- ♪
- MALE REPORTER: It was around noon when police were called
to this apartment.
That's where they found the body of the 25-year-old victim.
- AYMEE: Corey's one of those people that
when she walked into a room, people took notice.
- EDDIE: I've been to a lot of bad scenes in my career,
but nothing prepared me for what I saw.
- WILLIAM: He would stand outside her bedroom window
at night and try to peep in.
- PAUL: He had created a relationship with her
that existed solely in his mind.
- MALE NARRATOR: Five unique perspectives,
five points of view, one murder.
- AYMEE: Corey Parker was my best friend.
- EDDIE: I was the on-call detective.
- PAUL: I was an investigative reporter
at the Florida Times Union--
- WILLIAM: --in the investigative section--
- ANGELA: I was the lead prosecutor.
- ♪♪
- ♪
- My name is Aymee Ladan,
and Corey Parker was my best friend.
Corey's one of those people that when she walked into a room,
people took notice.
Most of the people that met her, I think,
felt immediately connected.
I had seen Corey a lot going out,
and we would say hi to each other.
Then one day we just started talking,
and we exchanged phone numbers and we became friends.
We definitely had an immediate connection.
We had a lot in common, we realized right off the bat.
She was very independent; I was independent.
Corey was going to college.
We both liked to go out and have a good time.
She always had a smile on her face,
and she just really--she was a really positive person.
- ♪
- AYMEE: During Thanksgivings together,
we'd do, uh, orphan parties.
And that's basically people that didn't have family
in the area, we would all get together.
Her family was up in New York.
And I think her plans were to go out the night before,
um, bake some pies, and meeting everybody
the next morning where the orphan party was gonna be.
She really wanted me to stay that night,
but I decided to go to my mom's, um,
a couple hours away.
So I know she went out and met up with
a few of our friends that night.
The last conversation I had with her,
it was just normal chat, you know,
told her to have a good time.
I called her on Thanksgiving Day
and didn't get an answer.
Friday morning, the following day, uh,
her boyfriend David called me.
David was hysterical, he could barely talk.
He said, "Did you hear about Corey?
Do you know what's going on?"
He said, "All I know is there's a lot of blood.
They found Corey and there's a lot a blood."
And I said, "Give me just a minute, I'll call you back."
So, I got off the phone with him and, um,
I called a paramedic friend of mine.
I asked him if he could tell me what happened, he said no,
but she was dead.
I was in shock, I didn't believe it.
I just didn't believe it at all.
I never would have thought in a million years
what happened actually happened.
- ♪ - [seagulls cawing]
- AYMEE: Corey was from Rochester, New York.
When she moved to Jacksonville,
I think she just wanted a complete change of lifestyle.
She was drawn to the beach, but I think it was more so
the peacefulness of the water,
the casualness of beach communities,
more so than the actual sun.
She transferred over to the college up there.
She was definitely dedicated to her education.
Often, we couldn't meet up until later
because she would be doing a study group after getting up
at 6 in the morning, running around, going to work.
Corey worked as a server at Ragtime.
It was convenient, it was a nice environment,
there were cool people that worked there,
and we used to hang out there afterwards.
I think she was really comfortable with being a server.
She made good money because of that.
I think that people automatically felt
connected to her, and-- even acquaintances felt like
they were good friends with her
because of the way she treated people.
- ♪
- AYMEE: When she met David, it was a little bit different,
there was an instant spark, which was unusual for her.
Often, she had to get to know somebody a little bit before
she felt that intrigued by them.
I remember her telling me he was special,
and she was crazy about him.
And she couldn't wait to tell me about it.
I think at this point in her life she was definitely, um,
looking for something a little bit deeper
than just the appearance.
Not only was he good-looking, he also could handle
everything that she threw at him.
He was about five years older than her,
and I think she was really grateful to have finally found
somebody that could connect with her
on the same level intellectually.
I remember thinking they were super cute together.
From the time they met, I believe until...
two days before this happened,
they were together, you know, every night.
When I got to the police station,
there was probably... 50 of her friends
standing out in the waiting area.
Luckily, one of the detectives came out and got me right away.
She asked me a lot of questions: um, obviously my alibi,
where I was, told me to be careful,
that every person was a suspect at that point.
There were some questions like:
"Do you know of anybody that might be upset with Corey?
Do you know about an argument she may have had this week?"
Um, "What do you know about her current boyfriend?"
I felt so useless because I had no information.
She didn't have any enemies that I was aware of.
My biggest fear was, if this happened to Corey,
this could happen to me,
this could happen to anyone else in our group.
- ♪
- My name is Eddie Bounds, I was the on-call detective
with the Jacksonville Beach Police Department
during the Corey Parker homicide.
We were preparing Thanksgiving dinner all that day with family.
Um, early in the evening hours, I received a call
from the Jacksonville Beach Police Department dispatch,
alerting me that there was a death scene
that I was being called to on 4th Street North.
Initially, Corey didn't show up for work,
and the, uh, Ragtime management became concerned
and sent one of their employees to her residence
to see what the problem was.
The employee walked around the residence and found
her bedroom window actually ajar
and had to move the blinds aside to look into--
to call out for Corey.
And when he did that, he looked down.
What he--he saw, was-- was Corey's body.
- [police siren blaring]
- EDDIE: I live about a quarter of a mile away.
I responded quickly...
and spoke with Officer O'Neal, um, the senior officer on scene.
We walked through the residence to the point of entry and exit,
which was the kitchen window.
You could see four fingerprints on the wall--
bloody fingerprints.
You could tell there were no ridges.
Um, having seen scenes like that before,
I knew there was gonna be gloves, uh, involved.
I worked my way around the living room and then
into the hallway and positioned myself outside
of Corey's bedroom until my eyes could adjust to the darkness.
After standing in the hallway outside of her bedroom
for several seconds,
I could make out Corey's outline of her body.
Um, I could see that she was laying on her bed.
I've been to a lot of bad scenes in my career.
I've been to a lot of classes that prepared you
for these types of scenes,
but nothing prepared me for what I saw
when I walked into Corey's bedroom.
It was surreal, um, the amount of injuries
that she had sustained.
It was such a vicious attack.
Brutal beyond-- beyond explanation.
You can--you can say and tell somebody,
but to--to be there, to see it,
to see what-- what she had sustained.
Once I'd realized how-- how vast the scene was,
I knew that we were gonna need everybody available
to respond to this scene,
um, and--and to conduct a thorough investigation.
I called my wife immediately to tell her
that I wouldn't be there for dinner.
It appeared to me on first sight that she had been positioned
in that, that--that corner of the bedroom,
with her legs spread and her arms wide.
She was nude, and her panties were rolled up
off of her body and at her feet.
Um, the way she was displayed by the--the suspect,
um, to me, it had sexual, uh, tones all throughout.
A lot of the injuries were postmortem.
There was cuts on her body with no blood,
meaning that whoever killed her, stayed with her
for a period of time after she quit bleeding
and then took the time to not leave out of the least path
of resistance, which would've been the front door.
He went back out through a small kitchen window.
So, it was all a preplanned event, in my mind.
It wasn't a--an accidental, walked in on burglary.
Somebody really wanted to show whoever found Corey
that he was angry.
My first thought, personally,
was that it was a relationship gone bad.
It was gonna be somebody that--
that had a connection with Corey--
a personal connection.
In instances like this where it is just a frenzy of stab wounds,
it is common for the suspect's hand to come in contact
with the blade and get cut.
Until FDLE had gathered all of that evidence,
we weren't sure if we were gonna have the suspect's DNA.
Time was going to transpire between what we had on scene
and what was going to be discovered later
through laboratory results.
There was a lot of legwork involved, a lot of interviewing;
repeatedly canvassing the neighborhood.
And Ragtime was a--was a business with over 50 employees.
So, we had our work cut out for us.
- ♪
- EDDIE: At the ME's office, you turn off all the lights,
and they turn on a-- an alternate light source.
It's a--kind of a bluish black light, um, that makes fibers
and any kind of microscopic evidence glow.
I was hoping that whatever he had been wearing,
his hair, sweat, blood, something,
had transferred from his body onto hers.
And when they turned that alternate light source on,
it emitted everything from fibers to blood.
There seemed to be so much evidence glowing from the body.
To me, it was hope.
It was hope in the case that something on her body
that was being recovered would relate back to a suspect.
When Corey's panties were unrolled, pulled apart,
there was a forcibly removed hair follicle found inside.
When I say forcibly removed--
when you lose your hair naturally, it falls off,
or it falls out, but during a struggle,
when hair is forcibly removed from your hair,
it pulls the follicle,
which has the bulb of DNA attached.
It was a new sign of life in the investigation,
knowing that when we found whoever was responsible,
that hair had to have come from them.
He would have to explain why and how his hair
got into her apartment,
rolled up in her panties and covered in blood.
- ♪
- My name is Paul Pinkham.
I was an investigative reporter at "The Florida Times Union"
in Jacksonville.
Corey's murder dominated, um, conversations,
news coverage, everything.
People were starting to lock doors.
Women would go out in groups together at night
instead of alone.
Because somebody was out there that did this,
and nobody knew really if it would happen again
to somebody else.
Even with all the other potentialities
that police had to look at, uh, they kept going back to the fact
that this was a crime of intense passion.
The obvious thing to do would be to look at the people
closest to her first as potential, um, suspects
or persons of interest.
Corey was in a relationship with a--a man named David.
He obviously was one of the first people
that police wanted to talk to.
Fortunately for David, he had a solid alibi.
He was out of town visiting family for Thanksgiving.
Police then turn to, um, Corey's circle of friends
and coworkers.
- ♪
- PAUL: Her friend Tiffany was the last known person
to see Corey alive, other than the killer.
She at the outset talked to them fairly willingly.
She remembered Corey leaving to go home, and, um,
she remembered going by the apartment or calling
at some later point in the evening.
In the course of that conversation,
Tiffany essentially talked herself into being a suspect
by revealing things that she knew that had not been
revealed to the public--
such as the incredible number of stab wounds,
the blood, how Corey's body was posed.
Tiffany was able to explain how she knew so much
about the crime scene,
and it was because she was dating somebody
with the fire rescue who showed up at the initial call-out
and told her what he saw.
The police moved on from Tiffany and, you know,
decided they needed to focus elsewhere.
- ♪
- PAUL: They went back to Ragtime and they talked
to Corey's coworkers.
A couple of them mentioned a-- a dishwasher at the restaurant
named Eric, who they all said was just infatuated with Corey
to the point where it was probably unhealthy.
It wasn't in Corey's nature to be mean to anyone.
So, she would rebuff Eric's advances as gently as she could.
But on his side of the equation, he was infatuated with her,
and, you know, continued to make advances.
It was a bit delusional from everyone else's perspective.
One night, Eric decides, "Well, maybe I can win her
if I just fix her dinner and then invite her over."
So, he goes to great lengths to fix this really nice,
romantic kind of dinner, and then calls Corey,
but she's got other plans, obviously,
she's out with her boyfriend.
Eric was hurt by that.
So, police bring Eric in for questioning,
and he thinks he can help because he was Corey's man
in his mind, you know.
So, he doesn't really shy away from anything they ask.
He told the police that he loved Corey,
he'd never hurt Corey.
It quickly became clear to the police that this was
way more than just a guy having a crush on a girl.
Eric talked at great length about his sexual fantasies--
violent fantasies about Corey.
And it was almost as if he had created
a relationship with her that existed solely in his mind,
but was as real to him as... reality is to the rest of us.
At some point, their conversation took a--a dark turn
into...how he would've killed her
if he had been the one to have killed her.
All kinds of radar went up at that point.
One of Eric's fantasies involved sneaking into Corey's apartment
at night and waiting for her,
and then ultimately stabbing her...multiple times.
- ♪
- PAUL: Certainly, as Eric talked,
um, the investigators got very, very, very excited
that this--this may finally be our guy.
Really, the last step now would be to get Eric's DNA
and wrap the case up.
Which is exactly what they did.
That takes time to run through the lab.
The police had to let Eric go
'cause they did not have enough to arrest him.
His DNA sample had come back,
and did not match anything at the crime scene.
So, they had to go back to square one.
- ♪
- PAUL: The beach was blanketed with these reward posters.
They were on every telephone pole, every tree.
You couldn't really go anywhere without seeing it.
And the hope was that something would shake loose.
Four, maybe five months after the--the posters went up,
there was a group of people
,who were sitting out on the dock
and they were talking about the reward, and one of 'em said,
"You remember that guy we worked with?
"He was acting really strange around that time,
"and he lived near that girl.
You know, I wonder if he had something to do with it."
One of 'em calls the cops up.
They gave 'em a name, the name was, uh, Robert Denney.
He had worked with them at the BBQ restaurant.
Ironically, I believe he was a dishwasher as well.
Police went and talked to Robert's boss.
Robert was 17 at the time Corey was murdered.
He lived in an upstairs apartment that had a balcony
that overlooked her downstairs apartment.
Robert had told them about this girl that lived
in the apartments across the way from his,
and that he used to masturbate while watching her.
That got their attention, uh, big time.
All of a sudden, Robert Denney became their focus.
I mean, they're back in the game, so to speak.
He was the creepy neighbor that we all fear.
- ♪
- I am Detective Sergeant William W. Carlyle.
I was the supervisor in charge of the investigative section
and in charge of this case.
- ♪
- WILLIAM: We got a tip from these three people,
they said at the time he was just acting
really, really, really strange.
They'd been working with him for some period of time
and all of a sudden right after
the, uh, the victim was discovered,
he's gotta get out of town, he's crying, he's hysterical.
We don't know where Robert's at, at this point,
so, we have to contact the sister, uh,
who lived in Atlantic Beach, and talk to her.
And, uh, then she gave us additional information,
which gave us reason for concern.
Robert had been staying with her for a period of time,
and he had, in her statements, become "a night creeper."
Meaning he had a lot of pornography.
He would stand outside, you know, her bedroom window
at night, and try to peep in at her.
She was spooked by it,
so, she-- she forced him out of the house.
On top of that, the sister had revealed
that, uh, his brother was serving time in El Paso, Texas,
for another murder where he, in fact, had killed a girl
and stabbed her 97 times.
You have a brother that stabbed a woman 97 times,
you have a victim next door to Robert that was--
been stabbed 101 times.
You're looking at it like,
"Yeah, this is a good, solid lead."
We asked her, we said, "Well, where's Robert at?"
'Cause we had no--no clue.
She didn't know exactly, but she knew that, um,
he had sent her an email and the lab was able
to trace that email to a residence in Easton, Maryland.
The first thing we did,
once we got all this information,
we jumped on the phone to, um, speak with the Easton, Maryland
police department.
We related to them, "Look, Robert doesn't know us.
"Let's call him in to the police department
"and approach him about potentially being a suspect
in a crime that had occurred up there in Easton."
We came up with this ruse that, "Look, the police chief's son
"was the victim of a battery,
and you generally match the description of this suspect."
When we conducted the interview,
we were gonna take him out into the garage
for a--for a smoke at the police department
and hopefully he'd leave the butt in the ashtray.
We also gave him a bottle of water to drink from.
And, uh, hopefully, at some point,
he'd take a--a sip, and we'd have his DNA.
He put the cigarette butt behind his ear
after he smoked it.
He didn't put it in the ashtray.
He never opened the water bottle.
As a last resort,
I put together three different letters,
saying, "Hey, you know, we've approached you
"for a DNA sample, although you are not interested
"in giving that DNA sample at this time,
"we need to record that we've asked you for it.
"Would you sign this and then,
put these in these envelopes and lick 'em and seal 'em?"
He looked at the detectives that were in the room,
and he basically said, "Look, y'all have tried three times now
"to get my saliva on something.
"Is there anything else I can do for you?
If not, we're done here."
Basically, at that point, we had to let him go.
We decided to set up surveillance on him
to, uh, try and get a covert sample.
We knew that he worked at a local computer store.
We noticed that he would come out, um,
about every 40 to 45 minutes and take a cigarette break.
We were gonna sit outside and get a DNA sample.
Well, he initially started doing the same thing,
when he would smoke the cigarette,
he'd put the butt behind his ear and go back inside.
The next day, we set up, um, surveillance on him again.
And, uh, lo and behold,
he walks outside to smoke a cigarette,
and out of the clear blue sky, he, um,
he starts spitting on the ground.
I scurried up there with my little swabs,
and I could clearly see where the spit was resting
on top of the rainwater.
I scooped that up, and, uh,
we drove that to the, uh, FBI crime laboratory.
- ♪
- WILLIAM: Two weeks later, the analyst from the FBI
called me and told me that, uh, it was a match.
That it was definitely, uh, Robert Denney.
We were ecstatic, we were jumping up and down
in the Detective Division.
We jump on the phone with the prosecutor,
and it was Angela Corey.
And we tell Angela, "Look, you know, we--we got a match.
And, uh, we wanna go get this guy."
She's like, "I'm not gonna give you a warrant right now.
"I want you to get a denial from him that he knew Corey
"or had ever been in her apartment,
"because the DNA evidence was only as good as your ability
to prove it should or should not have been there."
All he really had to do was come back, you know, later on,
with a good defense attorney and say,
"I helped her carry her groceries in
and that's how my DNA got in her apartment."
So, it was critical that we get the denial.
We felt like he was pretty savvy,
and that he would be, you know, smart enough to put together
that we were there to trap him.
So, we formulated a plan.
A detective was gonna tell him,
"Look, we've already found our suspect,
"and it's not you.
But we have to ask you a few questions."
- We had our denial.
- [police siren blaring]
- WILLIAM: We knew at that point he could not explain
how his DNA got into her apartment,
so, uh, we called back Jacksonville,
Angela had already typed up the warrant.
We got the Easton PD to go with us over to the house
and, uh, walked in and arrested him.
You could just see the blood, um,
drain from Robert Denney's face,
and he was just white as a ghost.
- ♪
- I'm Angela Corey.
I was the lead prosecutor on the case
of the State of Florida versus Robert Denney.
You know, I prosecuted for 35 years
and my specialty, uh, so to speak, was homicides.
I kept pictures of my victims up all over my office.
Because you--you can't forget about something this important,
and you can't forget what her loved ones are going through.
Just, looking at her beautiful face.
Obviously, the name Corey is special to me,
it's my family name, my last name.
And so, there was just this drive to solve this case.
It was a very exciting moment to--to see that
we're going to be able to put Robert Denney in handcuffs
and bring him to justice.
You know, that finally, we were gonna have
Corey Parker's murderer in custody.
The best part of all of it
was being able to call the victim's family
and let them know.
Once they arrested Robert Denney,
he was no longer the cocky, "I'm smarter than you" person
that he had shown himself to be.
He started sobbing like a little boy.
He couldn't catch his breath. He was hyperventilating.
And, I think he knew at that point that we had gotten him.
He just didn't give any statements that would help us.
- ANGELA: I'm not sure that it was as real an emotion.
There was absolutely no remorse.
And it was just sort of a back and forth
and, "He couldn't have done it."
And then, our detectives brought up his brother,
who was in prison for, ironically enough,
stabbing a woman to death.
- He stabbed Corey Parker more times than his brother
stabbed the young woman in Texas.
- Everything we asked him, he denied.
Denied, denied, denied.
When you looked at all of the evidence,
along with his DNA,
he was the only viable suspect
to be the person who murdered Corey Parker.
Robert Denney had not lived in the apartment
directly across from Corey Parker
for very long, so he had to have developed
this interest in her suddenly.
And then again, it could've just been
that he saw her come home late that night
and the idea occurred to him.
Really, it's inexplicable how he focused on her and chose her
as his murder victim,
because he was in contact with a lot of other women.
Whether it was an obsession, a rage,
or just an "I can get away with murder,"
I'm not sure we'll ever know,
but I will always be grateful we don't necessarily
have to prove motive in Florida.
We just had to prove premeditation.
- ♪
- ANGELA: My theory tends to be that he waited until after
all the lights were out, and went in through that window,
and it was the same way he exited.
We feel like she was asleep under the covers
and he crawled up on top of her,
and she began fighting immediately.
And never got off the bed once he started stabbing her.
You can tell by the way the blood was spattered
on the walls where she was found
that she fought as hard as she could.
One of the most stunning aspects of this case
and one that has always haunted us was that
most of the wounds were postmortem.
And, uh, the medical examiner believed that the killer
just played with her afterwards.
A continuous, um, desecration
of this beautiful woman's body,
and that was just stunning to us.
I've described it before as every woman's nightmare--
being killed, um, when you're in the sanctity
of your own home, your own bed.
He had to have planned this.
There was no trace of blood between Corey Parker's bedroom
and the lip of the kitchen sink.
He had to plan very carefully with that amount of blood
to not get a single bloody footprint anywhere.
He said he had never been in there.
We knew it was a lie, the DNA told us it was a lie,
and it was the evidence we needed to prosecute him.
We knew already that we were going to be able to take
Robert Denney to a grand jury.
We felt certain we could get an indictment.
And then, of course, the excitement wears off
when he fights extradition and then,
begin the five-year battle to get him to trial.
- ♪
- AYMEE: When I first found out there had been an arrest
and it was her neighbor,
I asked probably 30 times in a row,
"Are you 100% sure? Is this the person?
Is there any doubt whatsoever?"
- We're so determined to seek justice for the victim,
it's very difficult when there's not an immediate arrest.
But because of the evolving nature of DNA
and the numerous testing requests made by the defense,
there was a lot of back and forth for years.
We never gave up hope.
- AYMEE: The moment I think everything actually hit me,
it was in court and...
seeing the killer 20 feet from me,
and the way he just...
glanced around the room at everybody,
as if this was just--[sighs]-- a bothersome day for him.
I didn't realize how angry I was until I saw
how little he cared about what he did.
- PAUL: The State laid out a very methodical timeline
of what happened from day one in this case.
- We knew that you know, the defense attorneys
that he was gonna get were some of the best in the nation.
And so, you know, you--you got a lot of Is to dot
and Ts to cross.
- Our approach was really to leave the jury
with the impression that Robert Denney
is the only person who could have
committed this murder.
- PAUL: The image that the State created was someone that was
so obsessed and someone that knew he couldn't have
what he wanted, and so, he took it away.
He took her life.
- EDDIE: We don't know whether Robert Denney
was inside the apartment when she got home,
or whether he came into the apartment
after she got home.
But we do know that-- that when Robert Denney
attacked Corey Parker inside of her bedroom,
she--she put up a fight.
A fight that allowed us to have the evidence in the end.
- In essence, Corey Parker solved her own murder.
We put it together based on the physical evidence,
but because she's the one that grabbed the hairs
that we were able to get.
- The only way his blood could've gotten on the lip
of the kitchen sink and his hair could have gotten
on her dead, bloody body was if he was the killer.
And, oh, by the way,
he lied and said he had never been in there.
- WILLIAM: The defense came up with the story in trial about
how Robert Denney had a cat and that the cat went next door
into Corey's apartment after she was killed
and it drug the evidence in.
- There was no evidence the cat had walked on Corey's bed,
which was completely bloody.
So, how could the cat have deposited Robert Denney's DNA?
Once we rested our case after the three-week trial,
our prosecution team felt pretty good.
But when the verdict came back 45 minutes later,
you just get this moment of panic, this "What if?"
- PAUL: That's an awful quick, quick verdict.
I quickly run down the hall and get to the courtroom in time
to see the jury come out and...
everybody's on pins and needles.
- They came back with a solid guilty verdict.
- ANGELA: All I cared about was the fact that
Corey Parker's mother and father and sister were on the front row
of that court room to hear
that Robert Denney had been found guilty.
- AYMEE: He just tried so hard to pretend that he was
this poor guy that everybody was pointing fingers at,
trying to win over the jury,
and...you know, they could see through him.
- Because it was first-degree murder and he was
a juvenile at the time, um, the only sentence
he could get was life.
So, you know the--the jury verdict really was
the end of the story.
- ♪
- EDDIE: There was nothing taken,
there was nothing gained.
There was nothing you can put in your hand and say,
"Corey Parker was killed because of this reason."
Corey just happened to live next door to a monster.
In my 35-plus years as a law enforcement officer,
it was one case that I took home,
and still take home.
- AYMEE: She meant so much to so many people.
I think about her all the time,
and I think that's the only way I can keep her memories alive,
is try to go back in my mind and remember
where we were at then and where we might be today.
I know we'd be friends, so--
- ♪
♪♪