pieces.
During one of the first calls, Sweet asked Sunnycalb how the topic of murdering children had first come up with Penton. “We were watching the Oprah Winfrey show about the Christie Proctor case,” Sunnycalb recalled. “It was almost like he went into a trance when they started talking about it; then he started correcting the facts that they were getting wrong. That’s when he told me he did it.”
Sunnycalb said that Penton preferred certain kinds of victims. He liked darker-skinned kids—black, Hispanic and Asian—though he would take what was available; and he targeted low-income areas because “no one would give a shit” if those kids disappeared. He called them “throwaway kids.”
Sunnycalb conceded that he knew that Penton was a liar and probably embellished his brutality to impress other inmates. He said that Penton boasted about murdering as many as fifty young girls, beginning in South Korea, where he’d been stationed in the Army, and then throughout the Midwest and South. But judging from the cases in which Penton seemed to know the intimate details, Sunnycalb put the number of Penton’s victims at closer to twenty-five.
Sweet was stunned. Even with as much violence and horror as he’d experienced so far in his career, he had a hard time believing that Penton could have killed twenty-five little girls over a period of years.
The number paled in comparison to the world’s most prolific known serial child killers, such as three South Americans thought to hold that heinous distinction: Luis “The Beast” Garavito , reported to have raped and killed more than 400 street children; Pedro “The Monster of the Andes” Alonson Lopez , whose victims were said to number more than 300; and Daniel Barbosa , believed to have raped and killed 150. However, in the United States, with its modern law enforcement capabilities and inter-agency communication and computers—especially compared to countries where the disappearance of street children might go unnoticed—twenty-five victims was a staggering number. If true, or even on the low side, it meant that Penton was one of the worst, known serial child killers in U.S. history.
What’s more, it meant that Penton committed his crimes at a time when the issue of child abductions and murders was gaining national prominence. In the United States, instigated by infamous child abductions—such as the 1979 kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Etan Patz from New York City and the 1981 abduction and murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh from a Florida shopping mall—efforts to create a national law enforcement response to child abductions led to the creation in 1984 of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children . Paid for largely by the U.S. Justice Department, the purpose of the center was to become a national clearinghouse and resource for parents, law enforcement agencies, schools, and communities to assist in locating missing children and raise public awareness. The main tool was the FBI’s national crime computer to record, track, and share information, which previously were all efforts hampered by jurisdictional lines.
Other cases would make their way into the national consciousness about what had previously been a hidden epidemic, including that of Shannon Sherrill, the six-year-old whose October 1986 disappearance from her mother’s yard in Thorntown, Indiana, had become a national story even in those days before the internet. In Texas, relatives of Christi Meeks worked to bring widespread attention to her disappearance by establishing the Christi Meeks Foundation for Missing Children, which helped get the girl’s picture on billboards, milk cartons, and flyers.
However, some killers were better at flying under the radar than others, and it was difficult to link crimes committed in one state with those in another. Sunnycalb noted that Penton sometimes changed his stories a little bit, or seemed to mix up names, or didn’t always know the
During one of the first calls, Sweet asked Sunnycalb how the topic of murdering children had first come up with Penton. “We were watching the Oprah Winfrey show about the Christie Proctor case,” Sunnycalb recalled. “It was almost like he went into a trance when they started talking about it; then he started correcting the facts that they were getting wrong. That’s when he told me he did it.”
Sunnycalb said that Penton preferred certain kinds of victims. He liked darker-skinned kids—black, Hispanic and Asian—though he would take what was available; and he targeted low-income areas because “no one would give a shit” if those kids disappeared. He called them “throwaway kids.”
Sunnycalb conceded that he knew that Penton was a liar and probably embellished his brutality to impress other inmates. He said that Penton boasted about murdering as many as fifty young girls, beginning in South Korea, where he’d been stationed in the Army, and then throughout the Midwest and South. But judging from the cases in which Penton seemed to know the intimate details, Sunnycalb put the number of Penton’s victims at closer to twenty-five.
Sweet was stunned. Even with as much violence and horror as he’d experienced so far in his career, he had a hard time believing that Penton could have killed twenty-five little girls over a period of years.
The number paled in comparison to the world’s most prolific known serial child killers, such as three South Americans thought to hold that heinous distinction: Luis “The Beast” Garavito , reported to have raped and killed more than 400 street children; Pedro “The Monster of the Andes” Alonson Lopez , whose victims were said to number more than 300; and Daniel Barbosa , believed to have raped and killed 150. However, in the United States, with its modern law enforcement capabilities and inter-agency communication and computers—especially compared to countries where the disappearance of street children might go unnoticed—twenty-five victims was a staggering number. If true, or even on the low side, it meant that Penton was one of the worst, known serial child killers in U.S. history.
What’s more, it meant that Penton committed his crimes at a time when the issue of child abductions and murders was gaining national prominence. In the United States, instigated by infamous child abductions—such as the 1979 kidnapping and murder of six-year-old Etan Patz from New York City and the 1981 abduction and murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh from a Florida shopping mall—efforts to create a national law enforcement response to child abductions led to the creation in 1984 of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children . Paid for largely by the U.S. Justice Department, the purpose of the center was to become a national clearinghouse and resource for parents, law enforcement agencies, schools, and communities to assist in locating missing children and raise public awareness. The main tool was the FBI’s national crime computer to record, track, and share information, which previously were all efforts hampered by jurisdictional lines.
Other cases would make their way into the national consciousness about what had previously been a hidden epidemic, including that of Shannon Sherrill, the six-year-old whose October 1986 disappearance from her mother’s yard in Thorntown, Indiana, had become a national story even in those days before the internet. In Texas, relatives of Christi Meeks worked to bring widespread attention to her disappearance by establishing the Christi Meeks Foundation for Missing Children, which helped get the girl’s picture on billboards, milk cartons, and flyers.
However, some killers were better at flying under the radar than others, and it was difficult to link crimes committed in one state with those in another. Sunnycalb noted that Penton sometimes changed his stories a little bit, or seemed to mix up names, or didn’t always know the
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