Dna, Ex-Girlfriend's Testimony At Heart Of Double-Murder Case

Robert Parker is "a sexual sadist" who found it "titillating to tie up women at knifepoint" before killing them, prosecutors told jurors during closing arguments this week in his double-murder trial.

"He needed to eliminate the only eyewitnesses," King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Regina Cahan told the Superior Court jury.

Jurors, who listened to almost three months of testimony, began deliberations late yesterday - shortly after the prosecution and defense ended almost two days of closing arguments.

Parker, 27, is charged with two counts of aggravated murder. If convicted, he could receive the death penalty.

Cahan told jurors several factors pointed to Parker as the man who killed Renee Powell, 43, and Barbara Walsh, 53, in 1995.

Both victims, she said, were middle-aged and lived in ground-floor apartments. And both were doing laundry shortly before they were stabbed repeatedly and strangled.

The killer had to spend time watching them and had to live nearby, Cahan said, noting that Parker lived 130 feet from Walsh and 150 yards from Powell.

Cahan told jurors that after killing Powell, Parker found his next victim in the same Shoreline-area apartment complex.

But the defense countered that even though Parker lived near the slain women, nobody saw him at the scene of the crimes and nobody could testify that he knew the victims or had any previous contact with them.

"Robert Parker is no murderer. Robert Parker is no rapist," said Parker's defense attorney Howard Phillips.

Instead, he told the jurors, his client was a prosecutorial "mockingbird" - someone who appears to have committed crimes he did not commit.

"He was on the stand for 3 1/2 days," Phillips told jurors, asking them to draw on what they observed during Parker's testimony. "You were assessing him the whole time."

Much of the past two days of closing arguments centered on DNA evidence and on Princess Gray, Parker's former girlfriend who at first implicated him in the slayings but recanted a short time later.

Co-prosecutors Cahan and Donald Raz are banking on the reliability of the DNA, while Phillips and co-defense attorneys Marcus Naylor and Ann Mahoney are counting on Gray's unreliability.

Prosecutors allege blood with the defendant's DNA matches semen found on Powell.

They also allege that a single strand of pubic hair, found in a towel in Walsh's bathroom, also belongs to the defendant.

But the defense suggested the semen match was inaccurate and told the jury the hair was discovered one year after Walsh's slaying, and roughly two weeks after Parker's King County Jail cell was searched for contraband.