TFD-Show Notes S2-Ep2 Sleepwalk Murders

TFD | S02E02 | Sleepwalk Murders

What if you woke up to find you have committed a murder during the night? Yet you have little to no memory of doing so? Around seventy murders worldwide have been blamed on sleepwalkers. Now that’s Freaky Deaky

Welcome back to the Freaky Deaky today we’ll be discussing the ever so intriguing topic of Sleepwalk Murders. The stories we’ll be telling today are from the book Nightmareland by Lex Nover. Lex has been the web producer for Coast to Coast AM since 2002. We’ll be referencing this book quite a bit this season if you haven’t checked it out I highly recommend doing so. Nightmareland takes a look into sleep disorders, unusual dream states, scientific explanations, and the paranormal possibilities. Today we’ll be discussing the while phenomena of Sleepwalk Murders, is someone capable or committing such an act of violence all the while sleeping? Is it possible for a person to wake up with one of the heaviest of burdens with no recollection? Imagine waking up trying to convince people of your innocence. Is it all true? Or is it the crime of the century? 

In the Summer of 1887, Chief Inspector Robert Ledru was one of Paris’s top crime busters. He’d just come off a string of successes, including apprehending killers, breaking up a black magic cult, and rounding up members of an organization that plotted to over throw the French government.

Loaned out to the police department of the port town of Le Havre, he was tasked with solving the mysterious disappearances of some sailors in the area. Exhausted upon his arrival, he went to bed early at his hotel, his trusty German pistol tucked under his pillow. When he awoke in the morning, he noticed that his socks were damp.

Upon reporting to the local police station, he discovered that the case of the missing sailors had been set aside for a perplexing murder that had occurred during the night. Could the celebrated detective help them find the killer?

The victim, a Parisian merchant named Andre Monet, was found at dawn on the beach. A single, fatal bullet, shot at near-point-blank range, had pierced his chest. There appeared to be no motive or suspect. 

Ledru investigated the site where the body was found, across from the English Channel, and discovered a set of misshapen footprints. 

“They look familiar to me,” he declared. He ordered a set of plaster casts to be promptly made. 

Instead of interviewing people on the beach who might have seen something, he stared transfixed at the casts for some time. The he announced to the local gendarmes, “The case is solved. I know the identity of the killer!”.

Who was it? Ledru holed up in his hotel room for the night. The next morning he paid a visit to Le Havre’s chief of police. By then they had recovered the bullet that killed Monet. Ledru asked to see it and quickly compared it to an unfired one in the cartridge of his own gun.

Just as he thought. “I am the man who shot Monsieur Monet to death!” He informed the startled chief, who couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He must have killed the tourist when he stumbled upon him while in a somnambulant trance, Ledru explained. Needing to inform his superiors, he rushed off on the next train to Paris, armed with the plaster casts and fatal bullet.

His boss was incredulous. But then Ledru reminded him of how he had lost his big toe in a gun accident. The missing toe matched the plaster cast of the footprint on the beach. Further, he’d kept the damp socks unwashed, and they had grains of sand in them.

Still unconvinced, Ledru’s superiors agreed to lock him up and keep him under close watch. As an experiment, they gave him a pistol (loaded with blanks), which he stashed under his pillow. After sleeping soundly for three nights, on the fourth night, he arose in his sleep around midnight and pulled out the gun, firing at close range on one of the guards.

This was what the authorities needed to believe  Ledru’s tale. He was sent to live in seclusion on a countryside farm, where he was watched by guards and medical personal for a whopping fifty years, until his death in 1937.

At the time of Monet’s murder, Ledru was said to be suffering from overwork as well as syphilis , which he’d contracted a decade earlier- left untreated, the sexually transmitted disease is associated with mental illness  and perhaps was a factor in his sleepwalking violence. 

(Source: Nover, Lex. Nightmareland (pp. 72-73 Footprints In the Sand: Inspector Ledru Stalks a Killer)

Kenneth Parks was troubled as he nodded out in the early-morning hours of May 23, 1987. Nicknamed the “Gentle Giant”, the six and-a-half-foot-tall Canadian weighed 280 pounds. He’d been banished to the couch by his wife, Karen, while they dealt with his gambling problem.

It was no minor issue. The twenty-four-year-old had sunk the family’s finances with his compulsion for horserace betting and embezzled $32,000 from his employer to fund it. The company caught on, fired him, and started court proceedings against him.

Karen had given him and ultimatum- stop gambling or she’d take their infant daughter and leave. Further, she insisted that he reveal everything to her parents at a family barbecue that was scheduled the next day at their house fourteen miles away in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

Up to that point, Karen’s parents, Barbara Ann and Denis Woods, unaware of Ken’s gambling and arrest, were grateful to him, as years earlier he’d convinced their daughter, then a teenage runaway, to return home. Ken, in turn had greatly admired Barbra and Denis, as they provided stability that his own upbringing lacked. So it must have heavily weighed on his mind as he tried to sleep- would they reject him when they found out about his misdeeds?

Ken has no memory of what happened next. He put on his shoes, grabbed his car keys, and jumped into his vehicle, leaving the door to his house as well as the garage wide open as he headed out into the night. He managed to drive the fourteen miles to his in-laws home- a familiar journey, yet a mind-bogglingly long one to make while unconscious.

Denis Woods awoke to a nightmare. In the darkness, a large man had his hands around his neck in a stranglehold. He sputtered, “Help me, Bobbie!” To his wife, sleeping next to him, as he kicked his legs in desperation. But he soon lost consciousness.

Park’s first memory fragment of that night was “a very sad” image on his mother-in-law’s face. Eyes open, mouth agape, it was this visage frozen in his mind from around the time he murdered her.

Barbra Woods was dragged to the bathroom a few feet away from the bedroom. She’d been viciously stabbed with a kitchen knife in the chest, shoulder, and heart, as well as smashed in the skull with a tire iron.

Park’s second memory fragment was hearing the Woods kids yelling and going upstairs to check on them as he called out to them. But what the teenage girls heard were terrifying animalistic grunts, as he passed by their rooms without opening their doors.

At around four forty-five a.m., a dazed Kenneth Parks showed up at the local police station. Dripping with blood, he confessed, “I’ve just killed two people with my hands; my God, I’ve just killed two people……….I’ve just killed my mother- and father-in-law. I stabbed and beat them to death. It’s all my fault. 

But Denis Woods, who’d also been stabbed, had survived. At the time of Park’s confession, Woods was returning to consciousness in a blood-soaked bed, finding police already in his room.

Back at the police station, Parks suddenly noticed the cuts in his hands, blood pooling onto the floor. “My hands!” He gasped. He’d cut through the tendons of all ten of his fingers- the kitchen knife must have slid during the savage stabbings. Such an injury would normally be excruciatingly painful, yet in an example of dissociative analgesia, he did not exhibit any signs of pain .

The fact that Parks had gone straight to the police station and had no real motive for the crime led authorities to conclude that sleepwalking as the most likely explanation. But that’s not grounds for automatic acquittal, and Parks was jailed on charges of first degree murder.

During the fourth months before trial, he maintained a precise consistency of what he could and could not recall about the event. When interviewed by a battery of shrinks, lawyers, and cops. He underwent extensive tests, and while psychologists found no evidence of psychosis or delusion, his brain waves and sleep patterns indicated sleepwalking and other parasomnias. After one test, Parks was even observed by his cell mates eerily sitting up in his sleep, eyes open, and mumbling.

Park’s family tree was mapped, and parasomnias were shown to run rampant, particularly among the men. Ken’s grandfather, for instance, was known for sleepwalking into the kitchen, frying eggs and onions on the stove, and then returning to bed without eating them. When Ken was eleven, Ken’s grandmother had caught him just in the nick of time as he attempted to climb out a sixth-story window. He’d also struggled with bed wetting, was known  as a deep sleeper, and could be very difficult to awaken. 

On the two nights before the crime, he’d been unable to sleep, ruminating about his marriage, gambling addiction, loss of job, and embezzlement charges. On the third night, his body was desperate to catch up on a deep or slow-wave sleep- the kind associated with sleepwalking.

Park’s attorney didn’t deny that he attacked his in-laws. It was a kind of “non-insane automatism”, he argued, and he wasn’t accountable because the crimes were committed involuntarily. By skirting the insanity defense, he claimed sleepwalking was not a “disease of the mind,” and Parks wasn’t in need of a psychiatric commitment.

At the trial, assistant neurology professor Roger Broughton from McGill University testified that Parks was likely in a deep sleep state and acting out a dream as he drove to the Woods home. Upon arriving, his mother-in-law tried to awaken him, and Parks flew into an uncontrollable rage, Broughton conjectured- sleepwalkers often react with aggression when suddenly confronted, he noted.

How did Parks see to drive if he was sleepwalking? The prosecuting attorney inquired. Broughton explained that sleepwalkers have their eyes open and can perform complex maneuvers on a kind of autopilot.

“What true sleepwalkers cannons do,” write Prof. Rosalind Cartwright, “is recognize the faces of those they attack, even loved ones.” There are two separate visual pathways, she explained, one for motion and navigating through space, and the other for face recognition, and they terminate in different parts of the brain.

The evidence for Park’s sleepwalking, including his sleep deprivation, lack of motive, and absence of pain symptoms from the cut tendons, was enough to sway the jury. After just a few hours of deliberation, he was cleared of all charges and set free.

While parasomnia experts like Dr. Carlos Schenck think the jury got it right, others aren’t so sure. Berit Brogaard, a professor of philosophy who runs a perception lab at the University of Miami, casts doubt on the Parks defense.

“It is just plainly implausible” that he made the fourteen-mile drive without incident, she writes, and “that a severe struggle with his in-laws, the screaming at him…..pleading with him, failed to wake him up.” The fact that Kenneth remembers his mother-in-law’s face suggests some consciousness, and the dissociative analgesia from his hand injuries may have stemmed from being in shock over his violent deeds rather than being asleep, she writes. 

Brogaard concluded that Park’s actions were not entirely automatic, and he may have repressed his memories of the attacks, which perhaps were carried out more in the mode of temporary insanity, or in a hallucinatory figure.

Prosecutors ended up appealing the decision all the way up to the Canadian Supreme Court. Though troubled, they backed the jury’s original ruling, writing, “When asleep, no one reasons, remembers, or understands ……….. If the respondents acts were not proved to be voluntary, he was not guilty.”

Kenneth and Karen Parks eventually divorced, though she’d testified on his behalf at the trial.

(Source: Nover, Lex. Nightmareland (pp.74-78 Stabbings in the Dark: The Kennth 

Parks Attacks)

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