Burned Page 4

  Ron, it turned out, had taken a detour, ignoring the police request to come directly to the station house. He had been told only that there had been a fire, that it was under control, and that he should come quickly, with the police offering no information on the welfare of his children. That sort of news had to be delivered in person, they believed, with his wife and pastor at his side. But Ron had never been overly fond of the police. He wanted to see for himself. First he drove to a phone booth in that pre-cellphone era and called Paul Garman to tell him what happened and to ask for his prayers. Then he called the apartment and got a busy signal. Then he drove on toward Sherman Way to determine what had happened to his home and to his family.

  When he reached his block, he couldn’t get close to the apartment, with ready access obstructed by a welter of emergency vehicles and yellow police tape. But he chatted with gawkers on the sidewalk and, he would later say, eventually heard about how three children had been trapped inside a burning house and died before rescuers could reach them. The rumor going around the neighborhood was that the fire started because the parents had left the children home alone. The spectators didn’t know who Ron was, and he said nothing in response to the gossip making the rounds. Instead, he drove to a phone booth at a nearby strip center and called Garman again, only to learn that his Christian Science mentor had already left the house, heading to the Bell Police Department. Only then did Ron head back to his car and drive to meet his wife at the police department.

  When Ron Parks Sr. finally strode in and stood before Jo Ann, the first thing he said in his Missouri twang was, “You killed my kids.”

  Sitting a few feet away, close enough to hear and see everything, Shirley Robison gasped. She stared at the short, slight man with sandy hair, at the face Robison thought might have been pleasant, even pleasing, except that its default state seemed to her to be stripped of emotion and empathy. Even now, when uttering what she heard as breathtaking cruelty, Ron’s expression remained flat. She saw no anger, hysteria, pity, or sadness on that face. He just wants to know what happened, she thought, and he wants to lay blame.

  Robison took his meaning at the time not as a literal accusation of murder, but as recrimination for Jo Ann’s failure to save the kids, for not acting more heroically in trying to reach them. Indeed, in subsequent retellings and testimony years later, Shirley would recall that moment differently and more in line with what she believed Ron meant, asserting that he said, “You let my kids die.”

  Whatever was said, Jo Ann appeared stricken by her husband’s words. Her eyes welled with fresh tears. “No, I didn’t,” she pleaded. “No, I didn’t. I did everything I could.”

  It was a pitiful moment of shaming, Garman thought, when a husband and a wife who should have been comforting each other did anything but.

  In subsequent retellings to police, friends, and family, Parks would describe making a greater effort to save her kids before running for help, starting with small additions that, over time, grew more heroic and then improbable. Her second story to police had her crawling toward the kitchen through fire and smoke, then trying to telephone for help from inside the house before fleeing. Later she told a friend she had run around back and tried to break through a window. Much later this would profoundly affect Parks’s own fate, as others would put wildly different interpretations on why she might change her story and exaggerate her actions that night. Was it because she felt ashamed at not appearing braver to people she cared about? Or was she lying to cover her crimes and sound more appealing to cops, prosecutors, and jurors? Was the lying understandable human frailty laid bare, or did it render her untrustworthy about everything?

  Although she wouldn’t know about it for years, Ron Parks quietly offered the police a very different version of what passed between them in the station house. He claimed that it was his wife who spoke when he first walked in, and that it was she who muttered, “I killed the children. I killed the children.”

  No one else present supported this version of events. Ron softened his statement a bit by saying he understood his wife’s supposed mumbled words not as a literal confession to murder, but as an expression of shame at failing to save the kids. And he professed to have no idea that the police might put a more suspicious and literal interpretation on it.

  Ron Parks provided one other perspective to the police that night, though this one came unintentionally. Officer Espejo overheard him telephoning his manager on the graveyard shift at the ice cream plant. He called to explain that he would be missing work on his next shift. In what Espejo could only describe as a “cold and callous” manner, Ron told his boss flatly, almost offhandedly, “Yeah, the kids are dead. I’ll call back later.”

  Such is the stuff of criminal cases every day and everywhere, assembled not with brilliant detective work and Perry Mason courtroom moments, but one little brick at a time, built of shifting memories, shifting stories, shifting theories, shifting details. Seemingly innocuous, insignificant, or ambiguous moments, disregarded in real time, can be reinterpreted months or years later, weaponized and made consequential by suspicion, then woven into something that seems sinister and damning. Mistakes by investigators can be magnified or buried or ignored, the loss of evidence transformed from handicap to advantage. Lives and justice and public safety depend upon how these building blocks are interpreted and pieced together.

  And so it would be with the fire and death that swept through 6928 ½ Sherman Way on April 9, 1989. Each word, each nuance, each contradiction would be filed away, waiting to be reassembled into an official narrative, though no one yet knew if that would be a story of a deadly accident, a slumlord’s neglect, or a monstrous and intentional crime.

  In the hours and days after the fire, with the official story as yet unwritten, Jo Ann and Ron Parks remained victims, not suspects. They shuffled out of the police station into the predawn darkness, not holding hands, not touching, not looking at each other. Garman arranged a motel room for Jo Ann and Ron, then drove them over and saw them settled in. He left them there appearing stunned and exhausted, a family of five reduced to two, their future stripped bare, unable to comfort each other, barely able to speak to each other.

  Back at the gutted apartment, the LA County Fire Department investigators went to work on determining the origin and cause of the fire. Because of the late hour and poor lighting, most of that work was put off until the following afternoon—a leisurely pace for the investigation that reflected no heightened sense of urgency, no suspicions that this was anything more than an accident, though by nature multiple fatalities always draw a greater level of scrutiny than fires with no loss of life. The investigators examined burn patterns, degrees of charring in walls and doors, and looked for the presence of gasoline, lighter fluid, or any other liquid accelerant an arsonist would use. They found none. Then they traced the likely path of the flames to determine where the fire started, which appeared to them to be beneath the living room windows. There they found a large V shape burned into the wall at floor level—the traditional cone-like burn pattern that reflects the shape of a heat and smoke plume as it expands upward, and that indicates a possible point of origin.

  In that same area they found a tangle of overtaxed extension cords and appliance plugs connecting an old TV, box fan, and VCR to the same outlet, with the cords winding around and possibly beneath the burned remains of boxes of unpacked clothes and other household items. The county fire investigators found no evidence of a short circuit, but thought that a process known as “resistance heating” could have started the blaze—too much current passing through a single cord, especially with objects piled on top of it, can create enough heat through electrical resistance to cause a fire. It’s rare, but it can happen—it had been singled out as a likely cause in the Parkses’ first, nonfatal fire a year earlier. From this same process on Sherman Way, flames could have spread to the new drapes the Parkses had just bought for the living room windows, then to
the boxes and piles of clothes and toys yet to be unpacked. It wouldn’t have taken long for the living room to become engulfed in flames while mother and children slept unawares, and the absence of smoke alarms would have sealed their fate. That, at least, was the initial theory when the two county fire department investigators reported to the Bell Police Department the evening after the fire with a tentative opinion that the cause could have been accidental and electrical.

  The next few days brought an outpouring of support for the Parks family from neighbors, coworkers, places of worship, local charities, firefighters, and strangers who read about the fire in the newspaper or learned of it on the evening TV news. Checks came in the mail, along with offers of places to live, offers of jobs, offers of prayers and sympathy. Soon there were thousands of dollars sent care of Paul Garman’s church, and more coming in every day.

  The Parkses sat for a television interview in which Jo Ann seemed barely able to hold it together as she spoke haltingly of her children’s transformation into “little angels up there.”

  “It’s just realizing that and letting go that’s so hard,” she said, her features screwed up as if to hold back tears. “I miss ’em.”

  Ron’s expressionless demeanor and words were in sharp contrast as he remarked that his children were now God’s responsibility. He looked directly into the camera and said, “I know from my past experience I need to get it out of my thoughts and try to think about it as little as possible.”

  This coolly expressed notion of putting your three dead children out of mind two days after they perished caught the attention of many observers at the time, though no one seemed to know just what to make of it. Only much later would the other part of his statement draw notice: In the singularly dreadful, life-crushing context of a parent losing his children, just what comparable “past experience” was Ron Parks talking about?

  Then the Bell Police Department received a phone call on the morning of April 12, three days after the fire and one day after the TV broadcast of Jo Ann and Ron. And everything changed.

  “That fire was no accident,” said the woman on the telephone. “Those children were murdered.”

  6

  Arson Expert

  Five days later, the big guns arrived.

  A pair of investigators from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s elite Arson/Explosives Detail drove to Bell to walk the Parks apartment and to take over the origin and cause investigation.

  Detective Ronald R. Ablott, a senior arson investigator and former homicide detective with the imposing physique of an NFL lineman, took the lead. He had been briefed on the allegations made by the caller, Kathy Dodge, who described herself as a close friend and former neighbor of Jo Ann Parks. Over time, Dodge said, she had grown concerned about Jo Ann’s behavior as a parent, and news of the fire had confirmed her worst fears. Dodge told the police Jo Ann didn’t really like having children, that her house and her kids were always filthy, that she couldn’t bear it when they cried, and that she boasted of dosing her youngest with cough syrup so she would fall asleep early and not wake in the night.

  “You should try it with your baby,” she recalled Jo Ann suggesting. And if that wasn’t enough to let her sleep in peace, Dodge added, “She always wears earplugs at night.”

  The most damning recollection Dodge offered, however, concerned the fire that had destroyed the Parkses’ previous home a year earlier. According to Dodge, Jo Ann once mused aloud, “If Ron had come home five minutes later, Jessica would be dead and we’d be rich.”

  The Bell police had been horrified. They went out to interview Dodge in person and found her convincing. The tenor of the case immediately transformed from accident review to homicide investigation, and the small department called the far larger, more experienced, and better-funded Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for help. The department’s arson unit had a long and storied history and reputation. While the county fire department operation was fine for routine investigations, the sheriff’s arson unit handled major fatalities. Detective Ablott drew the case.

  Coincidentally, Ablott had investigated that first fire a year earlier and concluded that it was accidental and electrical in origin—the same tentative finding reached in the Sherman Way fire by the fire department investigator. Now, in the wake of Dodge’s information about neglect, drugging, and pining for profit from the death of a child, the possibility arose that Ablott could have been duped in the first case and was actually looking at serial arson. Or if not, could an accidental first fire have inspired the Parkses to stage a similar event a year later, one that would allow them to cash in on the deaths that were avoided the first time around?

  With all this background information in mind, Ablott and his partner entered the charred apartment on Sherman Way for the first time on April 17, 1989, a week after the fire, accompanied by county fire investigator Franklin. The place had been completely overhauled—the term for what firefighters do after extinguishing the flames. They use axes and shovels to overturn ash, to break through walls, and to throw furniture and other possessions through windows into piles outside the house. Overhauling’s goal is to eliminate any smoldering embers beneath the debris or hidden in furniture, closets, or roofing. Otherwise, home fires can reignite hours later, threatening neighboring homes long after the fire engines and police cruisers leave the scene. But overhaul also destroys evidence and makes reconstruction and investigation infinitely harder. Floors are shoveled, raked, and swept; doors and walls and ceilings are broken down or cut open; nothing remains in place. Overhaul has become an inevitable part of firefighting, but when foul play is later suspected, it’s as if the crime scene had been struck by a tornado. Evidence is misplaced, destroyed, moved, and lost during overhaul—not just sometimes, but all the time.

  And yet, years later, Ablott could still recall the visceral reaction he and his partner experienced as they walked through the shell of an apartment, looking everywhere, each of them repeatedly saying aloud, “This isn’t right. Something’s not right here. This isn’t right.”

  They immediately had a gut feeling they were dealing with foul play, Ablott would later recall. Sometimes you just know. It’s a sort of gestalt many cops talk about when they first walk a crime scene or interview a suspect. But then the real work starts. The arson investigators next began to search the Parks home for evidence to support this impression—or, in theory, to disprove it.

  There would be no disproving this day, or in the days to come. Sure enough, in multiple rooms of the tiny apartment, they found evidence not of an accident, but of a crime.

  That extension cord and other wires in the living room, first thought to have accidentally overheated, appeared to Ablott to have been deliberately sabotaged. He concluded that the insulation on one part of an extension cord had been cut intentionally in order to create a short circuit, while other parts of the cords were wrapped in small portions of the living room draperies. He deemed these “modifications” to be capable of starting a fire—with other investigators and prosecutors eventually characterizing his discovery as a homemade incendiary device. When a background investigation later revealed that Ron Parks had been trained as an electrician while serving in the army and in Vietnam, it seemed the know-how to create a deliberate electrical fire had been in the home all along.

  Next Ablott found what he believed might be a second “point of origin” on the floor in the girls’ bedroom—signs of a separate fire that might have been ignited purposely by a human hand, rather than initiated by flames spreading from the living room. Multiple points of origin have long been considered a sure indication of arson. Accidental fires almost always start in one place. If true, this meant the girls’ bedroom must have been one of the first areas of the apartment to burn. Contradictory information from Officer Bruce and Tuxedo Man was dismissed or ignored; in the hierarchy of arson investigation, Ablott’s long years of expertise would trump the f
allible memories of mere eyewitnesses.

  Then came the most disturbing discovery yet: Ablott spotted faint burn patterns in Ronnie Jr.’s room that were not noted in the initial walk-through by the county fire investigator. There appeared to be protected areas in the carpet in front of the closet where Ronnie’s body was found—patterns Ablott felt showed that an object had been placed in front of the closet door. He later decided this had been a clothes hamper placed in front of the closet to barricade the child inside the burning apartment. This chilling evidence didn’t prove how the fire started, Ablott knew, but it did provide strong evidence of murder.

  He would later profess a reluctance to believe any parent could be so monstrous as to trap a child in order to burn him to death, causing him to delay making an official finding in the case. “But in the end, the evidence left me no choice.”

  Neither Ablott nor any other investigator seriously considered Ronnie Jr. as the cause of the blaze. After all, Jo Ann had angrily denied that her son Ronnie had anything to do with it, despite blurting a contrary sentiment immediately after running to the Robisons.

  Ron Parks was the prime suspect from the outset, even though his time card and coworkers seemed to provide a solid alibi for him at the time of the fire. Everything about him put investigators on edge. He kept asking for police reports to give to his lawyer. He gave that awful TV interview. Coworkers who attended the children’s funeral said he acted inappropriately and without displaying any signs of grief. Ablott later claimed that Ron and Jo Ann came to the gutted apartment on April 17 and acted guiltily, ignoring investigators assembled there, walking by without a word instead of questioning them about the cause of the fire. (Ron and Jo Ann denied this ever happened.) The Parkses had received about thirty thousand dollars in donations after the spate of publicity on TV and in the papers, and Ron’s reaction to the windfall also seemed revealing to investigators: He used part of the donations to buy a used convertible and tooled around town to show it off to his friends. Then he and his wife left town on a road trip to visit his family in St. Louis. Along the way, Ron mailed a postcard to the dairy stating that he and his wife were vacationing, followed by the message, “We’re having a great time, wish you were here.” His coworkers were shocked.