Читать книгу Predator - Steven Walker - Страница 12

Mary and Brenda Parsh

August 12, 1977

Floyd Parsh clutched his chest. He gasped for air. It felt like the weight of the world was pressing down on him. His life was being crushed out of his body. It was a heart attack. He knew it. It was something that was prevalent in his bloodline. It was inevitable and, of course, inconvenient. He knew that the consequences would be significant, even life-threatening. If he had lived a thousand more years, Floyd would never have anticipated just how much his life was about to change. As his heart failed to function, he feared the idea of losing his life and his connection with his loved ones. He did lose that connection, but not because he died. It was his wife and daughter that ended up losing their lives. Floyd’s heart never recovered from that.

After receiving word that Floyd was hospitalized at the Southeast Missouri (SEMO) Hospital and was recovering from open-heart surgery, Brenda Parsh booked a flight from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to St. Louis, Missouri. From there, she would travel south to Cape Girardeau so she could be with her father.

Brenda’s boyfriend, Richard McGougan, lived in St. Louis at the time. He said that Brenda called him to let him know that she would be flying in on Friday, and if time permitted, they might be able to get together for dinner before she went to Cape Girardeau.

“I wasn’t sure what time her flight was getting in, so Brenda called me when she arrived at the airport. She said that she had just talked with her mother, who expressed that she was very concerned about Floyd’s condition,” McGougan said. “Brenda decided that we would not have time to meet because she wanted to take the next commuter flight out to Cape as soon as possible.”

It was the last conversation that Richard had with Brenda.

It was a short hop between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau, only 120 miles. Her plane arrived at 9:38 P.M. It took less than ten minutes to retrieve her luggage and then Brenda met her mother, Mary, who had come to pick her up.

Due to the situation they were now confronted with, the usual banter between mother and daughter was replaced by a long, uncomfortable silence during the short drive to Floyd and Mary’s house on Koch Street. Police reports estimate that they would have arrived at around 10:00 P.M., barring any stops or delays.

The blanket of night did little to stifle the heat of the August sun, which beat down with a vengeance for days and had elevated temperatures to the upper 90s.

Mary Parsh pulled her car into the driveway in front of her house. After turning the air-conditioning and fan dials on her dashboard console to the off position, she twisted the ignition key backward to stop the engine. Mary and her daughter Brenda unbuckled the seat belts that were strapped across their midsections and then took a deep breath of cool air before opening their doors to enter the lingering heat and humidity outside. Little did they know that someone was already waiting inside the house they were about to enter. The intruder was waiting for Mary to return home. He wasn’t expecting a guest, but when they arrived, he altered his plans to accommodate both of them.

Brenda and her mother got out of the car. They each grabbed a suitcase from the backseat of the vehicle before they shut the doors to the car, and on the life that they had both once cherished.

They walked forward and Mary slid her key into the lock of the front door. With a slight twist of her wrist, the door opened and they both stepped inside. Neither Mary nor Brenda was prepared for the possibility that Floyd might die. They didn’t know what to say to each other or how to act. The usual conversation between them that sometimes consumed hours and consisted of nothing pertinent at all seemed strained as they struggled for something to say to each other. It did not last long, though. As soon as they passed through the doorway, there was something else that they were not prepared for. Now they were confronted with something more immediate and even more terrifying than the thought of the death of Mary’s husband and Brenda’s father. It was the reality that their own lives were in jeopardy. More frightening was the possibility of what they might have to endure before they gave up their lives.

Inside the house, an intruder sat waiting. He wore a blue bandana over his face so that just his eyes and the top of his head were visible. He expected the return of Mary Parsh, a fifty-eight-year-old woman who wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight, and therefore become an easy victim. Instead, he got Mary, as well as her young and physically fit daughter Brenda. He would have to deal with Brenda first in order to eliminate any problems that might occur due to her unexpected presence.

When he heard the car pull into the driveway, the intruder moved to the front door. Adrenaline coursed through his body as he listened to the key enter the lock to release the bolt. The door opened and he confronted Mary and Brenda as soon as they stepped inside. Mary never even had an opportunity to pull the keys out of the front door’s lock.

They were led to the master bedroom at gunpoint and their hands were tied behind their backs. Their assailant pulled his bandana down around his neck and forced Brenda to perform oral sex on him. Then he raped her on the bed while her mother lay beside her, helpless and scared. The gruesome details of what Mary and Brenda had to endure would never be fully known by anyone other than the man who committed the crimes.

The phone might have rung several times during the ordeal. It was certain that at least one phone call was made. Somehow, Brenda was able to convince her rapist to allow her to answer it. The caller on the other end of the line was Floyd. She barely got to speak for a full minute when the intruder hung up the receiver. At least she got to tell her father that she loved him.

The gun that was pointed toward Brenda’s head blasted a bullet into the back of her skull. Her mother trembled beside her raped and murdered daughter. It is nearly impossible to imagine what thoughts must have been going through her mind. A second gunshot blurted out and penetrated the pillow that Mary’s head rested on, but it did not hit her.

Thinking that he had just killed both women, the intruder went into the other room. He rifled through a purse and took some money out of a desk in the den. He heard Mary crying, came back into the bedroom, and then squeezed off a third round. This time he made sure that Mary was dead.

McGougan claims that he called the house sometime between 8:30 and 11:00 P.M. but got no answer, so he decided to go to sleep and try again in the morning. Floyd called from the hospital after Mary and Brenda failed to show up to visit him. His call was the one that did get answered.

Sergeant John Brown, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department (CGPD) said Floyd told him that when Brenda answered the phone, he sensed that something was wrong right away.

“Floyd said that Brenda’s voice was shaky, nervous, and she spoke with too much formality,” Brown related.

Police speculate that during the time of the phone conversation, Brenda was already tied up and probably had a gun pointed at her head. Brenda told her father that they would not be able to visit him then because she was too tired. Floyd remembered asking, “Where is your mother?”

Without answering the question, Brenda told her father that she loved him. Floyd heard a click, which was replaced by the ominous sound of a dial tone.

As the hours passed on Saturday, and then through the entire day of Sunday, Floyd became increasingly worried that he had not heard from his wife and daughter. He called the house several times after they had not turned up to visit or even make contact with him. Brenda’s boyfriend, Richard, called the house periodically throughout those two days without response. Floyd and Mary’s other daughter, Karen, also called multiple times, and she became worried when nobody answered. She finally contacted her mother’s neighbor and asked her to check in on Mary.

Mary’s neighbor walked next door and found that the front door to the Parsh house was slightly ajar, with a set of keys still dangling from the lock. An overpowering stench of death filled the small house. The neighbor found two bodies inside, which were later identified as Mary and Brenda Parsh. A call to the police department was made.

“We received a call from a concerned neighbor very early on Monday, August fifteenth, when she noticed that there was a set of keys still inserted into the lock of Mary Parsh’s front door, but nobody answered to repeated knocks on the door or ringing the doorbell,” said Henry Gerecke. He was the Cape Girardeau police chief at the time.

Floyd was recovering from open-heart surgery and had been told not to become overly stressed emotionally just before he received the news that his wife and daughter had been murdered while he was in the hospital. A cardiologist, Dr. C. R. Talbert Jr., was not the physician who was treating Floyd at Southeast Missouri Hospital, but he was working there that day and was left with the unpleasant task of delivering the news.

“Mr. Parsh sat there quietly and took it in. He was obviously very upset, but he held it all inside. I believe that he already knew,” Talbert said.

It was early Monday morning when Brenda’s sister, Karen, called McGougan’s father to tell him what happened, and, in turn, Richard’s father called him to relay the news. Richard said that he was devastated and became almost dysfunctional. He ended up moving back to his parents’ house while he struggled to deal with the circumstances.

When Chief Gerecke and his team arrived at the scene, they weren’t prepared for what they were about to find when they entered the Parsh home. Just inside the front door were several suitcases, which were identified as belonging to Brenda.

“We entered the house and I remember that the stench was intolerable. I immediately opened up lines with the press and asked them to film the crime scene because we didn’t have the capability to do that. They were gracious enough to do it for us and give us the tape without exposing it to the public,” Gerecke said.

The victims were found naked and lying side by side on a bed with their hands tied behind their backs. Their clothes were neatly folded on a nearby chair. Their bodies were extremely bloated, black, and full of flies and maggots. During the August heat wave, nearly three days of exposure to extreme temperatures accelerated the decomposition process so rapidly that their insides began to turn to gelatin and their tongues protruded through swollen lips.

“I spent thirty-five years in the military and studied criminal justice, but I never encountered anything like this. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was out of my element and needed help,” Gerecke said.

Evidence technician Ron Thomas took over the crime scene to collect evidence, while Gerecke, Brown, and other police officers canvassed the neighborhood to gather any information they could.

Brown said that they questioned everyone in the neighborhood but didn’t receive much useful information other than the fact that nobody had seen Mary in a couple of days. They were told that Mary expected a visit from her daughter, which was helpful in identifying Brenda’s body.

On several occasions throughout the day, Brown returned to the Parsh home to see if any new developments were discovered by the evidence technician.

“I can look at just about anything, and have seen hundreds of autopsies, but this was unbearable. The smell was intolerable. I would make it as far as the middle of the living room, and then I’d have to turn around and go out to the front yard to throw up. This happened several times, until there was nothing left to come up except dry heaves,” Brown recalled.

When Brown was finally able to make his way into the back bedroom, Thomas, the evidence technician, was standing over the bodies and eating a sandwich without any difficulty at all.

It was discovered that a bedroom window was broken and then left open. It was determined that this was the intruder’s point of entry into the house. A faint partial print of a tennis shoe on the hardwood floor of the bedroom was captured on film by cross-lighting the dust on the floor. Both bodies had their hands tied behind their backs with an electrical cord, which was cut from a clock in the bedroom. An electrical burn on the cord indicated that the clock must have been plugged in when the cord was cut. Investigators later duplicated this procedure and discovered that when cutting a cord from a plugged-in appliance with a pocketknife, an arc would burn a mark into the blade. This was a minor detail, but if a suspect was found possessing a knife with a similar mark, it might be able to be used as evidence.

Mary’s keys were still in the front door. Saturday’s mail was still in the mailbox. The Friday newspaper was inside the house, but the Sunday paper was still outside. The contents of Mary’s purse were dumped on the living-room couch so the intruder probably stole anything valuable that he might have found in it, but no other jewelry in the house or on the bodies was disturbed, indicating that robbery was probably not the killer’s motivation. The hall light was left on. A large floor fan situated in the doorway of the bedroom was left on, and the airflow was directed toward the bed, where Mary and Brenda were found.

There was a large amount of blood on the bedding beneath the heads of each of the victims, and a large amount of blood had soaked through to form pools of dry blood on the floor beneath the bed. There was a single bullet wound in the back of each victim’s head. An additional bullet was found, which had penetrated the pillowcase beside Mary’s head. Ligature marks were also burned around Brenda’s neck, as if she had been strangled at some point during the assault.

After Thomas completed his investigation, the bodies were removed and transported to the Ford and Sons Funeral Home for autopsy.

One neighbor, Mr. Blattel, who lived about two blocks away, said that he heard several gunshots fired on Friday night, sometime after eleven.

With the evidence collected at the crime scene, the testimony of neighbors, and Floyd’s phone call, police attempted to re-create the horrific events that took place. It wasn’t difficult to determine an approximate time of death. Eventually they decided that Mary and Brenda were confronted immediately upon entering the house. They were forced to undress. They speculated that one of them was forced at gunpoint to tie up the other, and then the intruder tied up the second one. Police believed that while both victims were bound beside each other, Brenda was raped and then shot in the back of her head in front of her mother. Krajcir fired a second shot, but missed Mary’s head. It wasn’t until later, police speculated, that Krajcir heard Mary crying. He came back into the bedroom and made certain that his third bullet accurately hit its mark at the back of her skull.

Because of the advanced decomposition of the bodies, an autopsy provided no further clues to help identify their killer. DNA technology did not exist at the time. Mary and Brenda Parsh received a closed-casket funeral service in Cape Girardeau and then were buried in Alton Cemetery.

Background checks on Mary and Brenda revealed nothing that would target them to be executed. They were liked by everyone who knew them, and neither of them had any steamy secrets or was involved in any criminal activities. The evidence collected did little more than determine the time of death and provided no clues to a suspect in the murders.

Feeling overwhelmed, Gerecke contacted Lieutenant Colonel Dougherty, the chief of detectives at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD), on Tuesday. He explained the case and asked for assistance. Captain Jacobsmeyer, chief of the St. Louis Homicide Division, readily agreed to send two men from his department to Cape Girardeau. Sergeant Tom Rowane and Detective Colin McCoy traveled south to Cape on Wednesday, and they stayed for about two weeks.

After reviewing the case file and accompanying Cape investigators on interviews, the St. Louis homicide investigators were unable to solve the case. They told Brown and Gerecke that they had done everything that could be done and even more.

“They told us not to get too stressed out about it because we were living this twenty-four hours a day. They said we should put it aside, and that something would eventually turn up,” Brown said.

With no other leads to pursue, Richard McGougan, Brenda’s boyfriend, became the number one suspect.

“Homicide investigators from both St. Louis and Cape Girardeau came to interrogate me. It was grueling. I asked for an attorney, but they denied me the ability to contact one,” McGougan claimed.

He said that he was rigorously grilled for more than ten hours and forced to look at explicit crime scene photos, which nearly made him sick. McGougan claimed that he had to endure every police interrogation trick in the book, including the good cop/bad cop scenario. He said that in order to provoke an admission of guilt, he was told that the police had recovered the gun used in the crime and that his fingerprints were on it. (His interrogators don’t recall using this tactic.)

McGougan told the police that he was living with his brother in St. Louis and spent Friday night there. He gave the names of his brother and four other men, who were visiting to make plans for an upcoming weight-lifting competition, as witnesses to his whereabouts during the time of the murders. He also agreed to take a lie detector test at the conclusion of his interrogation. The test showed no evidence of deception on McGougan’s part. Several days later, McGougan’s brother and his friends were questioned by police investigators. They confirmed that he was in St. Louis at the time of the murders.

When Floyd was released from the hospital, he did not return home directly. Instead, he spent some time in a convalescent home on Sprigg Street, across the street from the Cape Girardeau Police Department.

McGougan was emotionally devastated by Brenda’s death. They had been in a relationship together for eight years since they met at Southeast Missouri State University, known as SEMO State University. They intended to get married and eventually move to New York City, where McGougan planned to pursue his acting career. Instead, Brenda was murdered, and Richard became an outcast when he became an object of suspicion and a target for the police and the media.

Brenda Parsh was an American beauty, with beautiful eyes. She had full lips, which framed a wide open smile of perfectly aligned teeth, which sparkled in ivory whiteness. Her long brunette locks accented the features of her oval face and fell down gently below her shoulders. Her longtime friend Vicki Abernathy described Brenda as the living embodiment of a Barbie doll.

“The thing about Brenda was that she was so strikingly beautiful without even trying, but she didn’t even know it herself,” said Abernathy. “She wasn’t a wild partier and wasn’t a snobbish girl hung up on her looks. She was a levelheaded humanitarian, who was nonjudgmental and pure as snow on the inside.”

Brenda grew up as a child in a hardworking blue-collar family that struggled to make ends meet, but they kept the values of love, honesty, family, and friendship as a priority. Despite the Parsh family’s meager lifestyle, Brenda developed a love for clothes and fashion. She was also very adept at accentuating her natural beauty with makeup, and she was not afraid to be seen without any.

By the time Brenda attended high school, it became obvious that she was destined to become noticed for her beauty—whether she wanted to or not. She took advantage of the situation by entering the world of local beauty contests. She easily won the local title of Cape Girardeau’s Watermelon Queen.

She enrolled in classes at Southeast Missouri State University and majored in theater. It was there that Brenda met Richard McGougan, a fellow drama student. Richard was a freshman when they met in 1969 and Brenda was a year ahead of him. Brenda got a job at the University Shop with Vicki Abernathy, who was another theater major and beauty queen. Despite the fact that Vicki was from the neighboring town of Jackson, she said that she became friends with Brenda while they were still in high school. She described their union as “Brenda, the mysterious brunette, and Vicki, the wild blonde. We bonded instantly and worked together selling clothes, designing window displays, and modeling.”

In a sense, Vicki and Brenda were pioneers in the modeling industry as some of the first women to pose as live models in the storefront windows. They would pose as still as logs for hours at a time, but Vicki admits to occasionally winking at a passerby or flashing a bit more skin than what was deemed appropriate. Eventually they even organized their own catwalk events for the University Shop.

While Brenda’s father, Floyd, remained quietly proud of his daughter’s accomplishment, staying in the background of the crowd, mother Mary remained outwardly supportive. As an unacknowledged but very talented seamstress, Mary designed and made by hand almost all of the gowns that her daughter Brenda wore for beauty competitions. Brenda advanced through the beauty queen path until she competed for the Missouri state title, which would qualify the winner to compete for the title of Miss America. She ended up as first runner-up, but Brenda would never have a chance to compete again.

“She never thought that she was beautiful. She loved clothes and the fashion world. She entered contests hoping to win scholarship money for school, not for some ego trip. One of the things that I loved most about Brenda was the fact that even though she was this tame, ‘always do what’s right’ girl, who didn’t have any desire to experiment with the party and sexual scene of the late 1960s, she was never judgmental. I could tell her anything and know that she would still be my friend. She was the greatest,” Abernathy said.

Vicki Abernathy was two years older than Brenda. Although both girls were beautiful and interested in theater, fashion, and modeling, Vicki moved on to become a flight attendant for Braniff International Airways. Her beauty queen days were over, but not without fond memories. She was able to attend college on a twirling scholarship, and was so talented at it that she performed at the 1971 Super Bowl V, where the Baltimore Colts overpowered the Dallas Cowboys.

Brenda remained focused on her passion for fashion. After graduating from college, she obtained employment as a fashion buyer and designer of window displays for Famous-Barr department stores, now Macy’s, in St. Louis. She continued to appreciate acting and the theater, but as a levelheaded realist, she did not expect to be able to make a living in that occupation. She loved performing on the stage. Hedda Gabler was a favorite play of hers, and one in which she performed during her college years. Although separated from the adventurous Vicki by time and distance, the two girls kept in touch. Brenda even attended Vicki’s wedding, once Vicki finally settled down a bit and decided to create a lifetime union with one man.

Brenda was happy for Vicki and her newfound love, but Vicki was less enthusiastic about Brenda’s choice for a mate.

“There is no doubt that Brenda’s boyfriend loved her, but he became completely obsessed with her. If there was ever a fatal attraction, that was it,” Vicki said.

According to Richard McGougan, this statement may have been an emotional reaction to his suspected involvement in Brenda’s murder.

“Brenda had lots of friends. Vicki was one of them, but she certainly was not her best friend,” McGougan said.

Richard said that he finished school and he and Brenda remained committed to each other. They intended to marry and eventually move to New York City, where Richard planned to pursue his acting career.

Brenda was offered a job at the Grand Department Store in Milwaukee and wanted to accept it. Richard and Brenda discussed their options and mutually agreed to postpone their wedding, but not indefinitely. Richard moved to Los Angeles to work as an actor and Brenda took the position in Wisconsin. For about a year and a half, they maintained a long-distance relationship with occasional visits. The strain became too much, and Richard moved back to St. Louis, where he still had contacts to continue acting and would have a closer proximity to Brenda. The fact that they had still not followed through with their marriage plans, and they continued to find reasons to live in different states from each other, decreased the validity of their intention to remain committed to each other. Still, Richard maintained that their love for each other was as strong as ever.

Floyd eventually recovered from the physical injuries to his heart and he left the convalescent home on Sprigg Street to return to his empty house. It was the emotional injury that Floyd could never recover from. According to Sergeant Brown, Floyd would spend much of his time sitting in a rocking chair with a loaded shotgun by his side, waiting and praying that the person who stole his family’s lives would someday return.

Without any other evidence or leads, McGougan remained on the police investigator’s short list as a possible suspect for years. Because of that, he removed himself from the life he was familiar with, and finally moved to New York in 1979 in an effort to escape suspicion, to pursue his acting career, and to try to put this episode of his life behind him.

Without placing blame on the incident or excusing self-responsibility, McGougan admitted that for the next several years he indulged in drug use and heavy drinking, which might have been a result of the depression that was brought on by Brenda’s murder and the accusations that he might have been responsible for the crime. He wasn’t raped or murdered, but McGougan—like Floyd, Vicki, and many others—became a victim of the real perpetrator’s actions.

Floyd later died of complications related to his heart condition, and he was never able to have the satisfaction of finding out who was responsible for killing the people he loved most in his life. It was the phone call that he made long ago, in August 1977, that proved to be a critical piece of evidence for linking the killer to the crime.

Thirty years later, after the murderer confessed to the crime, police authorities kept saying that they would not officially press criminal charges in connection with the deaths of Mary and Brenda Parsh unless there was positive proof that he was guilty. It’s the “Show Me” state. The killer was the only surviving person who would have had knowledge about the phone call that Floyd made to Mary from the hospital. It was his mention of this call that sealed his confession of guilt. There was no possible way that he could have known about that call unless he was there. There was no longer any doubt about the perpetrator of the crime. Unfortunately, because so much time had passed, the number of living relatives who benefited from his confessions of at least nine murders all across the country has been reduced, but the number of people that these victims have had an influence on may be uncountable.

Floyd went to his grave without ever having the satisfaction of discovering the identity of the person who murdered his wife and daughter. He never saw justice prevail, and he never had closure. He died of a broken heart.

When investigators announced publicly in 2007 that Timothy Wayne Krajcir had confessed to the crime, McGougan was relieved that closure would finally take place. Still, he was disappointed that Krajcir was able to escape the death penalty in exchange for his confession.

“Krajcir stole the lives of decent, wonderful people, but there are other lives, the lives of those who lived on, which were also negatively impacted because of his actions. Justice would be best served if he (Krajcir) would be executed,” McGougan stated.