Predator. Steven Walker
with beautiful eyes. She had full lips, which framed a wide open smile of perfectly aligned teeth, which sparkled in ivory whiteness. Her long brunette locks accented the features of her oval face and fell down gently below her shoulders. Her longtime friend Vicki Abernathy described Brenda as the living embodiment of a Barbie doll.
“The thing about Brenda was that she was so strikingly beautiful without even trying, but she didn’t even know it herself,” said Abernathy. “She wasn’t a wild partier and wasn’t a snobbish girl hung up on her looks. She was a levelheaded humanitarian, who was nonjudgmental and pure as snow on the inside.”
Brenda grew up as a child in a hardworking blue-collar family that struggled to make ends meet, but they kept the values of love, honesty, family, and friendship as a priority. Despite the Parsh family’s meager lifestyle, Brenda developed a love for clothes and fashion. She was also very adept at accentuating her natural beauty with makeup, and she was not afraid to be seen without any.
By the time Brenda attended high school, it became obvious that she was destined to become noticed for her beauty—whether she wanted to or not. She took advantage of the situation by entering the world of local beauty contests. She easily won the local title of Cape Girardeau’s Watermelon Queen.
She enrolled in classes at Southeast Missouri State University and majored in theater. It was there that Brenda met Richard McGougan, a fellow drama student. Richard was a freshman when they met in 1969 and Brenda was a year ahead of him. Brenda got a job at the University Shop with Vicki Abernathy, who was another theater major and beauty queen. Despite the fact that Vicki was from the neighboring town of Jackson, she said that she became friends with Brenda while they were still in high school. She described their union as “Brenda, the mysterious brunette, and Vicki, the wild blonde. We bonded instantly and worked together selling clothes, designing window displays, and modeling.”
In a sense, Vicki and Brenda were pioneers in the modeling industry as some of the first women to pose as live models in the storefront windows. They would pose as still as logs for hours at a time, but Vicki admits to occasionally winking at a passerby or flashing a bit more skin than what was deemed appropriate. Eventually they even organized their own catwalk events for the University Shop.
While Brenda’s father, Floyd, remained quietly proud of his daughter’s accomplishment, staying in the background of the crowd, mother Mary remained outwardly supportive. As an unacknowledged but very talented seamstress, Mary designed and made by hand almost all of the gowns that her daughter Brenda wore for beauty competitions. Brenda advanced through the beauty queen path until she competed for the Missouri state title, which would qualify the winner to compete for the title of Miss America. She ended up as first runner-up, but Brenda would never have a chance to compete again.
“She never thought that she was beautiful. She loved clothes and the fashion world. She entered contests hoping to win scholarship money for school, not for some ego trip. One of the things that I loved most about Brenda was the fact that even though she was this tame, ‘always do what’s right’ girl, who didn’t have any desire to experiment with the party and sexual scene of the late 1960s, she was never judgmental. I could tell her anything and know that she would still be my friend. She was the greatest,” Abernathy said.
Vicki Abernathy was two years older than Brenda. Although both girls were beautiful and interested in theater, fashion, and modeling, Vicki moved on to become a flight attendant for Braniff International Airways. Her beauty queen days were over, but not without fond memories. She was able to attend college on a twirling scholarship, and was so talented at it that she performed at the 1971 Super Bowl V, where the Baltimore Colts overpowered the Dallas Cowboys.
Brenda remained focused on her passion for fashion. After graduating from college, she obtained employment as a fashion buyer and designer of window displays for Famous-Barr department stores, now Macy’s, in St. Louis. She continued to appreciate acting and the theater, but as a levelheaded realist, she did not expect to be able to make a living in that occupation. She loved performing on the stage. Hedda Gabler was a favorite play of hers, and one in which she performed during her college years. Although separated from the adventurous Vicki by time and distance, the two girls kept in touch. Brenda even attended Vicki’s wedding, once Vicki finally settled down a bit and decided to create a lifetime union with one man.
Brenda was happy for Vicki and her newfound love, but Vicki was less enthusiastic about Brenda’s choice for a mate.
“There is no doubt that Brenda’s boyfriend loved her, but he became completely obsessed with her. If there was ever a fatal attraction, that was it,” Vicki said.
According to Richard McGougan, this statement may have been an emotional reaction to his suspected involvement in Brenda’s murder.
“Brenda had lots of friends. Vicki was one of them, but she certainly was not her best friend,” McGougan said.
Richard said that he finished school and he and Brenda remained committed to each other. They intended to marry and eventually move to New York City, where Richard planned to pursue his acting career.
Brenda was offered a job at the Grand Department Store in Milwaukee and wanted to accept it. Richard and Brenda discussed their options and mutually agreed to postpone their wedding, but not indefinitely. Richard moved to Los Angeles to work as an actor and Brenda took the position in Wisconsin. For about a year and a half, they maintained a long-distance relationship with occasional visits. The strain became too much, and Richard moved back to St. Louis, where he still had contacts to continue acting and would have a closer proximity to Brenda. The fact that they had still not followed through with their marriage plans, and they continued to find reasons to live in different states from each other, decreased the validity of their intention to remain committed to each other. Still, Richard maintained that their love for each other was as strong as ever.
Floyd eventually recovered from the physical injuries to his heart and he left the convalescent home on Sprigg Street to return to his empty house. It was the emotional injury that Floyd could never recover from. According to Sergeant Brown, Floyd would spend much of his time sitting in a rocking chair with a loaded shotgun by his side, waiting and praying that the person who stole his family’s lives would someday return.
Without any other evidence or leads, McGougan remained on the police investigator’s short list as a possible suspect for years. Because of that, he removed himself from the life he was familiar with, and finally moved to New York in 1979 in an effort to escape suspicion, to pursue his acting career, and to try to put this episode of his life behind him.
Without placing blame on the incident or excusing self-responsibility, McGougan admitted that for the next several years he indulged in drug use and heavy drinking, which might have been a result of the depression that was brought on by Brenda’s murder and the accusations that he might have been responsible for the crime. He wasn’t raped or murdered, but McGougan—like Floyd, Vicki, and many others—became a victim of the real perpetrator’s actions.
Floyd later died of complications related to his heart condition, and he was never able to have the satisfaction of finding out who was responsible for killing the people he loved most in his life. It was the phone call that he made long ago, in August 1977, that proved to be a critical piece of evidence for linking the killer to the crime.
Thirty years later, after the murderer confessed to the crime, police authorities kept saying that they would not officially press criminal charges in connection with the deaths of Mary and Brenda Parsh unless there was positive proof that he was guilty. It’s the “Show Me” state. The killer was the only surviving person who would have had knowledge about the phone call that Floyd made to Mary from the hospital. It was his mention of this call that sealed his confession of guilt. There was no possible way that he could have known about that call unless he was there. There was no longer any doubt about the perpetrator of the crime. Unfortunately, because so much time had passed, the number of living relatives who benefited from his confessions of at least nine murders all across the country has been reduced, but the number of people that these victims have had an influence on may be uncountable.
Floyd went to his grave without ever having the