Bogeyman by Steve Jackson Page B

teenager; he began skipping school, and his grades dropped. He turned violent and was abusive towards his sister; his moods fluctuated wildly and without warning—calm one moment, agitated the next. Amanda recalled an incident when she’d come home from school and was standing at the top of the stairs in their home when her brother entered . “He looked at me with a wild look in his eyes. Then, he ran up the stairs and grabbed me and hung me over the banister. He did these things to me often.” She said that although Penton abused her physically, he never sexually molested her.
    Penton dropped out of school after failing a grade and realizing he would be in the same class as his sister. “He couldn’t handle that.” So he joined the Army.
    According to Amanda, her brother’s main male role model from the time he was about six until he left for the Army was a man he met through the Big Brother organization. The man took him camping and even on a trip to see the man’s mother in Washington, D.C. That man, according to Amanda, never married.
    Although the Army described Penton as a motivated soldier, Amanda told the detective that his personality continued to change for the worse while in the service. He became more violent and prone to fits of rage. His vicious temper and “sadistic” nature carried over to his wife, Katherine.
    “David used to beat her in front of me. He did mean things to her. One day it was 110 degrees in Texas, and she was nine months pregnant; he drove her away in the car and forced her out. She had to walk all the way back home, and he locked her out.”
    Amanda claimed that her brother molested Katherine’s daughter from her first marriage, and that his wife left him when he molested their own infant daughter. He then married Kyong.
    After David Penton was discharged from the Army and on the run from authorities in Texas for the murder of his son, Amanda said, he moved back to Columbus, Ohio, into his mother’s home. Amanda and her husband, Andrew, were also living in Columbus at the time, and the two men worked together. Penton did the driving, and on the way home after work, he liked to cruise past elementary schools and playgrounds to watch the children. “He would point out various children to Andrew.”
    In January 1987, Amanda and her husband moved to Oklahoma and felt relieved to be away from her brother because of concerns about their own children. “I believe David is capable of hurting children. I believe that David did murder those children in Texas,” she told Doberneck. “I just hope you can prove it and get him locked up. I will not take my children to Columbus while David is there. So if you charge him with these murders, and he goes to prison for it, I hope you will let me know so that I can visit Columbus again. I don’t want my children around him; I don’t want them molested.”
    Amanda told Doberneck that her mother would never cooperate with the police. “She will always protect David no matter what.” She said she was aware that her mother’s husband had been cooperating with the police, but neither of them wanted her mother to know that they were talking to the authorities. However, she told the detective that she would help investigators if she could and would call if she thought of anything else that might be important.
    After reading through the transcript, Sweet called Amanda, hoping to ask a few questions of his own. She was back living in Columbus, Ohio, with her mother, and he hoped that with her brother in prison, she wouldn’t be afraid to talk. But she claimed that she couldn’t even remember being interviewed by Doberneck and denied that she’d ever said anything negative about her sibling. Instead, she claimed that her brother had visited her in Oklahoma several times, and there’d been no problems involving children—hers or anybody else’s.
    Hanging up, Sweet was again reminded of the Giles case and what it said about human beings and their