New Suspect Charged as Man Held 17 Years Is Freed

Prosecutors filed murder charges Friday against a former Marine in six slayings, including one case in which another man was wrongfully sent to prison for 17 years.

Investigators identified Gerald Parker, a state prison inmate, as the elusive “bludgeon killer” after a new system of genetic testing helped link him to attacks on young women who were raped and bashed in their Orange County homes in the late 1970s.

Police and Navy officials said they are investigating whether Parker may be responsible for even more killings across the country. He spent 7 1/2 years in the Marine Corps, including stints at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station as well as at bases in North Carolina, Alaska and Mississippi, before he was convicted of raping a 13-year-old girl in 1980.

That was the same year another Marine, Kevin Lee Green of Tustin, then 22, was convicted of second-degree murder in a bludgeoning attack on his pregnant 21-year-old wife that led to the death of their unborn baby.

Parker, who could face the death penalty if convicted, confessed last Friday to the attack on Green’s wife, police sources say. Green, now 38, was freed from custody Thursday as a judge and prosecutors apologized for the mistake.

“You can never get back those 17 years. All of us obviously feel very bad that this took place,” said Orange County Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi. “Our justice system is not 100% perfect, but it’s as close to perfect as you’re going to find anywhere in this world.”

The Green case blew open this year while investigators from Tustin and Costa Mesa were working on a cluster of unsolved murder cases--the killings and sexual assaults of women ages 17 to 31 that had baffled them for years.

The detectives had learned of a new state database that can match DNA from convicted criminals to evidence from unsolved crimes, and they lobbied the Orange County sheriff’s crime lab to run their cases.

Investigators said they made five matches--all to Parker--with the help of new technology that allowed them to compare evidence such as body fluid stains from crime scenes to the database records of 34,000 convicted felons.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department had just begun using the new system--known as the short tandem repeats technique--in March. The lab is one of three in the nation capable of such a task, Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates said.

“We were completely amazed,” said Frank Fitzpatrick, the sheriff’s forensic science director. “Not only did we get a hit in the database, but it was linked to all of these cases.”

That led the detectives June 14 to travel to the Avenal State Prison in the Central Valley, where Parker was imprisoned for a parole violation and getting ready for release next month. During interviews, he admitted attacking Green’s wife, Dianna D’Aiello, and several killings, police said.

D’Aiello was comatose for a month after the 1979 attack and suffered significant memory loss, but testified against her husband. Jurors said Green’s alibi--that he was out getting a cheeseburger at the time of the attack--”just wasn’t believable.”

Green had maintained his innocence over the years, and had been a model inmate, most recently at the Correctional Training Facility at Soledad, where he worked as a warden’s secretary and coordinated the prison Christmas party.

Ronald G. Brower, Green’s attorney, said his client left the state immediately after Thursday’s court hearing and flew home to the Midwest to be reunited with his family.

Brower said his client is still “in a fog.”

“He didn’t understand what was happening [at Thursday’s court hearing]. I explained to him that he was going to be a free man,” Brower said. “He asked me, ‘Do you think it will be all right if I leave the state?’ ”

After the judge told him he was free to leave, Brower said that Green “just stood up and turned in circles.”

“He is not resentful. He believes everybody proceeded in good faith,” Brower said, adding that his client had no plans to sue for damages resulting from his wrongful conviction.

At a news conference Friday, police and prosecutors announced the new charges against Parker and revealed some of the soul-searching that has gone on since they realized that Green had been the victim of a terrible mistake.

Gates said that when he learned about the Green case, “I felt happy and I felt terrible. My stomach went ‘boom.’ My first words were, ‘I’m glad it wasn’t my brother.’ ”

But based on the case they had at the time and with assurances by experts that D’Aiello was a credible witness, Capizzi said police and prosecutors acted correctly.

Even back in 1979, investigators believed that the attack on D’Aiello may have been linked to five murders in Orange County. But eventually, Tustin detectives shifted their focus to Green.

Meanwhile, D’Aiello and her family remained stunned by the turn of events Friday. The 36-year-old woman remained secluded with her mother in Riverside.

“I’m going through it,” D’Aiello said, declining further comment.

Her father, Jerome D’Aiello, said his daughter was going “to have to deal with it” and accept that someone else now has been charged with the crime.

“From what they say, there was a palm print and DNA,” the father said. “My daughter still has no recollection of any other face [besides Green’s]. You have to understand, she was in a very traumatic state at the time. The beating she saw could have been something that happened before.”

While Green was incarcerated, he attempted to have a DNA test performed on the semen that investigators collected as evidence in the case, Brower said. However, he said, Green lacked the money needed to pay for the expensive forensic tests.

The attorney said he was “frankly surprised” that crucial evidence from the attack on D’Aiello had not been destroyed or discarded by authorities. It would have been impossible to prove Green’s innocence without this evidence.

Brower said that Green’s constant refusal to confess to the crime hurt him at parole hearings because officials viewed him as unrepentant.

“He continued to assert his innocence in a series of parole hearings. . . . [Deputy Dist. Atty.] Mel Jensen felt particularly bad because he had gone to several hearings and urged that Green be kept in prison,” Brower said.

According to Brower, Green passed a defense-administered polygraph test before the trial.

Although D’Aiello’s testimony was instrumental in convicting Green, he is not resentful of his former wife, Brower said. The fact that she identified Green, who is white, and not Parker, who is African American, as her attacker “points to the extent of the wife’s brain damage,” he added.

“I think it was a good faith effort on her part [when she testified that Green attacked her]. I don’t think she made it up,” Brower said.

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Anna Cekola, Tina Nguyen, Greg Hernandez and Rene Lynch.