Paula Zahn’s non-judgmental demeanor when questioning murderers and victims alike should be taught in journalism school.
Tomorrow night, Zahn does it again, brilliantly, in a segment of her “On the Case” show called “Painful Memories.” It’s about a woman, Diana Green, who, at nine months pregnant in 1979, was raped and savagely attacked in the middle of the night.
Her young Marine husband, Kevin, had gone out at 2 a.m. to Taco Bell to grab some grub — leaving the front door to their first-floor Southern California apartment open.
Did Kevin go to the 24-hour Taco Bell across the street? No — he went to one several miles away.
The baby, which was two weeks overdue, died that night, as Diana clung to life. Despite huge odds that she would die, she didn’t. But she did have a brain injury and lost her speech and her complete memory. When her memory did return, Diana remembered every moment of the attack — and identified her rapist/attacker. It was, she knew, her husband, with whom she’d had a rocky and occasionally violent relationship.
Only thing is, Kevin maintained his innocence, claiming he’d seen a black man with a black van lurking about the apartment’s parking lot. Right. But it never occurred to him to close the front door after seeing a stranger lurking about at 2 a.m. with a pregnant wife at home?
The blood type from the semen sample was O positive, the same as Kevin’s, and it took the jury three hours to convict him. It took 16 years for DNA evidence in other cold-case murders — perpetrated in the area at the same time of Diana’s attack — to prove Kevin’s innocence and get him released from jail.
The rapist and murderer of their child was a career criminal, Gerald Parker, who freely admitted to beating and raping Diana and the other murders.
Was justice finally done? Not in Diana’s mind. She maintains to this day that Kevin was her attacker — and that Parker broke in and attacked her as well.
Fascinating.