Ted Bundy: Rarer Kathy Parks Case Aspects

by Erin Banks

When, in March 1975, another skull was discovered up on Taylor Mountain, Keppel believed he noticed it immediately, having studied the dental records and shapes of the missing girls’ faces and skulls. He was right, it was Kathy Parks’.

Parks was born in Lakewood, Ohio on February 27, 1954 to Elizabeth Madge Wilks Parks and Charles E. Parks, after which the family relocated to Lafayette, California. She had been born prematurely, weighing only two pounds and nine ounces. She was placed in an incubator, where she only slowly gained weight and grew healthier. You may have noticed Parks’ slightly elongated face/skull, and this unique physical trait is owed to the fact that she had lain on her side during those early weeks of life in the incubator. As noted in the book “The Deliberate Stranger” by author Richard Larsen, “As a young woman, the slenderness of her face gave Kathy a rather dramatic look of fragile beauty.”

Kathy Parks’ mother Elizabeth Madge Wilks Parks (via Jessica J. Jurewicz)

For her 20th birthday, her dad, Charles E. Parks, Jr. (who soon after had a heart attack, a fact that troubled Parks greatly in the time before her murder) wrote her a letter stating that he couldn’t believe twenty years had gone by since he’d looked at her in an incubator at Lakewood Hospital in Cleveland. He urged her to take “practical courses” that would assure her financial independence. An interesting notion, was this a covert swipe at Chris McPhee who intended to marry Parks but the relationship went a bit up and down occasionally? At the time of her disappearance, Parks was in a dreary mood, and had reportedly intended to break up with McPhee, yet still wrote a letter postmarked May 7, 1974 to him, :

“Dear Christy,
I got your letter today. I often wonder what you think of me, being so far away. I had a usual day today, somewhat. Ma reports my Aunt Mary opened her eyes a few days ago, and actually looked human again for the first time since she got sick. That’s a relief. Sharon called from my folk’s house this morning (Ma is still in Alabama). Dad had a heart attack last night around midnight. Evidently, he was conscious enough to call the doctor; get Sue out of bed to take him to the hospital. He’s in the intensive care section for cardiac patients now. Sharon says he’s O.K. now. I’m shook up about it, and I know dad must be, also. I hope he changes his lifestyle after this. I’m feeling down right now, due to a combination of things, I suppose. To tell you the truth, I don’t even feel like finishing this letter. I think I’ll go walk around outside a while. I’m sorry this is such a bum letter. I really am. But, after all, everyone has their ups and downs. This day has especially had its share of bad news. Well – I’m looking forward to seeing you – very much. When you come, please put your arms around me and make me feel like everything is O.K. I really miss you. I’m needing the comfort of your presence now.
I love you,
Kathy”

Parks had also been profoundly moved by the aforementioned letter from her father, as they had rare interactions, and wrote a lengthy and very loving letter in reply, suggesting to her dad to start over after they’d had some friction due to her rebellious teen phase.
This was the last letter the Parkses would ever receive from their daughter, for a few weeks later, she went missing and her fate remained a mystery for almost another year.

Charles Parks’ plea to the Corvallis Gazette from June 18, 1974, and related newspaper entries

Some wondered whether Bundy approached Parks by offering to lend her an ear, as she appeared dejected and vulnerable to most everyone who knew her. Whom easier to confide in than a kind stranger who may have mentioned in the course of their brief conversation that he had been studying psychology? Bundy, though only “speculating” about what the person who killed Parks, and whom he denied being, shared with author Stephen Michaud that,

“She could have been sitting in a library studying. She could have been sitting in a cafeteria studying. She was supposed to be depressed or lonely or something.
She might seek out company just to take her mind off her problem or loneliness – depression. Let’s say she was having a snack in the cafeteria and (he) just sat down next to her and began talking, representing himself to be a student there, and suggested they go out somewhere to get a bite to eat or to get a drink. Either he was convincing enough or she was depressed enough to accept his invitation.”

A distraction from her low mood and fatalistic thoughts appears to make sense, because, according to the “This Interests Me” page,

“Psychiatric social worker Georgine Thompson said that 20-year-old [Roberta Kathleen Parks] was unpredictable and hesitant to engage with therapy. She also stated her belief that Kathy was ‘capable of running off’ and that she may have been having suicidal tendencies.
Dr. Peter Winters told investigators that Parks was angry, nervous, emotional, depressed and at risk of suicide.
Other doctors who treated Roberta also echoed similar sentiments. One even recalled how she had talked about “getting away” at one point.”

And a friend of Parks’ said that she was not only extremely hesitant about talking to strangers but also did not feel comfortable confiding in her personal friends. Although Dielenberg writes in his “A Visual Timeline” book that one Carl Hoffman, a grad student in his fifties, had managed to get Parks to open up to him. Dielenberg’s theory appears to be that Bundy made for an even better person to confide in because he was younger and “suave.”
Either way, it appears as though Bundy had not employed the injury ruse in Parks’ case either and instead posed as a regular student.

There’s yet one more thing to ponder, and that is if Bundy knew (of) Parks. As previously mentioned on this blog, Bundy stalked Karen Sparks, Lynda Ann Healy, could have seen Brenda Ball and Denise Naslund at the Flame tavern before their disappearances, may even have met or seen Georgann Hawkins when the Daffodil princesses visited the politicians for lunch in Olympia while Bundy was there in 1972, and they did take a psychology class together around that time as well. And then there is a passage that is doubly interesting, though very brief, in Kevin M. Sullivan’s “Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries” which states that his good friend Terry Storwick lived in student housing in Ellensburg, where he habitually went jogging with victim Susan Rancourt. But not only that, Bundy, a source states, went with her through Corvallis and “looked around campus.” It is likely a coincidence that he was there, and nothing more cements the fact he may have seen Parks there. But when Hugh Aynesworth spoke with Ted Bundy for his book, “Conversations with a Killer,” they had this exchange:

“HA: […] Okay, let’s dig in a bit more, mixing some fact, logic, and a bit of amateur
psychology. Were most of these girls watched for long periods of time before the killer got the nerve up to hit?
TB: Well, one wonders how long someone watched that girl in Corvallis, Oregon. Or the girl over in Ellensburg (in eastern Washington). And I was never gone for long periods of time. Uh, if we’d consult our model, our personality profile, we’d recall that this person would avoid long periods of observation because it would increase the chances of an eyewitness confrontation. And that, we would expect, uh, that the abduction would occur, more, uh, primarily as a result of opportunity.
HA: Except, perhaps, at the beginning – when he followed the girl home, saw where she lived
and later returned to her house, and. . .
TB: Oh, yeah, yeah.
HA: But that was way back in the beginning.
TB: Well, we’re talking about opportunity also. There may not have been that many opportunities right away.”

Although Bundy, while in “speculation mode,” claims that the killer would not want to excessively stalk his victims, there are many factors that point to the contrary with various of the murdered women. This cat-and-mouse game reminds of the two accounts he gave about Lake Sammamish. In one he suggested the killer may have taken Denise Naslund back to a still living Janice Ott, so she could watch as he assaulted the latest addition to his victim pool. Yet in another instance, he claims what has always been my pet theory, that he accidentally killed the petite and fragile Ott too soon and had to return to Lake Sam to satisfy his Entity urge to the full extent. Bundy always mixed truth with lies or lied with the truth, and that is what makes it both so compelling and so difficult to determine what precisely happened in some cases.

One of the stranger aspects of the Bundy cases was that at times law enforcement were so desperate that they resorted to unconventional measures to try and find the missing girls.
Bill Harris, campus security chief at OSU in Corvallis, had already spoken to Paul Barclift who investigated Donna Gail Manson’s disappearance. As some of the other investigators and campus security, several of them believed that they were looking at the same suspect.
Benton County Sheriff John Dolan suggested to Harris to try the infamous “water witch” to locate Kathy Parks. Charlie Bowman, an elderly man from Monmouth, OR insisted on being called a diviner, rather than a water witch, and he allegedly had a knack for finding underground water. In the course of his “dowsing” he had occasionally discovered the one or other dead body, and he had allegedly also successfully found the body of a dead child when working with police.
Bowman requested something that Parks had worn, making clear that no one else could have worn these clothes so as not to throw off his sixth sense. Harris brought Bowman a boot, and the latter got to work with the words, “Ain’t no magic in it.” Bowman believed that his body contained its own unique chemistry and sensitivity to magnetic impulses.

On the first day of divining, Bowman and the officers stayed in Corvallis, then headed East towards I-5. Although the officers stated they were leaning towards the theory that Kathy might have gone or been taken back south to her native California, Bowman maintained that she was “way up north.”
Chris McPhee, Kathy’s boyfriend had traveled all the way up to Oregon from Louisiana to aid in the search on the next day. Bowman took the group to Portland, then further east and north, until they had reached Washington State. When they reached the Cascade Mountains, Bowman said, “Nope. Nope. It’s all wrong,” sharing with the others that his impulses were being confused because he could sense another girl had once worn Parks’ boot.
Bowman went back to Washington without law enforcement, but his trusted friend Shorty Fisher, a day later, but yet again, they lost the vibrations. On his way to Washington, he’d picked up several beer bottles and a can of sardines which he intimated “gave off Kathy vibes.”

Now, there are two significant tidbits in relation to Bowman possibly being more or less of a deliberate con artist. The most pressing one is the fact that Parks’ older sister Sharon Kaehler and her husband Paul shared with investigators and news outlets (Gazette Times) that Parks had expressed her desire to go to the World’s State Fair in Spokane, Washington – far up north! And in another interesting twist of events, Parks’ boyfriend had stated that when the couple had visited his aunt in Canada, Kathy had grown rather fond of her. He insinuated she could have gone to visit her.
So Bowman very likely received this information from law enforcement or read about it in the paper, consequentially acting as though he had certain psychic powers, as people who claim to have supernatural connections are wont to do.
Furthermore, dowsing and divining are regarded as pseudo-science. Experiments have shown that this only works in case the diviner possessed some unconscious knowledge of where their target is located. They were subconsciously using clues from vegetation, geography or temperature. During other experiments, the diviner was asked to locate water running through one of ten pipes laid underground, but under these types of controlled circumstances, the diviners/dowsers did not succeed in such a manner that it could be regarded as more than random successes. The motion of dowsing rods is attributed to the so-called ideomotor effect, where a thought or mental image brings about the reaction.

Locations of the remains by OddStops (link to page at the bottom); Kathy Parks’ skull via KCA

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Sources
Kevin M. Sullivan, Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries; The Encyclopedia of the Ted Bundy Murders; Richard Larsen, The Deliberate Stranger; Stephen Michaud & Hugh Aynesworth, Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer; Robert A. Dielenberg, Ted Bundy: A Visual Timeline; Thisinterestsme

Photos
Thisinterestsme, Oddstops.com, Parks family archives, Classmates.com, King County Archives, Newspaper.com, Findagrave.com, Weremember/Ancestry, Erin Banks, Jessica J. Jurewicz

Thank you to Judy D’Aversa Taver for delivering the passage from “Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries.”