How a fugitive’s trail of alleged crimes went through Valley Center [The Wichita Eagle, Kan.]

Jan. 29--Starting around 1996, Daniel Urive Perez left a trail of trouble that began in Texas.

His trail stretched to North Dakota, South Dakota, the Kansas City area, rural Valley Center, Tennessee and, finally, Wichita, according to records and interviews. He is being held in the Sedgwick County Jail under a $2.1 million bond after being charged earlier this month with first-degree murder; multiple sex crimes, including crimes against children; multiple counts of aggravated assault involving a rifle; criminal threat; and filing false information in applications for auto credit and life insurance. The alleged crimes occurred in Sedgwick County between 2002 and 2010, the charges say.

Along the way, Perez -- a fugitive from Texas who fled around 1997 before he could be sentenced for indecency with a child -- collected an entourage. Some of them moved from state to state with him. They lived what seemed to be communal existences, financed in part by large life insurance payouts from associates or relatives who died in accidents, court documents say. About a dozen people associated with Perez or his group have died.

And along the way, Perez drew suspicion: from relatives of his associates, from neighbors and acquaintances, and, finally, from the FBI and the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office.

In 1996 or 1997, in a small North Dakota town, Lionel Lemier Sr. met Perez, and Lemier didn't like what he saw.

One day Lemier's daughter, about 15 at the time, brought a man to meet her father and introduced him as Danny Perez. Lemier recalls that as the two men sat across a table from each other, it was clear that Perez was too old to be dating his daughter. Perez, now 52, would have been in his late 30s at the time, more than 20 years older than Lemier's daughter. Lemier, who also suspected that Perez was an illegal immigrant, reported Perez to the Border Patrol.

Perez was put in a local jail, and for years, Lemier thought Perez had been deported.

Around 2010, Lemier got a call from the FBI, saying investigators were checking into Perez's background.

Just recently, Lemier said, he learned that after his daughter went away to South Dakota when she was 15 or 16, she ended up with Perez, moving from one state to another. The Eagle is not naming her because, according to some allegations, she was a victim of Perez.

Texas connection

In January 1997, a grand jury in Bee County, Texas, indicted Perez, accusing him of multiple sex crimes in 1996 with two girls under 17, court documents say.

When he was arrested, his Bee County jail information sheet said he was white/Hispanic, 5 feet 6 inches, 135 pounds, with medium skin tone, short black hair and brown eyes and that his last known address was in Beeville, Texas. Years later, he had long black hair and told people he was a Native American. Over the years, he gained 25 pounds.

According to a March 1997 plea agreement in Texas, Perez pleaded no contest to second-degree indecency with a child -- sexual contact and was facing three years of community supervision. But, according to court documents, he fled before sentencing.

By August 2002, Texas authorities became convinced that the fugitive Perez was dead, a Texas court document says.

South Dakota connection

By late 1999, Lemier's daughter, the teen who had left North Dakota around 1996 or 1997, was living in Black Hawk, S.D., records indicate. Perez also was living in Black Hawk, according to an obituary for a 38-year-old woman who died with two others in February 2001 in a South Dakota plane crash. The twin-engine Beechcraft crashed in a pasture during bad weather, a newspaper article said. "Lou Castro" -- an alias Perez often used -- was listed in the obituary as a brother of the woman who died.

Years later, Perez would tell people that he received a lot of money as a result of relatives dying in a plane crash.

The obituary said the woman had sisters living in the Kansas City, Mo., suburb of Lee's Summit.

Kansas City connection

By 2001, the lives of three women were intersecting, and within a few years, two of the three would be dead.

One of Perez's associates -- Lemier's daughter -- and another woman, real estate broker Jennifer Hutson, were living in Lee's Summit, records show. By late 2001, Hutson and Lemier's daughter were living next door to each other in the 7700 block of West Cornelison in Wichita.

At some point, Perez introduced Lemier's daughter to Patricia Hughes, and the women became friends, a court document says. Hughes received $700,000 from a life insurance policy of the woman who died in the plane crash. Hughes and Lemier's daughter used the money to buy a house in Kansas City, Mo. The sale of that house led to the purchase of a house in a rural tract in the 9500 block of North Oliver, which has a Valley Center mailing address.

Valley Center connection

Eventually, the three women were living in houses at the Valley Center compound on North Oliver, north of Kechi.

In June 2003, Hughes, 26, died in a swimming pool on the property. According to news accounts at the time, Hughes had died trying to rescue her 2-year-old daughter from the pool, and an 11-year-old neighbor saved the toddler. Authorities classified the death as an accidental drowning.

Three months later, the Kechi police chief introduced Perez, known then as Lou Castro, at a Kechi City Council meeting. Castro was donating about $19,000 to help buy and equip an additional police vehicle for the small town. Castro asked for one thing: that a sticker be put on the vehicle in memory of Patricia Lynn Hughes.

A 2003 article about the donation in the Ark Valley News said that members of Hughes' estate considered themselves to be part of the Kechi community. The article quoted Castro: "We looked at different things that we could do to benefit the community. We want you to try to get a more suitable vehicle to get where you need to go."

It was the ultimate irony: a fugitive publicly going to police, saying he wanted to help them and that he wanted to honor the memory of a woman he would be accused of murdering. Earlier this month, Perez made his first court appearance on a first-degree murder charge in Hughes' death.

A life insurance company paid Patricia Hughes' husband, Brian, $1.2 million, and he put most of the money in an account controlled by Hutson and Lemier's daughter, court documents say. By the summer of 2005, much of the money was gone. Lemier's daughter was living with Brian Hughes at the Valley Center compound.

In July 2005, Brian Hughes executed a transfer of death deed that would split the interest in one of the North Oliver houses between Hutson and Lemier's daughter if something happened to him. He was dead less than a year later.

Meanwhile, to neighbors and others, the North Oliver properties seemed like a compound, with people living together in their own mini-community. They shared finances. They drove vehicles with common vanity plates: Angel 1, Angel 2, Angel 3. The place became known as Angel's Landing.

John Goyette was a private contractor hired to do a bank inspection for a new, 3,400-square-foot house built on the property in 2005. He met the man known as Lou Castro, and Goyette remembers telling Castro something like, "This is quite a compound you have here."

A long driveway led back to the new house, where Perez, alias Castro, lived. With the new house, a total of three houses sat on adjacent lots. Hutson lived in one; the third house was the Hughes home. A fourth building sat in the middle of the three homes and held a large enclosed pool, a well-equipped game room and a garage where Perez tinkered with his expensive remote-control planes. He also had motorcycles and drove expensive cars, including at least one Corvette and a Cadillac Escalade.

Perez told Goyette that he had received a large sum as a result of a plane crash that killed some of his relatives and that the money was being invested in the property. Perez took him on a tour and said that all of the residents at the adjacent homes belonged to the same group.

Goyette noticed three young women at the property. They looked like teens to him. One held an infant.

Over the years, word spread about parties at Angel's Landing. At Simon Retail Liquor in nearby Park City, the staff saw younger women come in and buy $300 to $400 worth of liquor at a time for weekend parties at Angel's Landing. Once, one of the young women coming in for liquor was turned away because she was underage, store manager Susan Lehr says.

In March 2006, in Rapid City, S.D., Brian Hughes died in an accident while working on a vehicle. As a result of his death, Lemier's daughter received $500,000 in life insurance and an accidental death benefit, documents say.

Brian Hughes had nominated Hutson, the real estate broker who lived in one of the three houses on North Oliver, to be guardian of his young daughter.

After losing her two parents, the girl lost a third person in her life: In September 2008, Hutson, who had been caring for the girl, died after her vehicle ran into a dump truck loaded with gravel on SW 70th Street, near the Wagon Wheel addition, in Butler County. Authorities determined that Hutson's white Tahoe crossed the center line and ran head-on into the truck.

On Friday, Butler County Sheriff Kelly Herzet said that he has reviewed Hutson's death -- in response to the Perez case unfolding -- and still considers it an accident based on available evidence.

Beginning of the end

By 2008, Perez's days of evading detection were numbered.

In early November 2008, a U.S. Treasury Department task force officer and a Sedgwick County sheriff's detective filed a federal criminal complaint alleging that a man using the alias of Lou Castro had used someone else's Social Security number. The detective met with Castro and his wife at one of the North Oliver houses. The man identified himself as Lou Castro and said he was born in 1975, federal court documents say. Perez was actually born 16 years earlier.

In January 2010, investigators including an FBI agent learned that the couple had moved from Valley Center to Columbia, Tenn., near Nashville. Perez was living in a high-dollar neighborhood, in a sprawling plantation-style house on a hill at the end of a meandering driveway. The FBI interviewed Perez.

He was living in the impressive house with Lemier's daughter and others. About the same time, law enforcement came upon information that Patricia Hughes' death was not an accidental drowning but a homicide. Perez was formally charged with murder on Jan. 19.

All those years in Valley Center, the fugitive hid in plain sight.

His trail finally ended, about 15 years after he fled Texas and about 15 years after he drew suspicion as he sat across from a teenager's father.

Reach Tim Potter at 316-268-6684 or [email protected]

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