Walter and Joanne Parkin were one of the most popular young couples in the hamlet of Victor (pop. 275), a cluster of buildings along Route 12 about 40 miles south of Sacramento. Wally Parkin, 32, ran the local supermarket, giving credit to hard-up farm workers and even hiring some of the members of one family that could not pay its bills. When the Parkins began to build their new, redwood-paneled house, friends and neighbors just naturally pitched in on the job. That is the way life is in that part of the San Joaquin Valley.
On Tuesday night last week, as usual, the Parkins went bowling, leaving their two children, Lisa, 11, and Bob, 9, in the care of Debbie Earl, 18, a neighbor's daughter who had come over to baby-sit. Sometime during the evening, Debbie's parents, Richard, 38, and Wanda Earl, 37, and Brother Ricky, 15, came by to visit, along with her boy friend, Mark Lang, 20. When the Parkins came home, they were all still there —and so, the police were later to charge, were two uninvited men.
Carol Jenkins, a house guest of the Parkins, recalled that she arrived home at 3 a.m., found the house utterly quiet, and went to bed. It was barely daybreak when Carol was awakened by two friends of Mark Lang who were anxiously searching for him; his parents were worried because he had not come home the night before. Looking through the house, Carol walked into the main bedroom—and ran out screaming. Bob and Lisa Parkin were lying on the bed. Each had been shot through the head.
Hidden in the Closet. Later, one of the investigating deputy sheriffs cautiously pushed open the door of the walk-in closet of the bedroom and found a horrifying sight. Bunched on the floor were seven bodies—the two Parkins and the Earl couple, plus Debbie Earl, her boy friend and her brother. Their arms and legs were bound with nylon cord sometimes clinched with as many as six knots and they were gagged with knotted ties. Each had been shot in the neck or head with a small-caliber pistol. Some had taken longer to die than others. Debbie had been hit by four slugs, her father by five. In all, 25 bullets were recovered from the bodies, plus one from the pillow of Bob Parkin.
The manhunt quickly zeroed in on two men who were wanted for a double murder, in which similar techniques had been used, that had been committed in Arizona in October. One of the men was a 22-year-old drifter from The Bronx named Douglas Gretzler, and the other was Willie Steelman, 28, who lived near Victor. Steelman, who had once been briefly confined in a mental hospital, had a long record of scrapes with the law and had served time in prison for forgery.
After police released pictures of Steelman to the press, a hotel desk clerk in Sacramento recognized him when he and Gretzler checked in. Gretzler was arrested in the hotel by police armed with shotguns, and Steelman was later apprehended in a nearby building.
Gretzler and Steelman were charged with nine counts of first-degree murder. They also came under suspicion for a total of five slayings in Arizona, and police wanted to talk to them about four missing persons in the region.