On January 19, 1985, five-year-old Christi Lynn Meeks was taken while she played outside her mother's apartment in Mesquite, east of Dallas. Her body was found floating in Lake Texoma on April 3 and identified two weeks later. On February 15, 1986, Christie Diane Proctor, nine, was taken in Dallas; she was found in a field in Plano more than two years later. On November 3, 1987, Roxann Hope Reyes, four, was taken in Garland, and her body was found on May 19, 1988. All three girls had been sexually assaulted and strangled, and all three cases went cold. It was eighteen years before anyone was charged, and the man charged was already serving life in Ohio for killing a fourth girl.
David Elliot Penton was born on February 9, 1958. In 1984 he was a soldier stationed at Fort Hood, and on November 23 of that year he was charged over the death of his infant son, Michael James Penton, in Killeen, in Bell County; the boy, reported as one or two months old, had been violently shaken. Penton was honorably discharged in late 1985 and that year pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He then disappeared while appealing the sentence, and where he was between 1985 and 1988 has never been fully established.
He surfaced in Ohio. In 1988 nine-year-old Nydra Ross, the niece of a friend of his, went missing, and on September 15 her body was found in a creek bed in rural Marion County. Penton was arrested that year. In August 1988 North Texas detectives confirmed that they were questioning him about the three girls there, but said they could not place him in Texas at the times of the abductions. He was indicted for the kidnapping and murder of Nydra Ross on May 10, 1990, and convicted and sentenced to life; accounts put the conviction in 1990 or 1992, and some later reports give 2001.
The Texas cases were revived in 2003. On May 22 Plano police asked the Collin County district attorney, John Roach, to take charges against Penton to a grand jury, and Roach said he would seek the death penalty. Penton was indicted that June and extradited from Ohio. Prosecutors had information from other inmates who said he had given them specific details about each missing girl. In January 2005, to avoid a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty to all three capital murders and received three consecutive life terms, which are to begin only when his Ohio sentence ends. He became eligible for parole in Ohio in 2027 under that sentence, and if released there he would be sent to Texas.
In 2007, in his first interview since 1988, given to a Tyler newspaper, he admitted pleading guilty over his son's death but said he had not killed Roxann Reyes, Christie Proctor or Christi Meeks, and would not discuss the Ohio case because of pending investigations. He said that if he had been a juror in Collin County, he would have convicted himself. Investigators in several states have since looked at him in the disappearances of other young children, and he has denied those cases. None has been charged.