'I was going to kill you, but I changed my mind'
'I was going to kill you, but I changed my mind'
On Richard Parker and criminal versatility
Boomerang
In 2016, New York magazine published my essay, “Boomerang: I Was Richard Parker’s First Victim, But Not His Last.” The piece went live on June 1 of that year. My eldest sister, Sherry Huff-Grimes, died unexpectedly on June 3, 2016, and due to her passing and a book deadline at the end of June, I did little to promote the essay, even though it meant a lot to me.
In writing about knowing Richard, I exorcised a demon of childhood trauma. I finally revealed my “origin story” as a true crime writer. Richard was my first experience with how a certain kind of evil can hide behind a perfectly innocent-looking mask. How even a young teen—he was perhaps 13 at the time, I was nine going on 10 years old—could manipulate and abuse a victim and then behave as if everything was completely normal.
The opportunity to write that story, however, came from the worst possible thing: Richard Parker had murdered his in-laws in February 2014. He’d embezzled $40,000 from his father-in-law, retired attorney Jon Setzer, and figured he could eliminate the debt by eliminating Setzer and his wife, Marion. Richard left a bomb disguised as a lamp in a box on the Setzer’s porch, complete with a fake FedEx slip. The explosion killed Jon Setzer outright, and Marion died three days later. Richard, who had once left a diary listing all the ways to demonstrate his love to his wife in a house he burned after realizing he couldn’t complete remodeling it, was arrested on Valentine’s Day.
An American Monster
Richard Parker, who is now serving life without parole in a medium-security Tennessee prison, is a peculiarly American monster. That’s why a producer from the Investigation Discovery series American Monster contacted me in 2018 with an eye toward an episode about his crimes. While he would’ve been the perfect subject for that show, I told the producer they would unlikely get enough cooperation to proceed, and I was right. What I’d learned about his family through the years told me they were a closed circle, and the pain from his actions would only erect an unbreakable wall.
Richard and I were products of the same time, place, and culture, and I’ve long been bothered by the parallels between our families. We grew up on the same remote rural road on the outskirts of an iconic American city (Nashville). We lived in similar-sized houses built on virtually useless, rock-strewn land riddled with limestone caves. Our parents knew each other well—just yesterday, I found an obituary from a 1961 edition of the Tennessean listing my father as a pallbearer at the funeral for one of Richard’s great-grandparents. We’d both been beaten over the head with a working-class idea of manhood. Men were hyper-independent loners but leaders, and using violence to solve problems was honorable.
I got away from all that without meaning to (at first), even though I still see it in myself when I’m angry or resentful. Recently—and I know I’m burying the lede here—I learned a little more about how such an upbringing meshed with Richard Parker’s likely psychopathic personality to produce intimidating, frightening behavior once he was in college.
‘Frank’
I won’t use the man’s real name; I’ll call him Frank.
A few days ago, he contacted me to share his college experience with Richard. As we discussed Frank’s story, my mind started churning again. A question I’ve asked hundreds of times still plagues me: What else did Richard Parker do?
Even though Frank’s tale is mild compared to Richard’s later acts against the Setzers, it does underscore a key feature of many violent psychopaths: criminal versatility. The following is from “Identifying subtypes of criminal psychopaths: A replication and extension,” a 2007 report published in Criminal Justice and Behavior, or CJB:
[Primary] psychopaths had been charged with a greater number of violent crimes and had a history of more incarcerations compared with other groups. However, the secondary psychopathic subgroup was charged with a greater number of nonviolent crimes. Both primary and secondary psychopaths displayed significantly greater criminal versatility than other groups…
True crime narratives usually center on the most violent acts committed by psychopaths for sensationalist reasons as well as to focus narratives and make them more reader or viewer-friendly. Criminal versatility doesn’t become part of the conversation, but experts know that killers, especially those who have committed multiple murders with clear forethought, often have a history of “lesser” crime. Like Richard Parker committing arson and embezzling from his in-laws. Or molesting me.
‘You could literally see the path he took by the damaged cars.’
Which brings me to Frank’s story.
In an email, Frank told me that he also felt “that Richard is probably guilty of other crimes as well.” Then, he detailed his route to encountering the other side of Richard Parker’s personality, which was well-hidden by then. I’ve edited Frank’s account for brevity and clarity.
“The incident where Richard got angry with me started as a road trip,” Frank wrote, “[My] roommate, Richard, and two girls went to a bar.”
“Richard saw me and one of these girls dancing,” Frank continued, “and making out, and [he] became so enraged that he stormed out of the bar and pounded the hoods and roofs of several vehicles in the parking lot only with his fists. You could literally see the path he took by the damaged cars.”
According to Frank, Richard Parker came across to most as “a fairly soft-spoken gentle giant of a guy, but this shows how the gasoline can ignite in his personality.”
Frank told me that Richard didn’t join them on the ride back to college that night, and they “didn’t know where he went, which was a good thing for me.”
In a separate email, Frank detailed what happened next. He noted that Richard was infatuated with the girl in question and pointed out that she was not Laura Setzer, Richard’s now ex-wife.
Afterward, Frank wrote, he and Richard passed each other “on campus one day where no one was around, and Richard said, ‘I was going to kill you, but I changed my mind.’”
“The expression on his face as he turned and walked away told me he was deadly serious,” Frank wrote, “and I never forgot that. Someone told me what he did to his in-laws, and those memories came back, and recently, I found your article of how you were molested by him and was sickened. I’m sorry that happened to you. I always knew something was off about Richard in college, but I never imagined how messed up he was.”
Frank offered a coda explaining why he is still wary of Richard Parker. “[Three] years after college graduation, some friends of mine would play tackle football in a field near Nashboro Village (A large apartment complex in the Nashville suburb of Antioch, where Richard and I grew up ~ SH). Some bodybuilder-type guy tackled me and tried twisting my head in the process. Words were exchanged, and later, a friend told me he was one of Richard’s buddies, so he was still sending me a message after all this time.”
A Voice in the Night
In any other context, Frank’s tale wouldn’t be that remarkable. A guy who lived on my dorm floor during my sophomore year in college developed an obsession with the woman I was dating and behaved in a threatening way on more than one occasion. Still, I was never particularly intimidated, just weirded out. By the following school year, he seemed like a different person, was never less than cordial with me, and left her alone. In college, boys begin to realize they’re men and start to figure out what that means, and sometimes, all that posturing and testosterone leads to idiocy.
Yet the detail of a likely friend of Richard’s attempting to hurt Frank a few years later tracked completely with what I’d concluded about Richard Parker. I’ve long wondered if he was responsible for something that happened at my house when I was about 12. At that time, Richard would’ve been old enough to drive, and his family still lived in the same house a couple of miles down the road.
I was having a sleepover with my friends Matt and Brett. We were “camped out” in the three-season room my dad added to almost double the size of our house. It was late and we were settling down when we heard a raspy voice outside, stage-whispering, “Hey, boys.”
We froze. We heard the voice again. “Hey, boys.”
I vividly remember thinking I recognized the voice, even though the person was trying to disguise it. For a moment, I thought it could be my brother, but he was married to his first wife by then and had never been prone to such pranks anyway. Then I wondered if it was Richard.
I stepped outside, unwisely not wearing my glasses. About twenty yards away, our weak yard light barely illuminated a person crouched at the base of a big tree, marking the fence line between our property and the neighbor to the east. I shouted that I was going to get my dad’s gun and, pushing my friends ahead of me, ran up the stairs and into the house to wake my parents.
Dad, though irritated at being woken up by a trio of panicky middle-schoolers and certain it was just a friend of ours screwing around, grabbed his 12 gauge, jacked a shell into the chamber, and walked outside, where he promptly fired it into the air and re-racked, ready to fire again.
As far as I know, the voice owner was gone and never returned. But to this day, I am certain I know who it was.
I can only speculate on what motivated him and whether a blast from Dad’s shotgun prompted him to change his mind.
Versatility
I know what Richard Parker did for sure. He committed arson. He embezzled. He killed. Perhaps those crimes alone were enough to demonstrate his criminal versatility.
It was tempting to hunt for unsolved crimes and map them to Richard’s former addresses, but I think leaving the question out there is enough for now.
Between 1982 and 2015, Richard Parker lived in Nashville, Murfreesboro, Mt. Juliet, Cookeville, and—finally—Lebanon, Tennessee. He may have owned property in Arkansas at some point. How many times in those places, during his life before prison, did he contemplate other crimes only to change his mind? More importantly, how many times did he forge ahead?