Another Bizarre Twist in a Macabre Tale

Dianna D’Aiello is on the phone. She sounds exhausted. She’s been up since 6 o’clock Thursday morning. “I tossed and turned all night,” she says. That was before she, her mother and an aunt drove together to the Orange County Superior Court building in Santa Ana, where D’Aiello took a seat in Department 40 and spoke of the man who raped her, beat her into a coma and killed her unborn daughter.

Or of the men who did.

“Why do you think Kevin wasn’t there today?” she asks, referring to her ex-husband, Kevin Lee Green.

She means the man who did 16 years in prison for second-degree murder, then was freed after another man confessed to the crime.

That man was Gerald Parker, 43, a serial killer who Thursday was sentenced to death.

D’Aiello does now believe Parker attacked her. But she also believes Green attacked her first.

“I really wish Kevin would have been here today, so he could hear what was said. I guess I’ll see him in April.”

Green’s side will be heard then. He is suing his ex-wife, attempting to overturn a wrongful-death civil judgment against him. They haven’t spoken since his release from prison in 1996.

“I thought he’d show up,” D’Aiello says, unconvinced of his innocence. “Especially with all the cameras there.”

*

Many years ago in Paris, there was a theater called the Grand Guignol, where dramatic productions of a particularly gruesome nature were staged. A modern-day one has just played out another act in Santa Ana.

More than 20 years have passed since Gerald Parker went on an Orange County killing rampage. He abused substances, then he abused women. Two of them--Debra Lynn Senior and Sandra Kay Fry--were only 17. Kimberly Rawlins was 21. Debora Jean Kennedy was 24. Marolyn Kay Carleton was 31. Parker murdered all of them. In some cases, he used a 2-by-4 board or a hammer.

In 1980, Parker kidnapped a 13-year-old and raped her. He was caught and convicted.

Orange County’s serial killings stopped.

No one at that time, however, had connected Parker to a September 1979 assault on Dianna D’Aiello Green, who was 9 1/2 months pregnant and overdue with the already named Chantel Marie on the night someone--possibly her husband, definitely Parker, she thinks both--left Dianna and her baby to die.

One way or the other, it’s a tale as macabre as something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

Either a woman falsely accused her own husband of the death of their child, condemning him to 16 years behind bars.

Or that woman was attacked twice in the same night, first by a man she married, then by a murderous madman.

“I was only 20 years old when I began a year of horrific events,” D’Aiello told a hushed courtroom, while Parker sat nearby in shackles.

“I was a whole person then.”

She wasn’t when that 1979 night was over. Her fetus was stillborn. And D’Aiello spent weeks in a coma.

Nor is she whole now.

Making a victim impact statement, to influence a guilty defendant’s sentencing, D’Aiello testified to Judge Francisco P. Briseno: “I’m deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other. I lost my sense of smell. I have a plate in my head. When I came out of the coma, I was aphasic. I had to learn to talk and write again.”

Out of her trance, D’Aiello had to talk about that fateful night. She testified in 1980 that Green--angry at his wife saying no to sex--brutally beat and raped her. Her husband was found guilty and given 15 years to life. While in prison, he also lost a civil judgment by default.

Sixteen years later, DNA evidence linked Parker to the rape. Green was set free. He lives now in Missouri, exonerated by a judge as “factually innocent.”

D’Aiello still thinks he did it.

Memory lapses notwithstanding, she contends that Parker “waited [outside] while my husband beat me and left me for dead. Then Mr. Parker entered my home, beat me and raped me and left me for dead again.”

*

A jury needed scarcely two hours Oct. 20 to convict Parker of the crime--a crime for which someone else paid a 16-year price.

Parker said nothing at being condemned.

In jail not long ago, he had a visitor--Dianna D’Aiello. She claims he confessed everything, including having waited for Green to leave.

“When I spoke today,” D’Aiello says on the phone, a few hours after testifying, “I looked at Parker and his lawyer. They knew. They knew.”

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com