Gerald Parker was convicted in Orange County, California, in 1998 of six counts of first degree murder for a series of night attacks in apartments in Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Tustin between December 1978 and October 1979. He was a Marine Corps staff sergeant at the time, and the media of the late 1970s called the unknown attacker the "Bedroom Basher," according to the California Supreme Court. Five of the people he was convicted of murdering were women and girls between 17 and 31. The sixth was a full-term unborn girl whose mother survived. For 16 years the man in prison for that attack was the girl's father, another Marine. A DNA match in 1996 identified Parker, who confessed, and the father was freed.
Parker was sentenced to death in January 1999. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in full in June 2017, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case in February 2018.
The court records give only a little of Parker's early life. At the penalty phase of his trial, a defense psychiatrist reported what Parker had told him: that he had inhaled glue, paint and paint thinner from about age 7 to 15, began smoking marijuana at 11, and later used PCP, hallucinogens and heroin mixed with cocaine. He said he had used LSD and mescaline in junior high school in San Diego. The prosecution's psychiatrist pointed to a youth of running away from home, stealing and breaking into buildings. Parker also reported five head injuries, three of which had left him unconscious.
He joined the Marine Corps and, after basic training, was posted to Adak, Alaska. A fellow Marine who met him there in 1973 later shared an apartment with him in Tustin from 1974 to 1977. That friend testified that Parker was intelligent, quiet and respectable, a model Marine who made staff sergeant within five years, and that he never saw him fight or turn violent after drinking or using drugs. The two drank and sometimes used marijuana or PCP on weekends.
Parker was stationed in Tustin with a helicopter squadron from 1975 to 1978 and moved to El Toro near the end of his service. His commanding officer in 1978 and 1979, a lieutenant colonel, testified that Parker was the squadron's material chief, a demanding post, and that he earned outstanding evaluations and a recommendation for Warrant Officers School. The officer said he saw Parker weekly and never saw him drunk or hung over. Parker himself told police that drinking and drugs had affected his work and that he had nearly been discharged by the middle of 1979.
Sandra Fry was 17. She was one of ten children, and her sister told the jury years later that she was compassionate and was always bringing home stray animals. She had moved out on her own only three days before she was killed.
On December 1, 1978, at about 11 p.m., her roommate came home to their apartment in Anaheim and found her badly hurt. Paramedics took her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The cause of death was bleeding in the brain from skull fractures caused by blows from a blunt object. Investigators lifted a latent fingerprint from the window where the attacker had come in; it was later matched to Parker's left index finger. In 1996 he told Anaheim detectives that he had climbed a fence at an apartment complex and entered through an open bedroom window.
Her sister, who was pregnant at the time of the killing, testified that her son grew up fearful and overprotected and that she herself seldom leaves her house.
Kimberly Rawlins was 21. Her sister, who called her her best friend, described her as happy and giving, a young woman who wanted many children. The sisters had planned to help each other through college. Kimberly had just moved out of the apartment they shared.
She was attacked after midnight in her Costa Mesa apartment on the night of March 31 to April 1, 1979. Her roommate came home at about 4:45 a.m. and found her. Officers found a faint pulse and began CPR, but paramedics pronounced her dead soon after. She died of bleeding in the brain from skull fractures. She had also been sexually assaulted, and DNA from that evidence matched Parker in 1996, as well as matching the profiles from the Kennedy and Senior cases.
In his confession Parker said he had watched the apartment and then walked in through the unlocked front door. Friends who had left earlier in the evening had been asked to leave it unlocked.
Her family could not at first afford a grave marker, her sister told the jury.
Marolyn Carleton was 31 and the mother of a nine-year-old son. Her son, grown, told the jury she had been his caring protector, his teacher and his friend, someone who always put him first.
The apartment manager saw her at about 11:45 p.m. on September 14, 1979. Hours later her son woke to her screams, saw a man run from the room, found her hurt and called for help. An officer arrived shortly before 3 a.m. on September 15, and the boy led him inside. She was taken to a hospital, where she died the next day of a severe head injury. The evidence collected in her case held too little biological material for testing.
Parker told detectives in 1996 that he climbed a back wall and came in through an unlocked sliding glass door, and that he ran into the boy in the hallway. Her sister also testified at the penalty phase and read a poem written by their mother, who had died of cancer the year before the trial.
At about 2:15 a.m. on September 30, 1979, a police officer was called to an apartment in Tustin. The woman inside, nine months pregnant, had been beaten and sexually assaulted. She survived. Her baby, a girl named Chantal in the court record, was delivered stillborn several hours later. The court found that the baby died of intrauterine anoxia caused by her mother's shock and blood loss.
In 1996 Parker told a Tustin investigator that he had been drunk, overheard the couple arguing, and waited until the husband left. He then went in through the unlocked front door.
The husband was a Marine. He said he had gone out to get a hamburger. He was charged in April 1980, and the prosecution's case rested mainly on his wife's testimony, according to the Innocence Project. A jury convicted him on October 1, 1980, of second degree murder for the death of the baby, attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, and on November 7, 1980, he was sentenced to 15 years to life, the National Registry of Exonerations reports. The registry lists mistaken identification and false or misleading forensic evidence among the causes of the wrongful conviction. Behind the Badge, a news site serving Orange County police agencies, reported in 2015 that the husband was convicted on the basis of blood type and his wife's statements, and that both men had type O blood. The California Court of Appeal upheld his convictions in 1992. He always said he was innocent.
Debora Kennedy was 24 and lived in Tustin. A younger relative who grew up with her told the jury that Debora had been like a sister to her: giving, sensitive, creative and full of potential. The family had chosen not to talk much about the killing, partly out of concern for Debora's grandmother, who had a stroke after the murder.
She was attacked late on October 6 or early on October 7, 1979, while she slept in her apartment. Her sister, returning from a trip, found her at about 6 p.m. on October 7. She had died of skull fractures from blunt force to the head. She had been sexually assaulted, and DNA from that evidence was matched to Parker in 1996. Parker told police he had come in through a window that was open a crack. Behind the Badge reported that she lived about a mile from the apartment where the September 30 attack took place.
Debra Senior was 17, the youngest of four children. She had graduated from high school, worked full time and lived on her own, and she planned to move back home and attend Orange Coast College. Her sister told the jury about her smile, her laugh and her kindness, and read two poems Debra had written. She said their father had died three years later, of a broken heart, as the family saw it.
On October 20, 1979, Debra left a party at about 10:30 p.m. Her roommate came home to their Costa Mesa apartment at about 2:30 a.m. and found her dead. She died of bleeding in the brain from skull fractures. A handprint on a windowsill was later matched to Parker's left palm, and DNA from the scene matched him in 1996. Parker told detectives that he had posed as a jogger to look into windows, picked an apartment that was empty and came in through a bathroom window.
On July 19, 1979, a woman in Costa Mesa was sexually assaulted and attacked in her home. She survived. DNA later matched Parker, and he admitted the attack. It was not one of the six murder counts; prosecutors presented it at the penalty phase as other violent conduct.
On February 2, 1980, Parker attacked a woman in a parking structure in Pasadena and took her necklace. She got away and was taken to a hospital. Minutes later a police officer found Parker half a block away with blood on his hands and clothes. He was calm and cooperative and was taken into custody. In October 1980 he pleaded guilty to robbery with infliction of great bodily injury.
On February 15, 1980, in Tustin, he had forced a 13-year-old girl into his van. In May 1980 he pleaded guilty to kidnapping her, with other charges. At his 1998 trial he agreed under cross-examination that if he had not been arrested for that crime he would have gone on attacking and killing women.
None of the 1980 charges connected him to the killings. The Tustin and Costa Mesa murder cases went cold, the Orange County Sheriff's Department wrote in 2020, and investigators had not linked them to each other.
Parker was sent to state prison. On February 13, 1984, at the state prison in Tehachapi, he attacked his cellmate with a metal object, injuring him, and in June 1984 he pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon. That year he was first given psychiatric medication, which he said calmed him. He testified that after his release from prison he stopped taking it for about eight years.
He was in and out of custody from 1987 on. In November 1988 he was arrested in Garden Grove for trying to force a woman into a sex act while armed with a knife, and he went back to prison. When the DNA match came in 1996, he was serving time for an unrelated parole violation. The DNA profile that identified him came from a blood sample taken when he was last released from prison.
In the 1990s, Tustin and Costa Mesa police investigators kept working on their unsolved murders and submitted evidence for DNA testing, the Orange County Sheriff's Department wrote in a 2020 history of the case. Its crime lab was then one of only three in the country able to run short tandem repeat (STR) analysis, a newer method that could identify individuals.
Behind the Badge's 2015 account, based on the recollections of retired Tustin Police Lt. Tom Tarpley, says the Tustin effort began when Lt. Bill Fisher suggested that Tarpley, then a detective, take another look at the Kennedy file. Tarpley sent the rape kit from that case to the Sheriff's crime lab, which was then testing old evidence for the Orange County District Attorney's Office. Two Costa Mesa murder cases had also been submitted.
The profiles were compared with convicted offenders in the state's offender DNA database. In June 1996 the lab reported three hits: the Tustin case and two Costa Mesa cases all matched Gerald Parker, an ex-Marine in prison. The California Supreme Court's opinion describes DNA testing that linked the killings both to one another and to Parker.
The rape kit from the September 30 Tustin attack, collected in 1979, was then found and tested. It too matched Parker, according to Behind the Badge, the National Registry of Exonerations and the Innocence Project. In June 1996, the husband's lawyers were told of the match.
On June 14, 1996, Costa Mesa Detective William Redmond and investigator Lynda Giesler went to Avenal State Prison in Kings County. They advised Parker of his rights and told him that his DNA matched evidence in two 1979 Costa Mesa homicides. Parker said he could not imagine why he would want to talk to them about something from so long ago. Later in the interview he said "the day is not today" and that he thought he should wait until later.
Before leaving, the Costa Mesa detectives told him that an investigator from Tustin also wanted to speak with him. Parker did not object. Tarpley advised him of his rights again, and Parker agreed to talk. He said he might have killed someone in Tustin, since he sometimes blacked out. Then he asked whether the Costa Mesa detectives were still there. Told they were, he agreed to "get this over with."
According to Tarpley's account to Behind the Badge, Parker's manner changed when the questions turned to the Tustin attack, and after a bathroom break he said that a man was in prison for a murder he had committed. He described the attack in detail that, Tarpley said, only the attacker would know. Mel Jensen, a prosecutor in the district attorney's office, had asked Tarpley to raise that case. Parker's blood was drawn that afternoon under a search warrant.
That night at California State Prison, Corcoran, Anaheim Detective Richard Raulston and Sgt. Steven Rodig questioned him about Sandra Fry. Part of the recording was accidentally erased while it was being copied, so Raulston returned on June 16, advised Parker of his rights again, and recorded a repeated and fuller account. On June 18, Redmond and Giesler conducted a videotaped interview at Corcoran. By the end, Parker had admitted entering all six apartments and attacking the women. He said he had meant only to knock them unconscious, and that alcohol and drugs had clouded his memory.
Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas later said that officers read Parker his Miranda rights five separate times, and that each time he waived them.
Tarpley went to Soledad State Prison to interview the husband, Behind the Badge reported, to be certain he had no part in the crime. His account matched what he had said in 1979. Tarpley then told him he was going home.
On June 20, 1996, an Orange County Superior Court judge set aside the husband's convictions and dismissed the case, and he was released that day, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. He had served 16 years. St. Louis Public Radio, which interviewed him in 2003, described him as the 35th person in the United States exonerated by DNA evidence.
In February 1997 the State of California paid him $10,000, then the most its compensation law allowed. In October 1999 Governor Gray Davis signed a bill granting him a further $620,000, the registry and the Innocence Project report.
Parker was charged with six counts of capital murder in Orange County Superior Court, case number 96-ZF-0039. Jury selection began on September 29, 1998. During it, the prosecutor used peremptory challenges to remove two Black prospective jurors, and the defense objected that the strikes were based on race. The trial judge ruled the defense had not shown an inference of discrimination.
The defense did not dispute that Parker was the attacker. It presented no evidence at the guilt phase and argued, using his own statements to police, that intoxication had so reduced his mental capacity that he was guilty only of second degree murder. The jury convicted him in October 1998 of six counts of first degree murder and found true the special circumstances of multiple murder and of murder during rape and burglary.
At the penalty phase the prosecution presented the 1979 Costa Mesa attack, the 1980 Pasadena robbery and Tustin kidnapping, and the 1984 prison assault. Relatives of each of the five women and girls described their losses.
Parker testified. He spoke of his psychiatric medication and said he was sorry and accepted responsibility for the families' pain. On cross-examination he said he had gone on with "business as usual" after one of the killings, that the crimes had been for sexual gratification, and that he had acted of his own free will. He also acknowledged that while medicated in jail he had said he was out of control and had no doubt he could kill someone.
A defense psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Blair, who interviewed him for about three hours in October 1998, diagnosed an organic mental syndrome, an unspecified psychotic disorder, chronic alcohol abuse in institutional remission, and major depression. Parker had told him he drank a case of beer and half a fifth of vodka a day for ten or eleven years. Blair said Parker would be dangerous out of custody and unmedicated, but probably not in a controlled setting with medication.
In rebuttal, Dr. Park Dietz, who reviewed about 8,000 pages of records and the interview tapes but did not examine Parker, found no sign of a psychotic disorder or organic brain damage. He said Parker's mind worked perfectly adequately in the police interviews, and diagnosed antisocial personality disorder.
The jury returned a verdict of death. On January 21, 1999, Superior Court Judge Frank Briseno sentenced Parker to death, Patch reported.
A death sentence in California goes straight to the state Supreme Court. Parker's automatic appeal, No. S076169, was decided on June 5, 2017.
The court rejected his claim that the strikes of the two Black prospective jurors were discriminatory, finding the record gave clear race-neutral reasons: one had religious objections to the death penalty and the other, a basketball coach, had scheduling conflicts and seemed reluctant to serve.
On the Miranda claim, the court held that Parker's early remarks to the Costa Mesa detectives were questions about why they wanted to talk, not a clear request to remain silent, and that he had waived his rights by taking part in the interview. His later "wait until later" remark was a limited invocation that applied only to the Costa Mesa detectives, not to the Tustin investigator, whom he agreed to speak with after waiving his rights. Because the crimes came before Proposition 8 took effect on June 9, 1982, prosecutors had to prove the waiver beyond a reasonable doubt, and the court found they had.
The court also held that the trial judge was right to refuse an instruction on unconsciousness as a defense. Parker's talk of blackouts was tied to his voluntary drinking and drug use, and his detailed confessions showed he remembered the crimes. The court found the victim impact testimony allowed, apart from one improper remark about Debra Senior's father dying of a broken heart, which it found harmless. It found that the trial judge had wrongly limited the defense's argument that Parker would not be dangerous in prison, but that this error too was harmless. It affirmed the judgment in its entirety. Rehearing was denied on August 9, 2017.
Parker petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court on November 3, 2017, arguing that the state court had misapplied the rules on race-based jury strikes. California opposed the petition, and the Court denied it on February 20, 2018.
In 2014, criminology students at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh wrote to Parker on death row. WPXI reported that he wrote back that his case was "still pending in the courts" and that he needed to consult his lawyers before saying more. He did not discuss the crimes.
In September 2020 the Orange County Sheriff's Department reported that Parker remained on death row at San Quentin State Prison.
Parker remained under sentence of death in September 2020.
The date of the Tustin attack. The California Supreme Court gives September 30, 1979, as do the Innocence Project and the opinion's own victim list. Behind the Badge's 2015 article gives September 20, 1979.
The husband's trial year. The Innocence Project says he was tried in September 1990 and convicted in October 1990; the National Registry of Exonerations gives October 1, 1980 and a sentence on November 7, 1980, and the California Supreme Court says he was committed to prison in November 1980. 1980 is correct.
Why Parker was in prison in 1996. The Supreme Court opinion and the state's 2018 brief say he was serving time on an unrelated parole violation. The Sheriff's Department's 2020 history says he was in custody for the 1980 Tustin kidnapping, and Behind the Badge says he was serving time for a 1980 crime.
The number of counts. A published summary of the 2017 decision speaks of seven murders; the opinion itself and the state's brief name six victims and six counts.
The penalty verdict date. Patch gave October 20, 1998, as the day the jury recommended death, which would be 19 years to the day after Debra Senior's death. No court record giving that date has been reported.
1973: Parker, a Marine, is posted to Adak, Alaska.
1975 to 1978: Stationed in Tustin with a helicopter squadron.
December 1, 1978: Sandra Fry, 17, is killed in Anaheim.
March 31 to April 1, 1979: Kimberly Rawlins, 21, is killed in Costa Mesa.
July 19, 1979: A Costa Mesa woman survives an attack; Parker later admits it.
September 15, 1979: Marolyn Carleton, 31, is attacked in Costa Mesa; she dies the next day.
September 30, 1979: A pregnant woman survives an attack in Tustin; her daughter, Chantal, is stillborn.
October 6 to 7, 1979: Debora Kennedy, 24, is killed in Tustin.
October 20, 1979: Debra Senior, 17, is killed in Costa Mesa.
February 2, 1980: Parker is taken into custody in Pasadena after a robbery.
February 15, 1980: He kidnaps a 13-year-old girl in Tustin.
May 1980: Pleads guilty to kidnapping, with other charges.
October 1, 1980: The husband of the Tustin survivor is convicted of the attack.
October 1980: Parker pleads guilty to robbery with great bodily injury.
November 7, 1980: The husband is sentenced to 15 years to life.
June 1984: Parker pleads guilty to assaulting a cellmate at Tehachapi.
November 1988: Arrested in Garden Grove and returned to prison.
1992: The Court of Appeal upholds the husband's convictions.
June 1996: DNA from Tustin and Costa Mesa cases matches Parker.
June 14, 1996: Parker confesses at Avenal State Prison.
June 16 and 18, 1996: Further interviews at Corcoran.
June 20, 1996: The husband's convictions are set aside and he is freed.
February 1997: California pays the husband $10,000.
September 29, 1998: Jury selection begins in Parker's trial.
October 1998: Parker is convicted of six counts of first degree murder.
January 21, 1999: Judge Frank Briseno sentences him to death.
October 1999: Governor Gray Davis signs a $620,000 award for the husband.
October 2014: Parker answers letters from Duquesne University students.
June 5, 2017: The California Supreme Court affirms the judgment.
August 9, 2017: Rehearing denied.
February 20, 2018: The U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
September 2020: Reported on death row at San Quentin.