really details or anything, but i knew. knowing eva and steve s relationship, knowing the violence, it was obviously shocking but not surprising. violence? what violence? stephen reitz told detectives that he and eva had a very loving relationship. rarely, if ever, did they quarrel or disagree. odd, then, that he never mentioned the incident here in san diego a few months before eva s death. did he think the detectives wouldn t hear about this? she didn t want him to be at her house. and somehow he climbed to the third floor to her balcony and kicked in a plate glass window with a huge knife. and he said to her, i m going to cut a man, i m going to gut him like a fish and i m going to name him eva. and then she got scared and ended up leaving the house. eva called the police, who filed a report.
he didn t know how he got from his house to their house. he didn t know why he would have done anything like that, because he said i loved her. she was great to me. psychiatrist dr. r.h. billings was assigned the case of kenneth parks, saw him soon after the killings. he was believable because he was so distraught and extremely willing to talk about anything you asked him. dr. billings delved into his medical background and initially found nothing unusual. was he psychotic in any way? no. no history of that? no. no history of that. it was by chance when another patient told me about sleepwalking and how complicated the behavior could be. a lightbulb must have gone on in your head. right then. and, i thought, i wonder if that s what it is. so ken parks, just like stephen reitz, underwent a series of sleep tests and also psychological exams conducted by a number of specialists. they discovered he had a family
to more complex episodes such as walking, as we see in sleepwalking. in the morning they wouldn t be aware of any of this? they have no recollection. if someone has a history of sleepwalking like stephen reitz was claiming, and who uses drugs or alcohol like those found at the crime scene, then the chances of an episode are even more likely. and there was one more risk factor that may have contributed to the violent nature of stephen reitz s alleged sleepwalking episode. he was bipolar, which made him more susceptible to violent behavior during a sleepwalking episode. much like those seen in sleep disorder clinics. they may be dreaming that there s an intruder in the house and they re trying to protect themselves against the intruder. and, in a way, punch and kick and hurt their bed partner. and perhaps even kill them? yes, says dr. avidan. it s rare, but it happens. consider the story investigators were about to encounter.
d.a. dinko bozanich. who, remember, specialized in cases involving mental defenses. how many times do you hear about anybody really committing a crime while they re sleep walking, except for the ones that have been caught and then raised that as a defense instead of something else. well, it turned out there was one particular case, here in toronto, canada. it was more than two decades ago. it, too, was a violent crime, involved a man who had no apparent motive and who later on had absolutely no recollection of what he had done, just like stephen reitz. this killer s name was kenneth parks, and his story made headlines round the world. it was 1987. parks was 23, married, the father of a baby girl. it happened about 2:00 a.m. parks had fallen asleep in front of the television set.
intruder or something, i m thinking. i knew i was i felt threatened for some reason. but it had nothing to do with eva. i wasn t dreaming about eva. he then said something chilling. there s no other way to put it. he said he was sitting on the bed and she was still alive and she was moaning. and he saw the lacerations to her neck and he said it began to occur to me that i was responsible for that. cause of the wounds. that s what i do to shark fishing. i said, why would you recognize that? he said, when i was a commercial fisherman, that s how we killed the sharks. we d sever their spinal and incapacitate the sharks. he must have done the same thing to eva but somehow thinking she was an intruder, must have, he told them. but it was really on a guess. reitz insisted he remembered virtually nothing of his violent attack on eva. i see bits and flashes of it, you know, but i don t but