CALIFORNIA (1980) Cold Case Solved — Arrest Shocks Community

Four six years ago, a 36-year-old woman was murdered in her own apartment in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Stabbed 16 times, beaten in the head with an 8-lb dumbbell, and raped while her 11-year-old nephew was dressed in new clothes waiting for his aunt to pick him up to go to Magic Mountain, not understanding why she never showed up.

Authorities investigated but found no suspect. The DNA collected at the scene could not be processed with 1980 technology, and the investigation eventually stalled while the family lived with unanswered questions for four decades. However, through all those years, the victim’s sister never gave up.

 A close family friend investigated for years, and the DNA sample from the scene sat in the LAPD’s storage waiting for the day when technology would be strong enough. Then in 2010, when the semen sample from 1980 was finally processed, the results led to a man who shocked everyone involved in a way no one could have imagined. Not someone who had been on the run, but someone sitting in prison for a completely different murder.

 Before diving deep into this story, let us know where you’re watching from. And if you like videos like this, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. The summer of 1980 blanketed Los Angeles with the dry heat of Southern California and glaring sunshine that stretched from morning to night. Neighborhoods like Silver Lake were filled with young people coming from everywhere to seek out what America’s largest West Coast city promised.

Stephanie Summers, 36, grew up in Redondo Beach, lived in Newhall for a while before moving to Silver Lake, an up-and-coming neighborhood where people came to start over and build their lives the way they wanted. Stephanie was the kind of person her family and friends described as a force for good. The sister Sheridan called her little sister.

 The aunt that nephew Kelly waited all day to see. The friend that those close to her remembered. She had been married, then told close friends she was a lesbian, a detail the prosecutor later mentioned in court not to judge but to paint a full portrait of the woman who had lived her life on her own terms in the city she chose in the apartment she had just moved into on Marathon Street.

 Kelly Roberts, 11 years old, was Stephanie’s nephew. Stephanie had promised to pick Kelly up to go to Magic Mountain as a late birthday gift, not a casual promise but a real plan and the 11-year-old boy had been dressed in new clothes since morning. The first day passed with no news. The family tried calling Stephanie, no one answered.

The second day, still nothing. The silence stretched on with no explanation that made normal sense. Sheridan Roberts, Stephanie’s sister and both their mother tried to make contact but got no response. On the third day, Kelly’s mother received a phone call and she shooed him outside before answering. The action of someone who knew what she was about to hear was not something an 11-year-old child should be in the room for.

 A neighbor brought Kelly inside, then went back out and told the boy in his new outfit that his aunt had been brutally murdered. The apartment at 3500 Marathon Street in Silver Lake, Stephanie’s home, where she had just moved, where it should have been the safest place, was where it happened. Not a dark street, not a dangerous place, just home and that was what the family would have to live with for the next 34 years.

August 30th, 1980 was the day those 34 years began. Stephanie Summers’ body was found in her apartment on Marathon Street. LAPD arrived at the scene and what they found inside left no doubt about the brutality of what had happened. The apartment was not the scene of a quick attack. This was the site of a real fight where Stephanie Summers had not simply endured but had fought back using all the strength of a 36-year-old woman to defend herself in her own home against her attacker and the violence. Signs of that struggle

were left throughout the apartment. Furniture overturned, evidence of someone trying to escape from the person holding her, proof of someone who did not give up after the first blow. The autopsy results showed Stephanie was raped, stabbed 16 times with a knife, and beaten in the head with an 8-lb dumbbell that the attacker had found in her apartment.

 The California Court of Appeal later described “Forensic evidence proves Summers did not get up after sexual intercourse. She was either raped and then killed or knocked unconscious and or killed and then raped. 16 stab wounds were not the level of violence from someone who just wanted to kill. One or two stabs could be an impulsive act in a moment of lost control, but 16 was a decision repeated 16 times, something that could not be explained by panic or randomness.

 This was the crime of someone carrying something darker than ordinary violence, something for which no words in police reports or legal statements could fully describe when placed in the context of a woman who had just begun rebuilding her life in her new apartment in Silver Lake.

 LAPD collected forensic evidence during the crime scene investigation and autopsy, including a semen sample from Stephanie’s body, the most direct biological evidence the attacker had left behind. In 1980, DNA technology did not yet exist in American forensics because forensic DNA sequencing techniques were only developed and applied in the mid-1980s.

 And in 1980, there was no method to take a semen sample from a crime scene and turn it into a person’s name. The semen sample could not be used to identify a suspect at the time, but the sample was collected, documented, and stored in LAPD’s evidence locker as part of standard evidence preservation procedures.

 Investigators knew the perpetrator had left biological traces at the scene, knew that the sample was the closest thing they had to his identity. But in 1980, knowing that and being able to do something with it were two completely different things separated by three decades of technology that did not yet exist and a national DNA database that had not yet been built.

 LAPD investigated Stephanie’s acquaintances, neighbors in the Silver Lake area, anyone who might have had a connection or reason to harm her, pursuing every lead they could with the tools and information available at the time, interviewing people in Stephanie’s life, looking for anyone who had seen something unusual in the area that day.

There were no direct witnesses who saw the attacker enter or leave the apartment. No suspect was strong enough to pursue to a conclusion. No one for whom the evidence was sufficient to charge. No investigative direction that led to a name that could answer everything the scene showed. The case went cold, one of hundreds of cold cases in Los Angeles at a time when forensic technology was not yet strong enough.

With no clear path forward after the initial leads dried up. Meanwhile, the lives of those left behind continued, carrying the unanswered questions through each year, each decade, each moment when Stephanie should have been there but was not. Stephanie’s mother lived the years after her daughter’s death in a way no one could prepare for.

 In 2002, 22 years after Stephanie was murdered in the apartment on Marathon Street, Stephanie’s mother passed away, 12 years before the killer was arrested, 17 years before he was convicted, and never knowing the name of the person who had done that to her daughter, never hearing the guilty verdict from the jury, never having the moment of standing in the courtroom that Sheridan and Kelly had in 2019.

 A moment that, while not perfect and while not erasing anything, was still the answer she deserved to have. Sheridan Roberts, Stephanie’s sister, who had to clean up the crime scene herself after LAPD finished, who lived with that memory along with all the other memories of her sister, did not let the case fade into silence. Together with her husband, Jerry Roberts, she cooperated with every investigator, journalist, or program interested in the case, never missing any opportunity to keep Stephanie’s story alive in the public memory. When asked about the

family’s hopes during those waiting years, Sheridan said, “I think the miracle is that he was caught. If he’s convicted, we’ll be happy.” Shannon Tulloss was a close family friend of the Summers, not a trained detective, not a lawyer with legal power, with no title or organization behind her, but she investigated the case for years, gathering information, pursuing leads, connecting with people who might know something, keeping the case alive in the memory of the Silver Lake community and greater Los Angeles when no one else was

doing so. She attended every day of the Parkinson trial in 2019. No one asked her to, no one paid her. Kelly Roberts, the 11-year-old nephew who had been dressed in new clothes waiting for his aunt to pick him up from Magic Mountain, grew up with the memory of that third day when his mother shooed him outside before answering the phone, the memory of the neighbor bringing him back and then going outside with the three words, “brutally murdered.

” The memory of not understanding right then what that meant, but understanding it very clearly from that day forward. That memory did not disappear with the years and did not shrink with time. It shaped the person that 11-year-old boy became. Kelly and Aunt Stephanie were very close, as he said at the trial, and that closeness, suddenly severed in August 1980, when he was still not old enough to fully understand its meaning, was a void that no one and nothing could fill for the next 34 years.

 While Stephanie’s family lived with unanswered questions through the decades, forensic DNA technology was advancing in ways no one in 1980 could have imagined. From basic DNA sequencing techniques first applied in criminal investigations in the mid-1980s to increasingly sophisticated methods in the 1990s and 2000s that allowed processing of old degraded biological samples or those with very small amounts of genetic material that previously could not be analyzed.

 LAPD, with hundreds of cold cases accumulated over decades and an archive of biological evidence from unsolved crimes, had a cold case homicide unit within the robbery homicide division dedicated to using modern DNA technology to reopen cases that 1980 or 1990 had no tools to solve. Stephanie Summers’ case was exactly the type this program was created to handle.

 A victim who had left clear biological evidence, a properly preserved sample, and no answers from any traditional investigative direction for more than two decades. The semen sample collected from Stephanie’s body during the 1980 autopsy, stored in LAPD’s evidence locker for three decades, became a candidate for this reprocessing.

 Around 2010, 30 years after the sample was collected from the apartment on Marathon Street, that semen sample was processed using modern DNA technology that did not exist in 1980. The result was a full DNA profile of the person who had left the biological trace in Stephanie Summers’ apartment. That DNA profile was entered into CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, the FBI’s national DNA database containing DNA profiles of convicted criminals that had been collected and submitted to the system under legal regulations for automatic comparison with the entire

database. CODIS was not a passive system waiting for investigators to search manually, but an automatic system that compared newly entered DNA with all existing profiles, searching for matches among millions of records, and the system found one. LAPD cold case detectives received the information that three decades of stalled investigation had not produced.

 The DNA from the 1980 semen sample matched the DNA profile of a person in the database. That person’s name was Harold Anthony Parkinson. That name had not appeared in any investigation files from 1980. Not a suspect ever considered in the initial investigation. Not an acquaintance of Stephanie mentioned in any interview. Not anyone connected to the case in any way for 34 years.

 It was not a name Sheridan Roberts or Shannon Tullis or Kelly Roberts had ever heard in this context. It was just a name that emerged from the DNA database, and investigators began to find out who Harold Anthony Parkinson was. To be certain before taking any further steps, investigators collected a direct DNA sample from Harold Anthony Parkinson to independently compare with the profile from the 1980 semen sample.

 The result confirmed. It matched. Harold Anthony Parkinson was the person who had left the biological trace in Stephanie Summers’ apartment. After 34 years, the question who finally had an answer. The truth that no one was mentally prepared for was not the name of a stranger, but the name of a person who had lived about a mile from the Marathon Street apartment in 1980.

 A neighbor in the Silver Lake area whom no one in Stephanie’s family knew, no one in the initial investigation had reached, and no one had questioned in the 34 years that followed. Harold Anthony Parkinson’s, 21 years old in 1980, living in the Silver Lake area, a person with nothing in his public record at that time connecting him to Stephanie Summers.

 Not an acquaintance of Stephanie. Not someone with a prior record of sexual violence whom police might have looked at. Just a neighbor in the area. One of hundreds of people living within a mile of the apartment on Marathon Street. On August 30th, 1980, Harold Parkinson entered Stephanie Summers’ apartment. And what happened inside that apartment? The 16 stab wounds and the 8-lb dumbbell and the rape and the struggle that Stephanie could not win was a crime he would never admit to.

 Harold Parkinson continued his life in Los Angeles until 1981, 1 year after killing Stephanie, when he committed a second murder in Los Angeles. A different victim, different circumstances, unrelated to Stephanie or the Marathon Street apartment or anything from August 1980. This time Harold Parkinson was arrested. This time he was brought to court.

Harold Parkinson was sentenced to 15 years to life and began serving his sentence in the California prison system. While he sat in prison for the 1981 crime, the Stephanie Summers case remained a cold case in LAPD’s files. While he served his time, Stephanie’s mother wrote about her unrecoverable pain and passed away in 2002 without ever knowing the name of the man who killed her daughter.

 While he remained in the system, Sheridan Roberts and Shannon Toolis and Kelly Roberts lived with unanswered questions through the years. None of them knowing that the answer was sitting in a California prison. None of them knowing that the justice system had held Stephanie’s killer in custody since 1982. On June 19th, 2014, LAPD detectives drove to Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe, California.

 Harold Anthony Parkinson, 55 years old, was serving his 15-to-life sentence at Chuckawalla. He was arrested right there in prison and transferred to Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. Not a manhunt, not a dramatic takedown, just a procedural transfer of custody for someone already in the system who now faced new charges from a case he thought had long been forgotten.

 The LA County District Attorney’s Office formally charged Harold Anthony Parkinson with first-degree murder with special circumstances, murder during the commission of rape. Charges that fully reflected what the 1980 crime scene and autopsy had shown. Deputy District Attorney Laurie Mendoza from the Sex Crimes Unit was assigned to the case.

The DA’s office decided not to seek the death penalty. Parkinson faced life without parole if convicted, and he was scheduled to appear in court on July 9th, 2014 at Los Angeles Superior Court. Sheridan Roberts, the sister who had cleaned the crime scene herself in 1980, who had refused to let the case fade into silence for 34 years, received the news that the killer had finally been arrested.

 Her husband, Jerry Roberts, told the press in words shaped by 34 years of waiting, “I think the miracle is that he was caught.” “If he’s convicted, we’ll be happy.” Shannon Tullis, the close friend who had conducted unofficial investigations for years, who had kept the case alive in the community’s memory when no one with official authority was doing so, received the news and knew that all those years had finally led to this moment.

 Kelly Roberts, the nephew who had once worn new clothes waiting for his aunt to pick him up for Magic Mountain, the grown man carrying the memories of that 11-year-old boy for three decades, knew that the man who killed Aunt Stephanie would finally stand in court and answer for what he had done. And in all those reactions, in all the relief and joy and finally answered questions, there was one person who would never know this moment existed.

Stephanie’s mother, who passed away in 2002, 12 years before June 19th, 2014, 17 years before the guilty verdict was read in a Los Angeles courtroom. From the day of his arrest at Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in June 2014 to the day the trial began in October 2019 was five years of legal proceedings.

 Five more years that Stephanie’s family had to wait after already waiting 34 years. Five years in which Sheridan Roberts and Kelly Roberts and Shannon Tullis knew the killer’s name and knew he would stand trial. The family was told the trial would begin in August 2018. Then it was delayed, adding one more weight to a chain that had already stretched nearly four decades.

 On October 28, 2019, the trial began with opening statements from both sides before a jury of seven men and five women at Los Angeles Superior Court in front of Judge Kathleen Kennedy. Harold Anthony Parkinson, 60 years old, sat before that jury, and the jury was not allowed to hear that he was already serving 15 years to life for the 1981 murder because Judge Kennedy ruled that information could not enter the courtroom, meaning those 12 people had to reach their verdict based only on what they heard about the 1980 case without knowing they were facing a man

who had previously been convicted of murder. Deputy District Attorney Lowry Mendoza opened, “It’s heartbreaking. This case is about the brutal rape and murder she endured at the hands of the defendant 39 years ago.” Mendoza laid out the chain of evidence. The DNA from the semen sample collected in 1980 matched Parkinson’s DNA, a man who lived a mile from the apartment with no legitimate reason for his DNA to be at the scene of a murder, who never came forward to police after the crime, provided no information, and had no

alibi for that night. Defense Attorney Jesus Lopez, he did not deny the DNA because DNA could not be denied, and he knew it. Instead, he attacked the meaning of the DNA. She had consensual sex with Parkinson within 5 days before her death, arguing that the DNA was evidence of voluntary sexual contact, not evidence of a crime.

 There is not one piece of evidence that will place Parkinson in that apartment at the time the murder occurred. Parkinson did not kill her. Parkinson did not rape her. This was why this defense argument was legally frightening, even if emotionally infuriating. If the DNA only proved that sex had occurred, but did not prove that sex was forcible, then legally the rape charge was not proven.

And if rape was not proven, the entire structure of the case could collapse. That was why the forensic evidence from the autopsy had to be strong enough to refute that argument, and the California Court of Appeal later confirmed it was. Forensic evidence proves Summers did not get up after sexual intercourse.

 She was either raped and then killed, or knocked unconscious and or killed and then raped. Sheridan Roberts was called as the prosecution’s first witness, recounting how she and her mother had tried to contact Stephanie before learning she was dead, how the family had to clean the crime scene afterward, and the 34 years without answers.

 Then Kelly Roberts took the stand and recounted that day. The grown man with the voice of someone who had lived with that memory since he was an 11-year-old boy. “My mom shooed me outside when the phone rang. I cried as I went to the neighbor’s house. That person brought me back home, went inside and came back out announcing that my aunt had been brutally murdered.

 On November 5th, 2019, after a week of trial and 4 hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict, guilty of first-degree murder, along with the true findings of the special circumstance of murder during the commission of rape and the use of a dumbbell and knife in the attack.” The jury’s guilty verdict was not the end of the legal process.

 It was the beginning of another battle that Stephanie Summers family had not anticipated after already enduring 34 years of waiting, 5 years of legal proceedings, and a full trial. In December 2020, the newly elected Los Angeles District Attorney, George Gascón, issued a directive instructing prosecutors in his office to dismiss special circumstances and weapon enhancements in many cases as part of criminal justice reform policy, and the Parkinson case was among them.

Prosecutors filed a motion following that directive proposing to dismiss the special circumstance of murder during rape along with the weapon allegations, enhancements that the jury had confirmed as true in the November 2019 trial. Judge Kathleen Kennedy denied the motion, one of many Los Angeles judges during that period who refused to follow Gascon’s directive in cases they deemed too serious to apply the policy mechanically.

 For Stephanie Summers family, this was yet another time the justice system nearly failed to do the right thing. On February 4th, 2021, Judge Kathleen Kennedy sentenced Harold Anthony Parkinson to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a sentence that left no path to freedom, no parole board that could review it, no chance that he would one day walk out of the California prison system.

 Judge Kennedy called the crime an extremely heinous, horrible, violent offense, and stated she believed there was overwhelming evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Parkinson was responsible for what happened in the Marathon Street apartment on August 30th, 1980. Parkinson, 61 years old, received his second life sentence, this time with no possibility of parole, no board hearing, no path leading out of the prison system where he had lived since 1982.

 Before sentencing, Stephanie’s family had the opportunity to say what they had carried since 1980. Sheridan Roberts stood before Parkinson and asked directly the question that had no satisfactory answer. Why did you choose a woman who had no ability to defend herself? She mentioned how the family had to clean the crime scene themselves after LAPD finished.

 Parkinson appealed the sentence, arguing there were errors in the trial process that affected the fairness of the verdict. In 2022, a three-judge panel from the California Court of Appeal, Second District, reviewed and denied the appeal, stating that the evidence of Parkinson’s guilt was overwhelming and that he had been conclusively identified through forensic DNA analysis as the person who had sexual intercourse with Summers at the time she was killed.

 The life sentence without parole for Harold Anthony Parkinson was the legal end of the case, but a legal end is never the real end of anything for those who have lived inside that case. And the aftershocks of the Stephanie Summers case exist on three levels that no verdict, sentence, or appeal decision can reach. The first level is about the person who never knew.

 Stephanie’s mother wrote about her unrecoverable pain and passed away in 2002, 12 years before Parkinson was arrested at Chuckawalla, 17 years before the jury read the guilty verdict in a Los Angeles courtroom. She never knew the name Harold Anthony Parkinson in this context. She never heard the guilty verdict she deserved to hear.

 She never had the moment that Sheridan and Kelly had in 2019, a moment that was not perfect, did not erase anything, but was still the answer she had lived without for all those years. This is not a rare occurrence in DNA cold cases. When technology takes two or three decades to become powerful enough to process samples, victims’ parents often pass away before answers arrive, and that is the unspoken price everyone understands of technology arriving later than people needed it.

The second level is about the decision in 1980 that no one knew would matter so much. The semen sample collected from Stephanie’s body during the autopsy and stored in LAPD’s evidence locker for three decades was the only thing that led to Harold Parkinson. There were no witnesses who saw anything that night, no confession in 34 years, no traditional leads from any investigative direction that produced a result.

 Only one biological sample properly preserved by people in 1980 who did not know they were preserving evidence that would one day be processed by technology that did not yet exist to convict an unidentified perpetrator. And that simple decision over three decades led to February 4th, 2021 and the life sentence without parole.

The lesson is not complicated, but important. Biological evidence from cold cases should not be destroyed, should not be discarded when files are purged, should not be considered useless just because current technology cannot exploit it. No one knows in what year technology will become strong enough to turn a sample useless today into tomorrow’s answer.

The third level is about the legal argument this case raised and answered. Defense attorney Jesus Lopez’s argument, they had consensual sex, DNA only proves contact, it does not prove a crime, is an argument defendants in DNA cases often use when they cannot deny the presence of DNA, and it is not unreasonable purely on technical legal grounds.

 The California Court of Appeal rejected that argument not with abstract reasoning, but with specific evidence from the autopsy. Forensic evidence proves Summers did not get up after sexual intercourse. The lesson, comprehensive forensic evidence, not just DNA, but combined with autopsy results, wound patterns, and everything the crime scene left behind is what defeats such arguments, and that is why collecting and preserving complete evidence from the scene right from the beginning is important not only for the investigation, but for the trial decades

later. Shannon Tuls, the person with no official authority who conducted unofficial investigations for years and attended every day of the trial, not because anyone asked her to, but because that was what she had been doing long before there was a trial to attend, said after the verdict, a sentence that summarized not only this case, “You never really get closure, but whatever that means, they came as close to it as possible.

Not closure in the sense that the pain disappears or the questions no longer exist or everything becomes okay, but closure in the only sense that can be achieved after 41 years. The final question finally has an answer. If you’ve watched this far, please leave a comment and let us know where you’re watching from and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss the next videos.