The Electronic Telegraph Sunday 20 March 1994 World News
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JERRY Parks had been edgy for several weeks. He had started taking different routes to work each day, and his family were surprised to see him pack his Colt .38 "detective special" when going to fetch the mail at the end of the drive.
His fears were well-grounded. As he was driving along the Chenal Parkway outside Little Rock on September 26, assassins pulled up beside him in broad daylight, sprayed his Chevrolet van with gunfire, then finished him off with four shots into the chest at point-blank range.
The murder has been the cause of wild rumours, not just in Arkansas but also in Washington, chiefly because Parks was head of the firm that provided security at the building used as the Clinton Campaign headquarters in Little Rock in 1992. His name keeps cropping up on radio talk shows as a man who served as fixer and henchman for the Arkansas political machine, and who may have been involved in the mysterious death of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster last July.
But now the family has at last agreed to speak out, in exclusive interviews with The Sunday Telegraph, and their allegations cast a different light on the whole story. Parks may have been a seedy character operating in a shady world, but that should not detract from the fact that the circumstances of his death are worthy of closer scrutiny.
The family claims Parks was never a Clinton sympathiser, but that he was employed as a private investigator by somebody - possibly the local Republican Party, possibly by Democratic rivals, possibly by powerful commercial interests in Arkansas - to gather compromising information on Mr Clinton.
"My dad was working on Clinton's infidelities for about six years, starting in the campaign around 1983," claims Gary Parks, a 23-year-old former submarine navigator in the US Navy, who is now trying to set up a small escort business, which he claims is "totally legit - no sex".
He is "pretty sure" that someone was paying his father to investigate Mr Clinton, "because he wouldn't have done it for free. Nobody knew at the time that Clinton was going to be President".
Mr Parks claims that his father kept two files on Clinton carefully hidden in his bedroom. The files were each about an inch and a half thick and allegedly contained pictures of Mr Clinton with different women, as well as notes of names, dates, and other details.
"Two or three months before my dad was killed, he said that if anything happened to him, we should make three copies of the files and give one to the FBI, one to the Little Rock Police Department, and one to the press."
But the files vanished around the time of the murder. "I don't know what happened," said Gary's mother, Jane Parks, a devout Pentecostal Christian who suffers from multiple sclerosis. "The files were just missing. I suppose they must have been stolen."
She said that their house, on a rural lane outside Little Rock, had been broken into shortly before her husband's death. The telephone lines had been cut, disabling the sophisticated alarm system.
Warned by the police not to talk to the press, this is the first time that Mrs Parks has agreed to speak out. However, she did give an emotional interview to a reporter from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette immediately after the murder in which she expressed fears that her husband had been killed because of the knowledge and documentation he had acquired on Mr Clinton.
Sgt Clyde Steelman, the Little Rock detective in charge of the murder probe, did not refute the allegations made by Mrs Parks and her son. "If they say that some files were missing, then I can tell you, those files were missing," he said. "The Parks family aren't lying to you."
Gary Parks admits that he has only a sketchy idea of what was in the files. He thumbed through the photos and documents once when he was about 16, but did not linger over them for fear that he would be caught red-handed by his father, a 22-stone man with a taste for strict discipline. But around the same period he also allegedly accompanied his father on four or five expeditions to spy on Mr Clinton.
"It would usually be from about two to five in the morning. We'd park just out of sight behind the security fence at the Quapaw Towers and watch Clinton coming and going with different women. My dad would take pictures. Another place we staked out was Vantage Point, where Roger Clinton rented a room for parties, and we'd see Bill and Roger and all the women going in and out."
Nobody outside his family can corroborate the claim that Parks was accumulating files on Governor Clinton during the 1980s. John McIntire, his former partner at American Contract Services, knew nothing about any such files.
"He could have been doing it, though. It's quite possible. I always had this sense that the company was more than it appeared." He added that Parks was capable of collecting information on people to use for blackmail, "but I don't think he'd have been stupid enough to take on the President".
Gary Parks, however, is convinced that his family is up against a very powerful machine. He claims that he has been under surveillance by off-duty state troopers, and that his mother's telephone line has been bugged.
Since the murder, he has been living a semi-clandestine life, afraid that his name is next on the hit list. He decided to speak out as a last resort, fearing that publicity is the only protection left, and he does not mince his words: "I believe they had my father killed to save Bill Clinton's political career."
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