In the summer of 1980, the body of a young White man was discovered along Interstate 5 near Woodburn, Oregon, leaving investigators with a grim mystery and no name to attach to the victim. For nearly 45 years, he was known only as a John Doe. Through recent advances in DNA technology and forensic genetic genealogy, the man has been identified as Larry Eugene Parks, a 30-year-old Vietnam veteran. His family had lost contact with him in 1979, and he was last seen in Pensacola, Florida.
Until the identification, the circumstances surrounding his disappearance were a complete mystery to them.
On the morning of July 18, 1980, Oregon State Police responded to a report of a deceased male along the interstate. The subsequent investigation revealed a brutal homicide; Parks had been drugged, sexually assaulted, and strangled. Investigators at the time believed he might have been a hitchhiker heading north when he was killed. His pockets were turned inside out, and his belt and bootlaces were missing. The case eventually went cold, despite extensive efforts to identify him and find his killer.
The discovery of Parks' body was chillingly close in time and location to another murder. Just one day prior, the body of another man, Michael O'Fallon, was found near an I-5 exit in the same county. Investigators suspected a connection between the two slayings due to similarities in the evidence, but leads dried up, and both cases remained unsolved for decades. A major breakthrough came with the arrest of Randy Kraft, a notorious serial killer known as the "Scorecard Killer," in California in 1983. Kraft was ultimately convicted of 16 murders and is suspected in more than 60 killings across the West Coast and Michigan.
Evidence from both the Parks and O'Fallon cases was sent to California during Kraft's prosecution. In 2024, an investigator in Orange County, California, contacted Oregon State Police with renewed hope for the John Doe case. Using a blood sample that had been preserved, a DNA profile was developed. This profile was then used to find possible relatives, who submitted their own DNA for comparison, leading to the positive identification of Larry Eugene Parks. Oregon State Police have named Randy Kraft as the sole person of interest in Parks' murder and are continuing to process evidence to definitively link him to the crime, bringing a long-awaited name to a victim and a renewed focus on achieving justice after more than four decades.
