William Parr was a 62-year-old white man from St. Louis who made his living behind the wheel of a Yellow Cab, taking calls that often sounded routine until they suddenly weren’t. Near midnight on March 17, 1981, he waited in the cab line at the Greyhound Bus Terminal downtown, first in position for the next dispatch. When the radio crackled with an urgent delivery run—pick up a package at First National Bank on Locust and carry it to a business out on Hanley Industrial Drive—he pulled
away as he always did, a professional moving fast because the company treated bank deliveries as top priority.
Minutes later, the night began to turn strange. Another driver, Richard Elder, passed the bank about four minutes after Parr left and spotted Parr’s cab sitting out front with its dome light glowing, as if the trip had stalled almost as soon as it began. Not far away at Sixth and Locust, Elder noticed a man with a suitcase trying to flag a ride—someone he would later identify as Kelvin Shelby Malone. Around the same time, a First National Bank employee leaving work testified that he saw a cab parked outside with a man in the back seat holding a suitcase. Then the dispatcher started calling Parr’s cab number again and again into the dark, getting nothing back but silence.
Police later found Parr’s cab abandoned in Berkeley, a St. Louis suburb, and in the early morning hours of March 18 they found Parr himself in Entrance Park. He lay face down with blood at his nose and ear, his legs crossed in an eerie stillness, with a road atlas, magazines, and trip tickets beneath him. He was taken to Christian Northeast Hospital and pronounced dead. The investigation that followed traced a trail that seemed to begin at the bus station: evidence showed Malone had arrived in St. Louis from Los Angeles by Greyhound with a suitcase and two. 25-caliber pistols, and witnesses placed a suitcase-carrying figure in the orbit of Parr’s final run.
As the timeline tightened, the circle around Malone narrowed. In Berkeley, Emmanuel Bego—living in the Crenshaw household—heard a knock at about 1:30 a.m.; he didn’t see the visitor, but he heard Michael Crenshaw answer the door and say “Kelvin.” Later that same day, Crenshaw and Malone left together for California in Crenshaw’s car, and afterward a Greyhound ticket for a Los Angeles-to–St. Louis trip was found in the basement. On March 24, 1981, police in San Jose found Malone and Crenshaw asleep in a Mercury Capri; when officers asked for identification, the men drove off, and the stop erupted into a high-speed chase before the pair were captured. Inside the car, officers recovered a small suitcase and two loaded. 25-caliber pistols—the kind of objects that suddenly carry enormous weight when a taxi driver has been found shot and left in a park.
The case against Malone leaned heavily on forensics and the chain of moments that witnesses had described. A bullet removed from Parr during autopsy was compared to test bullets fired from one of the recovered pistols. Early comparisons by local examiners did not settle the question, but an FBI ballistics examiner later concluded—using a comparison microscope—that the bullets matched the same weapon. Missouri charged Malone with capital murder, arguing the killing was tied to robbery and carried the added cruelty of a victim who was silenced mid-shift, mid-delivery, and left where no one would find him until morning.
In 1984, a jury in St. Louis County convicted Malone of Parr’s murder and returned a death verdict; appellate proceedings followed, and the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence. Later federal litigation recounted key trial testimony and the ballistic evidence, including that Parr was a cab driver killed in Berkeley while Malone—described as a black male in those records—was tried and condemned by an all-white jury. Malone remained under death sentences in multiple states stemming from a short, violent spree in March 1981, and he was ultimately executed in Missouri in January 1999.
