I initially asked Larry Parks to add me to his prison visitors list but he repeatedly put me off, not exactly refusing, but claiming family visits keep his schedule full. Desperate to find out what made him tick, to discover what I could about him generally as a person, I began to read the letters he received while he was in jail but not yet tried. In Florida these are a matter of public record.
Many of his letters were from his sisters Chris, Joyce, and Nancy. Chris wrote to him most often. She told him repeatedly that no one in the family believed that he had committed the murders. In one letter, she claimed that detectives had “really messed up your trailer” looking for evidence. Photos of the trailer interior revealed that the space had been filthy and messy well before investigators arrived.
In mid-November 1999 she discussed their family. “I had three years in prison to think about my life and who should be blamed for all the things I went through. I finally decided the only one I could blame for what happened in my life was me. I know we didn’t have a great childhood. I don’t think anyone denies that at all. Not even Dad. But the decisions I made in my life I made, not Dad, not Mom but me. Who’s to say that my life would have been any different even if Dad and Mom had stayed together? No one knows what lies ahead. I sure would have never thought that I would end up in prison on a murder charge, but I did. I didn’t do it but I went to prison anyway.” She said that the media was covering Larry’s case as a third murder or murder attempt in the Parks family. “It makes the Parks’s sound like the Charley Manson family.”
In another letter she talks about his offer to take whatever she wanted from his trailer. Among the small items she said she took was a punch bowl. She wondered whether it had belonged to his now-deceased wife, Debbie. Chris wanted something that had belonged to her. Interwoven with all the specifics of a dysfunctional family, here was a scrap of family life. It might have been anyone’s family, anyone’s life.
By February, 2000 Chris talked of her concerns about the pile-up of DNA evidence against Larry. She said she knew he had written to Joyce and his stepmother Marty and asked what he might do to make things easier for the family. “There is something you can do. If you done (sic) this, confess! I’m not saying to confess to make it easier on us, I’m saying to confess if you done (sic) it. If you are completely innocent, then say you are. If your (sic) guilty, then say your (sic) guilty. That’s all your family wants from you. Nothing more, nothing less.”
A letter from Joyce also mentions media coverage and she begged him to confess to stop people from digging up “dirt” about their family. “You are my brother and I will love you no matter what. We have the same blood running through our veins and I can’t abandon you.”
Nancy wrote to Larry from Old Town, Florida where she had moved. She told him she loved him and missed him but knew he didn’t want to see family and didn’t like family. Nonetheless, she asked him to write to her.
Beginning in March of 2009 I started to write to Larry in prison in Raiford Florida where he was incarcerated for life without possibility of parole. I told him I was writing a book about the Brannon case and asked if he might talk to me. I told him about my own life and my family and asked general questions about his. My hopes were not high.
I was surprised to get a reply within a matter of weeks. He was polite but firm: He would not talk about the case. He said to do so would risk harm to his family. It was hard to believe: He had confessed to three murders and told detectives and prosecutors that he had acted alone. What more could happen to him or his family? I continued to write and he responded, always refusing to discuss the Brannon case.
I was frankly impressed that his letters were so articulate and neatly written. My son is an attorney who worked one summer in a federal judge’s office. One of his tasks had been to manage the hand-written pleas that prisoners regularly sent to the court requesting new trials or pardons or reductions in sentences. He said what he read was often much like the letters I got from Larry. They were grammatically correct and the handwriting was neat. He hypothesized that every prison had some prisoners who were more literate than others and they may have written the correspondence in return for some favor, or that volunteers who supported inmates’ rights wrote them for the prisoners. I’m not sure. I am perhaps too trusting, but there seems to be some thread of truth in the letters Larry Parks wrote to me.
He answered the questions I asked about prison life. He worked as a welder six days a week, he said, and had a window in his cell from which he often looked out. He wished he could “look me in the eyes” and tell me things no one else knew about his crimes. He would never speak of the murders, he insisted, but if he ever did talk to anyone, he thought it would be me because of how open I had been about my own life. [I knew when I was being played.] He said that before the Brannon murders he thought we might have been friends. As every crime writer knows, you do not alienate the person you want to interview. I didn’t lie but was silent on that subject.
I now suspect that I had visualized him as a more evil man, but one living the life of the Birdman of Alcatraz. He could guess what I wanted to hear and he fed me the “right” answers. Nevertheless, sometimes I thought he spoke the truth. He did not want to be buried on prison grounds, he said. He told me his family members would faint if they knew how much he had written to me because he didn’t write very much.
The last handwritten letter he sent was closely written on narrowly ruled notebook paper and it nearly ran off the end of page two. “I wish that I would have never took the plea they offered me, because I know I’m not a prison person. I know now if it would’t be for my Dad still living I would rather had been executed. But I couldn’t do it to my family. But the Meyers [Sherry Brannon’s parents and twin sister] deserve to see me Dead. My heart really goes out to them for what I’ve done.”
While I continued to write occasionally, I did not hear from him again until November, 2018. Amazingly, an email appeared in my inbox. He said only “hi how” and attached was a color photo of him taken when he was perhaps in his mid-twenties. By this time prisoners had laptops and limited ability to exchange emails, photos, and videograms. I emailed him immediately. He wrote back a mostly incoherent response explaining that his email had been a mistake. I guessed he might have been courting some young woman who had to love a random murderer. I emailed him again in August 2019 about some family matters and he replied briefly.
Larry Parks and I are somehow linked through a great Tragedy. We are not friends, but I still crave an understanding of how he became a man capable of killing a woman he barely knew and her four- and seven-year-old daughters. It is likely that I will never understand that great and tragic mystery. Gaining some comprehension of this central fact, though, is why I write.
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