Parker was born in 1955 and was a Marine stationed in southern California. Between December 1978 and October 1979 he entered women's homes at night and raped and beat them: Sandra Kay Fry, seventeen; Kimberly Rawlins, twenty-one; Marolyn Carleton, thirty-one; Debora Kennedy, twenty-four; and Debra Senior, seventeen. He also attacked Dianna Green, whose unborn child died as a result. The press called the unknown attacker the Bedroom Basher.
Kevin Lee Green, a Marine, was convicted in 1980 of the attack on his wife Dianna and the death of their unborn daughter, on the strength of his wife's identification. She had been left with a severe brain injury by the assault. He served seventeen years.
In 1996 California ran unsolved cases against its new offender DNA database and matched Parker, then in prison for a sexual assault and about to be released on parole. Confronted, he confessed to six attacks, including the one Green had been convicted of. Green was released in June 1996 and exonerated, and later received compensation from the state.
Parker was convicted in 1998 and sentenced to death on January 22, 1999. He remains on California's death row.
The case is one of the earliest American exonerations produced by a database match rather than by post-conviction testing of a specific sample, and it is cited on both counts: on what the DNA achieved, and on what a mistaken identification by an injured victim cost an innocent man.