Predator. Steven Walker
the stench was intolerable. I immediately opened up lines with the press and asked them to film the crime scene because we didn’t have the capability to do that. They were gracious enough to do it for us and give us the tape without exposing it to the public,” Gerecke said.
The victims were found naked and lying side by side on a bed with their hands tied behind their backs. Their clothes were neatly folded on a nearby chair. Their bodies were extremely bloated, black, and full of flies and maggots. During the August heat wave, nearly three days of exposure to extreme temperatures accelerated the decomposition process so rapidly that their insides began to turn to gelatin and their tongues protruded through swollen lips.
“I spent thirty-five years in the military and studied criminal justice, but I never encountered anything like this. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was out of my element and needed help,” Gerecke said.
Evidence technician Ron Thomas took over the crime scene to collect evidence, while Gerecke, Brown, and other police officers canvassed the neighborhood to gather any information they could.
Brown said that they questioned everyone in the neighborhood but didn’t receive much useful information other than the fact that nobody had seen Mary in a couple of days. They were told that Mary expected a visit from her daughter, which was helpful in identifying Brenda’s body.
On several occasions throughout the day, Brown returned to the Parsh home to see if any new developments were discovered by the evidence technician.
“I can look at just about anything, and have seen hundreds of autopsies, but this was unbearable. The smell was intolerable. I would make it as far as the middle of the living room, and then I’d have to turn around and go out to the front yard to throw up. This happened several times, until there was nothing left to come up except dry heaves,” Brown recalled.
When Brown was finally able to make his way into the back bedroom, Thomas, the evidence technician, was standing over the bodies and eating a sandwich without any difficulty at all.
It was discovered that a bedroom window was broken and then left open. It was determined that this was the intruder’s point of entry into the house. A faint partial print of a tennis shoe on the hardwood floor of the bedroom was captured on film by cross-lighting the dust on the floor. Both bodies had their hands tied behind their backs with an electrical cord, which was cut from a clock in the bedroom. An electrical burn on the cord indicated that the clock must have been plugged in when the cord was cut. Investigators later duplicated this procedure and discovered that when cutting a cord from a plugged-in appliance with a pocketknife, an arc would burn a mark into the blade. This was a minor detail, but if a suspect was found possessing a knife with a similar mark, it might be able to be used as evidence.
Mary’s keys were still in the front door. Saturday’s mail was still in the mailbox. The Friday newspaper was inside the house, but the Sunday paper was still outside. The contents of Mary’s purse were dumped on the living-room couch so the intruder probably stole anything valuable that he might have found in it, but no other jewelry in the house or on the bodies was disturbed, indicating that robbery was probably not the killer’s motivation. The hall light was left on. A large floor fan situated in the doorway of the bedroom was left on, and the airflow was directed toward the bed, where Mary and Brenda were found.
There was a large amount of blood on the bedding beneath the heads of each of the victims, and a large amount of blood had soaked through to form pools of dry blood on the floor beneath the bed. There was a single bullet wound in the back of each victim’s head. An additional bullet was found, which had penetrated the pillowcase beside Mary’s head. Ligature marks were also burned around Brenda’s neck, as if she had been strangled at some point during the assault.
After Thomas completed his investigation, the bodies were removed and transported to the Ford and Sons Funeral Home for autopsy.
One neighbor, Mr. Blattel, who lived about two blocks away, said that he heard several gunshots fired on Friday night, sometime after eleven.
With the evidence collected at the crime scene, the testimony of neighbors, and Floyd’s phone call, police attempted to re-create the horrific events that took place. It wasn’t difficult to determine an approximate time of death. Eventually they decided that Mary and Brenda were confronted immediately upon entering the house. They were forced to undress. They speculated that one of them was forced at gunpoint to tie up the other, and then the intruder tied up the second one. Police believed that while both victims were bound beside each other, Brenda was raped and then shot in the back of her head in front of her mother. Krajcir fired a second shot, but missed Mary’s head. It wasn’t until later, police speculated, that Krajcir heard Mary crying. He came back into the bedroom and made certain that his third bullet accurately hit its mark at the back of her skull.
Because of the advanced decomposition of the bodies, an autopsy provided no further clues to help identify their killer. DNA technology did not exist at the time. Mary and Brenda Parsh received a closed-casket funeral service in Cape Girardeau and then were buried in Alton Cemetery.
Background checks on Mary and Brenda revealed nothing that would target them to be executed. They were liked by everyone who knew them, and neither of them had any steamy secrets or was involved in any criminal activities. The evidence collected did little more than determine the time of death and provided no clues to a suspect in the murders.
Feeling overwhelmed, Gerecke contacted Lieutenant Colonel Dougherty, the chief of detectives at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD), on Tuesday. He explained the case and asked for assistance. Captain Jacobsmeyer, chief of the St. Louis Homicide Division, readily agreed to send two men from his department to Cape Girardeau. Sergeant Tom Rowane and Detective Colin McCoy traveled south to Cape on Wednesday, and they stayed for about two weeks.
After reviewing the case file and accompanying Cape investigators on interviews, the St. Louis homicide investigators were unable to solve the case. They told Brown and Gerecke that they had done everything that could be done and even more.
“They told us not to get too stressed out about it because we were living this twenty-four hours a day. They said we should put it aside, and that something would eventually turn up,” Brown said.
With no other leads to pursue, Richard McGougan, Brenda’s boyfriend, became the number one suspect.
“Homicide investigators from both St. Louis and Cape Girardeau came to interrogate me. It was grueling. I asked for an attorney, but they denied me the ability to contact one,” McGougan claimed.
He said that he was rigorously grilled for more than ten hours and forced to look at explicit crime scene photos, which nearly made him sick. McGougan claimed that he had to endure every police interrogation trick in the book, including the good cop/bad cop scenario. He said that in order to provoke an admission of guilt, he was told that the police had recovered the gun used in the crime and that his fingerprints were on it. (His interrogators don’t recall using this tactic.)
McGougan told the police that he was living with his brother in St. Louis and spent Friday night there. He gave the names of his brother and four other men, who were visiting to make plans for an upcoming weight-lifting competition, as witnesses to his whereabouts during the time of the murders. He also agreed to take a lie detector test at the conclusion of his interrogation. The test showed no evidence of deception on McGougan’s part. Several days later, McGougan’s brother and his friends were questioned by police investigators. They confirmed that he was in St. Louis at the time of the murders.
When Floyd was released from the hospital, he did not return home directly. Instead, he spent some time in a convalescent home on Sprigg Street, across the street from the Cape Girardeau Police Department.
McGougan was emotionally devastated by Brenda’s death. They had been in a relationship together for eight years since they met at Southeast Missouri State University, known as SEMO State University. They intended to get married and eventually move to New York City, where McGougan planned to pursue his acting career. Instead, Brenda was murdered, and Richard became an outcast when he became an object of suspicion and a target for the police and the media.