CRIMINAL COLD CASES-FUGITIVES FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE-28-GERALD PARKER

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GERALD PARKER:
'THE BEDROOM BASHER'
TODAY, DNA PROFILING IS A POWERFUL METHOD OF IDENTIFYING CRIMINALS, GIVING EVIDENCE THAT IS EXTREMELY RELIABLE, INDEED INCONTROVERTIBLE. BUT, IN ONE CASE, AS WELL AS IDENTIFYING THE PERPETRATOR OF A SERIES OF CRIMES, DNA PROFILING ALSO HELPED TO FREE A MAN WHO WAS WRONGLY JAILED. THROUGH ANALYSIS OF DNA SAMPLES, GERALD PARKER WAS IDENTIFIED AS 'THE BEDROOM BASHER', A SERIAL RAPIST WHO HAD ALSO MURDERED SEVERAL OF HIS VICTIMS; WHILE THE MAN WHO HAD SERVED SIXTEEN YEARS IN PRISON FOR ONE OF HIS CRIMES, KEVIN GREEN, WAS SET FREE.
In 1980, a twenty-two-year-old Marine, Kevin Lee Green, was convicted of second-degree murder. He was alleged to have attacked his twenty-one-year-old wife, Dianne, who was pregnant at the time. The baby was at full term, but Dianne was beaten so badly that it was later born dead. Dianne also suffered brain damage in the attack and was comatose for a month afterwards. When she came round, she had lost her memory, but even so, she was somehow able to identify her husband as her attacker.

On the face of it, there was not much evidence to convict Green, beyond the testimony of his wife, a woman who had suffered mental impairment as a result of the attack. However, this was an emotive case, and there was a great deal of pressure to obtain a conviction, whatever the price. There were indications that Green was innocent, but they were ignored. Before Green's trial, the defence administered a lie detector test, which Green passed. He was adamant that he had not attacked his wife, claiming that at the time the intruder entered the house, he had gone to buy a cheeseburger, and was not there. A counter girl at the place where he had bought the cheeseburger identified him as a customer, and police gave evidence that the burger was still warm when he called them to the house. However, with such a strong allegation against him, supported by his own wife, the jury found Green guilty of the attack. He was convicted of second-degree murder, and went on to serve sixteen years in jail for his supposed crime.

Kevin Lee Green's wrongful conviction cost him his marriage and sixteen years' freedom. Thankfully, DNA evidence got him released and the true criminal imprisoned

A bolt from the blue
While in prison, Green tried to arrange a DNA test of the semen sample that had been collected from his wife's body at the scene of the crime. He thought – rightly, as it turned out – that this would show him to be innocent. However, the forensic test was extremely costly, and he was unable to afford the fee to have it done. Fortunately, the semen sample was kept safely as part of the evidence of the unsolved crime; a fact that was to prove very important for Green in the future.

While Green was in jail, he and his wife divorced. He continued to maintain that he had had nothing to do with the attack, and that his wife was lying. For this failure to co-operate and 'admit his crime', he had to forego his privileges and serve his full sentence. Yet, he was determined, whatever the personal cost, to maintain his innocence – not only for the sake of his own dignity, but for that of his family and friends.

Then something extraordinary happened, that must have seemed to him like a bolt from the blue. In 1996, the authorities in Orange County sent several DNA profiles to the state laboratory for analysis. They were samples taken from a series of unsolved rape and murder cases, all of them occurring in 1978 and 1979. This series of attacks had terrified women in the county, and the perpetrator had become known as 'The Bedroom Basher'. The authorities were hoping that the samples from the murder victims would match one of those on the national DNA database, which contained DNA samples from convicted felons across America.

The computer matched the 'Bedroom Basher' samples to that of a man named Gerald Parker. By sheer chance, Parker, like Green, was a former Marine. He had been convicted for a number of sex crimes in the 1980s, and was still serving time in jail for a parole violation connected to one of them. When he was charged, Parker confessed to the murders, and also to the beating and rape of Green's wife. Green was immediately freed. The state issued a formal apology to Green, and Superior Court Judge Robert Fitzgerald found him completely innocent of the crime. However, Green's former wife continued to believe that her ex-husband was responsible for the attack. Once exonerated, the ex-Marine corporal went to live with his family in the Midwest and said he did not plan to sue the state for damages resulting from his wrongful conviction. He might have been eligible for parole earlier had he not insisted throughout that he was innocent.

DNA from sperm traces
At the trial in 1998, the jury of nine women and three men were introduced to the then comparatively new technique of 'genetic fingerprinting', as it was called. An analyst at the Orange County sheriff's crime laboratory, Ed Buse, showed the jury blown-up charts of the DNA test results, which looked somewhat like product bar codes. Buse explained to the prosecutor that the black marks on the 'bar codes' showed where matches had been made between Parker's DNA sample and that of one of the murder victims, Kimberly Gaye Rawlins, from Costa Mesa.

Rawlins had been the victim of an attack on 1 April 1979, and had died of multiple skull fractures as a result. She was just twenty-one. After her death, blood and sperm samples had been taken from her body. However, for many years after she was killed, there was no DNA technology available, and the samples had to be stored. Meanwhile, the police had to continue their search for 'the Bedroom Basher' using the normal methods of police investigation. It was not until almost twenty years later that the samples from Rawlins' body could be used in DNA analysis, and were found to match up with Parker's. Buse pointed out that the Rawlins' samples and those from Parker were 'indistinguishable from each other', giving absolutely clear proof that it was Parker who had killed her.

Then Dr Bruce Kovacs, a scientist from the University of Southern California, took the stand to give a general description of DNA, explaining how minute strands of each person's DNA are unique, so that the pinpointing of those strands can distinguish one individual from another (in much the same way – but far more accurately – as the technique of fingerprinting). Dr Kovacs explained how DNA links cells together to form patterns that are unique to each individual, and pointed out that the only people who would share exactly the same DNA would be identical twins. He also described how the technique had been pioneered in the United Kingdom, and used to good order in police work.

Drug and alcohol abuse
In addition to the Rawley murder, Parker was charged with the murder of four other young women: Debra Lynn Senior, Deborah Kennedy, Marolyn Carleton, and Sandra Kay Fry. Speaking for his client, defence attorney David Zimmerman said that Parker did not dispute the fact that he had committed the murders. However, he alleged that, at the times of the murders, Parker had been suffering from an extremely disturbed state of mind. Parker had also been drunk when he committed the crimes, which, his lawyer argued, ought to lead the jury to convict him of second-degree murder.

While the court proceedings were going on, Parker, now forty-three years old, showed no sign of emotion. He listened to the story of how, as a young Marine, he had been stationed at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in the late 1970s. There, he had caused panic in the local community by raping and bludgeoning a series of young women to death. He had also been stationed at other Marine bases around the United States, including North Carolina, Alaska and Mississippi, and in 1980 had been convicted of the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, for which he was serving a prison sentence. He had been due to be released in a matter of weeks. It was thought that Parker may have been responsible for more sex killings, not only in Orange County, but elsewhere in the United States as well.

A miscarriage of justice: unfortunately for Green, his wife's evidence in the court room was enough to put him in jail. Luckily, the physical evidence from the crime scene was kept, and Green was freed as a result of that evidence being matched to Parker

In Parker's defence, attorney David Zimmerman said that he had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse, and had suffered from mental illness at the time of the murders. Apparently, Parker had since responded well to treatment for psychosis when in prison, and his personality had changed. However, countering Zimmerman, the prosecution insisted that whether or not Parker had changed, he was still responsible for his crimes: he had killed for pleasure, and must now pay the penalty.

Parker responded by saying that he was sorry for the crimes, but his expression remained impassive, even when the judge recommended the death penalty for him. One of the jurors, Nan Smith, commented that Parker's remorse had come 'a little too late', while family and friends of the deceased reacted more strongly. Jackie Bessonnette, whose sister Debra Lynn Senior had been just seventeen when her life was brutally cut short, said, 'We've been waiting a long time for this day. The best day will be a few years down the line when we're watching him die.'