In the spring of 2015, a Sedgwick County judge decided that Daniel Perez should spend the rest of his life in prison.
Across nearly two decades, the 56-year-old Texas native gathered about him a group of followers who trusted in his self-proclaimed magical powers and in his capacity as a prophet. They followed Perez from Texas to South Dakota to Wichita, before eventually ending up in Tennessee.
Perez proved in every way a criminal manipulator. He encouraged his followers — but particularly their underage children — to submit to his requests for sexual favors. In fact, he said his supernatural gifts — Perez claimed to be an angel, among other things — depended on his having sex with prepubescent girls. During his dominion over the small commune, Perez assaulted members of the group physically and preyed upon them psychologically. He guided their hands in filing false vehicle credit applications and — crucially — false life insurance applications. Perez himself used fake names — he was “Lou Castro” for most of those years — during which time he indulged his tastes for expensive cars and high-end remote-controlled airplanes. He was able to keep the commune financially viable and fund his personal predilections, Sedgwick county prosecutors showed, by cashing in on life insurance proceeds garnered from the suspicious deaths that befell a number of his followers over the years.
In 2003, while living at a compound on a rural stretch of road outside Wichita, one of Perez’s followers, 26-year-old Patricia Hughes, a wife and mother, drowned in a pool at the communal residence, dubbed by its leader “Angel’s Landing.” For years, her death was considered an accident. But in 2015, after a years-long investigation, a jury upended that consensus when it agreed with prosecutors that it was, in fact, by Perez’s own hands that she died.
In the end, the jury convicted Perez on all the charges he was facing, including first-degree murder, rape, sodomy, aggravated assault, sexual exploitation of a child and falsifying information.
Despite being one of the lead attorneys on the case, for Sedgwick County Chief Deputy District Attorney Kim Parker, the Perez case was not, at its heart, a victory for the prosecution; it was a win — albeit a muted one, given all that they suffered — for the many victims of Daniel Perez.
PARKER delivered a presentation at the Midwest/Kansas Crime Stoppers Training Conference Monday afternoon which laid bare the details of the Perez case. Parker has had a hand in prosecuting some of the state’s most high-profile criminal cases — BTK, the Carr brothers — but calls the Perez case, with its complicated web of interrelations and Perez’s long history of graft, her most “voluminous.”
Catapulted over a lifetime from a “bright sunny childhood” on an Allen County farm into the dimly lit labyrinths of criminal prosecution at the Sedgwick County Courthouse, Parker told the audience at Riverside Park on Monday that, even in dark times, she finds her reward in the measure of justice she is able to deliver on behalf of the victims.
Toward the end of her talk, Parker played a video clip of a young woman, who, as a girl of 10, was made to share the bed with Daniel Perez and who was forced to aid in the murder of Patricia Hughes. The young woman, in her twenties now — smart, articulate, successful — was asked by a Dateline reporter to reflect on the personal impact of the recent Perez trial.
Simply put, she said, “I would not have my life back if it weren’t for [the detectives], [District Attorney Marc] Bennett and Ms. Parker. It is amazing what they have given me.”
“That,” said Parker, who is scheduled to retire at the end of this year, “is a thank you that will carry me for the rest of my life.”
