The jury that convicted Gerald Parker in October 1998 returned six counts of first degree murder, and the sixth was in the name of Chantal Green. She was delivered stillborn about ten hours after her mother, Dianna, a twenty-year-old nurse, was beaten with a length of timber in the family's home in Tustin, nine and a half months into the pregnancy. Her father spent sixteen years in prison for it.
Parker was born in 1955 and grew up in Phoenix. In 1963, when he was eight, his mother, Frankie Wagner Parker, died giving birth to her tenth child and his father left. He went to a grandmother, then to Juvenile Hall for sniffing glue, then with a brother to an older cousin, Florence Russell, in Logan Heights, and spent much of his youth at Boys Republic, a school for troubled boys, where he won a work award for food preparation in 1971. He told a psychiatrist later that he had sniffed glue and paint thinner from seven to fifteen, used marijuana from eleven, PCP, LSD and speedballs, and drunk a case of beer a day for a decade. He joined the Marines in 1973, served as a barracks guard on Adak, and came to Tustin in September 1975, later serving as a staff sergeant at El Toro. Between December 1, 1978 and October 20, 1979 he entered women's homes at night in Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Tustin and raped and bludgeoned them. He usually carried a length of two-by-four. Sandra Kay Fry, seventeen, was beaten in her Anaheim apartment on December 1, 1978 and died in hospital. Kimberly Gaye Rawlins, twenty-one, was found dead in Costa Mesa on April 1, 1979, and semen on evidence from her autopsy would one day carry his DNA. Marolyn Kay Carleton, thirty-one, was beaten in Costa Mesa on September 15 in front of her nine-year-old son and died the next day. Debora Kennedy, twenty-four, was attacked asleep in Tustin on October 6 with a mallet taken from a truck. Debra Lynn Senior, seventeen, was killed on October 20 after he had watched her empty apartment pretending to be a jogger; he left a palm print on the bathroom window. The press named the unknown attacker the Bedroom Basher.
Dianna Green survived. He had walked through her unlocked door on September 30, 1979, hit her in the head and raped her unconscious, and she was in a coma for ten days and woke with no memory. Jane Pettengill, twenty-four, survived too: attacked in Costa Mesa on July 19, 1979, she was in a coma for about four weeks and needed a permanent tracheotomy, and her rape kit would later match the murder scenes. Her husband Kevin Lee Green, also a Marine, was convicted in 1980 of the attack and of the death of their daughter, on his wife's identification. The assault had left her with a severe brain injury.
On February 2, 1980 he beat Aida Demirjian with a metal pipe in her apartment garage; a witness shouted, and an officer stopped a calm, sober Marine with blood on his hands and clothes a block away. He was convicted that October of robbing her with great bodily injury. Two weeks after the Demirjian attack he had snatched a thirteen-year-old girl walking home from her father's funeral into a van. He was dishonorably discharged in 1980 after a conviction for rape, and the murders stayed unsolved for sixteen years.
In 1996 California ran unsolved cases against its new offender DNA database. Parker was matched and arrested on June 14, already in prison and facing parole violations. Confronted with it, he confessed to six attacks, including the one Kevin Green had been convicted of.
Green was released that June and exonerated, and the state later paid him $620,000. He served sixteen years for a crime committed by another man (seventeen in one account), and in 1999 he settled a civil claim brought against him by Dianna, who held him partly responsible for the attack.
And he does not want Parker executed. Speaking to a television reporter years afterward, he described what had been done to his wife, said their daughter died ten hours later, and said that it is a human system and that we make mistakes.
Parker was convicted on all six counts with special circumstances of multiple murder and of murder during the commission or attempted commission of rape and burglary. The jury recommended death on October 20, 1998, nineteen years to the day after the last of the killings, and Judge Frank Briseno imposed the sentence in January 1999.
His automatic appeal was decided in June 2017. He argued seven grounds, among them that the prosecution had wrongly dismissed two African American jurors and that his confessions should be suppressed as taken in breach of Miranda. The California Supreme Court rejected all of them in a sixty-six page opinion and affirmed the judgment in its entirety. He is held at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.
The case is cited for two things at once, and they point in opposite directions. It is among the earliest American exonerations produced by a database trawl rather than by testing a specific sample against a specific suspect. And it is a record of what a mistaken identification by a gravely injured victim cost a man who had done nothing.