Jackson Bogeyman

He Was Every Parent's Nightmare
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9905573-1-9
Verlag: SceneBooks Inc.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten

A WildBlue Press original true crime story from the New York Times bestselling author of MONSTER and NO STONE UNTURNED, describing in dramatic detail and with heart-rending poignancy the efforts of tenacious Texas lawmen to solve the cold case murders of three little girls and hold their killer accountable for his horrific crimes. From the book: 'For years he'd stalked elementary schools and playground looking for young girls from low-income neighborhoods to abduct, rape and murder. He thought of them as 'throwaway kids'--hardly missed, and soon forgotten, except by those who loved them. He was ever parent's worst nightmare. The bogeyman they warned their children about ... the fiend who lurked outside bedroom windows.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jackson, Steve

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

January 19, 1985

After several days of cold, the weather on that Saturday in Mesquite, Texas, had turned downright balmy, with bluebird skies and temperatures climbing into the mid-seventies. Many of the town’s citizens were out enjoying the sunshine in the parks, playing softball, and watching their kids laughing and chasing each other on the playgrounds. Others used the opportunity to go for a drive in the countryside around Mesquite, a satellite city fifteen miles due east of Dallas.

Detectives Bob Holleman and Bruce Bradshaw were home with their families enjoying a quiet Saturday afternoon when they got the call about 3 p.m. It was a moment that would forever alter the partners’ lives, though in drastically different ways.

Holleman was watching television with his wife, Molly, and their seven-month-old daughter, Emily, when the phone rang and he picked up. He listened with a frown, then Molly heard him say, “Well keep me updated,” before he set the receiver down. Thirty minutes later, the phone rang again. This time he asked her to hang it up after he walked back to his home office. When he returned, he was dressed for work. “Looks like we’ve got a child abduction; they think it’s the real thing. … I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

Molly understood. A seven-year veteran with the Mesquite Police Department, her husband worked with Bradshaw in the Crimes Against Juveniles unit. Most of these calls about missing children turned out to be false alarms; the child would be found at the neighbor’s or playing in a field and handled quickly. Occasionally, a parent locked in a custody battle took, or didn’t return, a child, but those cases were usually resolved within a few hours.

After five years of marriage to a cop, especially a dedicated officer like her husband, Molly was used to the long hours and sudden calls to work when other families would be enjoying their weekends and holidays off. So she had no way of knowing that in a very real sense, their lives had been changed forever by a stranger.

Bruce Bradshaw was also enjoying an afternoon off with his wife, Gail, and their two daughters, Jodi and Laci, ages three and one, when Holleman called him. A little girl was missing from an apartment complex over near Highway 80, a main thoroughfare that runs east to west through Mesquite. He didn’t give a lot of other details, but Bradshaw could tell from his partner’s voice that he was stressed. “I need your help,” Holleman said.

Bradshaw sighed and went to change his clothes. Their lieutenant, Larry Sprague, insisted that they dress professionally in a suit and tie whenever they were called out. Properly attired, he kissed his wife and headed for the door.

Gail watched him go and expected that he’d be home in time for dinner. Sometimes people asked her if it was hard saying goodbye to Bruce when he’d leave for work because of the dangers inherent with the job. She’d answer that it was really no different than when their spouses went to work, except that her husband was fully aware of the evil he might face and carried a gun for protection. No, she’d say, the hard part wasn’t watching him go; it was learning to live with the darkness he sometimes brought back home with him.

Bradshaw had been born and raised in Comanche, a small farming and ranching community in central Texas. His core values and strong Christian faith were instilled in Comanche. He’d grown up inspired by John Wayne westerns, the Lone Ranger, and other tales from the Old West in which justice prevailed and the bad guys paid for their crimes. An uncle who’d been in a deputy sheriff, William McCay, influenced his career choice. McCay was what you’d picture an old-time Texas lawman to look like: tall in the saddle—a former ranch hand, he was good with a horse—and always dressed in a cowboy hat and boots. Such was his influence that Bradshaw, his brother, and three cousins all ended up in law enforcement, a job that Bradshaw saw as an ongoing battle between good and evil.

Bruce met Gail, a Dallas native, when they were both attending Tarleton State University in Stephenville. Tarleton was a small “cowboy” college with a good science program. Perfect for a small town boy who’d never been on an escalator until Gail took him to a mall after he got the job with the Mesquite Police Department.

As he drove to meet up with his partner, Bradshaw, a medium-built man with intense hazel eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses and a bushy reddish moustache, also thought he’d be back in a couple of hours. However, this bright and shiny day was about to turn dark.

Arriving at the Charter Oaks apartment complex in a lower-middle-class, residential neighborhood, Bradshaw met up with Holleman, who briefed him on what was going on and what he’d learned from the witnesses so far. The call for help had come from Linda Meeks, the distraught mother of five-year-old Christi Meeks. She’d tearfully explained that she was divorced and that her daughter and son, Michael, age seven, were visiting for the weekend. She’d been inside the apartment getting supper ready when Michael and a nine-year-old neighbor girl named Tiffany Easter ran in to tell her that Christi had gone off with a stranger.

As they were talking, Lt. Sprague and their sergeant, Maggie Carathers, arrived and were also briefed. They called in more detectives and began assigning them to start canvassing the neighborhood. Meanwhile, Bradshaw was tasked with talking to Michael Meeks and Tiffany Easter.

Traumatized, Michael wouldn’t say much. However, Tiffany was more forthcoming. She said the three of them were roller-skating on the sidewalk when a young white man approached. She described him as about the same height as Bradshaw, around five-foot-ten, a hundred sixty pounds, with medium-length brown hair and bangs, unshaven, possibly with a moustache. He was wearing a pullover shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes.

Tiffany said he asked if they’d like some cookies. Older and more wary, she tried to get her two younger friends away from the man by inviting them to her house; she said she had cookies, too. Michael followed her, but Christi stayed behind.

Meanwhile, Holleman located two young Hispanic boys in the building south of where Christi was last seen. They claimed that they saw Christi get into a car with a man. The car was small, they said, but couldn’t agree on whether it was yellow or gray.

The detectives knew that Christi was in danger. But these were the days before cell phones, Amber Alerts, and the internet, so all they could do to get the word out to other law enforcement agencies was send a statewide teletype. They were also starting to worry about a change in the weather. A ‘blue norther,’ a swift-moving cold front named for its gunmetal-blue sky and cold winds, was racing in from the north. Within minutes, the temperature dropped thirty degrees, and the searchers worried that the stranger might let the little girl go somewhere in a rural part of the county where she’d be exposed to the elements wearing only a “Color Me The Rainbow” T-shirt, blue jeans, and Cabbage Patch Doll shoes.

More officers were called in to help search nearby parks, fields, and drainage ditches. But as night fell and temperatures plunged, there was no sign of Christi or the man who’d taken her. Bradshaw and Holleman drove home to dress in warmer clothes, but other than a quick word with their families, they were soon back out knocking on doors. Yet, despite the number of people who’d been outside the day before, they couldn’t find anyone else who’d seen anything suspicious. They also drove past all of the motels and hotels in the area looking for a car that matched the description of the suspect’s vehicle.

Members of the community volunteered to help, and the search widened, including by aircraft. Photographs of the little girl with brown eyes and sandy-blonde hair—possibly wearing a gold necklace with a red stone in the middle of a heart—were distributed. But she’d simply vanished.

The process of elimination began with the detectives asking the immediate family to take lie detector tests to remove them from suspicion; both parents passed. Christi’s father, Mike Meeks Sr., was tough to deal with; he angrily blamed his ex-wife for letting Christi out of her sight and as the days passed, constantly called the detectives demanding updates, though there was little they could say.

A reward generated telephone calls and leads to follow. Psychics contacted the police to offer their help or claiming to have some other-worldly information. The days turned into weeks, and then two months passed with nothing concrete to go on.

In March, a young man named Bruce Greene, a graduate of the Art Department at the University of Texas, called the Mesquite Police Department and said that perhaps he could sit down with Michael Meeks and Tiffany Easter and create a composite drawing of the suspect. The two children were brought to his art studio, where they described the young white male with longish dark hair, parted in the middle, and pale blue eyes set below a wide forehead.

Posters were made of the composite and distributed around town, as well as given to the news media. The drawing caused a new flurry of “tips,” which the detectives had to...