With fight for innocence behind him, Darrel Parker looks forward

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Darrel Parker

Darrel and Ele Parker sit at their kitchen table while drinking coffee, eating cookies and watching the birds at the townhouse they bought after the state of Nebraska settled with Darrel Parker for his wrongful conviction. Ele Parker died in 2017.

Parker murder file

Darrel Parker is escorted into the jail by Lincoln Police Chief Joe Carroll after confessing to the Dec. 14, 1955, murder of his wife. He confessed during an interrogation but has spent the past 55 years trying to clear his name. (LJS file)

Darrel and Nancy Parker moved into their home in October 1955. The city had moved it into Antelope Park for the city forester and his wife.

Darrel Parker shakes the hand of Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning after a news conference in the attorney general's office in the Capitol. Parker and the attorney general's office reached an agreement for his exoneration after he was convicted of killing his wife, Nancy, in 1955.

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Peter Salter

Darrel Parker landed back in Illinois with the cloud of a murder conviction lifted from his record for the first time in 56 years, a formal apology from Nebraska and the promise of $500,000.

So he and Ele took stock.

“Are we going to take a monumental trip somewhere? No, I don’t think so at this age. What about buying a Cadillac? No. We got a 7-year-old Toyota Corolla that’s doing nicely.”

But their home has always been important to them. No matter where they lived.

And in early September, Darrel and Ele Parker were living in a retirement home in Geneseo, 25 minutes from the Quad Cities, where they’d spent most of their marriage.

The Good Sam is a fine place, he said, full of good people. But their neighbors there, they liked to eat. And then they liked to sleep. And Darrel had worked all his life -- on his family’s farm in Iowa, as Lincoln’s first city forester, in prison, after prison, after he retired.

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“Truthfully, I was getting lazy,” he said.

They found a condo in Moline, a place by the woods where they can watch cardinals from their deck, walk to the movies and start thinking about the future -- because they’d spent so many years focused on the past.

*** * ***

Lincoln, 1955: Darrel Parker drives home for lunch, to the little house in Antelope Park the city provided him and his wife after they’d moved from Iowa.

Nancy had been in the living room that snowy, mid-December morning, writing Christmas cards at a folding table.

But at lunchtime, Darrel finds his wife upstairs, in their bed. She has been bound, raped, strangled.

Darrel is interrogated, and he confesses. But he immediately recants, saying he was psychologically tortured, coerced into saying he’d killed Nancy.

A jury finds him guilty. He is imprisoned, paroled 15 years later, pardoned 20 years after that. He marries Eleanore Jeanne Vandling in 1971 and works his way up through the Moline parks department.

They never give up trying to clear his name, he and Ele riding waves of hope and rejection with every effort and every failure.

“Through the years, we’d spend a couple of thousand to try to get something going,” Ele says.

A death-row inmate confessed to killing Nancy Parker, but Darrel’s expected exoneration never comes. And any advances in DNA technology are rendered useless when physical evidence from the crime scene vanishes.

Darrel keeps trying. He’d told a friend in prison: “As long as I live, I shall fight this.”

Then the past few years: His trial lawyer’s son-in-law publishes “Barbarous Souls,” which makes a compelling case for Darrel’s innocence. The state passes a wrongful conviction and imprisonment law. And in 2011, Lincoln attorney Herb Friedman sues the state on Darrel’s behalf.

The attorney general’s office fights the suit for more than a year, but in late August, it invites Darrel back to Lincoln.

To apologize, and to pay.

*** * ***

The day the state restored his innocence, Darrel’s voice cracked: Finally, he said, he could die in peace.

He’d won the fight.

But he won’t completely relax until Nebraska pays the settlement.

“When I get the rest of this money, I’ll be done,” he said recently.

The first $50,000 arrived within weeks, as Attorney General Jon Bruning promised it would. Darrel’s lawyers took their 40 percent, plus expenses, but the Parkers had enough left to put down on their condo.

The remaining $450,000 will take longer to reach Darrel and his lawyers, traveling through committees and readings and votes.

Any payout bigger than $50,000 must move through the Legislature, which convenes early next month. Darrel’s settlement will be included in a claims bill, and, because that’s tied to budget bills, likely won’t be resolved until near the end of the 90-day session, said Shannon Anderson, state risk manager.

Assuming the settlement is approved, the earliest the state could cut a check is July 1, the start of the next fiscal year -- or about 10 months after it was promised.

The money is important to Darrel and Ele. Not because they have lavish spending plans, but because of the peace it provides.

“The big thing now, at our age, it’s nice to have security. We didn’t have security before,” Darrel said.

So he’ll wait for the money. He’s patient. He was 24 when he was convicted, 40 when paroled, 60 when pardoned and 81 when exonerated.

And he can keep himself busy writing the speech he’ll deliver next semester to law students at the University of Iowa.

He’ll talk about his fleeting confession, and false confessions in general, and how tremendous pressure can make innocent people admit to crimes they didn’t commit.

“I’m going to tell them my story. It’s important that the students step back as they go on to be lawyers and not rush to judgment. It can happen. It can happen to anybody.”

Something else can happen, too.

A man can keep fighting for his innocence until enough people listen and enough people believe him. And then he can look forward.

“What happened 56 years ago happened. That’s still in my memory. The vision of how I found Nancy, that’s going to be there forever,” he says.

“On the other hand, I can finally let go of a lot of that and hopefully enjoy the remaining life me and Ele have.”

+4 

Nancy Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa, met Darrel Parker at Iowa State. When she joined him in Lincoln in 1955, she found a job as a dietitian for Gooch's, creating recipes for the company's flour and noodles. On a snowy Dec. 14, 1955, Parker told police he returned to their home in Antelope Park for lunch and found her body in their bed. She had been bound, raped and strangled.

Journal Star file photo

Reach Peter Salter at 402-473-7254 or psalter@journalstar.com.

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Peter Salter

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Darrel Parker

Darrel and Ele Parker sit at their kitchen table while drinking coffee, eating cookies and watching the birds at the townhouse they bought after the state of Nebraska settled with Darrel Parker for his wrongful conviction. Ele Parker died in 2017.

Darrel Parker is escorted into the jail by Lincoln Police Chief Joe Carroll after confessing to the Dec. 14, 1955, murder of his wife. He confessed during an interrogation but has spent the past 55 years trying to clear his name. (LJS file)

Darrel and Nancy Parker moved into their home in October 1955. The city had moved it into Antelope Park for the city forester and his wife.

Darrel Parker shakes the hand of Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning after a news conference in the attorney general's office in the Capitol. Parker and the attorney general's office reached an agreement for his exoneration after he was convicted of killing his wife, Nancy, in 1955.

Nancy Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa, met Darrel Parker at Iowa State. When she joined him in Lincoln in 1955, she found a job as a dietitian for Gooch's, creating recipes for the company's flour and noodles. On a snowy Dec. 14, 1955, Parker told police he returned to their home in Antelope Park for lunch and found her body in their bed. She had been bound, raped and strangled.