Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (46 page)

Even while engaged in this crime spree, the increasingly delusional Hickman felt infused with a renewed sense of religious vocation and resolved to reenroll in the Park College seminary. Tuition, however, was $1,500 (more than $18,000 in today’s money), far more than he was able to realize from his penny-ante robberies. To fulfill his holy mission, he came up with a diabolical plan.

P
ERRY
M. P
ARKER
was chief cashier at Ed’s former workplace, the First National Bank. Some historians of the case claim that Ed nursed a grudge against Parker for opposing his probation and denying him a second chance at his job. Others insist that Parker had no strong feelings about Ed’s sentence and had nothing to do with the bank’s refusal to rehire him. Indeed, Parker appears to have taken little notice of Hickman during the latter’s brief stint as a messenger boy.

Hickman, on the other hand, was keenly aware of certain facts about Parker. He had learned, for example, that the chief cashier had a substantial savings account at the bank. He also knew, from her frequent visits, that Parker was the doting father of a twelve-year-old daughter named Marian, a student at Mount Vernon Junior High School.

Shortly after noon on Thursday, December 15, 1927, a nicely groomed, well-spoken young man appeared at the attendance office of Mount Vernon Junior High and introduced himself to the secretary, Naomi Britten, as a friend and co-worker of Mr. Perry Parker. The banker, he explained, had been “gravely injured in a traffic accident” and wanted his daughter by his hospital bedside.

Unbeknownst to Hickman, there were two Parker girls in attendance: Marian and her sister Marjorie. When Mrs. Britten asked which daughter he meant, Hickman—though completely caught off guard—didn’t miss a beat. “The youngest,” he said. Since Marian and Marjorie were twins—another fact Hickman didn’t know—this was a peculiar answer. It was also odd that a critically injured father would summon only one of his girls to his side.

Still, the young man was so obviously trustworthy and the situation so urgent that the secretary dismissed whatever doubts she might have entertained. Assuming that Mr. Parker wanted Marian—the younger of his twins by a few minutes—she summoned the girl from her homeroom, where a Christmas party was under way. Repeating his story to the little girl, Hickman then led her outside to the dark blue Chrysler coupe he had stolen the previous month from Dr. Herbert Mantz and spirited her away.

W
HEN
M
ARJORIE
P
ARKER
returned home from school without her sister, her parents were perplexed, though not overly alarmed. It wasn’t until the first telegram arrived at around 4:45 p.m. that terror gripped the household. “Do positively nothing till you
receive special delivery letter,” read the ominous message. About two hours later, at a few minutes before 7:00 p.m., a second telegram was delivered to the door. “Marian secure,” it said. “Use good judgment. Interference with my plans dangerous.” It was signed “George Fox.”

Prostrated by the realization that her daughter had been kidnapped, Mrs. Parker was put under the care of a physician, while her anguished husband consulted with the authorities. The following morning—with police staking out the residence, patrol cars scouring the community, and descriptions of Marian’s abductor distributed to telegraph offices throughout the area—a special delivery letter arrived for Perry Parker. Across the top of the sheet the word “death” had been inscribed in pseudo-Greek letters with a triangular delta substituting for “D.” The letter itself read:

This time, the sender had signed with a different alias: “Fate.”

There was another sheet folded in the letter, a note in Marian’s handwriting. “Dear Daddy and Mother,” it read. “I wish I could come home. I think I’ll die if I have to be like this much longer. Won’t someone tell me why this had to happen to me. Daddy please do what this man tells you or he’ll kill me if you don’t.” Following Marian’s signature was a heart-wrenching P.S.: “Please Daddy, I want to come home tonight.”

Defying the advice of the police, Parker hurried to his bank and secured the money. That night, at around eight-thirty, he received a phone call. The menacing male voice on the other end instructed him to drive at once to a particular location
and not “bring any police if you want to see your child alive.” Parker set off immediately, unaware that he was being tailed by a pair of police cars. He waited at the designated spot for four hours, but his daughter’s abductor never appeared.

The following morning, Saturday, December 17, an infuriated letter arrived from the kidnapper, who had spotted the previous night’s police trap and laid the blame entirely on Parker’s shoulders. “Mr. Parker, I’m ashamed of you! I’m vexed and disgusted with you!” the writer raved. “You’re insane to betray your love for your daughter, to ignore my terms, to tamper with death. You remain reckless, with death fast on its way.… A man who betrays his own daughter is a second Judas Iscariot—many times more wicked than the worst modern criminal.”

Once again, the madman had enclosed a brief, plaintive note from his little captive:

A second special delivery envelope arrived later that day, this one containing two letters from the kidnapper. Though calmer in tone than the earlier message, they were no less threatening. “Please recover your senses,” the first began. “I want your money rather than kill your child. But so far you give me no other alternative … I’ll give you one more chance to come across and you will or Marian dies.” It closed by reminding Parker that he was dealing with no “common crook or kidnapper” but “with a master mind”—a boast picked up in the second letter, which began: “Fox is my name. Very sly, you know. Set no traps. I’ll watch for them.”

During the next few nerve-racking hours, the authorities agreed that it was best to conform to the kidnapper’s demands. Parker would be allowed to go by himself to the meeting place, pay the ransom, and get his daughter back alive. Whatever clues
he could glean from his contact with the kidnapper would, the law officers hoped, lead them to the criminal.

The climactic call finally came at around 7:45 p.m. The familiar voice instructed Parker to drive to the corner of Fifth Street and Manhattan Place in northwest Los Angeles. It took the banker only twenty minutes to arrive at the destination, a shadowy, residential neighborhood with little traffic and no pedestrians in sight.

He had been sitting in his parked car for only a few minutes when a blue Chrysler coupe, its headlights off, pulled up alongside him. The driver wore a handkerchief over his lower face, bandit-style. One of his hands was on the steering wheel. The other clutched a sawed-off shotgun. Beside him sat a huddled figure, tightly bundled in a blanket.

“You know what I’m here for,” said the masked man, aiming the gun at Parker. “No monkey business.”

“Can I see my little girl?” Parker asked.

“She’s asleep,” said the driver, indicating the swaddled figure in the passenger seat.

In the dim light, Parker could barely make out his daughter’s face. He thought she had been chloroformed. Passing the package of twenty-dollar bills across to the masked driver, Parker waited, as instructed, while the blue coupe edged forward about two hundred feet before coming to a halt. Suddenly the passenger door flew open and his daughter was shoved into the street. An instant later the coupe roared away into the night.

Leaping from his car, Parker rushed to the inert bundle lying in the gutter and scooped it in his arms. Wrapped in the blanket was Marian’s limbless and disemboweled torso, her face hideously rouged and her eyes sewn open to make it appear as if she were alive.

The following day, a stroller in nearby Elysian Park would come upon several newspaper-wrapped bundles containing Marion’s severed arms and legs. Later that afternoon, her viscera would be found in another neatly wrapped package in the tall grass of the park.

N
EWS OF THE
atrocity, trumpeted from every radio station on the West Coast and blazoned across the front pages, set off a panic among the residents of Los Angeles.
School attendance plummeted and playgrounds were deserted as terror-stricken parents kept their children at home. More than eight thousand local, state, and federal lawmen—assisted by untold numbers of outraged citizens—threw themselves into what quickly became the largest manhunt in California history. Rewards topping $60,000 (about $750,000 in today’s money) were posted for the killer’s arrest. Scores of suspects were hauled in for questioning. One young man who matched a published description of the kidnapper was arrested seven times in eight hours by different policemen. Another even less fortunate look-alike was nearly torn to pieces by a mob and had to be rescued by police. Tossed into jail, he was set upon by other inmates and found hanging in his cell the next morning.

In the meantime, the autopsy on the victim’s butchered remains had turned up a macabre clue. Stuffed inside Marian’s hollowed-out abdominal cavity was a bloody towel with a label from the Bellevue Arms apartments, off Sunset Boulevard on the fringe of downtown L.A. Descending on the building, police learned that a young man calling himself Donald Evans had occupied rooms there for the previous three weeks. A search of the apartment turned up, among other incriminating evidence, scraps of human flesh in the bathtub drain and a milk bottle with fingerprints matching those on the letters sent to Perry Parker.

By then, Hickman was long gone. After ditching the Chrysler coupe, he had car-jacked an olive-green Hudson sedan and headed north. On the afternoon of Thursday, December 22, a week after the abduction, his vehicle was spotted by sharp-eyed police officers in Pendleton, Oregon, and pulled over after a high-speed chase. There was a sawed-off shotgun on the seat beside the driver and a suitcase stuffed with the ransom money in back. Taken into custody, Hickman reportedly wondered aloud if he “would be as famous as Leopold and Loeb.”

E
XTRADITED TO
C
ALIFORNIA
, Hickman made a full confession on the train carrying him back to L.A. Marian, he explained, “did not hesitate” to accompany him when he showed up at her school with the trumped-up story about her father’s accident. It was not until he had driven her out to Glendale that he “stopped the car on a quiet street” and “told her that she had been deceived.” Explaining that he “would have to hold her for a day or two and that her father would have to give me $1500,” he proceeded to blindfold the girl and bind her hand and foot.

“She did not cry out or even attempt to fight,” said Hickman. “She pleaded with
me not to blindfold her or tie her and promised not to move or say anything. I believed her and took off the blindfold and the bandages from her arms and ankles.”

As Hickman headed back to Los Angeles, Marian “sat right up in the seat beside me and talked in a friendly manner.” By evening, they were having such a “jolly time” that—after sending out the initial warning letters and telegrams to Perry Parker—Hickman took his little captive to the movies. “Marian enjoyed the picture and we both laughed very much during the vaudeville which followed the picture.”