A man already serving time for murder was sentenced Thursday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for a fatal attack more than four decades ago on a woman whose head was bludgeoned with an eight-pound weight and stabbed 16 times in her Silver Lake apartment.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy — who noted that the August 1980 killing of Stephanie Sommers went unsolved for decades — called it a “very degrading, horrible, violent crime” and said she believed there was “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Harold Anthony Parkinson was “responsible for this.”
Parkinson, now 61, was convicted in November 2019 of first-degree murder.
Jurors also found true the special-circumstance allegation of murder during the commission of a rape, along with allegations that Parkinson used a weight and a knife during the attack on the 36-year-old woman.
Jurors did not hear that Parkinson is already serving a 15-year-to-life state prison sentence for an unrelated murder. He admitted a second special-circumstance allegation — murder with a prior murder conviction — outside the jury’s presence after the verdict.
Last December, the judge turned down a motion made by the prosecution to dismiss the special-circumstance and weapon allegations against Parkinson under a directive from newly seated District Attorney George Gascon, according to a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office. The case marks one of several in which judges have refused to dismiss sentencing enhancements against defendants who could otherwise eventually be eligible for parole.
Sommers’ killing had gone unsolved for several decades until cold case detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department received a lead that Parkinson — who had lived a mile away from the victim — could be a suspect in the killing, Deputy District Attorney Lowrie Mendoza told the jury.
A DNA sample collected from Parkinson was consistent with the DNA profile from a sperm sample collected from the victim, who had grown up in Redondo Beach, Mendoza told jurors. Sommers had briefly been married to a man, but had subsequently told some of her friends that she was a lesbian, the prosecutor said.
Parkinson’s attorney, Jesus Lopez, told jurors that Sommers “had sex with Mr. Parkinson” within five days of her death. But the defense lawyer said there was “not one shred of evidence … that will place Mr. Parkinson in that apartment,” where she had struggled with her assailant before being slain.
“Mr. Parkinson did not kill her. Mr. Parkinson did not rape her,” Lopez said. “The simple truth is that Mr. Parkinson did not commit this crime.”
In a statement read on her behalf, Sheridan Roberts, called her sister “a force for good.”
“Why did you pick on a defenseless woman?” she wrote in the statement, directly addressing the defendant, noting that the family subsequently had to clean up the crime scene.
In a letter to the editor about the death penalty, the victim’s mother wrote, “Our lives are irrevocably changed and will never be the same,” and referred to “deep, overwhelming grief,” a private investigator for the family said, noting that she died in 2002 before her daughter’s murder was solved.
Shortly before Parkinson’s sentence was handed down, the victim’s nephew, Kelly Roberts, told the judge that he and his aunt were “very close” and that it was “so unlike her” when she failed to pick him up for a trip to Magic Mountain as a belated birthday gift.
During the trial, Roberts testified that he waited for his “Auntie Steph” for two days and had unsuccessfully been trying to reach her. He told jurors that his mother ordered him out of the house when the phone rang and he went crying to a neighbor, who walked him back home, went inside the house and came back out to inform him that his aunt had been “brutally murdered.”