Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,148

house and Sherry-Ann for another woman in the midst of a contentious divorce, was the killer.

Police also considered Brannon the main suspect. The most intense six-week murder investigation in county history had revealed that it was Brannon, estranged and banned from the house on Father’s Day, who had called 9-1-1 for help on the morning of September 16, 1999. He told the dispatcher he’d found the bodies of his wife and older daughter and thought it was a murder-suicide, but then he saw that Cassidy was badly hurt, too.

He was cradling the four-year-old, dying from multiple stab wounds, in his arms.

“Sir. It’s gonna be OK, all right,” the dispatcher tried to calm him.

“It’s NOT gonna be OK,” he replied. “I’ve got two dead people here ’cause of me, all right. So just get somebody out here.” Three little words—the colloquial for “because of me”—had the whole county convinced Brannon was the killer, reporters wrote.

But as the crime lab did its work, all the physical evidence at the scene pointed to Larry Parks, a forty-seven-year-old landscaper who had recently dug the family’s pool. Parks’s DNA was found in a piece of skin under Sherry-Ann’s fingernail. Parks confessed that he was “mighty high” on cocaine and crystal meth that morning when, after a failed night of hunting hogs to sell for cash for more drugs, he knocked on Sherry-Ann’s door with the ruse that his truck had broken down, and forced his way in intending, he said, to rob her. When she fought back, he stabbed her ten or more times with a kitchen knife, went upstairs and stabbed Shelby to death in her bedroom, then dragged Cassidy downstairs and stabbed her in front of her dying mother.

Even though Parks pled guilty in exchange for three life terms—to avoid the death penalty—Bob Meyer said the case was destroying his family. He wanted Larry Parks dead. His wife had tried to enter the courtroom for Parks’s trial with a gun in her purse, an attempt at frontier justice all too common at POMC. His son-in-law, now exonerated, had plunged over the wooden railing to try to kill Parks. As deputies handcuffed him and took him away, his wife shouted toward the judge and Parks: “He killed our babies!”

Bob Meyer, boiling in anger and confusion and still suspecting his son-in-law, said he just wanted the truth: How and why could a human being do such things, and was it Parks, and why him, or his son-in-law? He asked for Walter to help. The Vidocq profiler studied the case file, and then flew to Tampa on Meyer’s request to sit in on Parks’s sixty-seven-minute confession to six attorneys and police officers. Afterward, Walter told Meyer that the killing, down to the last detail, was a perfect expression of Larry Parks’s history, personality, and character. Parks was “absolutely the killer and the only killer. He’s the purest, coldest power-assertive killer I’ve ever seen.”

The Meyers continued on their imperfect path of healing, but Walter remained concerned about Bob and Sherry. Passionate about music and baking, Sherry no longer found pleasure in her hobbies. She was dropping weight, growing sickly. Grief, Bob said, was literally killing her. Walter returned to Florida and walked in the door demanding one of Sherry’s “famous tangerine pies.” She said she didn’t feel like baking. “I want it now!” he insisted. She was out of tangerines, and the stores were closed. “Well, let’s go find some damn tangerines.” They drove country roads together until Walter spotted a tangerine tree behind a diner. The fruit was too high; laughing and scheming like schoolkids, they got a ladder. The pie was delicious. Late that night over Scotch, Bob confessed he was haunted by dreams of vengeance against Parks that sounded like something out of ancient Athens. “I’ll deny it if you tell anybody,” Meyer told the others, “but I want him blinded. I want Mr. Parks to live in prison not knowing what’s coming at him for the rest of his life.”

“As it happens, it’s not uncommon for one to have such feelings,” said Walter. “Indeed since the Greeks, it was deemed important to vent them in appropriate places—to the courts, to family, to friends, to one’s god—until we find our way again.” He left knowing there was still work to do.

Joy and Brian Kosisky also had a murder in the family that was ruining their lives. Joy’s brother had been murdered in Greenville, Pennsylvania. In gratitude for his work in helping them understand the