Brenda were confronted immediately upon entering the house. They were forced to undress. They speculated that one of them was forced at gunpoint to tie up the other, and then the intruder tied up the second one. Police believed that while both victims were bound beside each other, Brenda was raped and then shot in the back of her head in front of her mother. Krajcir fired a second shot, but missed Mary’s head. It wasn’t until later, police speculated, that Krajcir heard Mary crying. He came back into the bedroom and made certain that his third bullet accurately hit its mark at the back of her skull.
Because of the advanced decomposition of the bodies, an autopsy provided no further clues to help identify their killer. DNA technology did not exist at the time. Mary and Brenda Parsh received a closed-casket funeral service in Cape Girardeau and then were buried in Alton Cemetery.
Background checks on Mary and Brenda revealed nothing that would target them to be executed. They were liked by everyone who knew them, and neither of them had any steamy secrets or was involved in any criminal activities. The evidence collected did little more than determine the time of death and provided no clues to a suspect in the murders.
Feeling overwhelmed, Gerecke contacted Lieutenant Colonel Dougherty, the chief of detectives at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD), on Tuesday. He explained the case and asked for assistance. Captain Jacobsmeyer, chief of the St. Louis Homicide Division, readily agreed to send two men from his department to Cape Girardeau. Sergeant Tom Rowane and Detective Colin McCoy traveled south to Cape on Wednesday, and they stayed for about two weeks.
After reviewing the case file and accompanying Cape investigators on interviews, the St. Louis homicide investigators were unable to solve the case. They told Brown and Gerecke that they had done everything that could be done and even more.
“They told us not to get too stressed out about it because we were living this twenty-four hours a day. They said we should put it aside, and that something would eventually turn up,” Brown said.
With no other leads to pursue, Richard McGougan, Brenda’s boyfriend, became the number one suspect.
“Homicide investigators from both St. Louis and Cape Girardeau came to interrogate me. It was grueling. I asked for an attorney, but they denied me the ability to contact one,” McGougan claimed.
He said that he was rigorously grilled for more than ten hours and forced to look at explicit crime scene photos, which nearly made him sick. McGougan claimed that he had to endure every police interrogation trick in the book, including the good cop/bad cop scenario. He said that in order to provoke an admission of guilt, he was told that the police had recovered the gun used in the crime and that his fingerprints were on it. (His interrogators don’t recall using this tactic.)
McGougan told the police that he was living with his brother in St. Louis and spent Friday night there. He gave the names of his brother and four other men, who were visiting to make plans for an upcoming weight-lifting competition, as witnesses to his whereabouts during the time of the murders. He also agreed to take a lie detector test at the conclusion of his interrogation. The test showed no evidence of deception on McGougan’s part. Several days later, McGougan’s brother and his friends were questioned by police investigators. They confirmed that he was in St. Louis at the time of the murders.
When Floyd was released from the hospital, he did not return home directly. Instead, he spent some time in a convalescent home on Sprigg Street, across the street from the Cape Girardeau Police Department.
McGougan was emotionally devastated by Brenda’s death. They had been in a relationship together for eight years since they met at Southeast Missouri State University, known as SEMO State University. They intended to get married and eventually move to New York City, where McGougan planned to pursue his acting career. Instead, Brenda was murdered, and Richard became an outcast when he became an object of suspicion and a target for the police and the media.
Brenda Parsh was an American beauty, with beautiful eyes. She had full lips, which framed a wide open smile of perfectly aligned teeth, which sparkled in ivory whiteness. Her long brunette locks accented the features of her oval face and fell down gently below her shoulders. Her longtime friend Vicki Abernathy described Brenda as the living embodiment of a Barbie doll.
“The thing about Brenda was that she was so strikingly beautiful without even trying, but she didn’t even know it herself,” said Abernathy. “She wasn’t a wild partier and wasn’t a snobbish girl hung up on her looks. She was a levelheaded humanitarian, who was nonjudgmental and pure as snow on the inside.”
Brenda grew up as a child in a hardworking blue-collar family that struggled to make ends meet, but they kept the values of love, honesty, family, and friendship as a priority. Despite the Parsh family’s meager lifestyle, Brenda developed a love for clothes and fashion. She was also very adept at accentuating her natural beauty with makeup, and she was not afraid to be seen without any.
By the time Brenda attended high school, it became obvious that she was destined to become noticed for her beauty—whether she wanted to or not. She took advantage of the situation by entering the world of local beauty contests. She easily won the local title of Cape Girardeau’s Watermelon Queen.
She enrolled in classes at Southeast Missouri State University and majored in theater. It was there that Brenda met Richard McGougan, a fellow drama student. Richard was a freshman when they met in 1969 and Brenda was a year ahead of him. Brenda got a job at the University Shop with Vicki Abernathy, who was another theater major and beauty queen. Despite the fact that Vicki was from the neighboring town of Jackson, she said that she became friends with Brenda while they were still in high school. She described their union as “Brenda, the mysterious brunette, and Vicki, the wild blonde. We bonded instantly and worked together selling clothes, designing window displays, and modeling.”
In a sense, Vicki and Brenda were pioneers in the modeling industry as some of the first women to pose as live models in the storefront windows. They would pose as still as logs for hours at a time, but Vicki admits to occasionally winking at a passerby or flashing a bit more skin than what was deemed appropriate. Eventually they even organized their own catwalk events for the University Shop.
While Brenda’s father, Floyd, remained quietly proud of his daughter’s accomplishment, staying in the background of the crowd, mother Mary remained outwardly supportive. As an unacknowledged but very talented seamstress, Mary designed and made by hand almost all of the gowns that her daughter Brenda wore for beauty competitions. Brenda advanced through the beauty queen path until she competed for the Missouri state title, which would qualify the winner to compete for the title of Miss America. She ended up as first runner-up, but Brenda would never have a chance to compete again.
“She never thought that she was beautiful. She loved clothes and the fashion world. She entered contests hoping to win scholarship money for school, not for some ego trip. One of the things that I loved most about Brenda was the fact that even though she was this tame, ‘always do what’s right’ girl, who didn’t have any desire to experiment with the party and sexual scene of the late 1960s, she was never judgmental. I could tell her anything and know that she would still be my friend. She was the greatest,” Abernathy said.
Vicki Abernathy was two years older than Brenda. Although both girls were beautiful and interested in theater, fashion, and modeling, Vicki moved on to become a flight attendant for Braniff International Airways. Her beauty queen days were over, but not without fond memories. She was able to attend college on a twirling scholarship, and was so talented at it that she performed at the 1971 Super Bowl V, where the Baltimore Colts overpowered the Dallas Cowboys.
Brenda remained focused on her passion for fashion. After graduating from college, she obtained employment as a fashion buyer and designer of window displays
