Chapter 4
Kenneth James Parks and his high school sweetheart, Karen, had a beautiful five-month-old daughter, Melissa. Ken began suffering from severe insomnia and anxiety related to a gambling compulsion he developed in hopes of financing a surprise trip for his wife to visit her native land, Australia. Despite having lost much money betting on horseraces, he believed his initial win indicated a gift for picking winners. Soon his sad fortunes would reverse, he was sure. He just had to persevere.
Increasingly desperate for acquiring the means to finance his risky hobby, Kenneth created fraudulent invoices at work. Unlike his gambling, this activity brought him tens of thousands of dollars , enabling him to continue his passionate pursuit.
When Kenneth’s embezzlement was discovered in March 1987, he was fired and court proceedings were initiated against him. To repay his employer, Karen and Ken put their home up for sale. Succumbing to his wife’s urging, Ken attended Gamblers Anonymous. With further pressure from Karen, he made a commitment that on Saturday, May 23, he would tell his grandmothers—one of whom he had lived with during his high school years—about his gambling problems, the court proceedings, his unemployment, and their financial woes. The next day, Sunday, he would tell Karen’s parents the same things at a family barbeque at his in-laws’ home.
On the Thursday before that heavy confessional weekend, Karen discovered Ken had forged several checks in her name and had resumed gambling. Disappointed and enraged, she banished him from the marital bed. A few days later, Ken reneged on his promise to acknowledge his wrongdoings and their ramifications to his grandmothers. Instead, he opted to play rugby.
The following day, around 1:30 a.m., just hours before his scheduled confession with his in-laws, Ken dozed off on the living room couch while watching Saturday Night Live. That particular episode of the popular television show contained several violent scenes. Not long after falling asleep, Kenneth got out of bed and drove fourteen miles (10 to 15 minutes) from his home in Pickering, a small city just east of Toronto in the Regional Municipality of Durham, to his wife’s parents’ home in the Toronto suburb, Scarborough. Carrying a tire iron from his automobile, he proceeded to their bedroom. He stabbed and choked his father-in-law into unconsciousness and assaulted his mother-in-law repeatedly with a kitchen knife, then beat her to death with the tire iron.
When this emotional tornado subsided, Kenneth drove to the police station. Covered in blood, shaking in distress, he declared: “I just killed someone with my bare hands; oh my God …I’ve just killed my mother- and father-in-law. I stabbed and beat them to death.”
Ken told the police he could not recall anything after having fallen asleep until the moment he found himself looking down at his mother-in-law’s sad face. Her mouth and eyes were open. She had a “frightened ‘help-me’ look.” Hearing screams from his wife’s younger siblings who slept upstairs, he ran to them shouting, “Kids, kids, kids.” He wanted to reassure them. For a few moments, he stood outside the door behind which they cowered, then he left. Later, they said they never heard him shouting. They did recall him making grunting “animal noises” like people sometimes utter in their sleep.
In terms of the logical quality of Kenneth’s narrative, what reassurance could those children possibly get from the man they used to love who had just brutally assaulted their parents? Despite the absurdity of his statement that he wanted to reassure them, perhaps it was true at some level of psychic reality. He may have wanted to inform them that he had no intention of harming them and that there was no one else in their home who would endanger them.
When Kenneth became fully aware of the catastrophe in which he had participated, he concocted wild explanations that exonerated him from culpability. He was sure someone must have drugged him, hauled him to his car, then drove him to his in-laws’ home. There, he must have started to revive. In that semi-conscious state, he imagined he must have realized that the malevolent stranger who brought him there was now trying to murder his mother-in-law. Struggling to protect her from this vicious assailant, Ken’s hands were badly cut.
Kenneth admitted there were problems with this scenario that he had constructed. What stranger would have wanted to do all that? How did that person get into Ken’s house to drug the Kool-Aid Ken had consumed that evening? How could they have carried this tall, three hundred ten pound man to his car, and why would they? Although this tale was farfetched, to Kenneth it seemed no more bizarre than the alternative idea that featured him not being able to remember having driven fourteen miles prior to entering his in-laws’ home, then violently attacking relatives he loved. Even after his preliminary trial, he continued to be convinced that his imaginative explanation was correct. The evidence, particularly his distraught confusion at the police station, all pointed that way, he told himself and others.
Kenneth’s defense attorney, Marlys Edwardh, worked with other prominent lawyers in an elegant brownstone directly across the leafy, tree-lined street from where I practiced as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Marlys is married to a well-known forensic psychologist, Graham Turrall. Graham worked several meters down the hall from me. To begin making sense of the strange details of this case, Marlys and Graham, together with other professionals, considered an astonishing hypothesis. Was it possible that Kenneth may have committed this shocking crime while sleepwalking?