Cold Case Files - The Bedroom Basher

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

After pregnant Diana is attacked in her home, she nearly dies. Despite a severe head injury, she believes she can identify her attacker - her husband, Kevin. Kevin insists he is innocent, and that his wife was attacked by a boogeyman. His story sounds crazy. But is it? Check out our great sponsors! Function of Beauty: Go to FunctionOfBeauty.com/coldcase to take your quiz and save 20% on your first order! Talkspace: Get $100 off of your first month at Talkspace.com - and use code COLDCASE Lifelock: Go to LifeLock.com/coldcase to save up to 25% off your first year! Madison Reed: Find your perfect shade at Madison-Reed.com to get 10% off plus FREE SHIPPING on your first Color Kit with code CCF Change your scenery with Apartments.com - the most popular place to find a place!

Thank you for listening to this Podcast One production, available on Apple Podcasts and Podcast One. Thank you for listening to this Podcast One production, available on Apple Podcasts and Podcast One. An A&E Original Podcast. In 1979, 21-year-old Kevin Green and his 21-year-old wife, Diana Green, relocated to Tustin, California, a small town. Kevin was a military man, and Diana was nine months pregnant with their first child. They were both excitedly preparing for the arrival of their baby. We had gone out and done all the baby shopping, you know, doing the Lamaze classes, practicing the route to the hospital. Everything was just, you know, from our naive point of view, it was perfect. One third of all murder cases in America remain open. Each one is called a cold

case and only one percent are ever solved. This is one of those rare cases. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast. On September 30th, 1979, the couple spent a quiet evening together at home. They watched a movie and enjoyed each other's company. The movie night ended at 1.30 a.m., and Kevin decided to run out for some food. When Kevin arrived at the Jack in the Box across the street, there was a long line of cars in the drive-thru. So, instead of waiting, he decided to drive to another restaurant nearby. It was about 15 minutes away. He returned home after getting his food. He walked to the kitchen door like always, but he discovered that it was partially open.

He was a bit alarmed because he knew he hadn't left it that way. He'd left it unlocked, however. Kevin entered his home and looked for his wife. He found her in their bed. And went in and I found that she'd been, I thought she'd been shot. He called the police immediately, and his wife was taken to the hospital. It was then quickly determined that the wound to her forehead was not from a gunshot, but from blunt force trauma.

She was, however, alive. She was conscious. She could open one eye, and even the look that I could see from her face in that one eye was, you know, why are you letting this go on? Why is this happening? What's going on? All these questions. A little over eight hours after the attack, the unborn baby's heart stopped beating. Doctors attempted to deliver the child, but the baby didn't survive.

Diana survived, but fell into a coma. Kevin Green, in a state of shock, spent his time just sitting next to his wife's bed. Evidence collection agents recovered semen from Diana's body while she was still in a coma. At the time, police relied on blood typing to help them narrow down their list of suspects when biological evidence was recovered from a crime scene. The blood type recovered from the semen found on Diana was O-. Less than 15% of the population carries this type of blood. Kevin Green was one of them, and in the small town of Tustin, this didn't help detectives rule him out as a suspect in the brutal attack of his wife and the death of their unborn child. Detectives were already checking into Kevin's version of what happened. They were suspicious about the fact that he

decided to drive 15 minutes away to get food when there was a fast food restaurant within walking distance. What was curious to us is across the street, within walking distance, there is a Jack in the Box, and he drove all the way to Santa Ana, which was about 15 minutes away. When detectives attempted to find out if any of the Green's neighbors had heard or seen anything, they instead came across reports that the couple had been arguing that night. And when detectives looked into the history of that address for any police calls for service, they found that the police had been called to the Green's home more than once. They'd been having an argument for a while over what we're not sure. We had been out to the residence before on domestic violence kind of things where they were yelling, and so that wasn't uncommon at that residence.

Kevin told detectives about a man he saw that night outside his home. He told them that the man had acted suspiciously. He was dark-skinned and drove a black van. He just kind of glanced over his left shoulder at me and kept walking. I saw him reaching his arm out to the door, the driver's door of the van. He kind of ducked his head down as he did that. The police had already narrowed their vision though, so they didn't take what Kevin was saying as anything other than a way to cast suspicion away from himself. And I recall him telling me that he saw, yeah, a black man in a black van.

And my mindset at the time was, yeah, right. Two months after the attack, Diana had fully recovered from the coma and she was able to communicate with her parents. She had been able to communicate to them and Kevin was the one that had done this to her. She stated that she saw Kevin enter their room just before being hit on the head. With the testimony of the victim on top of the other circumstantial evidence,

the police arrest Kevin and charge him with assault, attempted murder, and second-degree murder for the death of his unborn child on November 30, 1979. Police confronted Kevin with his wife's accusations, but he never changed his statement. He told him that she was mistaken. He believed she suffered trauma to her brain and that her personality had changed. He believed she was misremembering the events of that night. My story sounded like the boogeyman did it. Didn't make sense that I could possibly leave my apartment for 40 minutes and in that time being gone, somebody would go into my house,

attack my wife, rape her, and leave her for dead, how could that happen in 40 minutes? Too convenient. So he decided, I did it. In court, Kevin pled not guilty to all charges and a trial was set. The trial lasted a week. During the trial, Diana took the stand and officially named Kevin as her attacker that night. The jury deliberated for two hours before returning with a verdict. When they told me the jury was coming back, they put me in a little room and I just sat there and prayed, you know, that this is all going to work out fine and that everybody's life is going to get back to normal and it's going to be okay. And prayed for understanding of how to get through this.

And walked back in and saw the jury walking in and they weren't looking at me and they weren't smiling and I didn't know what that meant. You know, I didn't know what to look for. And then the judge read that they were finding me guilty of second degree murder. Kevin was sentenced to 15 years to life in San Quentin State Prison. It sounds like case closed at this point, but unfortunately for everyone, this case wasn't as open and shut as it appeared, because six similar incidents were found to have occurred in nearby towns and cities in Southern California. Each involved a break-in, a sexual assault of a woman, and trauma to the victims' heads. The first assault was about 10 months before Diana Green was attacked. On December 1, 1978, in Anaheim, California,

Officer Steve Rodig responded to an assault call at an apartment. I walked into the east bedroom, and I saw a female lying on a bed, and she was partially disrobed and motionless on the bed. There was blood in the area of her head and her hands and again she was motionless and I reached over and touched her and noted that she was still warm to the touch. 17-year-old Sandra Fry died at the hospital from her injuries. Her cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma to the head. Semen was collected from her body at autopsy. At the crime scene, police recovered a single fingerprint and made some impressions of shoe prints in the dirt outside the apartment. A canvas of the neighborhood provided no new leads. No one saw or heard anything suspicious. No one was found

who matched the collective evidence. Four months later, on April 1, 1979, in Costa Mesa, California, another woman was attacked. 21-year-old Kimberly Rollins fell ill and decided to go home alone and set about with her roommates. She was found early the next morning when her roommates returned home. Kimberly was lying on the floor naked. She was dead. Here's Detective Linda Geisler. She has two black eyes, but one very, very predominantly black, swollen, protruding, and then there's blood coming from her head to indicate a head injury.

Detective Geisler assumed that Kimberly had been sexually assaulted as well, and that was later confirmed when semen was recovered from her body. It was tested for blood type and determined that the person who left that evidence had type O negative blood, just like Kevin Green. It was the 70s. There was no DNA. Blood typing was the best the crime lab could do. There were no witnesses or suspects or leads for Detective Geisler to follow. She thought Kimberly was probably asleep and didn't scream for help. She believed it was a crime committed by a stranger, but she didn't link it to the murder of Sandra Fry, even though Sandra's murder was only four months prior in nearby Anaheim. Nearly four months after Kimberly was murdered, a third attack occurred, this time in the same city, Costa Mesa, California. On July 19, 1979, 24-year-old Jane Pettengill was home alone and feeling the Southern California heat. She didn't have air conditioning in her apartment,

so she decided to open a window in the hopes of letting in some fresh air, not knowing she was also letting in an attacker. The next day, a friend stopped by Jane's apartment and saw her front door standing wide open. Inside the apartment, the friend found Jane severely beaten and near death. Jane was rushed to the hospital where doctors fought to repair injuries to her throat and skull. Her throat had been crushed and her skull was fractured. Doctors told police that they believed her head trauma was caused by a blunt force object. She was not expected to live. Her head trauma would be similar to falling out of a two or three-story

building and landing on your head. Police did dozens of interviews but made little progress. There were no connections between the two victims and no witnesses in either case. Police recovered semen from Jane's apartment and were able to determine the blood type of the person who left the semen. O negative. It's very alarming. And at this point, because you have two victims, again, you believe by the same perpetrator, you try to look into anything the two victims might have had in common. Jane Pettengill survived her attack. When she woke up, police questioned her at length about what she could remember. The police want to know all the people I knew, all the male people I knew. So I had to think about who I'd been seeing and who would ever have done that to me.

But all my friends and people I see, there's no way. Anybody I knew would never do this to me. So it was, to me, some stranger. The next attack came on September 14, 1979, again in Costa Mesa. A 31-year-old widow named Marilyn Carlton was at her home with her nine-year-old son. The attacker got into her apartment and began to attack Marilyn. Her nine-year-old son did awaken, and the perpetrator became aware of that and stepped out in the hallway and just basically put his hands on the young boy's shoulder and told him everything was okay and to go back to bed, and he did. The next morning, Marilyn's son

woke up and found his mother's lifeless body. She'd been bludgeoned to death. Police attempted to recover forensic evidence from the scene, but nothing was found. I think based on method of operation, MO, again, very close proximity, I think everyone felt that the three incidences were connected. Two weeks later, in nearby Tustin, California, Diana Green was attacked in a very similar manner, but she named her husband as her attacker. On October 7, 1979, Tustin police responded to the apartment of Deborah Kennedy, a 24-year-old model. She was found deceased in her ground floor apartment, which is only about a mile from Diana Green's home. Her sister found her body on the sofa. It was later determined that she had been raped and bludgeoned to death. By this time, in Orange County, California, women were

terrified. Everyone locked their doors and windows at night. No one was out past dark. A stranger was lurking in the shadows beyond their windows and doors. He was choosing his victims at random and was seemingly unstoppable. One of the women who was scared of this serial killer was 17-year-old Debbie Sr. Debbie called her sister, Jackie Bissonnette, and told her that she and her roommate were scared. Jackie advised her sister to lock their door and windows, but Debbie found that her bathroom window didn't lock.

She contacted the apartment building manager to fix it, but he never did. On October 20, 1979, Debbie and her roommate went out to a party. Debbie returned home alone. Her roommate later found her beaten to death. The killer got in through the faulty bathroom window. Jackie had to break the news to her mother about Debbie's death. Mom came in the door, and as usual, big box of goodies from a bakery. She always had to have something.

And I had to tell her her youngest child had been killed the night before. And I watched her die that day. I watched her heart break. As far as police are concerned, Debbie's death marked the sixth unsolved incident for the serial killer known in Orange County as the Bedroom Basher. They didn't count Diana Green's assault among the suspect's crimes. The connection wasn't made because she identified her husband as her attacker, and he was awaiting trial. Kevin Green didn't attack his wife or cause the death of his unborn child, but the fact that he was charged and wrongfully convicted of this crime helped experts identify a man, a murderer when DNA testing had become standard in determining a perpetrator of sexual assault, and using blood typing for the same purposes had become outdated. DNA analysts from the Orange County Crime Lab were asked to take a look into the evidence.

It was from a series of attacks that had been unsolved for the past 17 years. The analyst, Mary Hong, and her team began by opening the evidence kit from the basher's third victim, Jane Pettengill, who had survived. At that time, we didn't have a lot of experience with these old cases. More of our experience was with current cases, where the samples were pretty fresh. So this really was the first case that we went back a number of years, retrieved the evidence, and were successful at getting the DNA. They were able to retrieve a full genetic profile from the sample. They uploaded the sample into the newly created California State DNA database,

and with low expectations, they received a hit, a DNA match, almost immediately. The match was to a man named Gerald Parker. His DNA profile was then compared to the other unsolved bedroom basher attacks. All of them were determined to be a match for the former Marine, Gerald Parker. He was in the system because he'd been convicted of sexual assaults previously. Gerald Parker was in prison at the time these matches were discovered, but he was set to be paroled in just a few weeks. He'd been in and out of jail for various charges, including the kidnapping and rape of a 13-year-old girl. Here's Detective Tom Tarpley. The urgency now becomes

Gerald Parker is due to be released from prison, so we've only got about three weeks to put this case together or Gerald Parker is going to walk out of jail. A team of cold case detectives, along with Mike Jacobs, a deputy DA for Orange County, came up with a plan to confront Gerald Parker. They wanted a confession for the bedroom basher cases. To prepare themselves, they conducted a little more research into other possible assaults that Parker might have also committed. The team found nearly 20 other assaults that were similar to Parker's M.O. Among them, Diana Green's assault and rape. Even though Kevin Green had already been convicted and was serving a sentence, the case was too similar for detectives to rule it out. It's the same kind of victim profile. Young, attractive, white female, attacked late at night, ground floor apartment, similar wounds, blunt force trauma to the head. There was another prosecutor in the DA's

office that worked on the case with Mike Jacobs, and he had some doubt about whether Green was the killer. And he said, you know, please, please talk to Parker about this case. Detectives met with Gerald Parker at the Avenel State Prison in California on June 14, 1996. But Gerald Parker reveals nothing. Next, Detective Tarpley tried to elicit a confession. He mentioned that the victim's husband, Kevin Green, was also a former Marine, like Parker. This got Parker to talk. I can tell he wants to talk about this case. And I told husband, Kevin Green, was also a former Marine, like Parker. This got Parker to talk. I can tell he wants to talk about this case, and I told him, I said, look, you've done a lot of bad things in your life.

I'm sure you would love to take things back. You can't change what's already happened. But what you can change is today. Detective Tarpley kept on Parker until finally, Gerald Parker talked about the case involving Diana Green. For some reason, the guilt of someone else taking the blame for his crimes made Parker confess. Parker revealed that of all the things he had done, the incident involving Diana Green bothered him the most, because a fellow Marine had been wrongfully convicted for the attack. Here is tape of an interview between Gerald Parker and Detective Tarpley.

Warning, this is tough to listen to. left. So you pick up the cord and go in. Right. And what happens? Where is she at when you first She's in the bedroom. Okay. First when I open the door, she's in bed and she sits up. Okay. Almost as if in recognition of somebody that she thought that I was, but I wasn't. And what happened? And she laid back down as if she recognized me. I guess she thought it was One date confessed to the Green attack, Gerald Parker was willing to talk about all of the other attacks. He described the attacks of Kimberly Rollins, Jane Pettengill, Deborah Jean Kennedy, Debbie Sr., and Marilyn Carlton in detail. When detectives asked Parker about the nine-year-old child of Marilyn Carlton, Parker admitted that he didn't realize the child was in the apartment until it was too late. He said that the child asked him what was wrong with his mommy. Parker admitted that he had beat her in the head multiple times at that point when the child approached him. Parker moved him aside and exited the apartment. Detectives needed a confession for Marilyn's murder because they didn't have any physical evidence linking anyone to that crime,

let alone Parker. Finally, Gerald Parker confessed to the murder of Sandra Fry, a case that detectives hadn't connected him to. He said that he had struck her in the head two or three times while she was seated upright in a chair at her kitchen table. He hit her until she slid off the chair. In total, Parker confessed to the murders of five women and an unborn child. He also admitted to assaulting two other women. Because of my work, because of my life experiences, I have to wonder what the police were thinking when they realized Kevin Green had spent over 16 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit,

a crime that another man had just confessed to. Well, my head is spinning because I know that Kevin Green's locked up for this murder. And I know it was in 1979, and this is now 1996. And I'm thinking, maybe Kevin Green's on death row. You know, I have no idea where this guy's at. And now here's a man telling you, I did that murder. They tested the semen sample from Diana's body to the known DNA of Gerald Parker, and it was a match. Kevin had spent 16 years in prison. He'd been attacked himself, labeled as a baby killer.

He was transferred out of the general population and later transferred to a different prison with conditions that felt worse than the first. Every time it would come off lockdown, there'd be a riot, a killing, a stabbing, a staff assault, whatever, and it'd go right back on lockdown. It was just an evil place to live. And I was loving it, in a sense, because I understood it. I was pissed off and didn't care. But it was eating me alive. And so God and I had a falling out, a big major falling out. I pretty much, heart of hearts, told him where to go and how to get there, and I'd buy the ticket. If this was what God was going to do for me, I didn't need it. Kevin was angry, and after four years in this facility that felt more like 40,

for a crime he didn't even commit, he was done. He wanted to die, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, Kevin found himself turning to God for help to get through it. I stopped and just said to myself, God, I can't do this anymore. I need help. And I meant it. I meant it like I never meant it before. And I got calm right there, just from the head of my feet. I could feel it. I just got calm. That happening, that feeling of just everything washing out of me, the light bulbs in my head went on. It was like, okay, I get it.

This is happening to me for a reason. I don't know what it is. I don't know that I need to know. I know that now. Kevin believed that when Detective Tarpley came to him that day to tell him that another man confessed to the attack of his wife and the murder of his unborn child, his prayers were answered. On June 20, 1996, Kevin Green was brought before the court in Orange County. The judge apologized to Kevin and told him that after the proceeding was over that he was free to leave.

The state awarded Kevin approximately $620,000 for his time spent in prison. Kevin calculated that that was approximately $100 a day. I wrote a check to my attorney that day for $200,000 and it didn't bounce. But he got a third. I did the 16 years, he got a third. It's business. It's the way things are done. So I went home with a little over $400,000

as compensation for 16 years of my life. Unfortunately, Kevin quickly lost the money in the stock market. Money is fluid. It comes and goes. The people and relationships in our lives, though, those are priceless. Kevin Green learned that his child that was never born was a girl. It says, Chantelle Marie, September 30th, 1979, daughter of Corporal and Mrs. Kevin L. Green, USMC, and across. This kind of makes you wonder what her favorite color would have been. L. Green, USMC, and a cross.

This kind of makes you wonder what her favorite color would have been. In 1999, Gerald Parker was convicted on six counts of murder and was sentenced to death by lethal injection. In June of 2017, Gerald Parker's death sentence was upheld by the California Supreme Court. Gerald Parker is on death row awaiting a sentence. It's too painless. It's too easy. He lays on a table and they, you know, anesthetize him and they stop his heart and they stop his breathing. My sister had a two by four and a hammer to her head and laid there and died for hours. You know, there's no justice, but he's not out hurting other people. And that's what I have to be thankful for.

Nobody else's family will go through this. Nobody else will be caused the pain that he caused us. Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings. Produced by Scott Brody, McKamey Lynn, and Steve Delamater. Our executive producer is Ted Butler. We're distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced at Curtis Productions and presented by Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetv.com and by downloading the A&E app.