Sid Salter
- The Parker family’s odyssey merges with an unspeakable crime, an ineffective and frustrating legal system, and the slow march of time in the appeals process.
Once again, Mississippi’s highest court was asked to hold out for justice for a family murdered in 1990 in a hellish scene in their Walnut community home in rural Quitman County.
On June 12, the Mississippi Supreme Court denied the most recent attempt by one of the two men convicted of the Parker family murders. The appellant was Anthony Carr, now 60 and on Death Row at Parchman.
His co-defendant, Robert Simons Jr., is also under a death sentence for the same murders. Still, in 2011 a federal appeals court granted a stay of execution based on claims that Simons fell out of his prison bunk and suffered a head injury that caused memory loss.
Both Carr and Simons have been up and down the elevator of state and federal death-penalty appeals. Simons is in legal limbo – still under the death sentence, but the stay of execution has not been lifted; consequently, the state has not sought a new execution date.
Carr’s trajectory still leads to execution for the quadruple murders, unless new and legally noteworthy evidence emerges.
Scott Parker — the lone surviving son- maintained the lonely vigil of waiting for what he believed was justice for his murdered family. Sadly, Scott Parker, 56, died Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2021, at Greenwood Leflore Hospital in Greenwood — a victim of COVID.
My lingering memory of Scott Parker is from a 2003 interview I did with him at Brenda’s Restaurant in Marks, and later that same day at the gravesite of his parents and siblings in the Lambert Cemetery. He was an affable, friendly man carrying around an incredible burden of loss and pain.
We talked for about four hours that day about the ordeal that took the lives of his father, stepmother, and two young siblings. We talked about the impact the crime had on Scott’s life and that of his brother, Dean Parker. Dean has since died of cancer.
The story I wrote based on our interview focused on the concept of indigent defense — the provision of competent legal counsel for defendants who cannot afford it. Scott Parker was an unlikely supporter of that concept based on his family’s hard experiences in waiting to travel the labyrinth of state and federal appeals by the two individuals convicted and sentenced to death for murdering his family in one of the more heinous crimes in Mississippi history.
Standing by his father’s grave, Scott suddenly got a catch in his voice and a stricken expression on his face before saying, as his jaw began to tremble: “I need to get out of here before I get upset.”
The Parker family nightmare began Friday, Feb. 2, 1990. The facts of the case, as recorded in trial and appeal transcripts, are chilling. The family left the Riverside Baptist Church Bible study class at about 9 p.m. to return to their Walnut community home some 10 miles away on Hwy 322 southwest of Lambert.
Carl Webster “Bubba” Parker, 58; his wife Bobbie Jo, 45; daughter Charlotte Jo, 9; and son Gregory, 12; were active in the church where Bobbie Jo served as the church secretary and pianist. The family entered the isolated rural home in the midst of an apparent burglary, Quitman County investigators later testified.
The victims were bound, assaulted, tortured, and shot. Investigators believe Bubba Parker was forced to watch the attack on his family.
Firefighters said Parker had almost severed his own wrists struggling against the extension cord used to bind his hands and feet. After shooting all four family members, raping the little girl, and finally cutting off Mr. Parker’s finger to steal his wedding ring, the killers set fire to the home and left the wounded family to burn alive, according to court records.
The Parker family’s odyssey merges with an unspeakable crime, an ineffective and frustrating legal system, and the slow march of time in the appeals process.
Since those grisly murders, Mississippi created the Office of Capital Defense Counsel in 1998 and the Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel in 2000. That’s a start, but the calendar moves too slowly between the commission of such crimes and the eventual reckonings.
