TRUE DETECTIVE-Gary Sweet

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Christy Meeks disappeared during a game of hide and seek outside her mother's Mesquite apartment complex in January nineteen eighty five and was found dead less than three months later in Lake Texoma. Christy Procter's body was found in a South Plain O field in April nineteen eighty eight, more than two years after the fourth grader was last seen walking from her North Dallas apartment to a friend's home and Roxan Reyis was snatched from an alley while playing

outside her Garland apartment in November nineteen eighty seven. This story focuses on the work of a team of police detectives, starting with Garland police detective Gary Sweet, who picked up the cases of the three missing girls after they've done in nineteen ninety six. Years after the murders, he found the girl's files and information on suspect David Elliott Pentin. For some reason, out of all the stuff that was in those two boxes, I pulled out a file and

started reading about him. Sweet said Penton was in jail in Ohio for killing nine year old Nidra Ross. What followed was a series of faithful twists, from reviewing old tips to conducting new interviews and gathering information shared by Penton's cellmates. By two thousand and three, Sweet and the team had enough to indict Pentin. The title of the program, This evening is true Detective from the detective's perspective, with

my special guest, Detective Gary Sweet. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview, Gary Sweet, Good evening, Gary, thank you for agreeing to this interview.

So let's give our audience a little bit of the background on yourself.

I kind of wanted to do. But after the six months, I had to go back to patrol and worked a couple of more years, or actually about another year, and then I went into the School Resource Officer program and worked in a high school for about two and a half years, and then an opening came available in the criminal investigation division and I put in for that and was accepted in there, and I got I guess maybe

the buy an intervention here again. But there were several openings in just about every unit in the police department, and there were thefts, auto theft, burglary investigations, juvenile crime investigations, and the crimes against persons, crimes against persons being probably the hardest one to get into. And I thought, what the heck, I'll put in for that, and if I don't get it, I'll put it on another one form

my second choice. Well, I put in for it and actually got it, so I was kind of lucky to get in there right away.

of Dallas. We connect to Dallas on the east side.

covers a lot of ground. I think Garland is about sixty square miles relatively roughly speaking, sixty square miles I think a pretty good distance spread out, and the population I'm not really sure how accurate that is. I think we have a lot of unreported citizens also, I suppose.

in the lunch with them. So that habit kind of carried over when I went into the investigation division, and

so about eleven o'clock I would take lunch. And also the other benefit to it was we had at that time it's not like that anymore, but we had one computer per two detectives, and we shared a computer, and so, uh, I was not that computer savvy at that time, and uh, not that I am now, but the U I found that extra hour when everyone went to lunch and I could have the office to myself, give me a little bit more time on the computer. So I liked to

hang around in there quiet by myself. And this one particular that I don't think I had anything pressing, so I just kind of wandered into the We called it the murder closet. It there was a stacks of boxes of unsolved murders, and I went in there and started looking through them, just out of curiosity more than anything. No one was around, so uh and I saw the Roxanne Reis file, and I remembered that case because I was a late night patrol officer and I worked the

area of town. My beat was in the area very close to where Roxanne's disappearance curd so and I remembered it. And I just picked that box up and pulled it out and set it at my desk and opened it up. And I think, as you were explaining before, I picked the file out of it, just I think the first file I grabbed out of it was David Penton and it had several newspaper clippings, it had the composite drawing,

it had several things. I started reading about him and thought to myself, boy, this guy really sounds like a good suspect on this and looks like a good suspect. He matches the picture that was drawn the composite, and I thought to myself, I'm sure they looked him over really well. You know, I didn't know what had been done in the investigation by just you know, looking in that file that quick, so I just kind of assumed that I'm sure they looked at this guy pretty good.

And after the probably twenty five to thirty minutes of going through reading about him, I ended up putting it back up and going back to work basically, and I ventured back in there every now and then, and even took one of a new detective that came in there too. I took him in there and showed him around. We were both kind of fascinated with the cold cases, so just was an interest to mine, and that case stayed in my mind for some reason.

kind of work its way around the room. And Sweet was the second to the last name. Thompson was one behind me, so I always knew, here it comes, mine's about to be next. And when it rang, I picked it up and it was Tammy Lopez. I didn't snap on the name because Roxanne Res her name was Tammy Reyes at the time. But she started explaining to me that she had heard there was some new information about her daughter's case, and that's, well, who's your daughter? And

she's Roxane Res. And then it hit me who this was, and I at that time, I had not heard anything about it. So I told her, I don't know anything, but there's six other detectives in here, and when they get back from much, I'll ask them and check with my supervisor and see because there could have been something I didn't know about it. So I told her i'd call her back. And when they all got back and I asked each one of them, no one knew anything about it. So I had to call her and tell

her that, Nae, no one has heard anything. We don't know anything new, and she sounded pretty disappointed, and that kind of stuck with me. I think the worst thing about those cases was just thinking about what the parents must have been going through, because I had at that particular time, I had two daughters myself, and I just couldn't imagine what horrible things that was prepared to have to deal with.

what are the kind of cases? There are a couple of cases that really stuck out that you actually are involved with that, for lack of a better word, I guess prepare you for your inevitable work that you're going to have to do with Penton and to get Penton.

that person that was murdered. Not saying they deserve to be murdered by any means, when I'm saying they put themselves in a place that you know that it was a probably not a it was a possibility, maybe not a probability, but some people just put themselves into place to be a higher risk. These were a person who is just mining their own business, and they're what I would I I don't want to say true victim, because they're all true victims, but some of them are like

the one, particularly one I'm leading up to. I guess this case of Smiley Johnson. This was an elderly woman about eighty years old, and she was murdered in her home. She was stabbed repeatedly, brutally stabbed, and didn't die right away and was able to talk to the nine one

one operator a little bit. She called a friend first instead of calling the police, and the friend ran across the street to her house, and this lady called nine one one and they were able to talk to her for a few minutes on the phone, and I was able to get that recording and she she described her attacker as a young, small white male. She said, I thought it was my nephew, so I let him in, and you know, obviously it wasn't her nephew, she the way it sounded. And working on that, that case became

a cold case. After a while, we followed up tons of leads. I traveled to Atlanta, and interviewing one of her grandsons. We talked to every nephew just because she mentioned nephew, we talked to. I traveled to Oklahoma one time and interviewed a bankerby's suspect who had lived across the street from her that it was actually a young female, but when she robbed this bank, they described her as a young, small white male, and that just stuck out

to me. So I went to Muscogie, Oklahoma and interviewed her and thinking maybe she had come across the street and done this, but there was a lot of dead end leaves and then I don't remember the exact amount of time that had gone by off the top of my head, but we got a call we'd interviewed a great grandson and his cousin. I guess they were both great grandsons, but different mothers or fathers. I don't remember the exact relation, but they were two people that had

access to this lady. It had been over there several times. And uh. We also knew through talking to one of Smiley's grandsons, not great grandsons, but one of her grandsons, that she had a dog that was her grandson said this dog would bite anyone that tried to come in. There was not a nice dog. It would bite you. And if this person went in the back door, he was convinced that it was someone that knew her or

that dog would have attacked him. So we interviewed everybody we thought might know her, and we interviewed this young man, Michael Giles, and another young man, and really weren't able

to get anything out of him. But maybe a little over a year later, the other gentleman, and I can't think of his name off the top of my head, but he had called us and said that Michael told him that he killed his grandmother or his great grandmother, and so we had basically wired him and he went and we ended up arresting Michael Giles, and he did confess. We developed a little bit of a rapport talking and he he confessed to that murder pretty easily. I mean,

it wasn't like a hard interrogation. He was quite proud of it. And I asked him why, and he pretty much told me he wanted to know what it was like to have sex with a dead person. And that point, right there, I knew everything he had told me, what

he had done followed every step I had. Him described the offense that he attacked her in a back bedroom, and I knew that was true because we had luminol the house we had and it was red shag carpet, so you couldn't see any blood prints necessarily, but the luminol brings the blood out, makes it glow in the dark. And we'd done this at night, and we knew the footprints led into the bathroom, so we assumed the killer

went in and washed up. We even checked the sink and found blood residue in the sink, so we knew he had washed up and before he left. So he described that he went to He told us everything and everything matched until he come to that sexual assault part. And I said, well, then why didn't you raperr if you killed her? And want to know what it was like? He says, I did raper. I said, Michael, you're lying because we had a rape exam done at the medical

exam in his office and she wasn't sexually assaulted. And he got kind of upset with me and said, I did rape her. I raped her through one of the stab wounds. And he told me that he licked her intestines and a couple of times during this he'd break out into chance praising, and I knew what I was talking to him. This is an evil person. I mean, this was a sick guy. But you know, we we kept a pretty good report. He gave me a statement

and this ended up not going to court. He was a juvenile that was certified as an adult and he was sentenced to thirty years. I think he's eligible for pro this year. Hopefully he's not gonna get it. But anyway, dealing with him kind of let me know that they're even in the wildest craziest movies that you see, they don't really reflect what is really really out there, and that is there are some sick people. Uh you know these Friday the thirteenth and all those slasher movies. They

don't show reality. And I started kind of getting a grip on reality. What really is out there. There's some crazy people out there.

potential serial killer. He the only reason he's not a serial killer is he hasn't wasn't out long enough to kill multiple times. But I think he was killing for the thrill of it, and that I mean not even I don't think there's even animals in the animal kingdom that just kill for the thrill of it. They kill for food, they kill for I think humans are the only ones that may do that. But this guy was a thrill killer, I think, not a psychiatrist guy.

had called me. And then in two thousand and I don't remember specifically that they don't have my notes in front of me, but somewhere in two thousand I was again at During that between eleven and twelve o'clock hour. I'm sitting there in the phone starts ringing around the room again, which is not really that uncommon a thing.

So I sat and waited for it to hit my line and answered, and the secretary told me that there was a Fort Worth detective on the phone that wanted to speak to an investigator, in which that's relatively common thing, nothing out of the ordinary about that. Usually want help with something, and you know, we try to do everything

we can to help each other out. So I told her to transfer her back, and the lady got on the phone as a detective Diane Teff from Fort Worth Police Department, and she explained to me that she had received a letter from an inmate in a prison in Ohio about a child homicide that they had there, and she was explaining to me this was a little girl by the name of Julie Fuller, I think was maybe twelve or fourteen or something like that, and that this

inmate was telling her that he had a suspect. And I'm still not snapping on Pennon or anything, even having read that, until she mentions that this guy says that his sellmate also mentioned killing a little girl in Garland by the name of Roxanne Reyes, and then my lights went off. I thought, oh hey, and she said, I have an appointment for him to call me in the morning at eight or eight thirty, I don't remember this

exact time. And she said, if you would like to be here, I'm offering that to you to come here and talk to him. And I said, oh, absolutely, Well, my supervisor at the time was at lunch, and when he came back in I asked him about it, and he goes, oh, shoot you out. He said, let's go. He said, I'll go with you and and him, the other detective I was talking about that like to go into murder clause with me, is Charles Rena. We were

good friends. We all three. Next morning drove the fort Worth and waited on that phone call, and he called right on time, exactly when he said he would, and she spoke with him for several minutes and then got what she wanted and handed the phone to me, and I was able to question him about a few things about the case that I knew I had I had actually pulled it out and read a little bit more so i'd know more facts like what she was wearing, just a few things that we wanted to know and

see how much he could tell me. And everything he told me was exactly correct, so it you know, it did give me a lot of hope. I mean, I was excited about the information. But we were only able to talk for just a few minutes before he had ten minutes on a recorded on a line before it would cut off. So we talked maybe four or five minutes. But I did give him my phone number. He was still in contact with Detective Teft. But after we got off the phone, you know, we were pretty pumped up.

She was pumped up about her case. She set up a meeting with every agency in Texas basically that had a case of a missing child in the time frame they had done a timeline on him, I think from nineteen eighty four through eighty nine, I believe, or eighty eight, whenever it was he was arrested. I think it was eighty eight. They had done a timeline to you know, in any case between that time frame. They invited to

come to forth and speak about the case. And that was our next step was to make that meeting.

in Texas, and then after we all anywhere that case. Oh, you would have to ask me that there were probably maybe twelve to fifteen different agencies represented there. I want to guess that many there were. There were there were quite a few between I would say around twelve and now I'm guessing, but I remember a few of them specifically, but there were others that ended up not being closely related at all. And I know there's some that weren't there that had cases that later we were able to find.

But after that meeting, we were adjourned and Diane said that they had DNA on the Julie Fuller case, and she said they were having Penton's DNA compared to that and when that result came back, she would let me know and they would go from there. Well, the few days later she called and said the DNA came back and it is not Penton. And so I was felt really like, oh, you know, let down. But we I told she said, Sonny Cap, she's gonna drop the I'm sorry that our informant. She said, we're going to drop

him and not talk to him anymore. And uh, I said, well, tell him to call me. I'll I'll talk to him a little bit more because I just wasn't didn't feel like I wanted to give it up that easy because he had so much information about ours. And so he did call me, and uh, I was able to ask him. I said, why is this information you're giving turning out to be false?

why did he do that? And he says, well, he's bragged about killing kids so much that he says, I have done some research. And I I thought that was one that sounded like he would have done. He says, I know for a fact he did, and he named off several and and Roxane Rens was one of them. I said, why do you know that he goes? Because he mentions him by name, He knows him, and he knows too much about him. And I was still a little bit skeptical, but I had to listen to him.

to Sonny cab Too, our informant. He was. We were both dealing with him on the phone, and and after a while we started hearing things about him that maybe other investigators had dealt with him in the past, and he was not a very credible person, not a not trustworthy and and then we even found out that he had filed for open records and gotten open records on

these cases. And and now the investigator that I was dealing with told me, he says, I don't trust him, and uh, since the information he gave to fort Worth wasn't any good, because I don't think I'm gonna talk to him anymore. And I was pretty much almost feeling the same way. But I told him, I I think I'm gonna keep talking to him for a while. I just I don't. I mean, it was just that unseene driving force, call it what you want. I felt like it was God pushing me to go I don't to

not give this up. Something was definitely telling me not to give it up. My common sense was telling me to give it up. But my spirit inside of me was telling me to go push, go, go forward. And so I said, I'm gonna keep talking to him for a while, and I would I questioned him, I said, why did you file open records? You your credibility is worthless with us. You you everything you've told you read in a file. You know this is worthless information. Now

I can't trust anything you said. And he said, well, if you lived in a twelve x twelve room with a guy that does nothing about but brag about killing people, he says, you'd want to know if he's telling the truth. He said, I pulled those so I could see this guy's telling me the truth. And he said, he is telling me the truth. He did these, and so we filled we sent away for the open records that he got to see what he got. And I found out he did not get all of the open records that

we thought. He didn't have the information. So the rest of the there's almost a maybe a year spent just trying to build this guy's credibility up in my own mind, not in anybody else, that's just my own mind. I was having to try to convince myself that he was credible, and everything he told me that I checked on proved to be true. I couldn't. I couldn't disprove anything, so he you know, I just had to keep listening to him.

very little information. And when I saw what he got, I thought, you know, he could get enough out of it to develop enough information to convince someone he knew something. But he got nothing on Rocks and Rest. They wouldn't give him that file. They said it's still open, And so I knew that what he was telling me about that when he couldn't get it from those open records, so he had to be hearing it from somewhere. And I checked with the prison to see if he got

access to the internet, and he did not. He didn't have access to get it anywhere other than hearing it. So that was the biggest thing that kept my hopes alive. That and then he brought up I guess what he knows that I'm digging for credibility from him? And I guess he got a brainstorm one day and he told me, he goes, you need to find the little girl by the name of Tiffany Ibera, And I said, well, who is she? And he said, that's a little girl that he kidnapped and he let go. And I thought, well,

why would he let her go? He first tells me that Pentton told him a crazy story about the little girl's dad wanting him to kidnap her to scare her. And he didn't believe that story, and I didn't either after a while of listening to it. Why would this guy hire a child pedophile to could have his daughter to scare her, and especially a guy that didn't even

live around there. But that we did look and find Tiffany Ibera and she was living in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi at the time, which was pretty good distance away.

But it took me a while to get contact with her because I couldn't find a phone number, had to actually have the sheriffs department drive to her house and have her call me in It was probably maybe a week a week and a half later she called and I talked to her over the phone and she said that she was the Tiffany Iberta that was abducted in this neighbor in Dallas back then. And she I said, do you think you'd remember him? And she said absolutely,

I'd never forget his face. And that was she was kind of getting me a little bit optimistic, and then she dropped a bombshell on me. She told me I actually had pulled the report from Dallas too. I had the report sent to me and had it sitting in front of me, and her memory was outstanding what she was telling me, and she said, I'm alive, by the grace of God. And I said, yeah, you were a very lucky girl, because he you know, he's a bad guy, and she said, yeah, he kidnapped a little girl from

my school three days later and killed her. And I'm like, what I did. I had not put the pieces together. I didn't have the files on Christie Meeks or Christie Proctor. I just had rocks and raised files. I didn't know any really details about their cases. Knew, you know, I knew some basic facts, but not any details. And she said, yeah, that Christi Proctor went to school with her, and I'm kind of floored by that. And I looked at the

report where she was abducted. She was abducted on Waterfall Lane is where Tiffany was, And I looked I did have some information about Christie Proctor and found out she was also abducted on Waterfall They were off taken from the same street. And I had not seen that until she said it. That was just something I had overlooked. It didn't dawn on me. And so now I'm very interested three days apart on the same street, that's putting him in the area, if that's him. And that was a huge piece movie.

She was walking, she'd headed to school, and a bird had defecated on her clothes, and she went home and changed clothes, and all her friends that she walked to school with had already gone, so she was alone. And she saw this man walking towards her in a get out of a van, and and something in her told her this wasn't good, and she tried to run, and he grabbed her by her backpack and drug her into the van. And according to her, according to Tiffany, all he did was he took out a cell phone, which

is an old phone. We called him bagphones. It was just a big bag you had to carry with a suction antenna that stuck on the window, but that was the early cell phones. And told her to call her mother and tell her she's been kidnapped, and so she did, and then he took the phone away from her and hung it up, and he ended up telling her to get out and that if he ever sees her again, she won't be so lucky that he'll kill her. And

she ran home. He followed her home, and the mother I think maybe probably believed her because she had gotten a phone call, but she wasn't real sure. They drove around and looked for this van, didn't see anything, and then they took her to school, and I'm not sure how much the school believed or not, but they did call the police and the report was made. And then three days later, I think when Christy Frocter came up missing, they went back to Tiffany and had her do a composite.

They got a little bit more interested in her story later because they knew for absolute sure this was probably the same guy. I guess absolute sure, and probably don't go together, but they assumed it could be the same guy.

He was telling me about cases all over the country. And at first I tried to to you know, I I you know, I didn't wanna let any child case go. I I mean, I thought I need to I need to be on top of all this. Well, it got to the point where I couldn't keep up with all of it. Just it would be confusing on the phone. I wouldn't know really which one he's taught. It just got too much to handle. So I basically told myself, we're gonna focus on the ones here and we'll come

back to those when we're done. We'll just I have to just stick to my case. And of course my case I felt like involved, uh CHRISTI mex and Christy Proctor because we all felt they were connected. But I I went to Mosquite. Uh. Mike Bradshaw was the investigator that I originally dealt with, and Mike is a friend of mine, and I was gonna go talk to him and see if I could get him back interested in it.

And he told me before that the biggest problem they had with Penton in the beginning was that they couldn't put him in Oklahoma and where Christy Mack's body was dumped at Lake Texoma, and they really couldn't put him in the area here. There was just a lot of things wrong, and he didn't really trust Sunnycap. And I

agreed with him on Sunny Cap pretty much. But I'd found in our file a statement that had been taken from Penton's sister that she was basically saying she would not ever be around him again because she didn't want her children around him, because she felt like he was dangerous. And even she even said in the statement, I feel like he did kill those girls in Texas. And that was literally in her written statement that the Ohio investigators had taken. And I noticed the address on that statement

was Oklahoma. I don't remember the specific city off the top of my head. I don't remember if I can even pronounce it, but she lived in Oklahoma. And then I also read later that he would drive and visit his sister occasionally, so I knew, Okay, well, he's been in Oklahoma.

talk to him. So I went and the first time I met Bruce, and I started running it down to Bruce. And this was probably the greatest thing that happened in this investigation for me, because Bruce had actually been one of the detectives that had been called out on the Christie Meeks case and had a great deal of knowledge

about the early early things that I didn't have. I wasn't there, So Bruce was very, very interested in what I was saying, and really from that point on he jumped on board full force and we developed the team. Bruce brought in one of his guys, Don Phillips, excellent excellent investigator, and us three worked together on that from

that point on until some time later. We got we had to get Plano involved because that was where the Christi Procter case stemmed, and we got another guy by the name of Billy Meeks who wed in word cases with other agencies involved, there's egos, there's you know, departments don't want other departments to get It's just there's a lot of egos involved with There were no egos in

this this team. It was the best team I've ever been on and any thing I've ever done, we worked together great and I think every one of these guys were top notch detectives. It was, in my opinion, I was working with the dream team of detectives. It was a great group of guys and we just everything clicked and and from that point on we were able to divide up the task kind of focus on our own cases and uh and that just that helped so much. It was I can't even describe how much better things went.

So it was kind of another divine intervention that Bruce was transferred in there. Not that Mike wouldn't have done a great job, but Bruce just had the knowledge that of that case from the beginning.

souvenir to relive their experience. They might take a memento from it, and so I think when he was arrested on the najarass case, there were some little girl's panties recovered and some other items that were recovered from that one that were never able to link them to anyone. So we thought, well, there may be some items there in his attic that we could you know, we may we may get lucky. So we we did go look

through the attic. We found Don Phillips. Actually this attic was there was no insulation, as we have them here in Texas where our houses are built differently, I guess the different climates, but the insulation was tacked to the actual roof on the inside. Ours is blown in. It's it's kind of different. So we didn't really have to dig through insulation. But there were boards over the rafters and we had to kind of crawl on our bellies

and look underneath those boards. And Don found something unusually when he had to kind of fish it out and get it, and then it was a It was a a big bundle of rags tied with yarn, and I mean we were all like, oh, this is it. We have found his mementos. It's wrapped with a nice bowl tied on it, and I mean, we're like bowing to this, this is our evidence. We found it, and we started unwrapping it and it's just one rag after another and it base even nothing in there, so we were kinding,

but we didn't notice stains on it. So we collected it and took it back to the lab and they told us that there was semen, blood, saliva, there was all sort of bodily fluids on these rags, but it was so degraded and had been up there so long that in the elements, you know, the heat and the cold, that it was just not a good sample. And uh wow with that after all the tests, and it took a pretty good bit of time. We didn't know that

at the time. I mean, it took us maybe a year and a half to get all the test results back. But we really didn't have anything with that other than we couldn't match his DNA to it. We couldn't match Christie Proctor, Christie makes They did tell us that we can't tell you it's rocks Anderaeis's, but we can't tell you it's not. That was about the best we had with that. But he told us a lot of things Sonny cap did about the type of victims he picked and things like that.

He goes, he goes, but I do think he has as many as twenty or twenty five, he says. By the I said, well, why do you think that he goes because he just seems to know a lot of details about certain ones. Some of them he would just kind of make claims to, but some of them he specifically mentioned details of So that was where I'm trusting Sonny Cab. But also that same story was confirmed when we did finally meet with other inmates. They kind of

told us all the same thing, pretty similar stories. That his biggest downfall and it was his downfall in the Nigeros case that got him convicted. Is this guy likes to talk, and I think it's a he likes to relive these things and that's the best way he can. He never able to do them again, but he can relive them by talking about him. And I think that's that's his fantasy, it's his dream, and he just likes to talk about him.

maybe wiring Sunny Cab. I know that he wasn't necessarily in the same prison, but was there any talk about at all?

he said, do not come looking like cops. He wanted to wear jeans, wear T shirt, you know, T shoes, don't don't come in there looking like a cop with a coat and tie or whatever. He says, you're gonna look like my uncle and my cousin. You know I want. I don't. And he said if you pull, he said, and we didn't find this was all true, if you pull one of those inmates to a back room to interview them, he said, within minutes, in the far back reaches of that prison, they know that jefferysony Cavi is

in the back talking to the police. He said, they know it, and it's like a what We kind of laughed and said, it's like an old woman's quilting group. The gossip that goes on in there, they they they're very, very aware of what's going on. And so we respected his request and interviewed him as sitting at a table with other inmates all around us, but they were enough away and paying attention to their visitors that none of them seemed to be listening to us, and it went

real well that way. We interviewed two other inmates that same day that he had hooked us up with that also told us the same stories about uh, relatively same stories that were a little bit different, but he pentting bragged to every inmate in there that knew him. Every single inmate we ended up talking to, without exception of maybe two, told us that he bragged about raping and killing kids. That was all he ever talked about. We

visited prisons that of end would uh. We visited the prisons across the state, and we visited inmates that had been with him years past, and they even said, yeah, that's all you talk about, was raping and killing kids. And uh, one of them even told us, so, what took you guys so long to get on to him? Which didn't make you feel real good and know that. Of course, my reply back to him was, well, why didn't you call us? You know what took you so long?

You know, we don't know what he's talking about, but that was his downfall, his mouth.

shouting matches with each other. Oh, you know, we got into arguments, but we ultimately developed a pretty good rapport and it was not easy, I'm to tell you that. But the other ones we you know, you always run into the problem, Okay, Sonny Kep's got all those information, how do we know he didn't do this? So we had to kind of check his background and find out where he was during all this too, because he sure knew a lot and is he trying to pin it

on someone else? You know that those we looked at all those things, the other guys, we wondered if they were not people that Sonny cap knew. I was trying to build credibility with him, So I wondered, Okay, did he go get these guys and coach them so it would make his credibility look better that there's other inmates, So we had that worry. But after interviewing the two other guys, I was very convinced that wasn't the case because they didn't tell the same stories, they were different.

One of them didn't know anything. Bruce and I are interviewing these guys, and Bruce is interested in the Christie mix case. Obviously I'm interested in rox and Res, and we're both interested in Christi Proctor. We didn't want to leave her out. We didn't have a plane with us at the time, but we wanted to make sure all the girls cases were covered. So but I'm focusing on Rocks and res and he's focusing on Christie Meeks. Well,

one of the guys, David Kreki was his name. He he's telling us about Rox and Reus, and he's telling us about Christy Proctor. But Bruce is wanting, he's chomping at the bench to get to Christy Meeks. And he says, I've never heard of that one. He said, I don't know anything about that, And I would think if they're rehearsing, knowing who's coming to talk to them, they're gonna be talking about the cases we want to hear about. And he didn't, and he sincerely didn't know anything about that one.

Penton had just not talked about that one. He had talked about so many but that was not one of them. So I don't feel like they were lying. Just that was my gut feeling. And then later we did develop more and some that we had to go to that didn't come to us and they didn't want anything. So yeah, it it became pretty obvious that he had told many many people.

were one ready. We decided we were not going to interview him until we were just completely sure we had what we had because and we never really felt like he would ever. He's such a pathological liar. We knew he wouldn't tell us anything, or we felt that he wouldn't, So we just kind of waited until we were one hundred percent ready.

so we kind of respected him. Miss maybe the he's the ranking official there, so uh, and he had a extremely high i Q with him. I mean, he just had a lot of knowledge about this case. Don Phillips was an extremely organized, very good detective. We kind of made Don the keeper of the file. Don kind of organized it kept everything organized for us because I'm not the most organized person in the world, and Don was very good with that. So Don was the keeper of

the file, is what we called him. And Billy had worked on a multi jurisdictional task force. There was a lot of oh this was kind of it may have been national news. There was a kind of an epidemic of heroin cases involving young kids overdosing in the area at that time, and there was a task force developed. It even involved one of the Dallas Cowboys, Mark Tunenay,

had overdosed on heroin. Billy was on this task force that was working these cases and had a lot of experience with multi jurisdictional thanks and so he was really good at working with other people and getting things like that. And I guess my strong point was I was the how do I say this, the BS or I was the one that was able to talk to people and get them to tell me things. That was I guess that was my strong point. I had Sonny cap He wouldn't talk to nobody else, he would not work with

anybody else. He we had a relationship developed between us and he would only work with me. So we all had our point our strong points in this and and we worked off each other every you know, we if Don needed something for organizing it, and we gave it to Don. Don it was his deal. He developed a PowerPoint on it him. I think Billy actually helped him out. Everyone just had a task and we all it jailled.

It worked. So when we got together everyone kind of we just sort of knew our roles without ever really even discussing that. I don't know if that makes sense, but so tell him.

off into different areas of the state. When we got when we hit the ground in Ohio, we would take off. Billy and I would take off and go one direction. Don and Bruce would take off and go another direction. We were running down things and Marleita was Marlette. I believe she stayed in Columbus, and that was kind of our central contact person. She was, you know, we would call in check in with Marlette and she would tell us what Bruce and Donn are doing and vice versa,

so we kind of kept her in the center. We The day we decided to interview, we decided Bruce and I would do the interview, Billy and Don would check the cell. Marlene came in and she helped them look through his cell, but we brought him into a room he had now backing up one of the things we had done early on in working with the prison investigators,

who were huge help. We had his mail intercepted and when he would get a letter in or send a letter out, they would open it and make a copy of it, send it to us, and then close his letter back up and send it out. So I knew what mail had come in and out, and it was pretty ironic that after maybe the second visit there, I would read his mail and I would see my name in his mail, the detective Gary Sweet from Garland, Detective

Bruce Bratshaw, we're here talking about me again. He knew we were there, he knew our names, and I just kind of blew me away. The intelligence in the prison system. He had never seen us, but he knew our names and had talked about us in his mail. So when we brought him in for that interview and set him down, he was looking at us with a very puzzled look on his face, like who are you guys? And I walked over to him and stuck my hand out to

shake his hand and introduced myself to him. And Bruce stuck his hand out and introduced himself, and he wet his pants. I mean, his face went pale and he lost his bodily functions. I think the fly and it was that great. And men hadn't really said this, but he had a huge fear of Texas. They felt like in those inmates when they would talk to us, they thought we executed about I think one of them said,

you guys execute about five or six hundred people a year. Well, I think maybe that's really about maybe twenty or twenty five is probably the more accurate number. But I said, no, no, no, no, we don't execute six hundred people. Yeah, that's ridiculous. Probably only three or four hundred, you know, I just kind of keep that going in their mind. They really believed that if you come to Texas, you're gonna get killed.

So we the strategy for pening. I knew that he really didn't have a conscience about these because of things that he had told these inmates, one of them asking him one time, why did you kill the girls after you raped them? Because that was his ultimate goal. He said, well, they're not good for anything after that. You know, there's just gonna be a burden on society after you've sex with us. Often they're not good for anything, so just

kill them and throw them away. And uh, so me, that sounded like a person that just didn't have a conscience, didn't didn't have a soul. It was my thought. But and I knew he liked to brag. So I started reading up on that personality and it was a psycho path and I read books on cycle paths. Uh, every chance I got, I tried to read everything I could to learn to develop a strategy to talk to him. So the final strategy was what got us there his ego,

him talking and bragging about doing this. So we went in and kind of stroked his ego a little bit, told him how good he was at it, and how I look how along it took us to catch you, and uh, we you know it the first conversation when we introduced ourselves after he wet his pants, he tried to hide that from us and turn himself away so we wouldn't see it, but it you know, we knew it was there. But he said, I, I'm glad you guys are here. He goes, so I can tell you

I didn't do these crimes you are talking about. I just told him, David, we didn't come here to talk about whether he did or not. We know you did him, So I just wanted to come meet you before we bring you back to Texas and kill you. We just kind of wanted to introduce ourselves to you. So we kept pumping the fear into him. But then we would also stroke his ego a little bit, and that was our strategy basically.

in prison for a crime they didn't commit. I would rather a person get away with murder than put a person in prison for murder that didn't do it. I just that would be a nightmare for me. So I always had this in the back of my mind. You know, I'm ninety nine point nine percent sure this guy is guilty, but that's not good enough. I want to be one

hundred percent sure. So, you know, just everything kept lining up and Okay, what if all these inmates are like like you know, I just still had that tiny, tiny, tiny doubt in the back of my mind, and it worried me. I was convinced he did it, but I just, like I said, it's a very small doubt, but it was there. I'm not going to deny that. After that interview,

I was one hundred percent satisfied. And the first thing I think that convinced me is when Bruce asked him, you know, knowing that we had gone up into the attic and found those rags. We didn't know if that was his rags or not. We just didn't know because the DNA wasn't good enough. But Bruce threw that out there. He goes, David, what if I told you that we searched your house in Columbus and that we found something

in the attic and he looked at him. Now, David Pentton was a very animated, very moving He was constantly moving, his head was moving, he was always just shifting around. He was very animated, and he kind of paused still for a second and said, I would say that's a lie because I never took any souvenirs. And I think it was everything I could do to keep from falling out of my chair because I just heard him confess. He just said that I did. I mean, he said

I never took any souvenirs. So we didn't acknowledge that he said that. We just kind of kept right on going, hoping that he would say more, and he didn't. He would deny and deny some more, and then later, after stroking his ego about how good he was at it, he kind of chuckled one time and he goes, you know, he goes, y'all can't have any evidence on me, So why is that? He goes, I'm not stupid. He goes, I didn't leave any physical evidence. Well, then again, that's

another confession, and I had to question him. Then I said, well, what do you mean? I said, did you use a condom? I mean, what do you mean you didn't leave any evidence? And the expression on his face completely changed. He realized then what he had just said, and he got real antsy and started shifting around in his changes. Oh, well, I didn't leave any evidence because I didn't do it, but he had already slipped up and said he had done it. So he confessed twice in that interview without

really even knowing he had done it. And so we left that interview. I left one hundred percent positive that he was our guy, not that I had a whole lot of doubt, but any little bit I had was gone. And then we did get to bring him in the second day, And to be perfectly honest, we did the second day was because I think Bruce, I mean because I think Don and Billy were jealous that they didn't get a chance to talk to him. So that's what

we always telling him, tease him. But they wanted a shot at him too, So we brought him back out for a second day, and all four of us took a shot at him. And you know, Don and Billy, they didn't want to miss out on that. Those were those are two top nasty detectives. And for to hear men Bruce sitting here gloating about this interview with him,

they were wanted the shot at him. So we brought him out, let them have a shot at him too, And that was several hours of interviews and in that time he confessed a couple more times with slip ups. He just his mouth. He can't. I mean, if you talk to anyone long enough in their lying, they can't remember the lies. You can remember the truth when you tell the truth, but when you tell a lie, it's hard to remember that life. You talked to him long enough,

they forget what they said. Yeah, so he did slip up a couple more times.

they know the Bible. And he said, Pentton was pretty well versed, and he did went to a lot of Bible studies. And they said, don't stay away from that. They said, stay away from that. But it just got We ended up getting into that too, and he he was just I have to say he was. He was an interesting guy to interview.

turn it over with him watching. So we really didn't get anything recorded. I'd give anything if we had, but today it would have been recorded. Back then, we just weren't. We just didn't do it that often. If I could go back in time is one thing I would have.

His demeanor was like his how did you react to four of you guys in there trying to get something from him?

And uh, you know, a liar needs time to think, and we were able to hit him just with bam bam bam, one after another and without much time to think.

And I think that's a It can be a g if you work together well, it can be a good way of interviewing because, uh, you you always know when a guy's trying to think of a lie, when he when he repeats the question back to you, he's stalling for time when he uh you know, just just a little different techniques that they used to try to stall for time or to think, and uh, we didn't give him time for that, so it it.

maybe I did it, and I don't remember. I've heard that same story before from other people, but to me, that was a confession too, but never had to get out in court because he did it confess ultimately an open court.

that we, you know, we may have problems. So they offered. The defense offered to plead guilty to all of them for life in prison, the rest of his life in prison, and he just felt like this would be a guaranteed way to make sure he never got off the streets. We could go in and try to get the death

penalty and lose. Then we've lost it, you know, with the evidence, and we didn't have time to go search the evidence out that they had come up with, which later we found out was a time card for a job that he worked, did show that he was working, but we found out what his job was at that

place was doing the time cards. So it's been very much for him to fabricate a time card for when he's outs but we didn't have time to investigate that at the time, and they want to have accepted the plea, and he went into open court and pled guilty, and by pleading guilty, he had to openly admit that he had committed the crimes. And it did take away any possible cities for appeals for him. So it was kind of a in some ways it was good. I mean, we would you know, I think the families would have

liked to have seen the death penalty. And I'm not going to sit here and say I wouldn't have liked to have seen that too. But if there ever was a person that's a poster child for the death penalty, he who was it? But I think we now know that he's going to die in prison. So that's that's good enough.

a good attorney. He we asked permission to I probably shouldn't say this, but we had asked permission that we wanted to talk to Pentton after he played guilty because we wanted to know what were we right on and what were we wrong on? Did we miss some things? I mean, because we figured once he's played guilty, there's

no reason for him not to tell us anything. And we went to his attorney and asked him, I could we speak to him and he wouldn't allow it, and we kind of sort of under his breath told us he couldn't let him talk to us for fear of him implicating himself. In other cases, So we kind of knew rapped the end that there were more cases. So he wasn't gonna let us talk to him because he

didn't want us digging those out of him. So his attorney, I think knew, But he did do a very I think he was a good attorney, did a good job as far as I don't I don't know how well it must have been.

put it that way. In some states, it's it's hard. There is no device in terms of uh, there's always a parle hearing.

what we all can learn from reading this book. And I think, just like we spoke about in this interview and in the Steve Jackson interview as well, that fate really intervened and you could say where this came from or where it emanated from. But strange things happened, much stranger than fiction to be able to make this case and to bring this person to justice and get some answers for the victims' families. And so I want to thank you very much and congratulate you on beem famous

in Steve Jackson's books. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about real life experiences.

such a good writer. I'm thinking, wow, yeah it was. It was really interesting. But anyway, I appreciate getting to come on.

And even though you don't get too many happy endings, that's it's and it's not a happy ending because of the victims' families that it again, it's just there is satisfaction in getting something that's very difficult done and achieved and and you're still you know, you still retain your sanity after all this, So that's admirable in itself, right there.

Hope it's not a problem later.