A True Story of Murder, Mayhem and Lessons Learned

A Nightmare on Elm Street – the Original

A true story of murder, mayhem and lessons learned.

I heard it coming from the north from over a mile away. It was the classic wail of a police siren and it was traveling southbound at a high rate of speed. The unit passed my location and headed in toward downtown Rogers. That wouldn’t have been strange in and of itself, but I’d been hearing sirens consistently for the past couple of hours. Preoccupied helping a friend put some furniture into storage this fall night, it finally occurred to me that all the action seemed to be converging on the downtown area. The sirens went that direction and then stopped. As we left the storage area I considered the possibilities. Major traffic accident? Chemical leak from the processing plant? As I naively considered what might have caused all the action on a weeknight in our small town, the headline “Homicide Suspect takes over Police Station” never entered my mind. Maybe it should have.

After getting home, my curiosity assured that I called the Police Department to find out what was going on. Although I’d only been a cop at RPD for three years I knew everyone who worked there. They were a great group by and large, professional and competent. Imagine my surprise when I called the station and asked what all the sirens were about and the dispatcher hung up on me. The rest of the dialogue went something like this:

Dispatch: “Rogers Police”

Me:“Hey, what’s going on up there?”

Dispatch:“Hold on.”

Me:Hanging up and calling back.

Dispatch: “Rogers Police”

Me:“Hey, what’s going on?”

Dispatch: “What do you want?”

Me:“Who is this?”

Dispatch: Click.

Me: Hanging up and calling back again.

Dispatch: “Rogers Police”

Me:“This is Officer Tim Keck! Who is this?”

Dispatch: “This is Frankie Parker. Don’t call back!”

Click.

Realizing that it may well have been Frankie’s angry voice I heard, I surmised what must have happened. Frankie Parker was a local thug that we in northwest Arkansas law enforcement had been dealing with for several years. I’d even arrested him myself on burglary charges once. One of the guys must have hooked him up and, while booking him, walked away for a minute. Parker was probably handcuffed to the wall, watching the incoming call light on the telephone and answering it before the dispatcher could pick it up. It was just the kind of thing he’d do, making himself as much of a pain in the butt as possible to anyone with a badge.

Since calling the department obviously wasn’t working I decided to phone my division commander, Lieutenant Pete Iles at home. Pete was a good guy and had been my first shift supervisor when I started at the PD. We’d sort of hit it off and I figured he’d know what to do. But Pete didn’t answer the phone, his wife did. Connie was an intelligent woman with a razor-sharp wit but she wasn’t in the mood to chat. She informed me that Frankie Parker had evidently committed a double murder, gone to the station and shot Officer Ray Feyen. He’d then taken over the building, holding everyone at bay. Pete had rushed up there a couple of hours earlier and she was worried. I couldn’t believe my ears. Double homicide? Officer down? This couldn’t be happening. But if it was happening, the fact that Frankie Parker was at the middle of it was no real surprise.

I grabbed my pistol and ballistic vest as my wife turned on the television to catch the local news. Hugging my two boys, ages 4 and 7, I headed out the door. In those days we didn’t have take-home cars so I jumped into my blue Ford pick-up and made for the station. The department wasn’t very far away but I probably broke a number of traffic laws on the short trip there. It didn’t matter – there wasn’t a patrol car anywhere around. As I drove down Poplar Street approaching the PD the scene looked more and more surreal. There were cars parked everywhere. Police cars, sheriff’s cars, fire trucks, ambulances and vehicles abandoned by citizens who wanted to get a look. I finally found a parking space a couple of blocks south of the station on 3rd Street and made my way back down toward our building. The address of the department was 212 W. Elm Street.

The police department was located at in an old 3 story building that also housed city hall, the fire department, and municipal court. It had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places and, with the WWI Memorial cannon sitting beside it, usually looked a little slice of Americana. But tonight it looked like a scene from an old movie. There were cops surrounding the perimeter in haphazard fashion, some hunkered down behind cars with guns drawn and others relaxing with a smoke and chatting with one another. There were state troopers, sheriff’s deputies from both Benton and nearby Washington counties, and municipal officers from virtually every surrounding town.

I finally located Chief of Police Dennis Musteen who had taken a place of cover near the southwest corner of the property. Chief Musteen was a veteran police officer who’d been with the department for two decades. We were joined there by officers Mike Lott and Mike Mann. Lott was a tall red-haired man who took his job very seriously. He was also one of the best shots with a pistol I’d ever seen. Mann was an average-sized guy with a crazy sense of humor and a lot of natural leadership ability. He was also a close friend.

Together, they began to tell me the story about what had evidently transpired that night. Frankie Parker had gone to the home of his former in-laws, James and Sandra Warren with the apparent intent to kill his former sister-in-law, Cindy. The Warren’s, who lived on West Mulberry Street, were good people; liked and respected by all who knew them. But Frankie didn’t care about that. When he arrived at their home with a recently purchased Tec-9 pistol, Cindy saw him coming and escaped through a bedroom window. James and Sandra were not so lucky. Unable to locate Cindy, Parker instead shot her parents down in cold blood.

He then left and drove to the home of his ex-wife, Pamela. I knew Pam Warren well. We’d gone to school together in Rogers. She had always struck me as quiet and kind, the polar opposite of the man whom she would later marry. Parker kicked Pam’s door in and forced her at gunpoint into his car. He then drove to the Rogers Police Department and parked right out front. By the time he got there it was after 5:00 and most of the civilian employees had gone home for the evening. That turned out to be a huge blessing.

Walking in through the department’s ground floor glass door into the small lobby, Parker approached the counter. The secretarial area came into immediate view but the women who worked there (unprotected and unarmed) were already on their way home for the evening. If they’d still been at work, it could have been a bloodbath.

Sitting in the first office on the right was Officer Ray Feyen. Ray was working on his second career after retiring from the US Army as an intelligence officer. Dragging Pam up to the countertop, Frankie reached over the top of the half-door and twisted the lock that served as the only security feature. The door swung open and Parker began to step through. At the same time Ray was moving toward the door of his office. Ironically, he began to ask “How may I help you?” when Parker opened fire from point blank range.

Ray was struck by 3 bulletsfrom Parker’s gun as he reflexively moved backwards away from the pistol. He was even able to draw and return fire amidst the hail of bullets, driving Parker (and his hostage) to the back of the station. Officer Feyen had gone down and Parker probably thought he was dead as he explored the back part of the building, looking for his next victim.

What Parker didn’t know was that the only other person in the building at that time was the dispatcher, a very surprised Monty Balk. Monty had been sitting in the room next to Ray’s office at the dispatcher’s desk when Parker came in. Evidently, Parker thought he would only encounter an unarmed dispatcher when he came into the station. After getting shot at by Officer Feyen, he believed he’d just had bad luck and that Ray must have been working the radio that night. He never saw Monty.

Monty was a slender young man, only 23 years old, when he decided to take his first step toward fulfilling his goal to become a police officer. He intended to work as a radio dispatcher until he could get transferred to the street as an officer. He didn’t know he’d be in the midst of a firefight, witness an officer go down, and then be all alone with an armed gunman on the loose before ever leaving the radio room. But that’s exactly what had happened.

Seeing Parker disappear down the hallway, Monty took the .357 magnum pistol that was positioned under the dispatch desk in a hidden holster (for emergencies only) and went to Ray. Bleeding from multiple shots to his torso, Monty knew he could never get the badly wounded officer out of the building before Parker found his way back to them. Thinking fast, the young dispatcher opened the door to the small microfiche closet and drug Ray inside. Promising to return, Monty then had the presence of mind to grab a walkie-talkie as he ran out the back door.

The only other people nearby were the firefighters who were on duty at the opposite end of the building. Monty ran straight to their back door and told them what had happened. That’s when the call for help went out.

Officer Feyen would soon be rescued in a daring move by Officer Terry Woodside and Trooper Keith Ferguson. Terry was a good-looking, blonde haired, all-American type and my best friend through high school. After serving a stint in the Marine Corps, I had convinced him that police work was what he really wanted to do. Keith Ferguson was a long-time state police officer and family friend who epitomized the term “old school.” They approached the small room Ray was in from the outside and managed to get the window open. Risking their lives, they drug Ray out through the window and to the waiting paramedics who whisked him to the hospital. Ray was badly hurt but they thought he would live. In the meantime, more and more help arrived and the building had been surrounded.

Now that I had a better understanding of what had brought us to this point I took a closer look around. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of citizens lining the streets trying to get up close to the action. Although the sidewalks immediately adjacent to the PD were clear, the nearby blocks were jam packed. An announcer from a local radio station gave the play-by-play as officers moved around the building seeking cover, evidently not realizing he was jeopardizing their safety. Other media outlets had called the department and spoken with Parker himself, giving him the airtime he so desperately craved.

Inside the station Parker had the run of the department. He threatened Pam and made phone calls, reveling in the moment. Lieutenant Mike Jones had been given the job of hostage negotiator. A hard-working, tough-talking cop, with an adolescent’s sense of humor, Jones was one of the best investigators the department had ever seen. Having spent most of his career in the detective division, Jones was cut from the same cloth as his mentor, Lieutenant Bob Casto. Casto was a legend at RPD; a veteran cop who scared rookies more than any bad guy. That’s why making Jones the crisis negotiator seemed to most of us a little like making Rambo a Sunday School teacher.

As we gathered in small clusters around the building perimeter and talked about what to do, I noticed Corporal Steve Helms conducting a reconnaissance of the back corner of the building. Knowing Parker was, at least occasionally, sitting in the radio room, Helms was considering what plan might get us in the building and in a position to end Parker’s reign of terror. Steve Helms was an extremely competent young officer with a heart for doing things the right way. He was also the sniper on our SWAT team. The problem he had was the one all of us on SWAT shared; our gear was inside the station with the bad guy.

Suddenly, a shotgun blast shattered the night air. Then, a micro-second later, a big-bore rifle round went off. The shotgun had evidently come from the rear of the building and the rifle sounded like it was really close by, probably on the west end near the cannon. I was looking right at Helms (whom I would later nickname “Hobie”) when the gunfire started. If I thought it sounded close, he must have thought they were shooting at him. He crouched down and froze in place. He would later say that he was expecting rounds to start flying in from all around the building as every officer there let loose a barrage at the bad guy. Fortunately, not knowing exactly where the rounds had come from, every officer held their fire.

It’s a good thing they did, too. Because not only was the bad guy not shooting at them, he wasn’t shooting at all. The shotgun blast had come from a state trooper who took a shot at Parker as he strolled past a door. Unfortunately, he missed. The second round came from the sniper we had borrowed from another agency who’d taken a prone position near a large tree on the west end of the property. The first shot had startled him enough to make him fire an accidental round from his rifle into the building. Fortunately, he missed as well.

We soon got word back from the negotiators that Parker had just shot Pam in the abdomen. He was getting increasingly agitated and was threatening to kill her. Chief Musteen was forced to make two very difficult decisions. He gave the “green light” to the sniper, authorizing him to take the suspect out if he could. He also decided that the SWAT team should get prepared to go in and rescue Pam. We were ready to do that but, of course, we were without our equipment. I pointed that out to the Chief and he suggested that I should borrow some.

I ran to the end of the block and found Officer Jim Ketterman from the Springdale Police Department. Explaining our dilemma, Jim got on the radio and then went to his trunk. He dug a ballistic vest, a gas mask, and some other gear out of his car and promised more would arrive soon from their department. It did and we borrowed enough stuff to get us by as we planned an entry.

As I leaned back against a car and contemplated how much fun it wasn’t going to be to do our first hostage rescue without flash-bangs and wearing borrowed gear, my mind drifted back to all the encounters I’d had with Frankie Parker. I’d personally taken reports in which he’d been the suspect, like the time he slashed his ex-wife’s tires. I had the satisfaction of building a case on him after he broke into Pam’s duplex by climbing through the common attic from the other side. He’d stolen and damaged a lot of property and I was able to get him arrested. Unfortunately, the criminal charge was dealt away after he spent time in jail for contempt of court on the civil side of that same case. Several officers had similar stories and we’d all talked about what would eventually happen between Parker and his former spouse. None of us thought it would be a happy ending. And it wasn’t.

My thoughts were interrupted by the thwack, thwack, thwack sound of a helicopter rotor. Looking overhead I saw a dark-colored chopper flying just above the building. The letters KY3 emblazoned on the side told me it was the news helicopter from TV Channel 3 in Springfield, Missouri. News helicopters flying overhead are something we’ve grown accustomed to in this day and time, but 25 years ago in Rogers, Arkansas; it might as well have been Santa and his reindeer. That wouldn’t have seemed any stranger.

Another frightening report soon came in from the negotiators; Frankie had just shot Pam a second time. My heart sank. Could she still be alive? This was someone I’d known for years and I wanted to do something to help her. What if she died while we sat outside planning and waiting? What must be going through her mind as she sits there bleeding, in terrible pain from two gunshot wounds, wondering if help would ever come?