Shocking True Story (14 page)

"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 was 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.

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.

When the phone rang just before lunch, I told Valerie to tell the caller—a reporter, I was sure—that I was taking Hedda for a walk.

"It's Jett," she said quietly, her hand muffling the mouthpiece. "Better talk to her. This is the second time she's called for you today."

I got on the line and said hello. Jett took it from there.

"Now I know why you stood me up," she said. Her voice was somber. "I was mad as could be at you last night... but I saw the
news
this morning. It must have been awful finding her. Right on the front page there's a photo of Mrs. Parker."

She read the headline and a few lines:

MURDER ON OLD STUMP ROAD:
CRIME AUTHOR FINDS BODY

In a page out of one of his pulp crime books, Port Gamble author Kevin Ryan was in the right place at the wrong time... a source close to the Sheriff's Department stated that the author had been "badgering" the dead woman for an interview...

Pulp crime book? Badgering the deceased?
I had enough. Valerie and the girls formed a circle around me as I set down the receiver. I was shaking slightly. I felt sick to my stomach. I was so sorry that I had even come out to see Mrs. Parker. I was so sorry that I had been the one to find her. My wife put her arms around my shoulders. Like blonde-headed dominos, Hayley and Taylor fell into us with reassuring hugs of sympathy. We were a family and we had made it through bad times before. Lots of bad times. The ups and downs of plain old living. If anything, by the nature of my career path we had seen much of the worst as it affected others. But we were removed from it; it was just fodder for a book. Whenever a book was finished, the pain and horror of what someone else had endured would fade somewhat. It had to. I had to move on. I had to get on with another story; another murder.

Nothing had tested us like we all knew this would. It was one thing to be late on a power bill and cook over a wood stove and tell your daughters that you were "indoor camping. " It was completely different to have your lives shattered by a gruesome discovery and the steady invasion of the purveyors of publicity that accompanied it.

♦

THREE DAYS AFTER THE GRISLY DISCOVERY on Old Stump Road, a producer named Ashlee Something-hyphen-Something from
Rita Adams
called to book me on a show they were putting together called "Unbelievable Ironies."

"Rita loves your work and when we saw the piece on the wire —"

I was startled by the revelation. I hadn't Googled myself in days. "It was on the wire?"

"Uh-huh. When we saw the piece we thought your story would be just the right touch for the Ironies show."

A week earlier, I couldn't have imagined that I would ever give up the chance for publicity, but considering what happened, it didn't feel right. Even so, I was torn. I struggled with the idea of going on television to blab about finding June Parker and the fact that I was there to interview her for a true crime book. It seemed distasteful. It was, I knew, deep down, too soon.

"Who else is on?" I asked, halfheartedly.

The young woman—probably some underpaid intern from a Midwest university trying to make it in show business—gushed about the potential guests.