‘It Was Wonderful’

Kevin Lee Green returned home to his joyful, tearful family Saturday after spending 17 years in prison for a murder that authorities now say he did not commit.

“I knew I wasn’t guilty, and I tried to tell everyone that would listen I wasn’t, and it didn’t work,” Green told reporters.

Vindication came Thursday, when the Orange County legal system realized its error and granted freedom to the former Marine, who promptly flew to St. Louis to be with his mother and father, who had never wavered in their support.

“Oh my gosh, words can’t describe it. It was wonderful,” his mother, Sharen Green, told the Jefferson City News-Tribune on Saturday.

For 16 years, Kevin Green had told authorities “the same thing . . . that he was innocent,” said his father, Frank. “His story never wavered, yet nobody took the time to investigate.”

Relatives say it took law enforcement officials 17 years to figure out what Kevin Lee Green’s family said it always knew: He was an innocent man, wrongly convicted of brutally attacking his pregnant wife and causing the death of their unborn child.

The evidence had appeared overwhelming. Dianna Green was more than nine months pregnant in September 1979 when she was found bludgeoned in their Tustin apartment. She lost the unborn child, a girl. When she emerged from a coma a month later, she told police Green had attacked her because she refused to have sex.

Green’s conviction was sealed by her testimony and tests on semen found at the crime scene that did not rule Green out as a suspect, said his defense attorney, Ron Brower.

Now, authorities believe that suspected serial killer Gerald Parker, 41, of Santa Ana, is responsible for the attack on the pregnant woman and the brutal slayings of five other young women in Orange County in 1978 and 1979. Authorities say Parker confessed to some of the attacks, and newly discovered DNA evidence links him to the others. He is in Corcoran State Prison on unrelated charges.

Les Joyce, Kevin Green’s uncle in Jefferson City, Mo., spoke with his nephew by telephone and heard no bitterness in his voice. “He sounded very upbeat and he was very, very positive,” Joyce said.

Green later drove to St. Louis to pick up his third wife, Darlene Busby Green, whom he married while in prison. Dianna Green was his second wife. Green also has a daughter by his first marriage.