Ghost Stories: The Parker Family Murder

Ghost+Stories%3A+The+Parker+Family+Murder

Every small town has a ghost. For many, this ghost manifests itself as an urban legend–a hook-handed man, an escaped mental patient, the local Boo Radley. Just the ghost that haunts rural Clarksdale, Mississippi has a unlike name. Clarksdale'southward ghost haunts a charred plot of land at the finish of a driveway, circumvented by a weald highway, 15 minutes from the nearest boondocks, five from the nearest neighbor.

Highway 322 is sandwiched between sprawling bushels of cotton, Mississippi'due south cash crop, occasionally alternate between paved asphalt and loosely adhered gravel. The highway extends its reach for miles upon miles of nondescript cropland– the passing cotton gins being the only indicator of the modify of location.

Still, on this indeterminate highway, tucked into the northwestern corner of Mississippi, lies a patch of permanently blackened, untilled state– an unmarked gravestone and scorched reminder of Quitman County's heinous claim to notoriety. The now-empty lot stands in place of what was once the sight of rural Mississippi'due south display of grandeur: a two-story country domicile, housing a happy family of iv, coupled with a cerise Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck.

Merely rather than housing a lively household, the empty lot on Highway 322 lives in sinister infamy as the site of a gruesome quadruple homicide. And lingering at the back of that at present empty lot sits a man named Anthony Carr– the Clarksdale ghost who's been rotting on Mississippi'due south expiry row for the by 28 years.

According to the Quondam Farmer's Almanac, the winter of 1990 was an unequivocally hot one with the highs being in the upper sixties, the lows just grazing the fifties. On the night of Feb 2nd at around nine:15 pm, Carl Parker aged 58, his wife Bobbie Jo anile 46, and their two children Greggory, 12, and Charlotte, 9, piled into their car following a Fri night service at the Riverside Baptist Church and proceeded towards their rural Quitman County home merely off Highway 322 , according to caselaw.com .

Approximately three hours later at around xi:00 p.chiliad. that dark, while driving east on that aforementioned highway, Billy Male monarch arrived as sheets of rain pummeled his windshield. As his vehicle approached the at present infamous driveway that dog legged into the Parker residence, Male monarch's torso became enveloped in oestrus. Suddenly the threescore-five-degree warm winter air seemed to pale in comparing, as Carl Parker's stolen red Silverado pickup truck sped off into the highway's abyssal frontier.

The fire burned for four and a half more hours, and while the bodies of Carl and the two children was retrieved by firemen within their first 60 minutes on the scene, Bobbie Jo's trunk, that was found in the southwest wing, sat in the firm for another three hours and, past the time it was recovered, was burned beyond all DNA recognition. To this mean solar day, the body that rests under Bobbie Jo Parker'southward headstone is only assumed circumstantially to be hers.

Fifteen miles away awoke Clarksdale resident Eddie Lee Sprawls to the sound of a car door slamming– the door of a red Silverado pickup truck. Situated in between two abandoned houses sabbatum Carl Parker'due south stolen vehicle; its bed filled volition furniture, appliances, and valuables, its commuter's and passenger'due south seats filled with two unidentified black men. And simply as Sprawls wiped the sleep from his eyes and dialed 9-one-1, the 2 men, who would after be identified as Anthony Carr and his cohort Richard Simon, fled into the nighttime towards Highway 61, not to be seen until forenoon.


According to local legend, the killings had been the product of a robbery gone wrong– that the Parkers had get victim to one of the most grisly homicides in Southern history simply because they were home.

The prosecution had a dissimilar idea. In their eleven day autopsy of the case, DA Laurence Mellen detailed Carr and Simon's premeditated intent to kill the family of 4, sexually abuse nine-twelvemonth-quondam Charlotte, and torch their residence in add-on to burglarizing the home. The family had all been shot by both a .32 Winchester rifle and .38 revolver, and Mellen placed Carr'south hand behind the triggers. The prosecution had a clear case– a well respected, church building-going family unit of four murdered in their home by two, African American vagrants from W Memphis. Withal, looming over the prosecutions impending success was their showtime misstep in the form of a testimony by a homo named Anthony Washington, Carr'southward cellmate.

Washington came as a terminal-minute witness enlisted by the prosecution claiming that, while awaiting his trial, Carr, later on being administered a blood test, asked, "if they could tell if [I] raped that lilliputian girl?"

Co-ordinate to the "Statement of Facts" excerpt from Carr's trial, Washington, who had been reading upwardly on the case for the past week, and so asked him to elaborate, eliciting, "We had a ball" from Carr as he rose his fingers to his head, mimicking a gun. Washington's statement was a hit, sufficing as a clear admission of guilt from the political party on trial. The jury sentenced Carr to death in less than a day.

***

In the fourteenth century, a human named William of Ockham authored the phrase, "lex parsimoniae " or the law of briefness — Occam'south Razor — stating that the simplest answer is often the right one.

In the case of the Parker quadruple homicide, the simplest reply states that on Feb second, 1990, Anthony Carr and Robert Simon murdered, raped, arsonized, and burglarized a family unit they didn't know. But what happens when the simplest answer starts to crumble– what happens when the simplest respond becomes the most convoluted?

In 2004, Anthony Carr filed for postal service-conviction relief through the Mississippi Supreme Court citing thirty explicit examples of how his case had been mishandled. In information technology, Carr's legal team attached the transcript to a testimony of Anthony Washington'south stating that "All [he knew] when [he] testified for that capital murder case was that the State was going to work something out with [his] case."

Washington goes on to land that while he didn't know how much time he was going to get off in exchange for testifying confronting Carr, he had knowingly testified with the intent of getting a reward.

A 2017 written report conducted past The University of Michigan's Law School, in tandem with the National Registry of Exonerations, stated that, in death row cases involving African American defendants, state-induced perjury was the third most common reason for false convictions.

Washington, having never received his shortened sentence, has since retracted his statements– the only concrete piece of show placing Carr as anything other than Simon'due south co-conspirator.

Nonetheless, the leading cause of false death row convictions falls under the umbrella of what'due south referred to as a "Brady Violation," or the obstruction of evidence that could potentially sway a case in either direction.

Information technology's a concept that, due to the vagueness of what actually qualifies as being able to "sway a case", has been subject field to great controversy depending on the style in which information technology's ruled– whether information technology be for convicting innocent parties or setting gratis rightful criminals. In the case of Carr and his 2004 post-confidence relief request, he claimed that the state had knowingly excluded testimonies that would accept potentially swayed the length of his sentence. In it, he cites a completely blacked-out statement from Robert Simon given on the morning of February 5th in which Simon implies that he had been paid off by a third party to kill the Parkers.

Simon stated that "[Redacted] told [him] that he needed a task done and drew [him] a diagram of the Parker house․ [He] asked them why he wanted them killed, and they told [him], said 'It was none of [his] business concern.' "

Simon went on further to state that he would be paid off a considerable amount of coin for his services. In a sworn affidavit from 2001, the Mississippi Highway Patrol Criminal Investigation Unit of measurement stated that the defense, at no point during the trial, even knew this argument existed– that it had been practically buried by the prosecution.

Because of the broad berth of potential ground covered by challenge a Brady violation, a four-pronged vetting procedure was implemented, raising the question of if the evidence had been disclosed to the defence, "would it have created a reasonable probability that the outcome of the proceedings would have been different?"

In other words, the court was ruling on whether or not the burying of crucial evidence even mattered. Simply on that aforementioned solar day in 2004, the state of Mississippi ruled that, even if Carr'due south original defense had had the redacted and cached information, the outcome of his case would accept remained unwavering, denying Carr's relief on all counts– solidifying his identify in line for the death penalty.

What is information technology about the result of this case that is then greatly unsettling? The reply comes in the class of 2 numbers: 63 and zero. 63 — Anthony Carr's I.Q. score, a number falling well within the range of the I.Q. diagnostic criteria for the mentally disabled, according to the Pediatrics in Review.

Both Carr and his cohort scored within the bracket of medically mentally handicapped, Carr reportedly barely touching literacy — another fact basically discredited and thrown away during their trials.

To make the waters even more muddied, the African American pair was tried past an all-white jury — an all-white jury in a small, Mississippi Delta town with a population of ten,000, vii,000 of which were black.

Zero — the number of black jurors assigned to Carr and Simon, despite the fact that according to the U.South. Demography Bureau census, Quitman County'due south population was seventy% African American. I

In spite of the landmark Supreme Court Example Batson v. Kentucky, credited with ending racially-motivated jury nullification, dismissing a jury member on the ground of race is even so remarkably easy and goes largely unpunished, the New Yorker reported that this made Batson look spineless trounce of a Supreme Court precedent.

In a 1996 Court of Appeals, Illinois Judge James Flannery referred to the Batson procedure equally a "deception," going as far as to list the unjust dismissals of potential black jurors that he has had to deem as "race-neutral" during his term as a estimate.

Whether you care to adhere to the train of thought that race played a critical part in Carr and Simon's convictions or not, information technology is incommunicable to ignore the overarching problem– that Anthony Carr and Robert Simon existed within a arrangement that was statistically stacked against them. All-white juries have an 81% chance of convicting a person of color, even so when just one person of color is added to a jury, this number disparity is practically decimated as reported past The Quarterly Journal of Economic science.

What's incorrect is that there is no simple respond — no resolve to this mystery is palatable. Either one must accept that two twenty-year-old men committed a gruesome quadruple homicide in cold blood simply for the mere convenience of it, forever shattering the naivety of modest-town existence or one must accept that 2 mentally handicapped black men, tried by an all-white jury sit as placeholders, aimlessly awaiting release through unjust lethal injection.

It all trickles down to our homo instinct to require simplicity. Occam not only highlighted our tendency to take the path of to the lowest degree resistance only to believe information technology besides. On a neurological level, our minds accept a needlessly difficult time coping with the inability to answer questions and it's this chemical imbalance that makes usa then fascinated with the unsolved.

Simply information technology's this same instinct that makes this case then frustrating, for in that location is no path of least resistance. Every possible consequence forces its believer to accept that there will never be an incomplex resolve — that the simple question of what happened to iv people for two hours on a single nighttime in 1990 evokes the most convoluted, multi-pronged reverberations of vastly differing, contradictory accounts, all swearing to their utmost accuracy.

Information technology'south for this reason that Carr, stuck in the eternal limbo between guilt and innocence, will forever haunt Highway 322 in tandem with the Parkers, immortalized in the penmanship of local reporters and that charred monolith — the abandoned Parker acreage, since relinquished to the deterioration of time and the stranglehold of kudzu.

For while the physical manifestations of that fateful Feb dark become ephemeral under nature's inevitable withering, the Ghost of Clarksdale, Mississippi remains untouched, preserved by the Delta air that flows through the gates of Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary, scuffing the shoes of its spectral expiry row inmate — stationed 30 miles south of Emmett Till'southward grave.