and then squeezed off a third round. This time he made sure that Mary was dead.
McGougan claims that he called the house sometime between 8:30 and 11:00 P.M. but got no answer, so he decided to go to sleep and try again in the morning. Floyd called from the hospital after Mary and Brenda failed to show up to visit him. His call was the one that did get answered.
Sergeant John Brown, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department (CGPD) said Floyd told him that when Brenda answered the phone, he sensed that something was wrong right away.
“Floyd said that Brenda’s voice was shaky, nervous, and she spoke with too much formality,” Brown related.
Police speculate that during the time of the phone conversation, Brenda was already tied up and probably had a gun pointed at her head. Brenda told her father that they would not be able to visit him then because she was too tired. Floyd remembered asking, “Where is your mother?”
Without answering the question, Brenda told her father that she loved him. Floyd heard a click, which was replaced by the ominous sound of a dial tone.
As the hours passed on Saturday, and then through the entire day of Sunday, Floyd became increasingly worried that he had not heard from his wife and daughter. He called the house several times after they had not turned up to visit or even make contact with him. Brenda’s boyfriend, Richard, called the house periodically throughout those two days without response. Floyd and Mary’s other daughter, Karen, also called multiple times, and she became worried when nobody answered. She finally contacted her mother’s neighbor and asked her to check in on Mary.
Mary’s neighbor walked next door and found that the front door to the Parsh house was slightly ajar, with a set of keys still dangling from the lock. An overpowering stench of death filled the small house. The neighbor found two bodies inside, which were later identified as Mary and Brenda Parsh. A call to the police department was made.
“We received a call from a concerned neighbor very early on Monday, August fifteenth, when she noticed that there was a set of keys still inserted into the lock of Mary Parsh’s front door, but nobody answered to repeated knocks on the door or ringing the doorbell,” said Henry Gerecke. He was the Cape Girardeau police chief at the time.
Floyd was recovering from open-heart surgery and had been told not to become overly stressed emotionally just before he received the news that his wife and daughter had been murdered while he was in the hospital. A cardiologist, Dr. C. R. Talbert Jr., was not the physician who was treating Floyd at Southeast Missouri Hospital, but he was working there that day and was left with the unpleasant task of delivering the news.
“Mr. Parsh sat there quietly and took it in. He was obviously very upset, but he held it all inside. I believe that he already knew,” Talbert said.
It was early Monday morning when Brenda’s sister, Karen, called McGougan’s father to tell him what happened, and, in turn, Richard’s father called him to relay the news. Richard said that he was devastated and became almost dysfunctional. He ended up moving back to his parents’ house while he struggled to deal with the circumstances.
When Chief Gerecke and his team arrived at the scene, they weren’t prepared for what they were about to find when they entered the Parsh home. Just inside the front door were several suitcases, which were identified as belonging to Brenda.
“We entered the house and I remember that the stench was intolerable. I immediately opened up lines with the press and asked them to film the crime scene because we didn’t have the capability to do that. They were gracious enough to do it for us and give us the tape without exposing it to the public,” Gerecke said.
The victims were found naked and lying side by side on a bed with their hands tied behind their backs. Their clothes were neatly folded on a nearby chair. Their bodies were extremely bloated, black, and full of flies and maggots. During the August heat wave, nearly three days of exposure to extreme temperatures accelerated the decomposition process so rapidly that their insides began to turn to gelatin and their tongues protruded through swollen lips.
“I spent thirty-five years in the military and studied criminal justice, but I never encountered anything like this. I’m not ashamed to admit that I was out of my element and needed help,” Gerecke said.
Evidence technician Ron Thomas took over the crime scene to collect evidence, while Gerecke, Brown, and other police officers canvassed the neighborhood to gather any information they could.
Brown said that they questioned everyone in the neighborhood but didn’t receive much useful information other than the fact that nobody had seen Mary in a couple of days. They were told that Mary expected a visit from her daughter, which was helpful in identifying Brenda’s body.
On several occasions throughout the day, Brown returned to the Parsh home to see if any new developments were discovered by the evidence technician.
“I can look at just about anything, and have seen hundreds of autopsies, but this was unbearable. The smell was intolerable. I would make it as far as the middle of the living room, and then I’d have to turn around and go out to the front yard to throw up. This happened several times, until there was nothing left to come up except dry heaves,” Brown recalled.
When Brown was finally able to make his way into the back bedroom, Thomas, the evidence technician, was standing over the bodies and eating a sandwich without any difficulty at all.
It was discovered that a bedroom window was broken and then left open. It was determined that this was the intruder’s point of entry into the house. A faint partial print of a tennis shoe on the hardwood floor of the bedroom was captured on film by cross-lighting the dust on the floor. Both bodies had their hands tied behind their backs with an electrical cord, which was cut from a clock in the bedroom. An electrical burn on the cord indicated that the clock must have been plugged in when the cord was cut. Investigators later duplicated this procedure and discovered that when cutting a cord from a plugged-in appliance with a pocketknife, an arc would burn a mark into the blade. This was a minor detail, but if a suspect was found possessing a knife with a similar mark, it might be able to be used as evidence.
Mary’s keys were still in the front door. Saturday’s mail was still in the mailbox. The Friday newspaper was inside the house, but the Sunday paper was still outside. The contents of Mary’s purse were dumped on the living-room couch so the intruder probably stole anything valuable that he might have found in it, but no other jewelry in the house or on the bodies was disturbed, indicating that robbery was probably not the killer’s motivation. The hall light was left on. A large floor fan situated in the doorway of the bedroom was left on, and the airflow was directed toward the bed, where Mary and Brenda were found.
There was a large amount of blood on the bedding beneath the heads of each of the victims, and a large amount of blood had soaked through to form pools of dry blood on the floor beneath the bed. There was a single bullet wound in the back of each victim’s head. An additional bullet was found, which had penetrated the pillowcase beside Mary’s head. Ligature marks were also burned around Brenda’s neck, as if she had been strangled at some point during the assault.
After Thomas completed his investigation, the bodies were removed and transported to the Ford and Sons Funeral Home for autopsy.
One neighbor, Mr. Blattel, who lived about two blocks away, said that he heard several gunshots fired on Friday night, sometime after eleven.
With the evidence collected at the crime scene, the testimony of neighbors, and Floyd’s phone call, police attempted to re-create the horrific events that took place. It wasn’t difficult to determine an
