticed the address on that statement
Speaker 6: was Oklahoma. I don't remember the specific city off the
Speaker 6: top of my head. I don't remember if I can
Speaker 6: even pronounce it, but she lived in Oklahoma. And then
Speaker 6: I also read later that he would drive and visit
Speaker 6: his sister occasionally, so I knew, Okay, well, he's been
Speaker 6: in Oklahoma.
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Speaker 6: I was gonna go talk to Mike because hey, look
Speaker 6: I found some information that he was in Oklahoma. Well,
Speaker 6: when I went to talk to Mike, he had been
Speaker 6: transferred to another division in the police department. I was
Speaker 6: kind of upset. I thought, darn it, I don't know
Speaker 6: the new guy. Well, the new guy was Bruce Bradshaw,
Speaker 6: no relation to each other, but I had never met Bruce.
Speaker 6: And they said he's the new sergeant over the crimes
Speaker 6: against persons there Mesquite, and I said, well, let me
Speaker 6: talk to him. So I went and the first time
Speaker 6: I met Bruce, and I started running it down to Bruce.
Speaker 6: And this was probably the greatest thing that happened in
Speaker 6: this investigation for me, because Bruce had actually been one
Speaker 6: of the detectives that had been called out on the
Speaker 6: Christie Meeks case and had a great deal of knowledge
Speaker 6: about the early early things that I didn't have. I
Speaker 6: wasn't there, So Bruce was very, very interested in what
Speaker 6: I was saying, and really from that point on he
Speaker 6: jumped on board full force and we developed the team.
Speaker 6: Bruce brought in one of his guys, Don Phillips, excellent
Speaker 6: excellent investigator, and us three worked together on that from
Speaker 6: that point on until some time later. We got we
Speaker 6: had to get Plano involved because that was where the
Speaker 6: Christi Procter case stemmed, and we got another guy by
Speaker 6: the name of Billy Meeks who wed in word cases
Speaker 6: with other agencies involved, there's egos, there's you know, departments
Speaker 6: don't want other departments to get It's just there's a
Speaker 6: lot of egos involved with There were no egos in
Speaker 6: this this team. It was the best team I've ever
Speaker 6: been on and any thing I've ever done, we worked
Speaker 6: together great and I think every one of these guys
Speaker 6: were top notch detectives. It was, in my opinion, I
Speaker 6: was working with the dream team of detectives. It was
Speaker 6: a great group of guys and we just everything clicked
Speaker 6: and and from that point on we were able to
Speaker 6: divide up the task kind of focus on our own
Speaker 6: cases and uh and that just that helped so much.
Speaker 6: It was I can't even describe how much better things went.
Speaker 6: So it was kind of another divine intervention that Bruce
Speaker 6: was transferred in there. Not that Mike wouldn't have done
Speaker 6: a great job, but Bruce just had the knowledge that
Speaker 6: of that case from the beginning.
Speaker 2: And it's very important. One thing is that there's apparently
Speaker 2: Sonny cowbs A is conversing with Penton, and Penton says,
Speaker 2: if you really want to hide something, stick it in
Speaker 2: the insulation, because the cops are are not going to
Speaker 2: go up there and get themselves dirty looking up there.
Speaker 2: So with that prompting, what do you and your team.
Speaker 6: Do well when we do make a trip to finally
Speaker 6: meet in person Sonny cabin interview. That was also a
Speaker 6: plan that we would go to his home that he
Speaker 6: grew up in in Columbus and go up in the
Speaker 6: attic and check in the insulation. Knowing, you know, just
Speaker 6: that some serial killers were you know, would take a
Speaker 6: souvenir to relive their experience. They might take a memento
Speaker 6: from it, and so I think when he was arrested
Speaker 6: on the najarass case, there were some little girl's panties
Speaker 6: recovered and some other items that were recovered from that
Speaker 6: one that were never able to link them to anyone.
Speaker 6: So we thought, well, there may be some items there
Speaker 6: in his attic that we could you know, we may
Speaker 6: we may get lucky. So we we did go look
Speaker 6: through the attic. We found Don Phillips. Actually this attic
Speaker 6: was there was no insulation, as we have them here
Speaker 6: in Texas where our houses are built differently, I guess
Speaker 6: the different climates, but the insulation was tacked to the
Speaker 6: actual roof on the inside. Ours is blown in. It's
Speaker 6: it's kind of different. So we didn't really have to
Speaker 6: dig through insulation. But there were boards over the rafters
Speaker 6: and we had to kind of crawl on our bellies
Speaker 6: and look underneath those boards. And Don found something unusually
Speaker 6: when he had to kind of fish it out and
Speaker 6: get it, and then it was a It was a
Speaker 6: a big bundle of rags tied with yarn, and I
Speaker 6: mean we were all like, oh, this is it. We
Speaker 6: have found his mementos. It's wrapped with a nice bowl
Speaker 6: tied on it, and I mean, we're like bowing to this,
Speaker 6: this is our evidence. We found it, and we started
Speaker 6: unwrapping it and it's just one rag after another and
Speaker 6: it base even nothing in there, so we were kinding,
Speaker 6: but we didn't notice stains on it. So we collected
Speaker 6: it and took it back to the lab and they
Speaker 6: told us that there was semen, blood, saliva, there was
Speaker 6: all sort of bodily fluids on these rags, but it
Speaker 6: was so degraded and had been up there so long
Speaker 6: that in the elements, you know, the heat and the cold,
Speaker 6: that it was just not a good sample. And uh
Speaker 6: wow with that after all the tests, and it took
Speaker 6: a pretty good bit of time. We didn't know that
Speaker 6: at the time. I mean, it took us maybe a
Speaker 6: year and a half to get all the test results back.
Speaker 6: But we really didn't have anything with that other than
Speaker 6: we couldn't match his DNA to it. We couldn't match
Speaker 6: Christie Proctor, Christie makes They did tell us that we
Speaker 6: can't tell you it's rocks Anderaeis's, but we can't tell
Speaker 6: you it's not. That was about the best we had
Speaker 6: with that. But he told us a lot of things
Speaker 6: Sonny cap did about the type of victims he picked
Speaker 6: and things like that.
Speaker 2: So at what point did you what point did you believe?
Speaker 2: I mean, again, you you can only concentrate on the
Speaker 2: cases that that are already called, that are already there,
Speaker 2: never mind imagining. But did you guys were all in
Speaker 2: agreement basically that this guy likely had killed more people
Speaker 2: than you guys were even looking at.
Speaker 6: Sonny Keb himself told me that because we were talking
Speaker 6: about that, he would keep bringing up cases and bringing
Speaker 6: up cases. And I asked him one that said, how
Speaker 6: many is there? He says, well, he's claimed that he's
Speaker 6: killed as many as fifty. And I'm thinking, well, he
Speaker 6: kept bringing up cases. I said, do you believe that?
Speaker 6: Because he also told me that he lied and he
Speaker 6: exaggerated and he would, you know, make all kinds of claims.
Speaker 6: And he says, no, I don't believe he killed that many.
Speaker 6: He goes, he goes, but I do think he has
Speaker 6: as many as twenty or twenty five, he says. By
Speaker 6: the I said, well, why do you think that he
Speaker 6: goes because he just seems to know a lot of
Speaker 6: details about certain ones. Some of them he would just
Speaker 6: kind of make claims to, but some of them he
Speaker 6: specifically mentioned details of So that was where I'm trusting
Speaker 6: Sonny Cab. But also that same story was confirmed when
Speaker 6: we did finally meet with other inmates. They kind of
Speaker 6: told us all the same thing, pretty similar stories. That
Speaker 6: his biggest downfall and it was his downfall in the
Speaker 6: Nigeros case that got him convicted. Is this guy likes
Speaker 6: to talk, and I think it's a he likes to
Speaker 6: relive these things and that's the best way he can.
Speaker 6: He never able to do them again, but he can
Speaker 6: relive them by talking about him. And I think that's
Speaker 6: that's his fantasy, it's his dream, and he just likes
Speaker 6: to talk about him.
Speaker 2: Now, Sonny Colb is a pedophile and he's in with Penton,
Speaker 2: So he's no good guy, you know, just screwed up once.
Speaker 2: Only he's a bad guy as well. Was there any
Speaker 2: talk I'd find it interesting because there's so many American
Speaker 2: cases where very quickly they say, hey, we want you
Speaker 2: to wear a wire when they get some information to
Speaker 2: really confirm and be able to have some solid information.
Speaker 2: Was there any talk or any plans, any discussion about
Speaker 2: maybe wiring Sunny Cab. I know that he wasn't necessarily
Speaker 2: in the same prison, but was there any talk about
Speaker 2: at all?
Speaker 6: Whatsoever there was we did. We did talk about that,
Speaker 6: and we actually even talked about wiring the sale, and
Speaker 6: we talked about a lot of things. But the Sunny
Speaker 6: Cab absolutely would not. He was so paranoid of being
Speaker 6: labeled a snitch that even when we visited him, we
Speaker 6: had to visit him in the regular visitors room. Bruce
Speaker 6: and IV went to visiting first. He wanted us to,
Speaker 6: he said, do not come looking like cops. He wanted
Speaker 6: to wear jeans, wear T shirt, you know, T shoes,
Speaker 6: don't don't come in there looking like a cop with
Speaker 6: a coat and tie or whatever. He says, you're gonna
Speaker 6: look like my uncle and my cousin. You know I want.
Speaker 6: I don't. And he said if you pull, he said,
Speaker 6: and we didn't find this was all true, if you
Speaker 6: pull one of those inmates to a back room to
Speaker 6: interview them, he said, within minutes, in the far back
Speaker 6: reaches of that prison, they know that jefferysony Cavi is
Speaker 6: in the back talking to the police. He said, they
Speaker 6: know it, and it's like a what We kind of
Speaker 6: laughed and said, it's like an old woman's quilting group.
Speaker 6: The gossip that goes on in there, they they they're very,
Speaker 6: very aware of what's going on. And so we respected
Speaker 6: his request and interviewed him as sitting at a table
Speaker 6: with other inmates all around us, but they were enough
Speaker 6: away and paying attention to their visitors that none of
Speaker 6: them seemed to be listening to us, and it went
Speaker 6: real well that way. We interviewed two other inmates that
Speaker 6: same day that he had hooked us up with that
Speaker 6: also told us the same stories about uh, relatively same
Speaker 6: stories that were a little bit different, but he pentting
Speaker 6: bragged to every inmate in there that knew him. Every
Speaker 6: single inmate we ended up talking to, without exception of
Speaker 6: maybe two, told us that he bragged about raping and
Speaker 6: killing kids. That was all he ever talked about. We
Speaker 6: visited prisons that of end would uh. We visited the
Speaker 6: prisons across the state, and we visited inmates that had
Speaker 6: been with him years past, and they even said, yeah,
Speaker 6: that's all you talk about, was raping and killing kids.
Speaker 6: And uh, one of them even told us, so, what
Speaker 6: took you guys so long to get on to him?
Speaker 6: Which didn't make you feel real good and know that.
Speaker 6: Of course, my reply back to him was, well, why
Speaker 6: didn't you call us? You know what took you so long?
Speaker 6: You know, we don't know what he's talking about, but
Speaker 6: that was his downfall, his mouth.
Speaker 2: What was the Was there any to check the credibility?
Speaker 2: I mean, Sonny Cab you fully vetted him, But in
Speaker 2: terms of the other guys, was there any did you
Speaker 2: ask him why are you doing this? Well, why would
Speaker 2: somebody that's almost with the same ilkus penton, why would
Speaker 2: they do anything to help out the authorities?
Speaker 6: There was definitely a question. I never felt like Sonny
Speaker 6: keb was doing this out of the kindness of his heart.
Speaker 6: I think that I always felt that there was something.
Speaker 6: He always felt that he was going to get something
Speaker 6: out of this. That's what I was thinking. We did
Speaker 6: develop a I hate to say a relationship, a friendly
Speaker 6: but we were friendly. I had to talk to him
Speaker 6: like I would talk to anyone, and we got into
Speaker 6: shouting matches with each other. Oh, you know, we got
Speaker 6: into arguments, but we ultimately developed a pretty good rapport
Speaker 6: and it was not easy, I'm to tell you that.
Speaker 6: But the other ones we you know, you always run
Speaker 6: into the problem, Okay, Sonny Kep's got all those information,
Speaker 6: how do we know he didn't do this? So we
Speaker 6: had to kind of check his background and find out
Speaker 6: where he was during all this too, because he sure
Speaker 6: knew a lot and is he trying to pin it
Speaker 6: on someone else? You know that those we looked at
Speaker 6: all those things, the other guys, we wondered if they
Speaker 6: were not people that Sonny cap knew. I was trying
Speaker 6: to build credibility with him, So I wondered, Okay, did
Speaker 6: he go get these guys and coach them so it
Speaker 6: would make his credibility look better that there's other inmates,
Speaker 6: So we had that worry. But after interviewing the two
Speaker 6: other guys, I was very convinced that wasn't the case
Speaker 6: because they didn't tell the same stories, they were different.
Speaker 6: One of them didn't know anything. Bruce and I are
Speaker 6: interviewing these guys, and Bruce is interested in the Christie
Speaker 6: mix case. Obviously I'm interested in rox and Res, and
Speaker 6: we're both interested in Christi Proctor. We didn't want to
Speaker 6: leave her out. We didn't have a plane with us
Speaker 6: at the time, but we wanted to make sure all
Speaker 6: the girls cases were covered. So but I'm focusing on
Speaker 6: Rocks and res and he's focusing on Christie Meeks. Well,
Speaker 6: one of the guys, David Kreki was his name. He
Speaker 6: he's telling us about Rox and Reus, and he's telling
Speaker 6: us about Christy Proctor. But Bruce is wanting, he's chomping
Speaker 6: at the bench to get to Christy Meeks. And he says,
Speaker 6: I've never heard of that one. He said, I don't
Speaker 6: know anything about that, And I would think if they're rehearsing,
Speaker 6: knowing who's coming to talk to them, they're gonna be
Speaker 6: talking about the cases we want to hear about. And
Speaker 6: he didn't, and he sincerely didn't know anything about that one.
Speaker 6: Penton had just not talked about that one. He had
Speaker 6: talked about so many but that was not one of them.
Speaker 6: So I don't feel like they were lying. Just that
Speaker 6: was my gut feeling. And then later we did develop
Speaker 6: more and some that we had to go to that
Speaker 6: didn't come to us and they didn't want anything. So yeah,
Speaker 6: it it became pretty obvious that he had told many
Speaker 6: many people.
Speaker 2: Now, is was there any talk of once you have
Speaker 2: this kind of information, was there any talk of in
Speaker 2: the strategy of what to do next? Was there any
Speaker 2: talk of interviewing Penton or would that? Was that not
Speaker 2: an idea at all?
Speaker 6: Entertained, Oh, it was. We knew through doing. I mean,
Speaker 6: we had gone to Columbus. We had talked to Rick Cheesby,
Speaker 6: was the one of the lead investigators on the Nigerras case,
Speaker 6: and we had he had retired, but I talked with
Speaker 6: him a lot. I talked to a lot of the
Speaker 6: Columbus people. We went and went through their file. We
Speaker 6: knew his background. He never confessed, would not confess, deny,
Speaker 6: he would never confess anything. So we we until we
Speaker 6: were one ready. We decided we were not going to
Speaker 6: interview him until we were just completely sure we had
Speaker 6: what we had because and we never really felt like
Speaker 6: he would ever. He's such a pathological liar. We knew
Speaker 6: he wouldn't tell us anything, or we felt that he wouldn't,
Speaker 6: So we just kind of waited until we were one
Speaker 6: hundred percent ready.
Speaker 2: And I think, now, how did you get how did
Speaker 2: you prepare for this? And what was the strategy? Now
Speaker 2: you have four guys, you say this is the dream
Speaker 2: team of detectives. Everybody's dedicated, everybody has a piece of
Speaker 2: the puzzle. Everybody's up to speed. Tell us what those
Speaker 2: strategy like that strategy session was like with your fellow officers.
Speaker 6: As far as preparing to interview.
Speaker 2: Him, yes, well, preparing to put all the pieces together
Speaker 2: for to make your move like you say you want
Speaker 2: to make. You want to have all those things together.
Speaker 2: So tell us about what's the strategy and tell us
Speaker 2: about you must have spoke with other officers about this,
Speaker 2: what you were.
Speaker 6: Going to do.
Speaker 2: Tell us about those plans we had.
Speaker 6: I think as far as the four person team, I
Speaker 6: think we all had our own unique abilities that that
Speaker 6: kind of blended together real well. We Bruce obviously had
Speaker 6: the knowledge of the case from the beginning, and Bruce
Speaker 6: has an amazing memory, and he was Bruce was a sergeant.
Speaker 6: We were all just detectives. We kind of there was
Speaker 6: no rank in this. I mean we're all from different agencies,
Speaker 6: but we kind of Bruce was a sergeant at his department,
Speaker 6: so we kind of respected him. Miss maybe the he's
Speaker 6: the ranking official there, so uh, and he had a
Speaker 6: extremely high i Q with him. I mean, he just
Speaker 6: had a lot of knowledge about this case. Don Phillips
Speaker 6: was an extremely organized, very good detective. We kind of
Speaker 6: made Don the keeper of the file. Don kind of
Speaker 6: organized it kept everything organized for us because I'm not
Speaker 6: the most organized person in the world, and Don was
Speaker 6: very good with that. So Don was the keeper of
Speaker 6: the file, is what we called him. And Billy had
Speaker 6: worked on a multi jurisdictional task force. There was a
Speaker 6: lot of oh this was kind of it may have
Speaker 6: been national news. There was a kind of an epidemic
Speaker 6: of heroin cases involving young kids overdosing in the area
Speaker 6: at that time, and there was a task force developed.
Speaker 6: It even involved one of the Dallas Cowboys, Mark Tunenay,
Speaker 6: had overdosed on heroin. Billy was on this task force
Speaker 6: that was working these cases and had a lot of
Speaker 6: experience with multi jurisdictional thanks and so he was really
Speaker 6: good at working with other people and getting things like that.
Speaker 6: And I guess my strong point was I was the
Speaker 6: how do I say this, the BS or I was
Speaker 6: the one that was able to talk to people and
Speaker 6: get them to tell me things. That was I guess
Speaker 6: that was my strong point. I had Sonny cap He
Speaker 6: wouldn't talk to nobody else, he would not work with
Speaker 6: anybody else. He we had a relationship developed between us
Speaker 6: and he would only work with me. So we all
Speaker 6: had our point our strong points in this and and
Speaker 6: we worked off each other every you know, we if
Speaker 6: Don needed something for organizing it, and we gave it
Speaker 6: to Don. Don it was his deal. He developed a
Speaker 6: PowerPoint on it him. I think Billy actually helped him out.
Speaker 6: Everyone just had a task and we all it jailled.
Speaker 6: It worked. So when we got together everyone kind of
Speaker 6: we just sort of knew our roles without ever really
Speaker 6: even discussing that. I don't know if that makes sense,
Speaker 6: but so tell him.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it's uh. Everybody has their strengths and there
Speaker 2: is a rule. So tell us about the final the
Speaker 2: final arrest of Penton for these how you come to
Speaker 2: be able to do that?
Speaker 6: Tell us a lot time when we we made maybe
Speaker 6: five trips to Ohio interviewing people. Our last trip there
Speaker 6: was the trip we decided we were going to do
Speaker 6: our interview. We decided Bruce and I would interview Pentton,
Speaker 6: Billy and Don would go into his cell and search
Speaker 6: his cell while we're interviewing him. We also brought Collin
Speaker 6: County District Attorney investigator Marlena Scribner came with us, and
Speaker 6: she was kind of our we spread out. We took
Speaker 6: off into different areas of the state. When we got
Speaker 6: when we hit the ground in Ohio, we would take off.
Speaker 6: Billy and I would take off and go one direction.
Speaker 6: Don and Bruce would take off and go another direction.
Speaker 6: We were running down things and Marleita was Marlette. I
Speaker 6: believe she stayed in Columbus, and that was kind of
Speaker 6: our central contact person. She was, you know, we would
Speaker 6: call in check in with Marlette and she would tell
Speaker 6: us what Bruce and Donn are doing and vice versa,
Speaker 6: so we kind of kept her in the center. We
Speaker 6: The day we decided to interview, we decided Bruce and
Speaker 6: I would do the interview, Billy and Don would check
Speaker 6: the cell. Marlene came in and she helped them look
Speaker 6: through his cell, but we brought him into a room
Speaker 6: he had now backing up one of the things we
Speaker 6: had done early on in working with the prison investigators,
Speaker 6: who were huge help. We had his mail intercepted and
Speaker 6: when he would get a letter in or send a
Speaker 6: letter out, they would open it and make a copy
Speaker 6: of it, send it to us, and then close his
Speaker 6: letter back up and send it out. So I knew
Speaker 6: what mail had come in and out, and it was
Speaker 6: pretty ironic that after maybe the second visit there, I
Speaker 6: would read his mail and I would see my name
Speaker 6: in his mail, the detective Gary Sweet from Garland, Detective
Speaker 6: Bruce Bratshaw, we're here talking about me again. He knew
Speaker 6: we were there, he knew our names, and I just
Speaker 6: kind of blew me away. The intelligence in the prison system.
Speaker 6: He had never seen us, but he knew our names
Speaker 6: and had talked about us in his mail. So when
Speaker 6: we brought him in for that interview and set him down,
Speaker 6: he was looking at us with a very puzzled look
Speaker 6: on his face, like who are you guys? And I
Speaker 6: walked over to him and stuck my hand out to
Speaker 6: shake his hand and introduced myself to him. And Bruce
Speaker 6: stuck his hand out and introduced himself, and he wet
Speaker 6: his pants. I mean, his face went pale and he
Speaker 6: lost his bodily functions. I think the fly and it
Speaker 6: was that great. And men hadn't really said this, but
Speaker 6: he had a huge fear of Texas. They felt like
Speaker 6: in those inmates when they would talk to us, they
Speaker 6: thought we executed about I think one of them said,
Speaker 6: you guys execute about five or six hundred people a year. Well,
Speaker 6: I think maybe that's really about maybe twenty or twenty
Speaker 6: five is probably the more accurate number. But I said, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 6: we don't execute six hundred people. Yeah, that's ridiculous. Probably
Speaker 6: only three or four hundred, you know, I just kind
Speaker 6: of keep that going in their mind. They really believed
Speaker 6: that if you come to Texas, you're gonna get killed.
Speaker 6: So we the strategy for pening. I knew that he
Speaker 6: really didn't have a conscience about these because of things
Speaker 6: that he had told these inmates, one of them asking
Speaker 6: him one time, why did you kill the girls after
Speaker 6: you raped them? Because that was his ultimate goal. He said, well,
Speaker 6: they're not good for anything after that. You know, there's
Speaker 6: just gonna be a burden on society after you've sex
Speaker 6: with us. Often they're not good for anything, so just
Speaker 6: kill them and throw them away. And uh, so me,
Speaker 6: that sounded like a person that just didn't have a conscience,
Speaker 6: didn't didn't have a soul. It was my thought. But
Speaker 6: and I knew he liked to brag. So I started
Speaker 6: reading up on that personality and it was a psycho
Speaker 6: path and I read books on cycle paths. Uh, every
Speaker 6: chance I got, I tried to read everything I could
Speaker 6: to learn to develop a strategy to talk to him.
Speaker 6: So the final strategy was what got us there his ego,
Speaker 6: him talking and bragging about doing this. So we went
Speaker 6: in and kind of stroked his ego a little bit,
Speaker 6: told him how good he was at it, and how
Speaker 6: I look how along it took us to catch you,
Speaker 6: and uh, we you know it the first conversation when
Speaker 6: we introduced ourselves after he wet his pants, he tried
Speaker 6: to hide that from us and turn himself away so
Speaker 6: we wouldn't see it, but it you know, we knew
Speaker 6: it was there. But he said, I, I'm glad you
Speaker 6: guys are here. He goes, so I can tell you
Speaker 6: I didn't do these crimes you are talking about. I
Speaker 6: just told him, David, we didn't come here to talk
Speaker 6: about whether he did or not. We know you did him,
Speaker 6: So I just wanted to come meet you before we
Speaker 6: bring you back to Texas and kill you. We just
Speaker 6: kind of wanted to introduce ourselves to you. So we
Speaker 6: kept pumping the fear into him. But then we would
Speaker 6: also stroke his ego a little bit, and that was
Speaker 6: our strategy basically.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 2: Well, tell us more. I mean this is fascinating. Tell
Speaker 2: us more about the interview itself. I mean, he wets
Speaker 2: his pants. Now you're stroking his ego. You don't humiliate him.
Speaker 2: You know, you don't humiliate it because he wets his pants.
Speaker 2: So again, tell us more about actual conversations on how
Speaker 2: he begins and how he opens up a little in
Speaker 2: this interview.
Speaker 6: We know, we don't even acknowledge it, and no, we
Speaker 6: did not want to embarrass him. So he kind of
Speaker 6: turned his body away and crossed his legs, and we
Speaker 6: didn't acknowledge it. You could smell urine in their room.
Speaker 6: That wasn't a large room, but we didn't acknowledge that.
Speaker 6: And we just continued to talk to him, and he
Speaker 6: continued to deny. And one great thing I think that
Speaker 6: came out of it. You know, I've always said my
Speaker 6: greatest fear in police work is putting the wrong person
Speaker 6: in prison for a crime they didn't commit. I would
Speaker 6: rather a person get away with murder than put a
Speaker 6: person in prison for murder that didn't do it. I
Speaker 6: just that would be a nightmare for me. So I
Speaker 6: always had this in the back of my mind. You know,
Speaker 6: I'm ninety nine point nine percent sure this guy is guilty,
Speaker 6: but that's not good enough. I want to be one
Speaker 6: hundred percent sure. So, you know, just everything kept lining
Speaker 6: up and Okay, what if all these inmates are like
Speaker 6: like you know, I just still had that tiny, tiny,
Speaker 6: tiny doubt in the back of my mind, and it
Speaker 6: worried me. I was convinced he did it, but I just,
Speaker 6: like I said, it's a very small doubt, but it
Speaker 6: was there. I'm not going to deny that. After that interview,
Speaker 6: I was one hundred percent satisfied. And the first thing
Speaker 6: I think that convinced me is when Bruce asked him,
Speaker 6: you know, knowing that we had gone up into the
Speaker 6: attic and found those rags. We didn't know if that
Speaker 6: was his rags or not. We just didn't know because
Speaker 6: the DNA wasn't good enough. But Bruce threw that out there.
Speaker 6: He goes, David, what if I told you that we
Speaker 6: searched your house in Columbus and that we found something
Speaker 6: in the attic and he looked at him. Now, David
Speaker 6: Pentton was a very animated, very moving He was constantly moving,
Speaker 6: his head was moving, he was always just shifting around.
Speaker 6: He was very animated, and he kind of paused still
Speaker 6: for a second and said, I would say that's a
Speaker 6: lie because I never took any souvenirs. And I think
Speaker 6: it was everything I could do to keep from falling
Speaker 6: out of my chair because I just heard him confess.
Speaker 6: He just said that I did. I mean, he said
Speaker 6: I never took any souvenirs. So we didn't acknowledge that
Speaker 6: he said that. We just kind of kept right on going,
Speaker 6: hoping that he would say more, and he didn't. He
Speaker 6: would deny and deny some more, and then later, after
Speaker 6: stroking his ego about how good he was at it,
Speaker 6: he kind of chuckled one time and he goes, you know,
Speaker 6: he goes, y'all can't have any evidence on me, So
Speaker 6: why is that? He goes, I'm not stupid. He goes,
Speaker 6: I didn't leave any physical evidence. Well, then again, that's
Speaker 6: another confession, and I had to question him. Then I said, well,
Speaker 6: what do you mean? I said, did you use a condom?
Speaker 6: I mean, what do you mean you didn't leave any evidence?
Speaker 6: And the expression on his face completely changed. He realized
Speaker 6: then what he had just said, and he got real
Speaker 6: antsy and started shifting around in his changes. Oh, well,
Speaker 6: I didn't leave any evidence because I didn't do it,
Speaker 6: but he had already slipped up and said he had
Speaker 6: done it. So he confessed twice in that interview without
Speaker 6: really even knowing he had done it. And so we
Speaker 6: left that interview. I left one hundred percent positive that
Speaker 6: he was our guy, not that I had a whole
Speaker 6: lot of doubt, but any little bit I had was gone.
Speaker 6: And then we did get to bring him in the
Speaker 6: second day, And to be perfectly honest, we did the
Speaker 6: second day was because I think Bruce, I mean because
Speaker 6: I think Don and Billy were jealous that they didn't
Speaker 6: get a chance to talk to him. So that's what
Speaker 6: we always telling him, tease him. But they wanted a
Speaker 6: shot at him too, So we brought him back out
Speaker 6: for a second day, and all four of us took
Speaker 6: a shot at him. And you know, Don and Billy,
Speaker 6: they didn't want to miss out on that. Those were
Speaker 6: those are two top nasty detectives. And for to hear
Speaker 6: men Bruce sitting here gloating about this interview with him,
Speaker 6: they were wanted the shot at him. So we brought
Speaker 6: him out, let them have a shot at him too,
Speaker 6: And that was several hours of interviews and in that
Speaker 6: time he confessed a couple more times with slip ups.
Speaker 6: He just his mouth. He can't. I mean, if you
Speaker 6: talk to anyone long enough in their lying, they can't
Speaker 6: remember the lies. You can remember the truth when you
Speaker 6: tell the truth, but when you tell a lie, it's
Speaker 6: hard to remember that life. You talked to him long enough,
Speaker 6: they forget what they said. Yeah, so he did slip
Speaker 6: up a couple more times.
Speaker 2: We'd like you say, it is not the confessing the
Speaker 2: confessing type.
Speaker 6: No. Now, if you ask him after that interview, he
Speaker 6: never did confess. But but he did. I mean he
Speaker 6: he would not admit that he confessed, but he slipped
Speaker 6: up and confessed. We were told, we were warned about him.
Speaker 6: You know, things to do and not doing the interview.
Speaker 6: One was to not do not get into a discussion
Speaker 6: of the Bible or God, because they said, when they're
Speaker 6: not sitting around there talking about raping kids, they're in
Speaker 6: there talking about the Bible. There they studied the Bible,
Speaker 6: they know the Bible. And he said, Pentton was pretty
Speaker 6: well versed, and he did went to a lot of
Speaker 6: Bible studies. And they said, don't stay away from that.
Speaker 6: They said, stay away from that. But it just got
Speaker 6: We ended up getting into that too, and he he
Speaker 6: was just I have to say he was. He was
Speaker 6: an interesting guy to interview.
Speaker 2: And everybody so everybody say you got everyone got a
Speaker 2: shot and you had interviewed him for hours. But again
Speaker 2: just admissions that you really can't do much with right.
Speaker 6: We did not. We were out of our element. We
Speaker 6: did try to record the second interview, but we it
Speaker 6: was the recording devices and that time were not that
Speaker 6: great and we didn't get a lot on recording and
Speaker 6: we couldn't. You know, you hit thirty minute tape on
Speaker 6: one side you had to turn over for thirty minutes
Speaker 6: on the other side. After thirty minutes, we had barely
Speaker 6: got the preliminary introductions out and basics before the tape
Speaker 6: needed to be turned over, and we couldn't sneak and
Speaker 6: turn it over with him watching. So we really didn't
Speaker 6: get anything recorded. I'd give anything if we had, but
Speaker 6: today it would have been recorded. Back then, we just weren't.
Speaker 6: We just didn't do it that often. If I could
Speaker 6: go back in time is one thing I would have.
Speaker 2: Done right, and from that you just would be able
Speaker 2: to study from that interview him more so, or were
Speaker 2: there little bits of information that could have been used
Speaker 2: in his prosecution.
Speaker 6: Uh, I'm sorry, I mister, question.
Speaker 2: Was it there were just for your own purposes in
Speaker 2: terms of seeing his reaction action to certain information and
Speaker 2: his response in retrospect when you watch the tapes back
Speaker 2: or when you listen to the tapes back, or was
Speaker 2: it more so that there was some titbits of information
Speaker 2: that could be used in this prosecution.
Speaker 6: We wanted it for prosecution purposes mostly, and we knew
Speaker 6: that he had slipped up the first interview and we
Speaker 6: were hoping that the second one he would do the same,
Speaker 6: but they just didn't work out. With the types would
Speaker 6: have been great for prosecution, but there were four of
Speaker 6: us in the room. It would have been for our
Speaker 6: word against his, and I hope that would be enough. So,
Speaker 6: you know, we took noticing on what he said.
Speaker 2: But and how did he respond? You say, you know,
Speaker 2: there's a there's These guys respond respond differently. But lots
Speaker 2: of these guys share some of the characteristics in terms
Speaker 2: of narcissism, and they very much enjoy the spotlight. Some
Speaker 2: of them are very very talkative. They might not confess,
Speaker 2: but they're still very very talkative, And like you say
Speaker 2: he got into religion and in in in one of
Speaker 2: the interviews, Uh, tell us just what his behavior was like.
Speaker 2: His demeanor was like his how did you react to
Speaker 2: four of you guys in there trying to get something
Speaker 2: from him?
Speaker 6: He was talkative, he it was uh, he was polite. Uh,
Speaker 6: he was doing his I mean, I'm sure from his perspective,
Speaker 6: it wasn't an easy task because you know, if you're
Speaker 6: interrogating or interviewing someone one on one and you're they
Speaker 6: respond to you, you have to think of what your
Speaker 6: next question is back to them. While I'm talking to him,
Speaker 6: I got three other good detectives over there already ready
Speaker 6: for another question. So we didn't give him much time.
Speaker 6: And uh, you know, a liar needs time to think,
Speaker 6: and we were able to hit him just with bam
Speaker 6: bam bam, one after another and without much time to think.
Speaker 6: And I think that's a It can be a g
Speaker 6: if you work together well, it can be a good
Speaker 6: way of interviewing because, uh, you you always know when
Speaker 6: a guy's trying to think of a lie, when he
Speaker 6: when he repeats the question back to you, he's stalling
Speaker 6: for time when he uh you know, just just a
Speaker 6: little different techniques that they used to try to stall
Speaker 6: for time or to think, and uh, we didn't give
Speaker 6: him time for that, so it it.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 6: I think it was probably pretty pretty hard on him
Speaker 6: for four of us to be in there hitting him
Speaker 6: with questions one right after another, But I wasn't too
Speaker 6: worried about his feelings on it. Uh. He did ultimately
Speaker 6: tell us that I could have killed these kids and
Speaker 6: I don't remember, uh cause I was doing a lot
Speaker 6: of drugs back then, and that that was probably the
Speaker 6: best confession we'd ever get out of him, as oh, yeah,
Speaker 6: maybe I did it, and I don't remember. I've heard
Speaker 6: that same story before from other people, but to me,
Speaker 6: that was a confession too, but never had to get
Speaker 6: out in court because he did it confess ultimately an
Speaker 6: open court.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what was Did you attend court? The court
Speaker 2: proceedings itself?
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, And just tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: We won't won't keep you on too much longer, but
Speaker 2: just tell us how that went in terms of how
Speaker 2: you felt about the trial or the farm the proceedings themselves,
Speaker 2: and tell us what your overall feeling was seeing him there.
Speaker 6: And well, it actually never went to trial. They there
Speaker 6: were some issues that came up. They said that they
Speaker 6: had found some work records that might have proved that
Speaker 6: he was working during one of these cases. And in
Speaker 6: the prosecutor at the time, very very good prosecutor, probably
Speaker 6: one of the best in the state. He felt like,
Speaker 6: if we had doubt in one, you know, we had
Speaker 6: one shot at this pretty much in one. Juror gave
Speaker 6: us problems with this, things that they were bringing out
Speaker 6: that we, you know, we may have problems. So they offered.
Speaker 6: The defense offered to plead guilty to all of them
Speaker 6: for life in prison, the rest of his life in prison,
Speaker 6: and he just felt like this would be a guaranteed
Speaker 6: way to make sure he never got off the streets.
Speaker 6: We could go in and try to get the death
Speaker 6: penalty and lose. Then we've lost it, you know, with
Speaker 6: the evidence, and we didn't have time to go search
Speaker 6: the evidence out that they had come up with, which
Speaker 6: later we found out was a time card for a
Speaker 6: job that he worked, did show that he was working,
Speaker 6: but we found out what his job was at that
Speaker 6: place was doing the time cards. So it's been very
Speaker 6: much for him to fabricate a time card for when
Speaker 6: he's outs but we didn't have time to investigate that
Speaker 6: at the time, and they want to have accepted the plea,
Speaker 6: and he went into open court and pled guilty, and
Speaker 6: by pleading guilty, he had to openly admit that he
Speaker 6: had committed the crimes. And it did take away any
Speaker 6: possible cities for appeals for him. So it was kind
Speaker 6: of a in some ways it was good. I mean,
Speaker 6: we would you know, I think the families would have
Speaker 6: liked to have seen the death penalty. And I'm not
Speaker 6: going to sit here and say I wouldn't have liked
Speaker 6: to have seen that too. But if there ever was
Speaker 6: a person that's a poster child for the death penalty,
Speaker 6: he who was it? But I think we now know
Speaker 6: that he's going to die in prison. So that's that's
Speaker 6: good enough.
Speaker 2: It has to be enough. Yes, that has to be enough,
Speaker 2: and that's a success. The question I ask is that typically,
Speaker 2: and I know he probably had a court appointed lawyer,
Speaker 2: but did that lawyer do his best in terms of
Speaker 2: vigorous defense? If he he should have known that there
Speaker 2: was some difficulty with making this case, shouldn't he have?
Speaker 2: And then as a result, but this is not much
Speaker 2: of a good deal. That he's you know, there was
Speaker 2: the agreement this.
Speaker 6: Actually good attorney that represented him was not the original
Speaker 6: attorney that he had in the beginning. When he got
Speaker 6: to Texas. The original attorney somehow got excused from the
Speaker 6: case after going along a pretty good bit, so they
Speaker 6: had to postpone for the new attorney to familiarize himself
Speaker 6: with the case. So I think that's why it took
Speaker 6: a long time for this to actually go through the
Speaker 6: court process, because he had changed the attorneys. I do
Speaker 6: think that he had a good attorney. The guy was
Speaker 6: a good attorney. He we asked permission to I probably
Speaker 6: shouldn't say this, but we had asked permission that we
Speaker 6: wanted to talk to Pentton after he played guilty because
Speaker 6: we wanted to know what were we right on and
Speaker 6: what were we wrong on? Did we miss some things?
Speaker 6: I mean, because we figured once he's played guilty, there's
Speaker 6: no reason for him not to tell us anything. And
Speaker 6: we went to his attorney and asked him, I could
Speaker 6: we speak to him and he wouldn't allow it, and
Speaker 6: we kind of sort of under his breath told us
Speaker 6: he couldn't let him talk to us for fear of
Speaker 6: him implicating himself. In other cases, So we kind of
Speaker 6: knew rapped the end that there were more cases. So
Speaker 6: he wasn't gonna let us talk to him because he
Speaker 6: didn't want us digging those out of him. So his attorney,
Speaker 6: I think knew, But he did do a very I
Speaker 6: think he was a good attorney, did a good job
Speaker 6: as far as I don't I don't know how well
Speaker 6: it must have been.
Speaker 2: Obviously, despite not getting a confession, obviously you had enough
Speaker 2: evidence to you know, compel that a plea agreement. And
Speaker 2: the plea agreement that he got is to spend the
Speaker 2: rest of his life in prison, So you know, I mean,
Speaker 2: when you have a death penalty case, that's a heck
Speaker 2: of a thing to try to avoid. So you know,
Speaker 2: if you didn't start off in a death penalty capital case,
Speaker 2: then you know, it's a hell of a way to
Speaker 2: get a plea agreement that ends up like this. Let's
Speaker 2: put it that way. In some states, it's it's hard.
Speaker 2: There is no device in terms of uh, there's always
Speaker 2: a parle hearing.
Speaker 6: So yeah, well it's a good thing for parole, yeah,
Speaker 6: I think so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that it's it's sad that in some
Speaker 2: states and in Canada, we have that where there's there's
Speaker 2: always a parole hearing, you know, whether it's multiple murder
Speaker 2: like Robert Picton thirty three or twenty six or whatever
Speaker 2: the tally, he still has a parole hearing, not in
Speaker 2: a consecutive fashion, so it's not a one hundred years
Speaker 2: from now. He has a parle hearing as a pro
Speaker 2: hearing pretty soon, so very well, you know, even regardless
Speaker 2: for me.
Speaker 6: He will have a pro hearing. He is eligible for
Speaker 6: pro in Ohio in twenty twenty seven. But the thing
Speaker 6: is that if she is parole in Ohio, he has
Speaker 6: to come to Texas and starve out the rest of
Speaker 6: his life, so he may face a parole hearing there.
Speaker 6: I think he wants to stay there. I'm sure. I'm
Speaker 6: sure he'll not want to be paroled. Yeah, he's probably
Speaker 6: comfortable there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, still have to be.
Speaker 6: Gary.
Speaker 2: I want to thank you very much for coming on.
Speaker 2: And I want to tell people too that you've been
Speaker 2: listening to Gary sweet and uh and you are the
Speaker 2: person that they talk about. Steve Jackson talks about so
Speaker 2: eloquenttry eloquently in his book Boogie Man, and so that's
Speaker 2: the book just came out and how was that for you?
Speaker 2: Seeing your yourself on the pages of a true crime book.
Speaker 6: Kind of it is a little surreal. I guess it's
Speaker 6: flattering that a writer the caliber of Steve Jackson would
Speaker 6: write a story about a case that I've worked on.
Speaker 6: That's pretty flattering. I had the privilege of meeting him
Speaker 6: on another case that I had worked, another cold case,
Speaker 6: and which was a crazy story in itself. But yeah,
Speaker 6: to to have a Roterlck Steve write a story about
Speaker 6: a case that's very flattering.
Speaker 2: Yes, And I think, you know, it's nice. What I
Speaker 2: think is nice too, is the true crime writer like
Speaker 2: of the caliber of Steve Jackson, with all his experience too,
Speaker 2: is that it really it really compliments this and a
Speaker 2: very much essential the next step in terms of you.
Speaker 2: You are the people that do the dirty work. You're
Speaker 2: the people that do all the heavy lifting and have
Speaker 2: to live this literally. But Steve Jackson, through his talent,
Speaker 2: brings that to life and conveys that important story and
Speaker 2: what we all can learn from reading this book. And
Speaker 2: I think, just like we spoke about in this interview
Speaker 2: and in the Steve Jackson interview as well, that fate
Speaker 2: really intervened and you could say where this came from
Speaker 2: or where it emanated from. But strange things happened, much
Speaker 2: stranger than fiction to be able to make this case
Speaker 2: and to bring this person to justice and get some
Speaker 2: answers for the victims' families. And so I want to
Speaker 2: thank you very much and congratulate you on beem famous
Speaker 2: in Steve Jackson's books. I want to thank you very
Speaker 2: much for coming on and talking about real life experiences.
Speaker 6: I appreciate it. The you know, fame is not something
Speaker 6: to really look for. You want to retire quietly someday
Speaker 6: and just go away, but I do. I mean I
Speaker 6: want to. I want to get copies of that book
Speaker 6: and give it to my grandkids so they'll know their
Speaker 6: grandfather at least did something in his life. But it
Speaker 6: I was telling someone about the book. I knew the ending,
Speaker 6: and when I started reading it, I couldn't put it down.
Speaker 6: That's crazy. I knew the whole story. But Steve is
Speaker 6: such a good writer. I'm thinking, wow, yeah it was.
Speaker 6: It was really interesting. But anyway, I appreciate getting to
Speaker 6: come on.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's been very nice Gary for you to come
Speaker 2: on and share your experiences. It's not very often, if
Speaker 2: at all. It's very very rare to get your perspective,
Speaker 2: a detective perspective someone that lived through something like this.
Speaker 2: And even though you don't get too many happy endings,
Speaker 2: that's it's and it's not a happy ending because of
Speaker 2: the victims' families that it again, it's just there is
Speaker 2: satisfaction in getting something that's very difficult done and achieved
Speaker 2: and and you're still you know, you still retain your
Speaker 2: sanity after all this, So that's admirable in itself, right there.
Speaker 6: So well, yeah, it's I hope I'll retain you my sayingity.
Speaker 6: I still keep that file under my desk, and I
Speaker 6: still have the inspiration book that it talks about still
Speaker 6: sitting in the same place. I haven't been able to
Speaker 6: let go of that stuff even as long as it's
Speaker 6: been and hopefully when I retire, I can let it go,
Speaker 6: but I really still can't. So it does kind of
Speaker 6: stick with you. The only case I have like this
Speaker 6: is the biggest one I have like that, But I
Speaker 6: have a couple other ones that you just can't let go.
Speaker 6: Hope it's not a problem later.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, Well, I'm sure Steve will dig up one
Speaker 2: of your other stories and bring this it to life
Speaker 2: as well, so we'll hopefully we'll be able to talk
Speaker 2: to you again and sometime in the future. But anyway,
Speaker 2: you have yourself a great evening, Gary, and thank you
Speaker 2: very much. Thanks once again, good night, thank you very much.
Speaker 6: Good night.