By John Gillespie
Criminal District Attorney in Wichita County
Headlights flashed and temporarily blinded the 8- and-10-year-old girls as a black pickup whipped into the dark parking lot of a YMCA.
They looked up quizzically at their cousin, Jandreani Bell, who had promised them a trip to Burger King. Instead, they had been dropped off to shiver and wait. “Anthony is taking us to his house,” Bell told them. When the black truck pulled up, Bell put the girls in the back seat and she sat in front. Wide-eyed, the sisters sat in silence. The man did not say anything but drove into a nearby neighborhood.
“Duck down!” the man ordered. He pulled up the driveway of a big brick house and into the garage. The girls were then shuffled inside. “Do everything Anthony tells you to do,” Bell instructed them.
The Pattersons of Wichita Falls
“You mean Anthony Patterson of Patterson Auto Center is the ‘Anthony’ in the indecency with a child case?” Walking down the hall of our office one afternoon in October 2019 nearly two years later, I overheard two prosecutors and an investigator talking. I stopped in my tracks.
Anthony Patterson’s father, Harry Patterson, was a local icon. He owned multiple car dealerships, donated hundreds of thousands each year to charities, funded a local Christian school, and hosted a major leadership breakfast every summer. He also starred in commercials for his car lots. Everyone in Wichita Falls knew Harry Patterson. For 40 years, Harry had loomed larger than life over our community. His son, Anthony, was in his mid-40s. Anthony had just purchased and become president of Patterson Auto Group, a multimillion-dollar business with dealerships across Texas.
That Anthony Patterson had been connected to a criminal case involving two young girls triggered an FBI and Texas Ranger investigation (led by our office) that untangled a story of power, wealth, entitlement, and privilege. It culminated in his successful prosecution for human trafficking, sexual performance of a child, and three counts of indecency against two little girls. It was a wild ride.
The initial investigation
In late 2017, Macy and Maribel’s (not their real names) mother reported to the Vernon Police Department that a cousin had taken the girls to a man’s house in Wichita Falls without her permission. It took several months for her to bring the girls for a forensic interview, but when she finally did, Macy and Maribel disclosed the first trip in November 2017 when their cousin, Ms. Bell, took them to a house in Wichita Falls.
Macy, the 10-year-old, outcried about two trips in November and December 2017 where she was taken to a man named “Anthony’s” house. Maribel was taken only on the first trip. At Anthony’s house, Bell had them undress, sit in a jacuzzi tub, and wrapped only in towels, go and sit on Anthony’s bed. Anthony then came in the bedroom nude and had them rub him with oil. On the second trip, Bell took Macy back alone, where Anthony again sexually abused her.
That summer of 2018, the detective issued a warrant for Bell, who split her time between Vernon and Oklahoma City. She was not arrested for over a year, and the identity of the man who had abused the girls remained unknown.
When the case came to the Wichita County DA’s Office in the fall of 2019, Judy Rosenberger, one of our prosecutors, asked Jonny Zellner, a DA investigator, to figure out the identity of “Anthony.” Zellner listened to jail calls and discovered that Bell had mentioned the cell phone number for “Anthony, a man I’ve done work for,” who would help her make bail. When Zellner looked up the number, it came back to Anthony Patterson.
Because of the Patterson family’s prominence and connections, we needed a tight investigative circle. My chief investigator, Tye Davis, reached out to the FBI, and authorities there began quietly working on the investigation.
In January 2020, Tye and an FBI agent went to interview Bell in Oklahoma City. Bell was a prostitute who sold her services on Backpage, a prostitution website. She told them about her client “Anthony” and claimed she did not know his last name. She said he had a blasphemy fetish, meaning, he would engage in blasphemous acts while they had sex. When presented with a photo lineup, Bell looked right at Anthony Patterson’s photo, then picked a different photo. She ghosted Tye and the FBI agent for a follow-up interview. At that point in February 2020, we had sealed indictments issued for her on human trafficking. Then, COVID brought the world to a halt.
Bell starts cooperating
In January 2021, we received a call that Bell had been arrested in Oklahoma City, had waived extradition, and was in our jail. Her attorney said she was willing to cooperate. I reached out to a Texas Ranger, who stepped in. Bell picked Anthony Patterson out of a lineup, drove law enforcement to his house, and agreed to testify in front of a grand jury.
She also told us that Patterson had given her money after the January 2020 interview to keep her quiet and had given her a cover-story script. Law enforcement attempted a sting operation by sending her to his house, but he would not come to the door.
Tye and another investigator drove Bell to Oklahoma City so she could retrieve the cover story script. It was written in the first person and referred to a masseuse (Bell) who had a “client” the masseuse had met through Backpage. It said the client had leftover Halloween candy at his house, and the masseuse had “thought it would be a good thing” to bring her little girls to the house because they did not “get that kind of treatment” at home. The script claimed that when she had taken the girls to the client’s house, they sat in the living room the whole time, that nothing sexual happened with them, and that if they saw anything untoward, it was an accident. The script went on that the masseuse had gotten crossways with the girls’ mother, and the mother had invented a story to blackmail the client for money. Finally, the script recited that the client was a “light-skinned Mexican” in his early 30s who had been doing “some kind of temp work” in Wichita Falls, and that she did not know who he was. By contrast, Patterson was a white man in his mid-40s. Obviously, the objective of the script was to provide an innocent explanation for the girls’ outcries and to hide the identity of the perpetrator.
The takedown
As we built the case against Patterson, I reached out to the Human Trafficking Division of the Attorney General’s Office for help. Brooke Grona-Robb, a veteran prosecutor specializing in trafficking and crimes against children, was assigned. Brooke came to work with our office, lending her invaluable expertise to the case.
On February 3, 2021, Patterson was arrested on human trafficking warrants. While investigators searched his house, the Ranger put him in his pickup, turned on a Go Pro camera on the dash, and read him his rights. Patterson agreed to talk. While he acknowledged Bell (whom he knew as “Samantha,” her Backpage name) gave him “massages,” he initially denied that she ever brought little girls with her. When the Ranger confronted him with the fact that the girls could describe the inside of his house, Patterson began telling the cover story script, claiming Bell asked if she could bring them because she knew he had leftover Halloween candy, but that they stayed in the other room and absolutely nothing sexual happened with the girls.
“Well, that’s real interesting, Anthony, because it sounds a lot like this!” The Ranger then showed him a screen shot of the script. When Patterson realized what it was, he took a big gulp, captured on video. But, having rehearsed the story so much, Patterson then proceeded to recite the rest of the script, nearly verbatim.
The “weirdo” file
Around the time of the arrest, we learned that Patterson’s name was in a file kept by the Wichita Falls Police Department’s (WFPD) crimes against children division because of two prior trips to his house. In 2012, he asked a phone-sex worker whether she would be blasphemous while a 5-year-old girl was singing. He told her, “My little girl is in the next room and she sang ‘Jesus Loves Me’ earlier, and that was really hot to me!” He later claimed to the phone-sex worker that he had sexually abused the young girl. This worker, from California, reported him to the WFPD. Police could find no child, and Patterson said it was just a fantasy for “shock.”
And then in 2013, he freaked out an online sex worker in Canada by claiming to have raped a young girl. The sex worker called the Canadian Mounties, who referred her to the WFPD. When a detective contacted him, Patterson had no daughter (or children) and said it was just a “kink” he liked to fantasize about to shock people.
The defense team, DNA testing, and voir dire
The clothing in which Bell had dressed Macy for the second trip had been taken by the Vernon Police Department. When we had it tested for DNA, it came back with a likely semen stain. We obtained a DNA search warrant for Patterson, and the DPS report was inconclusive. The stain was very degraded with a tiny amount of sperm, which prevented DPS from reaching definitive conclusions. Without smoking-gun scientific evidence, the testimony of the two victims was paramount.
Patterson hired renowned Dallas lawyer Toby Shook to lead his defense. I have admired Toby for many years for his prosecutions of Darlie Routier, the Texas Seven, and the murders of two Kaufman County prosecutors. Toby assembled a high-level team of four lawyers, multiple investigators, and a DNA expert from the University of North Texas. The defense expert directed additional DNA testing at Intermountain Forensics in Utah.
At the designation deadline right before trial, the defense gave notice on experts from Cybergenetics, a computer lab in Pennsylvania that conducts “DNA reinterpretation.” When Brooke researched Cybergenetics, she found that it had the power to break apart complex DNA mixtures that DPS could not. We made an educated guess that an expert at Cybergenetics was going to testify it was not Patterson’s DNA on Macy’s clothing. While Patterson had admitted the girls had been at his house and Macy said she was ordered to take her clothes off before the assault and shower after, we were concerned a jury would automatically conclude the DNA finding was exculpatory (because everyone has heard about exonerative DNA in the news).
Brooke and I led our trial team. One of our goals in jury selection was to explain how sometimes DNA is exculpatory and sometimes not, and it’s determined entirely by the context. I used the example of a woman in the 1980s who was raped by a stranger. She positively identified her attacker, and he was convicted. Years later, with advances in DNA testing, the DNA from her rape kit did not match the man she identified. In that situation, the DNA is exculpatory because there was a single assailant who deposited his DNA. (This situation really happened with Ronald Cotton and victim Jennifer Thompson, where Mr. Cotton was eventually exonerated after the real perpetrator, Bobbie Poole, was identified through DNA testing.)
Conversely, if a woman was attacked in a hotel room and the attacker did not ejaculate, but the lab found hundreds of other semen stains on the bedspread (another real-life example I heard about at the Dallas Crimes Against Children Conference), then this DNA result would not be exculpatory because hotel rooms are high-sex areas. The context in these two scenarios makes all the difference.
When Brooke gave the opening statement, she connected that second scenario to our case: Human trafficking is a dirty world, and we suspected it was not Patterson’s DNA on Macy’s dress. But it’s not surprising that clothes (provided by a prostitute) had other male DNA on them. We were thankful we still had a strong case: Patterson’s admissions that he had brought the girls into his house through a “masseuse” on Backpage, photos from the search warrant corroborating details from the girls’ outcries describing intimate areas inside Patterson’s home, the cover-up including the script and hush money payments, and the compelling testimony of both victims.
The trial
Our first witness was Denise Roberts, the local Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) director and forensic interviewer. Both girls had disclosed that Patterson had paid Bell after the trips to Wichita Falls and that Bell had given the girls some money.
Now 17 and 15 at the time of trial in November 2024, the girls still seemed so vulnerable. Brooke has such a gift for making kids feel at ease on the stand. The jury was especially impacted when Macy testified that Patterson instructed Bell to put strawberry candy on his private part and have her lick it off. While we did not find strawberry lube in Patterson’s house three years later during our search, investigators did find various other flavored lubricants.
A former veteran investigator in human trafficking explained the world of human trafficking. What happened to the girls is called “familial trafficking,” where a relative “recruits” others. Familial victims are typically much younger than most trafficking victims. Macy and Maribel were from a home with crushing poverty, often without working utilities. Their extreme need and lack of strong family protection made them vulnerable. The expert also explained that in his many years in trafficking investigations, he had never known a prostitute to bring children to a john unless the children were part of the sexual transaction.
We flew in the phone sex worker from California who had reported Patterson. She was in her 70s and in a wheelchair. She testified that of all her clients and all the things they had said over the years, Patterson was the only one she had ever reported to the police. This was important motive evidence: Patterson fantasized about child rape before he actually sought out these flesh-and-blood children. This worker was one of the heroes of our story, caring enough to not only call the police, but to also fly across country to testify.
Defense DNA experts
At the end of the first week, the defense attorney handling the DNA approached and gave me a thumb drive with Powerpoint slides and many scientific studies to review that weekend. Science is not my strong suit, so it was a slog to digest them. One study caught my attention: It was about passive skin cell transfer from bathroom floors to clothing put on the floor. Macy had been told to disrobe in Patterson’s bathroom and her clothing had been on his bathroom floor. I called Brooke, worried that the defense was going to advance a study that appeared to suggest there would have been DNA transfer had Macy’s clothing touched the bathroom floor. None of the areas of the clothing that were tested had Patterson’s DNA.
Brooke, I’m thankful to say, was able to make sense of the incredibly confusing chart. The study actually indicated passive transfer only 3–5 percent of the time.
When the defense DNA Ph.D. implied on direct that she would expect there to have been passive transfer if Macy had taken her clothes off in Patterson’s bathroom, I had one of those moments prosecutors live for on cross-examination: catching an expert witness with the very literature she had provided. I asked her about the study concerning passive transfers and whether it found that 88 percent of the time, clothing on the floor showed no transfer of DNA cells from the floor. She stammered: “Can you tell me what page number you’re on? There’s so many tables.”
After I showed her the table, I asked, “So 88 percent of the time, the study said that there would not be passive transfer in a perfectly scientifically controlled experiment?”
“What their data said, yes.”
“Yes, and in fact, they found the person of interest to be a major contributor 3 percent of the time and a minor contributor 5 percent of the time. So this, I guess, is an opportunity, but it happens around 3 to 5 percent of the time, according to the study you provided to me?”
“This is the only study that I’m aware of with these particular stats. … This is one study with one set of data …”
“But the study you provided, they did their study and they calculated the probabilities based upon their scientifically controlled experiment, though?”
“Sure.”
“And they found 3 to 5 percent of the time, there was transfer. So I guess they’re saying there is a chance of it?”
“Sure.”
“Sure. Did you ever see the movie Dumb and Dumber?” A few jurors chuckled out loud at my “So you’re saying there’s a chance!” reference. (And Lloyd Christmas made an appearance in my closing slides.)
I caught this DNA expert strongly implying that something was likely (i.e., if Macy disrobed in Patterson’s bathroom, then there would be passive transfer of Patterson’s DNA from the floor to her clothes), when the study she provided showed such transfer was possible but actually very unlikely.
The script, Patterson’s payments to Bell, and public grooming
As co-defendant, Bell was also charged, so we opted to admit the cover story script through Chief Investigator Davis and authenticate it circumstantially. Davis testified about the trip to Bell’s apartment in Oklahoma City, that Bell had retrieved the script, and that she turned and handed it to him. The fact that Patterson recited the exact story from the script also corroborated the document. Finally, one handwritten word on the typed document appeared to match Patterson’s handwriting.
(On appeal, Patterson attacked it as a violation of the Confrontation Clause. The appellate court rejected his argument, finding it was non-testimonial in nature, that is, it was prepared as a cover story, not for future prosecutorial use at court proceedings.[1])
The script showed Patterson was telling a carefully crafted tale to try to evade prosecution. We also traced communications and withdrawals from Patterson’s bank account after Bell’s arrests, and then again after her meeting with Chief Davis and the FBI. These showed a pattern of payouts to secure her silence. The fact that a script matching his story had been retrieved from his co-defendant’s apartment showed Patterson’s desperation to prevent the dominoes from falling.
Patterson also began showing up at Wichita Falls children’s charities with large checks after he found out he was a target of the investigation in 2020. Patterson Auto Group had long donated to Wichita Falls nonprofits as part of its advertising and marketing. I found photos of him with a giant cardboard checks at the Boys & Girls Clubs, the Wichita Falls school district’s foundation, and the YMCA. The most shocking, however, was part of Child Abuse Awareness Month in April 2020. Patterson presented the CAC director, Denise Roberts, with a giant cardboard check while standing under the CAC awning, which reads “Hope. Healing. Justice.” Denise had forensically interviewed both of Patterson’s victims two years before.
Our sexual abuse dynamics experts explained this as “community grooming.” While we often think of grooming as how a perpetrator gains trust and control over a child or the adults around the child, our expert explained perpetrators will also attempt to groom the public. These gifts showed Patterson as the front man for charitable efforts when he found out the investigation was turning to him. The message he was sending was: “I donate to children’s charities and support the Children’s Advocacy Center. I couldn’t possibly be a child predator.”
Patterson’s team also advanced a “scatologia” defense, claiming he made the child rape claims to the phone/internet workers because he had a fetish where he was turned on by their shock to his statements, not because he was fantasizing about child rape. Their psychologist explained that “scatologia” is a form of verbal exhibitionism—obscene phone calls would be one example. On cross-examination, however, the expert had to admit that many perpetrators fantasize about child rape before they eventually seek out actual children to abuse.
The verdict and punishment evidence
After vigorous closing arguments from each side, the jury was out about eight hours before returning guilty verdicts on five counts for human trafficking, sexual performance of a child, and three counts of indecency. Macy and Maribel were in the courtroom and watched as Patterson was handcuffed, remanded into custody, and led away.
At punishment, we called the local director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. While Patterson was privately calling phone sex workers fantasizing about raping children, publicly he was serving on the board for this nonprofit. In 2016, he was even regional “Big of the Year.” He had served as a Big Brother for years. In addition to community grooming, we believed his involvement with the charity also permitted him opportunities to be around little girls at Big Brother’s events. Although no child has disclosed any abuse from his Big Brother’s involvement, it definitely fit a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” modus operandi.
The jury assessed an 18-year sentence for sexual performance, five years for each of the indecency counts, and 10 years for human trafficking. Judge Meredith Kennedy stacked everything she could (the trafficking count was not stackable under 2017 law) for an effective 33-year sentence. Patterson, who will turn 50 this year, has a projected release date in 2052.
The appellate court affirmed Patterson’s convictions last November. Bell pled guilty and received a 20-year sentence for human trafficking in December 2025. In February of this year, the Court of Criminal Appeals refused Patterson’s petition for review, ending his state appeals.[2]
In our trial photo taken after the two-week jury in trial in November 2024, Brooke and I both look like walking zombies. Justice in this case was a long and exhausting path. We each gave portions of the punishment closing, arguing for a significant sentence for Patterson’s exploitation and sexual abuse of the kids.
While the jury was deliberating, Macy and Maribel came up to us with wide eyes and said: “Nobody has ever fought for us like y’all did.” To Patterson, those precious girls were nobodies that he could order up like a pizza, use for his sick gratification, and toss aside like trash. Getting them justice made all of the anxiety, stress, and sleepless nights worth it.
[1] See State v. Patterson, 2025 WL 3119088 (Tex. App.—Fort Worth Nov. 6, 2025, pet. ref’d) (mem. op., not designated for publication).
[2] Id.