The Colonel

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine

Making the green one red.

—Macbeth, ACT 2, SCENE 2

IN 1957, Colonel Tom Parker was riding cross-country, returning to California from his home in Tennessee. Behind the wheel was twenty-three-year-old Byron Raphael, a William Morris agent-in-training that Parker plucked from the mail room a year earlier to become the first of his Morris-paid assistants. The “Parker School for Trainees” would become part of Hollywood legend for both the rigor and the humiliation that the manager foisted on his “students.” But at the time, Raphael only knew that he loved and feared the man he called Pops.

Parker, whose marriage was childless, would tell the young man he thought of him as his adopted son. Whether that was entirely true, certainly on that 2,000-mile road trip, he trusted Raphael enough to share one of his closest secrets.

“We were driving through Hobbs, New Mexico,” Raphael begins, “and it was snowing. I couldn’t keep the car on the road—we were sliding everywhere—and we stopped at this little motel. There were very few rooms available, so I had to share a room with him that night.

“He started out by telling me about how he was made a colonel by the governor of Louisiana. And then he said, ‘Where do you think I was born?’ I said, ‘Well, I guess Tennessee.’ And he just told me the story. He said he made a deal with somebody to come over, and he worked in the kitchen of the ship, as a dishwasher, I think.

His route, from what he told various sources, was through the island of Curaçao, in the Dutch West Indies, via England. From Rotterdam, he sailed for one of the British ports, probably Southampton, with a possible stop in France to pick up cargo. If he took a passenger ship to England, he likely would have jumped to a tramper or a freighter for the run to the Dutch West Indies, since the passenger ships concerned themselves with North Atlantic trade.

Eventually, he wrote home that an English friend had given him the papers he needed—presumably a passport and visa—to enter the United States. But whether the friend arranged for him to “become” Tom Parker during his layover in the British Isles or, as Nel believes, while Andre was still in Holland, is unknown. And if he already had a Dutch passport, as several members of the family believe, the more curious question is why he needed another in a different name.

Whatever the answers, he seemed to be going to a lot of trouble. In Curaçao, he apparently changed boats again and quickly moved on.

From here, the picture of Andre van Kuijk, just weeks away from his twentieth birthday, begins to blur. In all probability, he entered the United States through the gulf port of Mobile, Alabama, although the names recorded in the ships’ manifests for that year fail to bear witness to Andreas van Kuijk or Thomas Parker. Dirk Vellenga, the journalist who chronicled Parker’s Dutch origins, first for the Breda newspaper De Stem and later in a biography, Elvis and the Colonel, speculates that Andre came in on a rumrunner, a boat transporting illegal liquor to America. According to Lloyd Shearer of Parade magazine, Parker himself said he gained entry through Mobile on a Dutch fishing boat. Either way, that would have been the boat that issued the paycheck he never picked up.

For some reason, those events were on Parker’s mind in 1957, the morning after his late-night disclosure to Byron Raphael in a roadside motel.

“That’s when he told me the rest of the story—how fearful he was that he might be deported, or if he ever left the country, that he might not be able to get back in.

Since Parker’s personality was so forceful (“He gave you the feeling that he was omnipotent,” says Raphael), it never occurred to the teenager to ask him why he didn’t call on his powerful friends to solve his passport problems, especially given his celebrity and wealth.

But now the answer seems obvious. It wasn’t that Parker couldn’t leave the country. Through the years, he accumulated many influential friends in all ranks of government—including President Lyndon B. Johnson—who could have solved his problem with a single phone call. The truth of the matter was that Parker didn’t want to leave the country. And not even the promise of money beyond his wildest dreams could stir him from his spot.

For a man who judged the worth of every deal by money alone, such virulent aversion to international travel begs two nagging questions: Why had he never registered with the U.S. government, bypassing, as late as 1940, the safety net of the Alien Registration Act, which required all aliens to comply with the law, but did not discriminate between legal and illegal residents? And what was outside the refuge of the United States that frightened a man who otherwise seemed afraid of nothing?

“The Smith Act, or the Alien Registration Act of 1940, wouldn’t have necessarily made him legal,” explains Marian Smith, historian at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, D.C., but as an overstayed seaman, Parker could have registered and applied for certain kinds of relief. “And I am curious as to why he didn’t,” she muses. “Failure to register was subject to punishment, but I’m sure he could have later just paid a fine. It’s very odd.”

The search for his mysterious truth spawned a host of imaginative explanations through the years. The first is the theory that he might have been a low-level government spy, or carried papers for the leaders of a radical social movement. But although the U.S. government used Dutch citizens as drops in Nazi-occupied territory in the years before World War II, Andre was long gone from Europe by then. Besides, his family says he demonstrated no political agenda, and the selflessness of such an act—even if paid—doesn’t fit his psychological make-up.

However, the third story is harder to shake off. If true, it could answer every question about the enigmatic behavior of Colonel Thomas Andrew Parker.

In the days just after Elvis Presley’s death in August 1977, Dirk Vellenga was sitting at his desk at De Stem when he received an anonymous phone call. It was a man’s voice: “Do you know that Colonel Tom Parker comes from Breda? His name is van Kuijk, and his father was a stable-keeper for van Gend en Loos on the Vlaszak.”

While this information had been published before, first by Dineke Dekkers in the fan club magazine It’s Elvis Time in 1967, and then in Hans Langbroek’s 1970 eccentric booklet The Hillbilly Cat, Vellenga thought it only rumor. His curiosity now piqued, he began poking around in the ashes of Parker’s early years, interviewing his family and schoolmates, and soon began to sift out the fragments of the life of - Breda’s most famous nonresident. The first of Vellenga’s splashy articles appeared in the newspaper in September 1977 and started the taciturn reporter on a quest—perhaps an obsession—that drives him still today. Even though he long ago left reporting to become an editor, he has continued to file stories on the subject every few years, even as late as 1997, twenty years after he began.

At the end of one of his pieces, Vellenga posed a question: “Did something serious happen before Parker left that summer in 1929 for America, or maybe in the 1930s when he broke all contact with his family in Breda?”

One reader thought he knew the answer and in 1980 mailed a letter to Vellenga at the newspaper. The document had a hushed, dark-alley tone, as if its author were afraid that someone might be reading over his shoulder. It carried no signature, but the urgency and gravity of the words made it seem somehow real, as if the author experienced an unburdening in the telling:

Gentlemen:

At last, I want to say what was told to me 19 years ago about this Colonel Parker. My mother-in-law said to me, if anything comes to light about this Parker, tell them that his name is van Kuijk and that he murdered the wife of a greengrocer on the Boschstraat in Breda. This murder has never been solved. But look it up, and you will discover that he, on that very night, left for America and adopted a different name. And that is why it is so mysterious. That’s why he does not want to be known. But believe me, this is the truth and nothing but the truth. It has been told to me in confidence. I have been carrying it around with me for years, and am glad now that I can tell you what happened. This is the truth. Thank you.

At first, Vellenga hardly knew what to think. Could it be true? The reporter was intrigued to find that, indeed, there had been such a murder. Anna van den Enden, a twenty-three-year-old newlywed, the wife of the potato trader Wilhelmus “Willem” van den Enden, had been bludgeoned to death in the kitchen of her home behind the shop. The crime was what the Dutch call a roofmoord, a murder with intention of robbery, since the bedroom and bathroom had been ransacked in an apparent search for money.

More surprising, the date—May 17, 1929—coincided with Andre’s sudden disappearance.

Today, a careful reading of the original police report—handwritten in Dutch and numbering more than 130 pages—reveals a woefully inadequate investigation of the crime. The murder weapon, possibly a crowbar, was never positively identified. No background check was done on the victim. And once several witnesses reported seeing Anna’s brother-in-law, Jan van den Enden, a contractor, near the shop that morning, police focused solely on him, detaining him as a suspect. Eventually, however, he was released, and no one was ever brought to justice for Anna’s murder. The crime remains unsolved to this day.

There is not a single shred of evidence to tie Andre van Kuijk to the murder of Anna van den Enden. His name does not appear anywhere in the police report, and until the anonymous letter arrived at the Breda newspaper fifty-one years after the fact, no one in Holland had spoken of his name in connection with the crime.

Yet a set of circumstances makes it impossible not to speculate that Colonel Tom Parker in fact may have gotten away with murder.

And there was another connection. The van den Enden greengrocery was located at Nieuwe Boschstraat 31. Nieuwe Boschstraat is merely the continuation of Boschstraat, where Andre went to public school. What schoolboy, and especially one as fond of fruit as Dries, would not have stopped off at the market for an apple after school?

Certainly he would have known the shop, even if it had been in the hands of a previous owner when he was a child. And he would have remembered that of the two doors in the front, only the middle door led inside the shop. Then, too, the van Kuijk family is unsure which grocer employed him for deliveries when he first left school. Had this been the one?

Boschstraat is also where his mother moved after van Gend en Loos evicted her from the stables. It was that house that Andre visited whenever he returned home to Breda after the age of sixteen. And he was likely in town the weekend Anna was murdered. She was killed on the Friday before Whitsunday, or Pentecost—to Catholics, an important high church occasion accompanied, like Easter, by a longer school holiday, which made it a good time for travel and spending time with family. Surely Andre would have come home rather than spend it alone in the dreary hostel above his Rotterdam employer’s office.

Anyone familiar with the habits and interests of both Andre van Kuijk and the older Colonel Tom Parker will find several small points of the police report most absorbing. Witnesses described seeing a man in a “fancy costume . . . a dark fantasy jacket costume” come out of the shop at the hour the murder was committed, though one thought he recognized him as Jan van Enden. Another talked about seeing a well-dressed man “in a gray-colored overcoat and fancy trousers, and I do believe a black hat.” And still another described a man leaving the shop who wore a “light yellow” raincoat.

In the days after the murder, another witness, a meat delivery boy, came forth to testify seeing the same man in the yellow raincoat exit the fruit shop around the time Anna was killed. Shortly after, he encountered him again, this time elsewhere in the neighborhood, in a “conflict of words” with a woman approximately sixty years of age, “pretty chubby around the hips and a very slim face. She had gray hair which she wore in a twist on the head.” With the addition of eight years, that description fits Maria van Kuijk to perfection. Had she had an altercation with her son, a young man who had changed so much during the years he was away that he might not be immediately recognizable to others?

And perhaps a matter that most puzzled the police, according to the report, can be easily explained. Whoever snuffed out Anna van den - Enden’s brief life sprinkled white pepper around her body and then left a “very thin layer of corresponding gray dust”—again pepper—on the floor going into the bathroom, as well as “on the marble top of both drawers in the bedrooms, and in the hall from the bedroom to the stairs and descending into the hall which led from the shop to the kitchen.” A young man who had worked with the training of dogs surely knew that police used German shepherds in the tracking of criminals, even in the Holland of 1929. And he also might have thought that a snout full of pepper would have prevented them from picking up a scent.

But even more coincidental is the fact that the author of the anonymous letter referenced 1961 as the year he was told this story. That was the year that Ad van Kuijk, Andre’s younger brother, flew to Los Angeles and met with the man who called himself Colonel Tom Parker. It was the first time anyone in the family had seen him since 1929. And yet when Ad returned to Holland, he refused to talk about his trip, arousing suspicion with his siblings that he had either been bought off or threatened.

The more important question is whether the letter writer really knew his facts, or if he was simply reporting a rumor that had, through the years, become “truth.” In 1982, Parker claimed he came to America in 1928, a year before these events. Was that to cover his involvement in the murder of van den Enden, or could the anonymous author just have been wrong?

Standing at the sink, she was struck several times from behind and hit with such force that, as the police report vividly put it, “part of the brain came through the right ear.” Immediately, the burglar realized his awful mistake and attempted to bind her wounds with a piece of material torn from clothing later found in the hall. But the housewife was dead where she fell, her slippers askew on the coconut mat by the sink, a dark puddle under her head.

Yet was Andre truly capable of such a brutal deed, a sudden psychotic act? And one so bold?

“I really don’t think there was a murder in him,” says Todd Slaughter, who as president of the official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain, grew to know Parker well in the last twenty-five years of his life. “He was a noisy character, but I don’t think there was any brute force within his psyche at all.” But others disagree.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that he killed that woman,” asserts Lamar Fike, a member of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia, assigned to the Colonel in the 1970s. “He had a terrible temper. He and I got into some violent, violent fights. We fought all the time. When we started arguing, people would get up and leave the table. Everybody was just a nervous wreck.”

“I never saw him hit anybody, other than to shove his assistant [Tom Diskin] one time,” remembers Byron Raphael. “But he did have a violent temper and a terrible mean streak, and it took very little to set him off. In those fits of rage, he was a very dangerous man, and he certainly appeared capable of killing. He would be nice one second, and stare off like he was lost, and then—boom!—tremendous force. He’d just snap. You never saw it coming. Then five minutes later, he would be so gentle, telling a nice soft story.”

On a purely emotional level, Parker’s family in Holland refuses to entertain thoughts of Andre as a murderer. His sister Marie, the former nun, says it could not possibly be true. Besides, she adds, Mother would have known.

And yet this odd tale had a postscript, some fifty-three years after the fact. In the course of his research, Dirk Vellenga wrote to the American journalist Lloyd Shearer for help in piecing together the facts of Andre’s strange odyssey to America. Shearer had at least a working relationship with Parker, who had refused to reply to Vellenga’s letters, and Vellenga hoped that Parker would answer some preliminary questions if they were put to him by someone he knew.

To Vellenga’s delight, he soon received a telephone call from Lloyd Shearer. At first, the men chatted about the weather and exchanged pleasantries. But as Shearer talked on, Vellenga noticed that Shearer spoke with a familiar accent—something about the way he pronounced his Rs and Js—and that he seemed hoarse, like a man who might be trying to disguise his voice. Vellenga dismissed those thoughts momentarily, as Shearer was most intrigued by the Dutchman’s questions about Parker’s past, and the two journalists agreed to correspond about the matter.

Vellenga kept his end of the bargain, sending letter after letter. But he never again heard from Lloyd Shearer—lost today to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease—or, for that matter, from Colonel Parker. Or did he? Today, Vellenga is convinced it wasn’t Shearer who called him after all, and Mrs. Shearer agrees. That phone call was between two Dutchmen, both wildly curious about an investigation into the murky life of one Dries van Kuijk.

3

“ALL GREAT NEPTUNE’S OCEAN”