Freed O.C. Man Goes Home to Tearful Reunion

It was a joyous, tearful family reunion as Kevin Lee Green returned home Saturday after spending 17 years in custody for an Orange County murder that police now say he didn’t 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 television reporters.

Vindication came Thursday, when a horrified legal system realized its error and granted freedom to the former Marine, who promptly flew to St. Louis to hug his mother, father and sister. His parents provided nothing but support.

“He told them the same thing for 16 years; that he was innocent,” said Frank Green, Kevin Green’s father. “His story never wavered yet nobody took the time to investigate.”

Frank Green, a retired master sergeant in the Marine Corps and a Vietnam veteran with more than 20 years of service, compared his son’s homecoming to the return of American POWs from the Vietnam War.

“As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it was: my son returned as a POW,” Frank Green, 61, said Saturday. “I have such distrust of the legal system now because of what it did to my son. My son may not express this, but I’ve got ill feelings for everybody who was involved in this case.”

Since his son’s return to Missouri, the family has been flooded with phone calls from the media requesting interviews with Kevin, Frank Green said.

After breakfast Saturday with his parents in Holts Summit, just east of Jefferson City, relatives said Green drove to St. Louis to pick up his third wife, Darlene Busby Green, whom Green married a decade ago while in prison.

He also visited his sister, Karen Green Belcher, who lives in St. Louis and was stalked and shot by an off-duty Jefferson City police officer 11 years ago. Green also spent time with a teenage daughter by his first marriage.

“Right now he’s trying to get reacquainted with family and friends,” Frank Green said. “Presently, as we are speaking, he is out with his daughter, who just got her driver’s license and is driving her dad around.”

Wearing a yellow shirt emblazoned with the Marine Corps globe and anchor, Frank Green said his son’s release did not temper the bitterness he feels toward the justice system.

The pair had visited his son numerous times during his incarceration, including every parole hearing.

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

“We’ve always looked forward to Kevin being released, we always knew he was innocent,” said Les Joyce, Kevin Green’s uncle in Jefferson City. The two spoke by telephone and made plans to see each other soon. There was not a hint of bitterness in his voice, Joyce said.

“He sounded very upbeat and he was very, very positive,” Joyce said.

Kevin Green also spent the day in amazement at the changes that have taken place since he was incarcerated, said Ron Brower, Green’s defense attorney.

“He made a comment that he can’t believe the new technology he was experiencing--a car phone,” laughed Brower. “He was marveling at it. He was really gleeful about it.”

Admittedly, the evidence against Kevin Green appeared overwhelming. Dianna Green was more than nine months pregnant in September 1979 when she was found brutally bludgeoned in their Tustin apartment. She lost the full-term fetus, a girl. When she emerged from a coma one month later, she told police Green had attacked her because she refused to have sex.

Green’s conviction was sealed by the powerful testimony of a grief-stricken young wife and tests on semen found at the crime scene that did not rule Green out as a suspect, Brower said.

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.

Joyce said Saturday that those who knew Green and watched him grow up never believed he was capable of a crime. Green was a military brat of sorts who was born in San Diego and lived in many places--including Hawaii--but still managed to become involved in typical childhood activities like the Cub Scouts. Green’s mother was a troop leader.

“You know who he is and how he was brought up, and because of this, you knew he was innocent,” Joyce explained. “He was brought up to tell the truth. He knows to be honest.”

One of Green’s biggest influences was his father, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam. The family moved to Missouri after the father retired more than 20 years ago, and Kevin Green would go on to graduate from Jefferson City High School in 1976 and follow in his father’s footsteps to become a Marine.

And if Frank Green taught his son anything, it was to tell the truth. Always.

Kevin Green kept to the truth and refused to admit guilt in his wife’s attack. But a lack of remorse is not looked upon kindly by the parole board, which twice refused to grant his release.

But he had no choice. Lying to the parole board was not an option.

“He knows to be honest, so you’ve got to understand that when he kept telling the parole board he was innocent, it was because in his eyes, he was telling the truth,” Joyce said.

In the end, however, Frank Green was proven right.

“His father always taught him, ‘You tell the truth and things will work out,”’ Joyce said.

While Kevin Green is enjoying his freedom, Gerald Parker might be looking at spending the rest of his life in prison--or facing the death penalty--if found guilty of the charges he will face when he is brought to Orange County. A man with a lengthy criminal history, Parker is currently housed in Corcoran State Prison on unrelated charges.

Orange County Public Defender Ronald Y. Butler said Saturday that even though Parker is said to have confessed, there are numerous legal defenses that can be used to fight the charges, including the question of whether evidence in the slayings has been properly preserved.

“Certainly, the preservation of any evidence is a clearly a major issue,” Butler said. “And we have to look at the circumstances of the statements that Mr. Parker’s allegedly making.”

The stunning developments have opened new wounds for victims of the spree of killings that terrorized Orange County in 1978 and 1979. The similarities were eerie: An assailant would creep in and bludgeon his victims, sometimes sexually assaulting them or taking items from their homes.

Several of the murders and assaults remain unsolved, however, as authorities comb over the old cases for a possible link to Parker.

Orange County resident Kim Whitecotton finds herself poring over the news reports, wondering if Parker could be the person who broke into her Costa Mesa apartment in May 1979. She remembers nothing before awakening to the painful blows that shattered both cheekbones and her nose and nearly severed her ear.

Whitecotton fought back, got away from her assailant and began screaming, frightening him off. But in the darkness, she never got a look at the man who remained silent throughout the attack.

If Parker is the man who attacked her, Whitecotton says she is happy he is behind bars. But she still feels robbed of justice because the statute of limitations has long since expired on the nonfatal attack. There is no such statute in murder cases.

“If it is him, and even if he is sent away for life or given the death penalty, I’ll never feel closure,” she said.