The authorities have identified a man who was found dead along an Oregon motorway over 40 years ago, and whose death can be linked to the infamous “sales table killer” in California, who targeted young men in the 1970s and 1980s.
Captain of Oregon’s state police, Kyle Kennedy, said that the man had been identified as Larry Eugene Parks, 30, a Vietnam veteran whose family had lost contact with him in 1979.
The Parks’s body was found on July 18, 1980, along the Interstate 5 and about a mile south of Woodburn, a suburb of Marion County, Oregon. Despite vast efforts to identify him, the parks remained John Doe until the authorities identified him last month but did not reveal it until recently.
The authorities have linked Parks to Randy Kraft, which was found guilty of the murder of 16 young men in the County of Orange in 1989 and became known as “dashboard killer”.
His nickname came from a handwritten list that the police said they found in the trunk of his Toyota Celica Brune. Prosecutors described him as a “death list” during the Kraft trial and said he was showing each person he had killed.
Although he was found guilty of 16 murders, the authorities think that Kraft may have killed more than 60 people in California, Oregon and Michigan. Most of the victims were men at the end of their adolescence and in the mid -twenty, others who were members of the army.
The body of Parks was found one day after 17 years Michael O’Fallon had been found dead along the interstate near the exit of Talbot Road in the county of Marion.
“Due to similarities in evidence, investigators at the time suspected that the two murders were linked,” Kennedy said. “Unfortunately, the two investigations were cold while the wicks of the investigation fell.”
The death of O’Fallon was then linked to Kraft when the investigators said they had found a camera in his garage after his arrest in 1983.
The murder meat occurred while the authorities were trying to track down William G. Bonin, a former Downey truck driver known as Motorway killer.
But the bodies of young men continued to accumulate after the capture of Bonin, which led the investigators to believe that another killer was at freedom. This prosecution ended when two California road patrol officers withdrew Kraft in 1983 and discovered a man who died in the front seat.
Kennedy said that the effort renewed to identify the parks began in January when the Sheriff Department of Orange County contacted the Oregon’s Cold Police Case Unit, offering to help identify the victim using the genetic investigation genealogy, a popular tool that helps investigators generate tracks in cold cases.
As part of this effort, Kennedy said, the victim’s blood sample was sent to a laboratory, which created a genetic profile. The investigators were able to use the information to locate possible family members who finally led to the identity of the parks.
PARKS is the last victim to be identified and linked to the serial killer condemned. Two years ago, the authorities used the same tool to identify Michael Ray Schlicht, 17,.
Kennedy said the cold Oregon police unit is now trying to end the case.
“In the end, it will be up to the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office to determine whether the case will be prosecuted once the case is subject to exam,” he said.
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