Bogeyman by Steve Jackson Page A

to determine if the mitigating circumstances outweigh the aggravating factors, and if not, whether the defendant “deserves” to die for the crime.
    Unlike some states, such as Texas, where the death penalty is a realistic possibility, prosecutors in Ohio didn’t often win those fights. In the end, the Penton jury decided that the aggravating factors did not outweigh the mitigating circumstances, thus Penton escaped the electric chair. Instead, he was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole, which he began serving at the Marion Correctional Institute.
    As he familiarized himself with the Ross case, Sweet noted the similarities to his investigation, not just the modus operandi of the crime—the pattern of Penton’s kidnapping, rape, and strangulation of young girls—but also his behavior afterwards. In the Nydra Ross case, Penton had crossed jurisdictional lines, abducting the child in Columbus and then driving all the way into a rural part of Marion County before leaving the body in a wooded area, where it wasn’t found for months. If, as Sweet suspected, Penton was the killer in Texas, he’d followed the same pattern: taking his victims from one place and leaving them in another remote area, where the possibility of immediate discovery was remote.
    The Ross case also corroborated Sunnycalb’s assertion that Penton was obsessed with talking about his crimes. Instead of keeping his mouth shut, he’d almost immediately started bragging to other inmates in the Marion County jail. Sweet hoped that if he’d been so eager to boast about the Ross case and then to discuss other murders with Sunnycalb, Penton may have also discussed the Texas cases with other Ohio inmates. He put that aside as something to follow up on.
    Hoping to locate someone in law enforcement who could further shed some light on Penton’s possible connection to the Texas cases, Sweet called the police department in Columbus, Ohio. Detective Rick Sheasby had retired, but another detective gave Sweet his home telephone number to call.
    Sheasby was more than happy to talk to him about Penton. “I know he’s good for more than the Nydra Ross murder,” he said. He’d pegged Penton as a serial killer from the start, and Roxann’s grandparents had confirmed it, as far as Sheasby was concerned. Penton, of course, had denied it.
    Although he’d contacted Texas police agencies several times about his suspicions, Sheasby said it never went anywhere. He told Sweet he should look at the transcript of the interview between Penton’s then-28-year-old sister, Amanda, and Columbus PD Det. Rita Doberneck. The interview was conducted at Amanda’s home in Waynoka, Oklahoma, on August 11, 1988, more than a month before Nydra Ross’s body was found.
    Sweet was aware of the transcript, which he’d spotted in the Reyes case files. After speaking to Sheasby, he went back to review it. According to the document, Amanda told Doberneck that their father, Lathern Penton, disappeared two months before she was born. “He left for work and was never heard from again.” Her grandmother then moved in with the family and helped raise the children until her death in 1976; her mother then remarried a year later.
    Amanda told the detective that her brother, who was two years older, was her mother’s favorite. She said he’d been thrown out of a car in an accident when he was six months old and was in a coma for a time. He made a slow recovery and needed special care for so long that her mother once told her it was like raising two babies at once after Amanda was born. She attributed her brother’s higher place in her mother’s affections to his special needs. “David could do no wrong in my mother’s eyes, and if it was between me and David, I could do no right.”
    At first, her brother was behind other children in school, but soon caught up and became an “A” student. However, it didn’t last. “Almost overnight” his personality changed when he became a