The Bedroom Basher

On September 30, 1979, Marine Kevin Green left his Tustin, California, apartment to buy food. While he was gone, an intruder beat and sexually assaulted his wife, Dianna, who was nine months pregnant. She survived with a brain injury, and their baby daughter, Chantal, was stillborn. After waking from a coma, Dianna named her husband as the attacker. In 1980 Kevin was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years to life.

At the same time, Orange County detectives were chasing a killer who entered homes at night and bludgeoned women in bed. Between December 1978 and October 1979 he killed Sandra Fry, Kimberly Rawlins, Marolyn Carleton, Debora Kennedy and Debora Senior in Anaheim, Costa Mesa and Tustin. In 1996, investigators ran crime scene DNA through California’s offender database and matched it to Gerald Parker, an ex-Marine then jailed for a parole violation. The rape kit from the Green attack matched him too, and he confessed.

Kevin Green’s convictions were vacated on June 20, 1996, after sixteen years in prison, and California later paid him $620,000. In October 1998 a jury convicted Parker of six murders, counting Chantal. He was sentenced to death on January 21, 1999, and the California Supreme Court upheld that sentence in June 2017.