Cold Case Files - Rear Window

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

A heinous murder, an innocent victim, and an unsolved homicide investigation reopens a year after the crime when a new tip leads detectives to a teen with a disturbing history. Check out our great sponsors! Zocdoc: Go to Zocdoc.com/ccf and download the Zocdoc app for FREE! Bonafide: Get 20% off your first purchase when you subscribe to any product at HelloBonafide.com and use promo co de "COLDCASE" Check out Apartments.com - the best place to find a place! Listen to Killer Psyche on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app! Get a quote today at Progressive.com and see why 4 out of 5 new auto customers recommend Progressive!

We all have a picture in our mind of what it means to become an adult. For some people, it's to go to college. For others, it's to join the workforce. And to some, it's starting a family of their own. For Cory Parker, it was moving into her own place, and she accomplished that when she rented an apartment in Jacksonville Beach, Florida in 1998. Corey saw her apartment as the starting point for her adult life. Unfortunately, it's remembered by her friends and family as the place her life ended, and the crime scene of her murder. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I'm Brooke, and here's the iconic Bill Curtis with a classic case, Rear Window. It was really a good time for her.

She had been able to get her own apartment for the first time without having a roommate, which she was really excited about. Just a few blocks from the ocean is a little two-bedroom apartment, the new home for 25-year-old Cori Parker. This is the Thanksgiving before she died. She had baked this pie and was a cake and was very, very proud of it. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1998, one of Corey's co-workers stops by to check on her. She didn't show up, which is definitely not like her.

He went and checked the windows at that point and did go to her bedroom window, and he was able to lift it a little bit, and he saw her foot covered in blood. I was sitting at home on my off day, and I received a call from our dispatch that they needed for me to respond and assist on a homicide scene. And the only thing that they told me was that I needed to get there as fast as I could.

Jim Schott is a crime scene tech for the Jacksonville Beach Police. And this is the apartment complex right here. I walked in. It was a two-bedroom apartment. The first bedroom on the right was the victim's bedroom. And as you looked in, you could see a female body laying on the bed,

kind of scrunched up back in the corner, totally covered in blood. I don't know that experience or responding to hundreds of scenes ever prepares you for one like this, and it was brutal, to say the least. Angela Corey is the Duval County prosecutor on call that day. No woman or no human should ever be left in such an undignified position. Corey was left there with her legs spread wide open, naked, and dead in a pool of her own blood.

She had 101 stab wounds. The fatal wounds were in this area. She had one gaping wound on each side of her neck with multiple other stab wounds. At autopsy, the medical examiner discovers that more than half of the wounds were inflicted after death. The way our medical examiner described it, it was like a little picking motion. The ones in her stomach, just a little pick, pick, pick, pick, pick. It's almost like whoever's doing this is playing with the victim. In 1998, Lou Eliopoulos is an investigator with the Duval County Medical Examiner.

Although no semen is recovered from the body, Eliopoulos believes the post-mortem mutilation speaks to a sexual motive. These are deeply disturbed individuals that don't perform normally sexually. And just because there's an absence of sexual assault doesn't mean that you're not dealing with a sexual homicide. And there's a lot of freaks out there. And so from that standpoint, we're going to incorporate sexual homicide as a potential motive in this case. Eliopoulos tells detectives to look for someone with a history of sex crimes, perhaps someone in the neighborhood who knew Corey came home alone late at night. Back at the apartment, Jim Schott searches for trace evidence and finds what appears to be a strand of human hair near the victim's body.

Then Schott moves to the suspected point of entry, an open kitchen window. The windowsill as you go out to the outside had blood on it, on the outside of the windowsill. And it appeared like there was a small little area of blood in the kitchen cabinet area. The spot on the inside was probably the size of my fingertip, my little fingertip. The outside was just like somebody had actually taken their fingers in blood and just placed them down. Schott scrapes the blood and sends it to the state crime lab. From this case, I had several cuttings from the bedding,

the sheets and the comforter from the victim's bedroom. Tim Petrie is a DNA analyst for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. I also had a...some swabs from the kitchen area of the residence. Some were from outside the kitchen window. One sample in particular was from a countertop or cabinet surface from inside the victim's apartment.

Initial tests indicate that the blood does not belong to Corey Parker. While a full DNA profile is being worked up, detectives hit the streets looking for someone who wanted Corey Parker dead. You're looking at a picture, a photograph that was taken the night before we believe Corey was killed. This is her sitting at the bar with two of her friends.

She just appeared to be very happy and having a good time enjoying herself. Sergeant Billy Carlisle runs the detective bureau during the Corey Parker case. A few days after the murder, his detectives begin to investigate a friend of Corey's named Tiffany Zienta. They felt that Tiffany was overly close, in their opinion, to Corey. Somebody mentioned to the lead detective that Tiffany had mentioned being bi-curious. And I had never heard that word before. And apparently bi-curious means she likes men, but she's curious about having sex with women.

Tiffany comes in for an interview. She tells detectives that she and some friends hit the bars with Corey on the night she was killed. She said goodnight to Corey around 2 a.m. and phoned her at home around 4. We were all kind of hazy, and none of us were kind of clear on which night and what happened. And so it kind of made it, it all got muddled. Detectives pulled Tiffany's phone records

but find no record of the 4 a.m. call. There were some inconsistencies there with other information that we had developed and therefore she deserved a little more close attention. The police were alluding to the fact that I had tried to hit on her, and because she had resisted, I'd killed her. I not only lost a friend, but now they're looking at me, and not only that, but they're calling in to question my character, my sexuality. Six months after the murder, a search is conducted on Tiffany Sienta's car. Air and saliva samples are also taken.

That was when it became real. I knew that they were looking at me, but I thought, that's ridiculous. How could they really think that I did it? In my opinion, anyone's capable of a murder given the right circumstances. Tiffany was a big girl, and based on the statements that we got from her, she certainly deserved a little more attention

at that point in the investigation. Tiffany's DNA is processed and compared to blood left behind at the crime scene. The results are conclusive. They found none of my DNA in her apartment. They found none of her DNA in my car. I was excluded. With Tiffany Zienta cleared as a possible suspect, Corey Parker's murder investigation is back to square one. Meanwhile, the victim's friends are getting angry. I was very upset about that. I felt as though they were never

going to find out who killed her. Tiffany had nothing to do with it. I knew better. I looked the best suspect and they didn't have one, so I felt like it was a witch hunt. It certainly did take up a lot of time and effort to go after suspects that really, truly should never have been considered as anything other than possible witnesses. But we, unfortunately, have a lot of homicides in Jacksonville, and a lot of them are cold cases. Corey Parker's murder goes into the cold files,

where it stays for more than a year until detectives turn up a teenager with an attitude. He goes, I'll get buck-ass naked if you want me to. We're like, you know, that's not really necessary, Robert. At the year anniversary date, what we wanted to do was get the information on the case back in front of the public.

It's been a year since Corey Parker was murdered in her Jacksonville Beach apartment. The case remains cold. So we decided to put a poster together and also conduct some news interviews to possibly elicit some information from the public. The posters go up. A media blitz ensues. Shocking new details. More than half of those stab wounds. And the plan works. I thought we had information that would be helpful. A local woman named Julie Sedgwick

walks into the office of Assistant State Attorney Angela Corey. I mean, we didn't know if he had done it or not. We just thought we had information that could be pertinent. He is Robert Eric Denny, an ex-dishwasher at the restaurant where Julie Sedgwick worked. In the days after the murder, Denny was often absent and then suddenly skipped town. The DA's office does a little checking and begins to connect the dots between Robert Denny was often absent and then suddenly skipped town. The DA's office does a little checking and begins to connect the dots

between Robert Denny and Corey Parker. We start learning that he had lived in the apartment directly behind her and had the clearest view because his bedroom looked right down onto Corey's apartment. The DA assembles a team of investigators to background Denny. That was one of the initial things that we had for a red flag. They get some of their best information from the suspect's sister. She had kicked him out of her apartment because she woke up at three o'clock in the morning and he was standing over her watching her sleep. And she just was creeped out over that. In fact, the team learns that the Denny family

is the picture of dysfunction. He said, yeah, she had another brother that had stabbed a woman to death in Texas at the age of 15. He was serving a life sentence in Texas for that murder. He was a newspaper boy and had gone in to collect money, and as the young lady, and I think she was like 27, as she turned around to get her money, she turned back around and he just started stabbing her for no reasons. I think he stabbed her 106 times, Billy? It was 97 times. And when she went to get her purse to get her money to pay him for the paper money that she owed him, he locked the door behind him and turned and attacked her and killed her. And Billy had said that that was his greatest hero.

Robert, growing up, was his greatest hero. And so now it's starting to make sense in terms of the stab wounds, the multiple stab wounds, and drawing that, you know, maybe this was something trying to imitate his brother. The theory plays well in a police bull session and gets the investigative juices flowing. We agreed that this was a viable suspect. The fact that we had physical evidence for comparison, we needed to make a plan to go after Robert Denny. Denny now lives in a small town in Maryland.

Before the Florida detectives book a flight, there's one more thing they need to do. We want to formulate some type of a plan that will allow us to get his DNA without him knowing that he's a suspect in the murder case that we know about him in Jacksonville. The team's plan is ambitious. They make up a story about a fictitious crime spree and bring Denny in for questioning. Secure in the knowledge he is innocent, Denny should be at ease, and police hope willing to provide a sample of his DNA. The police see Robert Denny as a person of interest in the murder of Corey Parker.

Robert idolized his brother, who was in prison for stabbing a woman to death. Hoping to convince Denny to provide a DNA sample without letting him know he was a suspect, they asked him to come in for questioning about a made-up string of robberies. Hi, I'm Corporal Jim Miller. I'm with the Easton Police Department at Easton, Maryland. We're heading to interview room two, where the interview with Denny was conducted. In a ten-by-ten room, detectives from Jacksonville Beach and Easton, Maryland, sit down with 19-year-old Robert Denny. Corporal Miller explains that there have been some assaults in his neighborhood. Telling him that the time that it occurred was about four o'clock in the morning, which I knew ahead of time he was in bed. I gave him

enough information so he knew that he had nothing to worry about. At first Denny is cooperative. We had also asked if we could look at his hands and he goes yeah absolutely and he showed us look at his hands. And he goes, yeah, absolutely. And he showed us his hands, front and back, and he goes, I'll get buck-ass naked if you want me to. We're like, you know, that's not really necessary, Robert. Robert Denny is given the once-over by detectives, then asked to provide a saliva sample for DNA testing.

Well, with that, you could start to see the body language. He just, when they started mentioning DNA, he just started crossing his arms and backing away from the investigator. Denny declines to give a sample for DNA testing. Police, however, have a plan B. So I asked him if he wanted to go out to the garage with me and smoke a cigarette. Told him that I really needed a cigarette at that point, and he said he did too. So we went out in the garage, we smoked, and I put my cigarette out in the ashtray and

he put his out and put the butt behind his ear. I thought maybe he was onto it and I wasn't sure at that point. We had two more tricks up our sleeves and was hoping we'd be able to score with one of those. My hope was that he'd leave the bottle that he was drinking from so we can at least take the DNA off the bottle. And he took the bottle with him when he eventually left. Denny seems determined to leave the police station with all the DNA he walked in with. Police, however, have one more gambit to play. Before Denny leaves, they ask him to sign a statement

saying he declines to provide a saliva sample. So he writes that out. Detective goes, you know, could you put it in the envelope? He puts it in the envelope. The detective hands it back to him and goes, look, for your own protection, can you go ahead and seal this envelope? And that's when he stopped and he just stared down at the envelope. And he looked over at us and then he stood up and he goes, look, and this is a 19-year-old kid.

He goes, that's three things you tried me to put my lips on since I've been in here. The water bottle, the cigarette butt, and now this envelope. And he looks at me, and he tosses me the envelope. And he goes, here, you lick it. He goes, you got any other questions? You know, you try not to lose it and stuff, but to me it was, you know, actually, pal, there's four things I asked you to put your lips on today. And the fourth thing is your ass kissing goodbye. I think all of us were in shock with what we saw.

We didn't expect that at all. In a parking lot behind a strip mall, cold case detectives watch a 19-year-old murder suspect on a smoke break. He was kind of on edge and stuff like that. He would come out, you know, the place just behind us, smoking cigarettes and pacing back and forth, looking over his shoulder. The suspect is named Robert Eric Denny. He has already declined to give a saliva sample for DNA testing and knows full well the police are somewhere watching and waiting. And he's just ducking and bobbing and weaving, you know, where are they at? We were all eager for him to put that cigarette out because we were going to rush over there and

get it. And it didn't happen the way we thought it would. When he would finish smoking, he'd burn the cigarette butt, put it in his pocket, and it was just real strange. At that point, we all basically knew that he was definitely afraid of somebody getting his DNA. The next day, a team of detectives again trails Denny around town.

This time, however, the suspect makes a mistake. And the detective's luck takes a turn for the better. After declining to give a sample of DNA, Robert Denny was trailed by the investigators. They were hoping he would discard something with his DNA on it so they could compare it to the profile of Corey's murderer. We noticed he was very nervous,

and one of the investigators in the surveillance van noticed through a pair of binoculars that Robert Denny was spitting on the ground. And in fact, we recorded that he spit six or seven times and noted the location where the spit fell. Everybody was so excited and happy that he made such a blunder. We couldn't wait till he pulled out. It just seems awfully funny, or not funny, but kind of odd that at the end of the day, for him to come out and do that, it was almost like a godsend. Robert Eric Denny's spit may very well hold the key to a cold case of murder. It is swabbed off the pavement, packaged, and sent to a DNA lab for testing.

This would show basically the volume of work that was accomplished on this case. Tim Petrie is a DNA analyst for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. I think there were 71 separate submissions of evidence to the lab. Petrie's job is to conduct DNA testing on evidence from the Parker crime scene and compare it to Denny's saliva. I would say the most relevant or probative sample in this case would be the one from the kitchen area due to the fact that that did appear to be the point of entry and exit of the suspect in this case.

On the kitchen countertop was a small spot of blood. Yeah, it was one of the first items that I looked at, actually. It was item number 19, particles or material from inside or near the kitchen cabinet. And basically, I just obtained a full DNA profile that matched Eric Denny for every DNA location that we test for. For that match, the frequency of occurrence of that profile was 1 in 9.5 trillion Caucasians. The blood match is confirmed when hair samples found at the scene are also genetically linked to Denny Detectives want to arrest the suspect immediately Assistant State Attorney Angela Corey tells them to wait

I said, you're not getting a warrant. And they wanted one desperately. And I said, we're not doing a warrant until you get a denial from Robert Denny. Corey wants a statement from Robert Denny. Ideally, one where he denies knowing Corey Parker or ever being in her apartment. You cannot have physical evidence linking somebody to a crime scene and then allow them the chance to explain it away. I know that was a bone of contention in the beginning, but it's just necessary. There was no way around that.

There's one problem. How to get Robert Denny, a young man very much on edge, to open up and talk. We're dealing with the killer. The approach on Mr. Denny became very important. We didn't want to scare him. We didn't want Joe Friday to go on his door, knock on his door. The cold case team doesn't want Joe Friday.

Instead, they send in a female version of Columbo. Hi, Robert Denny. My name's Katie Kingston. How do you do? This only takes a couple minutes. I need to run a couple questions by you. On November 28, 2000, Detective Katie Kingston puts on a wire and knocks on the door of a

two-story house in the suburbs. It's where 19-year-old Robert Denny lives with a 49-year-old woman he met on the Internet. I decided that I was going to be a person that was a silly type southern female who just had little odd men jobs to do in the detective division. I talked to, well, that's you. Yeah, that's me.

Oh, they've been running me all over the damn place looking for people. Now they're getting ready to make arrests on the sky. So what I'm going to do is, I'm not real good at this. I'm going to just go down these questions just like I did everybody. You know, when you give direction in a narrative, I said, do you know Corey Parker? Show picture. And I actually said that to him. Do you know Corey Parker show picture and I actually said that to him do you know Corey Parker or ever talk to her show picture

do you ever go to her apartment you never went to her apartment I could hardly contain myself I was thrilled because I knew that that was going to nail it for us. It was nice meeting you. Nice meeting you. And thank you very much, Robert. Good luck. Kingston's play dumb routine works as Denny's statement gives him no way to explain away his DNA found inside Corey Parker's apartment. Three hours after Kingston leaves,

police return to the suspect's home, this time with an arrest warrant. Robert, what I'd like to do right now is I'd like to invite you to your constitutional rights. Okay? Listen to me. Are you able to please use that answer? Okay, sure. Sorry, sorry. That's okay.

Inside a police squadron, Robert Denny's world begins to crumble. If you ask me a question, I don't have to answer it. You don't have to answer it. I can call the lawyer. You can call the lawyer. Denny does exactly that, declines to give a statement, and prepares for his murder trial. There is nothing better. A full, complete, clean DNA profile. Melissa Nelson is an assistant state attorney for Duval County. In April of 2005, she tries the case with Angela Corey. It became very personal for me. We are rarely

dealt with cases where we have such a truly innocent victim of such a heinous and cruel crime. He stabbed her, he slashed her, he sliced her, and he cut her. Over and over and over again. The state's case rests mainly on DNA evidence. Blood in the victim's kitchen matches Robert Denny, as do hairs found on Corey Parker's body. This exhibit reflects all of the hairs collected from Corey Parker's body and her hands, both from the scene and the medical examiner's office, six hairs matched Robert Denny, four from her body, then two others from the bloody panties that were rolled up next to her body.

These are the ones where they were trying to document the blood. Pat McGinnis and Louis Bazell are Denny's defense attorneys. PAT MCGINNIS, There was never any discussion of a plea negotiation in this case because he maintained from the get-go his innocence. And as we grew to know him in the case, I came to share that belief in his innocence. I've been doing murder cases for a long time. I don't see a 17-year-old boy who no witness ever suggested the two of them had exchanged so much as a high, or how are you, getting up in the middle of the night, going next door and finding unerringly the only unlocked window in the neighbor's apartment, crawling in and stabbing

this person 101 times. McGinnis and Bazell hire independent DNA analysts to retest the evidence. Reagan used to say, trust but verify, and that's what we do. We assume that the analysts in the labs are operating on a good-faith basis according to their protocols, but we don't know that until we check it. Defense experts verify the state's DNA results. Still, McGinnis disputes the relevance of the DNA, because Corey Parker and Robert Denny were neighbors.

Well, he lived in an apartment 35 feet to the north. The window, as I say, remained open all day. They were neighbors. DNA at this level and in these quantities, we're talking about nanograms, which is like a billionth of a size of a paperclip. It's almost like a virus. It spreads very easily. And the tests are so exquisitely sensitive, you don't know what you're dealing with or where it came from. If Robert Denny had never been inside Corey Parker's apartment, then not one shred of his DNA could have been in there. And all the theories in the world

about cats taking it in and sneezes flying through the air and all the stuff that the defense put forth to a jury. Yes, you can get contamination from sneezing, from dandruff, from everything else. And we know where they're claiming it was found. It's just beneath the window they left open all day. It's ridiculous. The office of defense calls Robert Deeney. In the third week of his trial, the defendant takes the stand. Ms. Corey, I didn't kill Corey Parker.

How did your forcibly removed hair get on her bloody rolled-up underwear next to her body? I don't know. Never denied it was his DNA, and on cross-examination, never came up with an explanation for it. His exact words were, I don't know. In fact, I think I called him Mr. I don't know in my closing argument. On April 28th, the jury is sequestered in a conference room to decide Robert Denny's fate. We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment.

We, the jury, further find that the killing was done with premeditation. I turned around immediately to the family and just smiled at them because it was their verdict. It was a wonderful moment in court. I was so happy, and it did, for me, some closure. I mean, it doesn't change what happened to Corey, of course, but it definitely does help. It does help to know that he's never going to walk free again. Robert Denny is sentenced to life in a Florida prison without the possibility of parole. I learned through a blog that's credited to Robert Denny. I'll put a link to the site on

Twitter at Brooke Giddings. On December 10th, Denny's attorney filed an appeal on his behalf. The appeal claims ineffective assistance of counsel, which means the original attorneys failed to do their job properly. These were their arguments. The hairs collected from the crime scene were mishandled, and his attorney should have had the DNA evidence thrown out, which likely would have changed the outcome of the trial.

Denny's appeal also claims that his right to privacy was breached. More or less, if the police wanted his DNA, they should have gotten a court order instead of following him. This also could have led to the DNA being thrown out of the trial. The appeal ends with a claim of new evidence that wasn't available at the trial. That evidence was a woman's testimony at an evidentiary hearing. She said that her husband had confessed to her that he had killed Corey Parker. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings,

produced by McKamey Lynn and Steve Delamater. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. Our music was created by Blake Maples. This podcast is distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and is hosted by Bill Curtis. You can find me on Twitter at Brooke Giddings or Instagram at Brooke the Podcaster. Check out more Cold Case F files at AETV.com or learn more about cases like this one by visiting the A&E Real Crime blog at AETV.com slash real crime.