On January 19, 1985, five-year-old Christi Lynn Meeks was playing hide-and-seek with her older brother outside her mother’s apartment complex in Mesquite, Texas, when a man lured her into his vehicle. Christi’s brother witnessed the abduction. Her body was found floating in Deer Haven Cove at Lake Texoma on April 3, 1985; an autopsy determined she had been raped and strangled to death.

The investigation later identified David Elliott Penton, a former U.S. Army mechanic with a prior manslaughter conviction in the 1984 death of his infant son, as responsible for Christi’s abduction and murder. Penton was also linked to the abductions and killings of at least two other Dallas-area girls, Christie Dianne Proctor and Roxann Hope Reyes. Penton had fled while out on bond and evaded capture for years before being connected to these Texas cases while incarcerated in Ohio for the 1988 murder of another child.

Penton signed a plea deal and pleaded guilty to the murders of Christi Meeks, Christie Proctor, and Roxann Reyes, receiving three consecutive life sentences to follow his Ohio sentence. Did anyone in the Mesquite area remember unusual activity near the apartment complex in January 1985?