Shocking True Story

by Gregg Olsen

  The lady in the nightgown was frantic. The investigator wanted to tell her that she didn't have to put the invalid on the wet, cold lawn. It was too late. It was all happening so fast.

  "Don't shoot!" she cried out again, yanking on the old man's arm as he tumbled onto the lawn without making a sound.

  "Danny Parker?" Raines called from his car.

  "Danny ain't here. I'm Davy. Danny's my big brother," the younger man said.

  "My boy's been gone all night long!" the woman sobbed. "My husband and I are worried. Is he all right?"

  "That's what we want to know. Where is he?"

  "We don't know."

  In the dark, the light from the house and flashlights and headlights converged on three members of the Parker family as they huddled, shivering in the wet of November. The woman, identified as June Parker, was fiftyish. She had patches of dried-on Noxzema on her face and her hair was a medium-length mess that made her thin frame resemble a Joshua tree. She wore an ecru-colored flannel nightgown with a thin, white chenille robe—now stained from mud, grass and the indignity of what was occurring on her property.

  Raines was awash in empathy. She had probably never done anything wrong in her entire life and yet there she was suffering the humiliation of wearing nightclothes while uninvited company pointed guns and high-beamed flashlights in her direction.

  The man in—and out of—the wheelchair, Dwight Parker, never said a thing. He apparently never did. Mr. Parker had been falling apart piece by piece for better than twenty years. He had lost both feet in a terrible logging accident. His larynx was removed when cancer stole his voice at forty-seven. At a hard-living sixty-five, his hearing was lousy and his eyesight was failing by the month. Mrs. Parker used to tell friends that if her husband lost the use of one more part of his body, she'd strap him in his chair and wheel him into the Pacific Ocean to put him out of his misery.

  "It would be an act of love," she said.

  There wasn't much left for Dwight Parker.

  Raines looked on as a pair of young cops hoisted Mr. Parker back into his chair and pushed him in the direction of the house.

  Davy Parker wore a red auto supply company T-shirt and jeans that fell so low that the top third of his butt hung like two loaves of unbaked bread. He was in his late twenties, with thin, oily brown hair and a tattoo of an anchor on his right forearm. He had the tattoo made when he was seventeen in anticipation of going into the Navy after graduating from high school. Instead, he got a girl pregnant and took a job at the Wendy's stocking the Garden Spot salad bar in the mornings before the lunch crowd arrived. The girl had the baby, but refused to marry Davy. By that time, Davy had spent so much on household items getting ready for a family that didn't want him that he owed Visa and MasterCard more than four thousand dollars.

  The anchor tattoo was an indelible reminder of what might have been.

  Fifteen minutes after the phone call that rocked their neat little house, when it was clear there was no Danny around, the Parkers and the cops went inside to the living room. Bowling trophies gleamed from a corner cabinet, the TV Guide was spread open to the programming log for ESPN, and motor oil had stained the carpet where one of the Parker sons had worked on his mini-bike. It was the house of men; the kind whose interests had stayed frozen in the seventh grade.

  "I knew something bad was going to happen," June Parker stammered as she fought for composure. She pulled her robe tight against her chest and absentmindedly re-stacked the newspapers on the coffee table. "I had a bad feeling about tonight."

  "Ma'am, tell me what you know," Raines said, softly, leaning closer.

  Mrs. Parker put her fingertips to her thin lips and tapped. For a few seconds she said nothing. She was reviewing the night before she spoke.

  "It started around ten tonight," she said. “My son's fiance Janet called every fifteen minutes. Her old boyfriend was hitting her... beating her up again. Danny was fit to be tied. He had it in his mind that he'd go beat up Deke to give him a taste of his own medicine."

  "Janet Lee Kerr and your son were going to get married?" Raines asked, trying to hide his surprise.

  "Yes, in Vegas. Before Christmas. For Thanksgiving dinner, we had Janet and our daughter over and she and Danny got online to pick out wedding rings from the Sears web site."

  Raines asked Mrs. Parker to fast forward to the events of the night.

  "Danny was pacing the floor after every call. Goodness, the girl called every twenty minutes. He wanted gas money to go see her, but I refused to give it to him. He makes good money driving a truck. He just doesn't know how to hang on to it. I didn't want him to go beat up anyone."

  "When did he leave?"

  "About midnight, I guess. My husband and I had gone to bed. Danny's okay, isn't he?" She asked once more.

  The detective felt sorry for her. "We don't know. We don't know where he is."

  When asked to see if any of the Parker family's guns were missing, son Davy led the officers to the closet. A sixteen-gauge shotgun was propped up against the back corner. A quick sniff of its barrel suggested it had not been fired recently.

  "What was Danny driving when he left?"

  "His '84 Escort," Davy answered.

  "Hatchback wagon?"

  The brother and mother nodded in unison.

  "Blue and white?"

  "Uh-huh," June Parker answered. "The 'New Wave' package with a splattered interior and a row of distressed stars etched on the back window. There aren't many like them left on the road. Danny is real proud of his car."

  Mr. Parker tugged at his wife's arm.

  "Potty?" she asked sweetly.

  The man in the wheelchair nodded and said “yes.” It was the only thing he said during the interview. Mr. Parker was a man of few words.

  Note from Val: The description of June Parker needs a fix. The dried-on Noxzema on her face is good (mom used to wake up with that caked on, cracked mask every morning), but a Joshua tree? Jeesh, honey, no one outside of Arizona will know what that looks like. I'm not even sure and I've been there. The line: “Raines was awash in empathy?” Is that meant to be ironic? A pun? Last thought... I feel sorry for these people. I'm not sure if you want me to. But I'm just saying. —V

  Chapter Fifteen

  Monday, August 19

  ONE DROP FALLS, THEN ANOTHER. It starts the same way every time. Rain again. Being a native Northwesterner, I knew that as well as anyone. I only wished I had new tires as I drove off the interchange and felt the road slip beneath the old white Chevy LUV. I was on my way to more interviews, and while it was more of the same, it's what I loved more than anything. First up was June Parker, Danny's mother. I also made plans to get together with Jett for a tour of Timberlake, after hours.

  "Wait 'til you see the Poodle Dog Inn!" she had said the night before. "I'll meet you there after you're done with Mrs. Parker."

  "I can hardly wait," I said in a jokey, sarcastic manner.

  "What time are you going out there?"

  "About five-thirty... I asked her what time she ate and I'd show up afterwards. Her husband has physical therapy on Mondays and Wednesdays."

  I told Jett that I had written what I called "update notes" to her sister and mother, letting them know that I was busy on the book and would see them at Riverstone soon—possibly as early as the following week. Provided, of course, the prison media flack wasn't too busy and could accommodate a special visit into her schedule. Jett seemed so happy that someone was writing to Janet and their mother. No one else did, and mother and daughter were very lonely.

  "They don't even share a cell anymore," she said wistfully.

  I didn't tell her that I knew that Janet had moved in with her lover Angela, and Connie was stuck with some new gal, refusing to "go lesbian" because it was too late in life to do so.

  I checked my recorder, two new AA batteries and a small yellow pad. Those were the tools of the trade. I was ready for anything.

  Or so I thought.

  ♦
/>
  EVEN IN DAYLIGHT, OLD STUMP ROAD could use a succession of streetlights. With all the accidents that took place as a result of its steep curves and blind driveways, it had become the kind of place tow truck drivers knew by rote. With nearly drill-press precision, the road had been bored through a forest as a tunnel of dark green that let in only the skimpiest of light. Most of the vegetation on the ground was leggy, straining for the glow of the sun. By now I found a peculiar irony about the road. It was the site of the shooting and it was the address of two victims. Paul Kerr lived at one end and at the other lived the Parker family. I had finally convinced a Parker family member to see me for the book. June Parker at first resisted, but with her son facing all those years in prison, she "had some things she wanted to get off her chest."

  We had brief conversations over the phone and she had reluctantly provided a few details that I knew would enrich the story by making Danny Parker a kind of victim of his love for Janet Lee Kerr. Mrs. Parker cautioned me several times that I was dead wrong if I thought I knew the whole story.

  "I hate being teased," I kidded her when she once again became evasive.

  "I can tell you more when you see me."

  And so I drove south.

  The rain splattered onto the sodden roadway, falling impatiently from a heavy gray sky interrupted by the smallest flecks of blue. In deliberate strokes, the LUV's windshield wipers sloughed the moisture off and the act was repeated, matching the beat of the music on the car radio. The wetness from the sky slathered the road.

  ♦

  THE HOUSE AT 2121 OLD STUMP ROAD, Timberlake, was a simple white and turquoise-trimmed two-story. A patchwork flower garden of daisies and Cosmos in the front, and an acre of compost-topped land in the back, made perfect beds for the annual vegetable garden. It had been the Parker home since 1977, when Dwight Parker had the old mobile towed away and the little house built. Some thought it was funny that June Parker chose the same color for the stick-built house as the old aluminum doublewide, but she didn't give a hoot. She always wanted a white and blue house and she was going to live her dream.

  I parked the LUV in front of what I assumed had once been a chicken house, though it had been a long time since anything but spiders laid eggs in it. A larger enclosure, about twenty-five yards away, was the rickety remnants of a hog pen.

  I knocked on the front door, but there was no answer.

  Through the front window, I could see the sliding glass door on the other side of the house had been left partly ajar. Maybe Mrs. Parker was in the backyard? I walked around the house and let myself in through the door fronting a small dining area.

  "Mrs. Parker?" I stuck my head inside. "It's Kevin Ryan. I'm here for the interview. Forget I was coming?"

  I hated it when people changed their minds and didn't bother to call to let me know. It wasn't as if I was in the area and just stopping by for a little chat. I had courted this woman and had done all I could to let her know that I would be writing a true story and her input was needed to ensure proper balance. Whereas Anna Cameron had screamed at me, June Parker seemed more open to the idea of an interview for the book I was writing.

  "Hello?" I said as I followed a noise coming from the kitchen. It was the sound of the tap water gushing from the sink. It was the only noise breaking the stillness of the tiny house. Though they had little money and the decor was truly from the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family era—muddy earth tones, Naugahyde recliners, "mushroom" wall art for their sons. It was also obvious that this was the home of a couple not feeling well. Three of the familiar red and white cans of soup, sore throat spray, chicken bouillon cubes and cold pills were pushed to the end of the cluttered counter.

  I called out again, but there was no reply.

  While shutting off the running faucet, I noticed one of the four high-backed dinette chairs encircling the table had been overturned. It was glaringly out of place in what seemed fairly neat and organized. I wondered if June Parker had left in a hurry, perhaps to go to the doctor? Maybe she had knocked over the chair as she ran for her car. A trip to the hospital? A family member in need? A dog hit by a car? Something made her rush out.

  I turned to leave when curiosity or impulse got the best of me and I went further into the house. Something felt peculiar.

  I pushed the hallway door open and I saw her.

  The horror began in a series of images that I instantly knew would play repeatedly in my mind over the next few years—indeed, the rest of my life. Red seemed everywhere. Spattering the walls, the baseboard, the floor. I was drawn to the color. The red was a light at the end of a long tunnel. I felt the air leave my lungs in a quick rush. I commanded my eyes to move over the figure slumped next to my feet.

  June Parker lay on the floor in the front of the door leading to a bedroom. Thick red blood had painted the dark flooring beneath her limp body. Her throat had been slashed so deeply that it altered her facial muscles, making the woman's face strangely distorted, like a deflated rubber balloon with a human likeness hastily painted on it. In shock, I knelt beside her and touched her neck. I was not a doctor, but I knew there were no signs of life. Her round-framed glasses cracked beneath my knee.

  I ran to the kitchen and dialed 9-1-1 on the white wall phone, gave the operator the address and did what the dispatcher told me to do.

  "Go outside and wait."

  I stood shivering outside in the driveway and waited for the strobing lights and whining sirens of aid cars, the Pierce County Sheriff, the fire department. The image played again. Red. The distortion of her face. Red. Her hands frozen and contorted... reaching and clawing for protection... the screams that no one heard.

  No one except her killer.

  I shuddered in the cool, damp air. The direction of the wind had shifted and for the first time in my visits to Timberlake, I smelled the salty air of the Pacific Ocean instead of the wet sneaker smell of the mill. A few minutes later, I watched without word as the Timberlake Adult Daycare blue van ferrying Dwight Parker was surrounded by several of Pierce County's finest. An officer leaned inside the vehicle and spoke quietly to one of the passengers. I couldn't see the man's face, but I could imagine his irrevocable shock. His world was changed forever at that moment. June Parker's husband was just coming home from a day of “passive activity” to learn the unthinkable had taken place inside the walls of his little house. Mr. Parker, understandably and tragically, would never be the same.

  The van driver pushed the button activating the wheelchair lift, and the man who couldn't speak was lowered to the driveway.

  Detective Raines arrived, looking frazzled, as though he had been yanked once again from his family and his home. His sandy hair hung like a bunched-up curtain over his forehead and his necktie hung limply and askew over the outside of his jacket. He had left in a hurry. How the job ruled his life, his wife, their children. Time and time again, it had been proven in the Raines household: Homicide was not an eight-to-five job.

  There was no smile for me, only the grim nod of recognition as Raines took a statement about my discovery. It took all of five or ten minutes. I hadn't seen anything other than the body, and I hadn't touched anything.

  "Wait," I remembered, "the tap was running when I came inside and I turned it off."

  "Kitchen? Bathroom?" he asked

  "Kitchen. And that's all I touched. Besides her. I touched Mrs. Parker to see if she was alive."

  Raines made some additional notes and walked back toward the house.

  Wet from my own perspiration as much as the subsiding rain, and exhausted from the relentless questioning, I called over to Raines that I was going to go home. I couldn't think of anything else to say. Even those words fell flat, but the detective didn't seem to notice. He nodded over his shoulder and told me he'd be in touch. He had work to do. There would be photographs, witness interviews, blood samples, autopsy, media inquiries.

  My brain was mush as I drove north on the freeway. I ground the gears of my truck twice. My mind w
as gone. I couldn't shake what I had seen. I had seen crime scene photos before, terrible photos. Children murdered. Women mutilated. The cruel and lethal handiwork of knives, razors, guns, and various ligatures. I would never forget the image of a dead teenage boy who had strangled himself with his father's necktie during autoerotic play. Or the woman whose face had been horribly disfigured with a hot waffle iron—before her husband stabbed her on top of their Sunday morning breakfast table.

  I had seen what the ocean did to the human body after it sank, then floated to the surface as the gassy ballooned remains of what had been the mother of three. I had seen what carbon monoxide poisoning did to a father and his two daughters after he strapped them snugly into their car seats and drove them to hell. I had pored over color photographs of a maggot-infested corpse that had been dumped in a ditch. I meticulously counted and measured each rice-sized larvae to see if the coroner had correctly determined the age by the size and number of tiny white flesh-eaters.

  I knew from my work what murder looked like in all of its hideous faces.

  I had seen everything that juries were required to see and what the curious friends of a medical examiner showed to impress them.

  It was true that I had never seen the real thing and while the photographs were always graphic, the shock value was mitigated by the horrible fact that you know you are going to see something horrible before you look upon it.

  With Mrs. Parker, I had expected coffee and cookies. Maybe I was in fantasyland? Maybe she would have thrown me out and told me never to come back again? That I could live with. I had not expected anything like this. Not a murder.

  Not in a million years.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tuesday, August 20

  THE DAY AFTER JUNE PARKER'S MURDER, I WAS IN AN EERIE, impenetrable fog. I tried to write. I tried to talk it out with Val and the girls, but the words did not come easily. Each phrase choked in my throat. Each flash of what I had seen made the shock of it all hit deeper. I couldn't purge from my memory the images that haunted me. Valerie canceled appointments and stayed home with me and the girls. I watched television. I talked with a reporter, and though I had always prided myself on being quotable, I could not think of anything to say.