Valley Center death fuels questions about previous accidents

Was a 2001 plane crash that killed Mona Griffith, her boyfriend and her 12-year-old daughter a tragic accident, nothing more?

Jeff Chace says he can’t help but have that question. Chace, now 30, is the son of James Chace, Griffith’s boyfriend who was flying the plane when it crashed in a South Dakota pasture.

A series of deaths in Kansas and other states — all people who were associated with Daniel Perez and his traveling entourage — have been raising questions for years. The situation drew attention because, according to a court document, there had been about a dozen deaths involving members of the group who lived off life insurance payouts that resulted from the deaths.

The fact that Perez was recently charged with first-degree murder in the 2003 death of Patricia Hughes at the group’s Valley Center compound — a death that for years was thought to have been an accidental drowning — is fueling questions about the other deaths and prompting a call to reopen the plane crash investigation.

Perez was already in trouble before the Sedgwick County charges. According to court documents, he used aliases and false identification and had been a fugitive since 1997 from sex-crimes cases involving children in Texas. He is facing nearly 40 separate charges in Sedgwick County, including multiple sex crimes against children and filing false applications for life insurance; the crimes occurred from 2002 to 2010, the charges say. Perez faces a March 8 preliminary hearing to find whether there is enough evidence to take the cases to trial.

Sedgwick County sheriff’s Capt. Greg Pollock said his agency, which is leading the investigation into Hughes’ death in rural Valley Center, has shared information with other agencies that could lead them to take a new look at the deaths.

“We’ve contacted the other agencies, and we’ve asked them to take another look at their cases,” said Pollock, who wouldn’t elaborate or say which deaths were involved.

Jeff Chace said he would like someone to reopen the investigation of his father’s crash in light of the unfolding investigation of Perez, to see “if there were other factors involved that weren’t apparent at the time,” in 2001. He said he has learned that Perez was living in the Rapid City area, where the plane departed, at the time of the crash.

“And now I’m hoping the truth will come out about maybe what happened,” Jeff Chace said. “It’s always been a mystery to us.”

The National Transportation Safety Board said recently that it has not received any official request to reconsider the board’s “probable cause” finding in June 2002: “The pilot encountering instrument meteorological conditions and his subsequent loss of control of the airplane.” The crash occurred during an intensifying cold front.

Jeff Chace said he had always questioned how the crash happened because his father, a 50-year-old auctioneer and real estate broker, was an experienced pilot who had flown for more than 30 years and had flown as far as Alaska. James Chace’s six-seat, twin-engine Beech crashed in a remote area after leaving Rapid City, S.D., en route to Nebraska. Jeff Chace thought his father had the skills to make a safe emergency landing.

Money questions

Part of the mystery involves $700,000 in life insurance money that Patricia Hughes received as a result of Mona Griffith’s death in the plane crash. Hughes and Griffith were part of Perez’s traveling entourage. Griffith, 38, had two young children, but the money went instead to Hughes, a friend. Hughes used life insurance money from Griffith’s death to buy a house where the group lived outside Valley Center, a court document says.

Griffith’s relative, who asked that her name not be used because of safety concerns, gave this account of how Griffith became involved with Perez and an account of the group’s actions after Griffith died in the plane crash:

Griffith met Perez apparently by coincidence, when the two ended up in the same apartment complex in Corpus Christi, Texas, around 1997 or 1998. After awhile, Griffith, a single mother with two children, began living with Perez and a woman known as Trish – Patricia Hughes. At the time, Perez was known as Lou, the alias he also used in Sedgwick County. Griffith and Hughes became friends. Around 1998, Griffith, her daughter, Hughes and Perez moved to Wichita; Griffith’s son stayed with family in Texas.

“Lou never worked that I’m aware of,” the relative said.

By the time of the plane crash in early 2001, the group was living in South Dakota. The group also included another woman and Brian Hughes, Patricia Hughes’ husband.

The relative got a call from Perez or Patricia Hughes saying that Griffith, her daughter and James Chace were missing after their plane left Rapid City.

The relative thought it was unusual that Griffith, who was young and had little disposable income, had a sizable amount of life insurance and that it went to Hughes, rather than Griffith’s children. “We thought it was strange,” the relative said.

After the crash, an obituary listed “Lou Castro” – the alias Perez used – as being a brother of Griffith, even though Perez was not a relative, the relative said. It’s not clear how “Lou Castro” came to be listed as a surviving brother.

Perez paid funeral and burial expenses for Griffith and her daughter.

To the relative, Perez seemed charismatic in a soft-spoken way. He seemed to be in control of the group, although he pointed out that he had no checks in his name, that the women with him handled the checkbook.

Twice over the years, he told the relative not to say anything to others about his group, that it was none of anyone’s business.

Sometime after the crash, the relative said, Perez told a story: That he had been married before and had a 12-year-old daughter, that he and his wife had a bar in Texas, that his wife suffered an illness and died, and that he got life insurance money from her death and more money after his in-laws and his daughter died in a car crash and from the sale of the bar. He said he had a bunch of expensive cars stored in Texas.

Years later, around 2010, a Sedgwick County sheriff’s investigator told the relative that Perez made up a story about having a wife and daughter, the relative said.

A few months after the crash, Perez and his group moved to Lee’s Summit, Mo., where Griffith had relatives. In Lee’s Summit, someone introduced Perez to Jennifer Hutson, who sold real estate and had been a neighbor of Griffith’s relative. Hutson was active in the neighborhood association. The group bought a house in another Lee’s Summit neighborhood and said they paid cash for it, the relative said.

Not long after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Perez announced that Boeing had contacted him and needed him, so the group was moving back to Wichita, the relative said, adding that Perez had said he was a consultant for Boeing on something secret. Soon after Perez announced that the group was relocating to Wichita, Hutson, the real estate agent, told others that she was getting divorced, selling her home and moving to Wichita.

The group, including Hutson, ended up on rural property on North Oliver, outside Valley Center. In 2003, Patricia Hughes, then 26, died in what was ruled to be an accidental drowning at a swimming pool on the North Oliver property. Authorities have not said how she died or how they came to accuse Perez of killing her.

In 2006, Patricia Hughes’ husband, Brian Hughes, died while visiting relatives in South Dakota. He had been changing oil on a vehicle when a jack slipped and the load fell on him, authorities concluded.

Capt. Martin Graves, with the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office in Rapid City, said last week that his agency still considers Brian Hughes’ death an accident. About a year ago, two Kansas-based detectives re-interviewed witnesses, Graves said. No information indicated that Perez was in the vicinity of the accident, Graves said.

Then in 2008, Hutson, the real estate broker who lived on the North Oliver property, died when her SUV crossed into oncoming traffic and collided with a gravel truck in Butler County, in what has been ruled an accident.

Still, the growing number of deaths kept raising suspicion among people who knew the group.

Even before Hutson died in 2008, Griffith’s relative said, she worried about Hutson because so many other people had died before her and insurance money always went to a member of the group. “They always called themselves a family,” she said.

“Yes, it all seemed to be accidents, but it was just suspicious.”

Now with the charges against Perez, the relative said, “Maybe our worst fears were confirmed.”

This story was originally published February 4, 2012 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Valley Center death fuels questions about previous accidents."