After nearly half a century, a John Doe case has taken a turn towards closure, as Oregon State Police's Cold Case Unit, with the assistance of the Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, successfully identified Larry Eugene Parks as the victim of a 1980 murder, once an unknown man found dead along Interstate 5; Parks, a Vietnam veteran who lost contact with his family back in 1979, was finally given a name thanks to Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy and a cooperative endeavor between state and county law enforcement agencies.
Originally, the bleak discovery of Parks' body in Marion County on July 18, 1980, had investigators scratching their heads, and when the body of Michael O’Fallon surfaced just a day prior along the same highway, police pondered the possibility of a connection, although both trails grew cold, the victims' stories slipped into the silence of decades-old unsolved cases, unyielding to the passing years and fading memories.
Years later, in Orange County, California, Randy Kraft's 1983 arrest for multiple murders reopened the chapter on unsolved cases, as evidence from the Parks and O’Fallon murders found its way to Orange County’s courtroom floors during Kraft's trial; Kraft was eventually convicted for 16 murders, with suspicions that his grim tally far exceeded that count, a resolution that eluded Parks' case until the evidence made its way back to Oregon in 2024.
Revitalizing the case, an investigator from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department reached out to Oregon's Cold Case Unit, offering a critical piece of the puzzle through the innovative use of genetic profiling, and when Parabon Nanolabs generated a genetic profile from a blood sample of the victim—it was this pivotal clue that led detectives to possible relations of the then-unnamed man, culminating in the DNA match that pierced through the cloak of anonymity shrouding Larry Parks, now posthumously stepping back into the realm of the known as a consequence of this dogged pursuit for justice.
As published on May 9th by flashalert.net, with Parks now identified, the Oregon State Police are pressing forward, re-energized by the breakthrough and propelled by the hope of shedding light on the enduring mystery that clouds that fateful summer day in 1980, as they piece together the last chapters of Parks' life story in their effort to bring resolution to this long-standing case and a semblance of peace to those left in the wake of his absence.
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