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[Music] up next a murder that stumps even veteran detectives it was a nasty nasty
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crime scene and a crime that offers few clues there were no signs of any struggle or fight was this a sex crime
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by a jilted lover her body was positioned in a way that was very sexually suggestive it's hard to imagine
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that anybody's capable of something like this until one man's words reveal a
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twisted motive and a killer with a bizarre past [Music] jacksonville florida with its warm sandy
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beaches and sub-tropical climate was the perfect place for 25-year-old corey parker to attend college
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she liked it a lot better than the cold winters of her hometown of rochester new
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york corey was beautiful she was very tall she had a presence about her some of our
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best times together was a girls night in you know rent movies and go hang out at
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the house corey worked her way through college as a waitress during the thanksgiving holiday of her
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junior year she didn't show up for work so her fellow employees were concerned
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they thought immediately that something was wrong so the manager directed one of
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the cooks to go by her apartment to check on her her apartment door was locked but her co-worker looked inside
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and saw her body on the bed covered in blood this crime scene was one of the worst
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that this county has ever seen in terms of its uh just gruesomeness there was blood all over her bedroom all
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over her body almost as if it had been painted on her the scene appeared to be staged
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cory's body was positioned in a way that was very sexually suggestive she was nude
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her legs were spread apart there's every indication that there was a sexual motive to this crime
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interestingly the autopsy found no evidence of sexual assault cory parker was stabbed 101 times of
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those 101 stab wounds i believe 54 were postmortem overkill does indicate to investigators
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a relationship between victim and perpetrator police learned that the night before her
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murder corey spent the night at a local bar with friends witnesses said she left around 1am
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the clothes cory wore to the bar were folded neatly at the bottom of her bed we also know that she had prepared
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herself for bed and crawled in her bed so we know that she wasn't attacked until after she
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was in bed so either he was waiting in her bedroom closet or he let himself into the apartment
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investigators found a gold-plated zippo lighter in cory's bedroom although corey
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smoked none of her friends recognized it investigators dusted the lighter for fingerprints
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but none were found it became apparent to us that there was no way that that was corey parker's lighter
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inside the kitchen of corey's apartment police found a blood stain on the kitchen counter
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next to the sink and on the windowsill above the sink both inside and outside this led police to believe the killer
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entered and exited the apartment through the kitchen window the reason we believe
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the killer didn't go out the door was because of the light that was outside the kitchen window offered the suspect a
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way to both get in and out of the apartment without being illuminated corey's phone records revealed that a
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former co-worker 27 year old eric jones had been calling her repeatedly before her death
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he had been asking cory out for some time she had been telling him no employees at the restaurant told us that
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he had an obsession or an infatuation with her and was continuously talking to her when she'd come to work or trying to
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ask her out jones had no criminal record but acted bizarrely when interviewed by
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police not only did he have a history of mental illness by his own admission but he told
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police officers that he had fantasies about raping and killing women which clearly
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jumped out at law enforcement he described sexual fantasies that he had about cory some some were fairly violent
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he even told investigators how he would have murdered corey had he been given the chance
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he described how he would have slit her throat early in the early in the murder so that she couldn't scream for help
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and that description was similar enough to how she was really killed that it again raised the police suspicion
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[Music] the medical examiner who performed corey parker's autopsy found no signs of
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sexual assault but corey had been stabbed over 100 times there were numerous defensive wounds on
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her hands and arms proving there had been an intense struggle our theory was that corey parker fought
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for her life in order to prevent a sexual assault investigators found several foreign
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hairs in corey's hands one had an intact root the fact that the hair had root material
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on it and was not from her would allow you to at least presume that that hair had to
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be attained forcefully dna testing revealed the blood in the kitchen came from the same person as the hair in
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corey's hand surprisingly this dna did not match the prime suspect eric jones corey's co-worker despite his
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bizarre behavior i think it's fair to say was mentally unstable at this time and while
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prescribed medication to control his mental illness he was not taking it and so i think at the time
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that he gave these statements he was mentally unstable the dna from corey's apartment
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did not match any of the dna profiles in either the state or national criminal databases
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in the search for corey parker's killer investigators discovered that she had
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just started dating someone new his name was david wilt but it didn't take long for
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investigators to eliminate him as a suspect he was out of state at his parents house
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for thanksgiving and so you know he had a very solid alibi investigators interviewed everyone corey
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spoke with at the ritz bar on the night of her murder most of the people corey saw that night
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left the bar before she did but one friend tiffany smith stayed with corey until
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one in the morning tiffany told police they both left the bar at the same time in their own cars and went their
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separate ways but tiffany told friends that wasn't the only contact she had with corey that
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night she said she called corey from her cell phone around 2 am and corey answered the phone
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she said when corey answered the phone that corey was asleep and she asked her what she was doing corey
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said i'm sleeping tiffany also told friends she drove to corey's apartment
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around 4am and knocked on her door but no one answered so she left her statement that she went by corey's
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house puts her at the crime scene during the time that corey could have possibly
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been killed and that added to that suspicion that she could possibly be involved
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but when investigators checked tiffany's cell phone records they made a startling discovery
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tiffany didn't call corey after they left the ritz bar obviously investigators were curious as to why she
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would say that she had called and actually spoken with corey when it wasn't true
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but why would tiffany make up a story like that everybody was talking about the possibility that maybe she was sexually
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interested in corey tiffany mentioned to me in just a very casual conversation that she had been
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vicarious [Music] tiffany had a real true affection for corey in addition tiffany told friends things about the
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crime scene that had not been released to the general public she was describing the state of the victim's body and the
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scene without having been privy to either photographs or a walk-through of the scene they thought it was certainly
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suspicious i thought it was really strange that she would have any idea of how corey had been killed
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tiffany denied any involvement in the murder but when asked to provide a dna sample
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she refused the fact that she did not willingly give up dna or hair samples led the police to
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believe she had something to hide even though corey parker's friend tiffany smith insisted
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she had nothing to do with corey's murder she made untruthful statements about her
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activities on the night of the murder she also refused to provide a dna sample she actually put herself at the crime
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scene in one of her statements but scientists found a surprising piece of information in the blood evidence
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left by the killer they found the tell-tale y chromosome a y chromosome is present
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only in men we did develop a male profile from this particular sample which was a blood sample
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from a point of entry or exit into the apartment we were optimistic that this could be from the suspect
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so tiffany was eliminated as a suspect they believed that tiffany was saying things to kind of inject herself into
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the investigation to make her seem more important than she was investigators believe tiffany learned
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details of the crime scene from a friend who worked on the emergency crew police were forced to consider the
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possibility that corey's murder was a random act perpetrated by a man with an
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uncontrollable hatred for women eventually police performed dna tests on 38 men co-workers fellow students former
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boyfriends with no success i was very concerned that they would never solve the case and what i learned
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from watching other crimes is that the longer it goes on the less likely it is to solve a crime
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18 months passed and police continued to work the case pouring through the file re-reading the
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police interviews to generate new leads police offered a reward for any new evidence which would lead to a
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conviction and degenerated a lead some employees of a local steakhouse a few miles from corey parker's apartment
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called police to report that a co-worker robert denney behaved suspiciously after
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corey's murder you just seemed to be upset and was crying had come into this
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restaurant one day and told them that his child had been killed in an automobile accident in texas and that he
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needed to get back home denny's co-workers responded generously by raising money so he could return to
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texas to attend his son's funeral after collecting that money the owner of the restaurant went over to give the
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money to his sister when he was told that robert denney did not have a son and that that story was fabricated
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and there was something else about robert denney he lived in the same complex as corey
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parker with a direct line of sight into her apartment robert denney told some co-workers about
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this woman that lived in an apartment below him and he began to talk about how he would watch her
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and even went so far to graphically describe that he would masturbate while watching her
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when police decided to question denny again his sister told police that he'd
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left the area she had actually kicked him out of the home she shared with her husband
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because of his odd behavior staying up all hours of the night his what she described as an addiction
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to pornography she told one law enforcement officer that she had awoken to him looking over her bed and staring at her
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then police learned another disturbing piece of information robert denny's older brother was serving
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a life sentence in texas for stabbing a woman 97 times corey parker was stabbed 101 times what
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are the chances of two young men coming out of the same family committing such heinous heinous and atrocious murders
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and did he get that idea from his brother was he trying to emulate his brother 18 months after corey parker's murder
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investigators found robert denney 800 miles away in maryland where he was living with a 52-year-old married woman
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robert denney had struck up an email relationship with a married woman and eventually had convinced her
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to let him come up there and live with her and her husband he and this woman had a sexual
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relationship right under the husband's nose when police questioned denny they told him they were investigating
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his possible involvement in a different crime hoping he'd let down his guard
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they told him that they were investigating a potential allegation that he had been involved in a fight in
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eastern maryland which they thought that he would voluntarily give his dna to prove that he had not been involved in
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the fight and we were not leaving eastern maryland until we got his dna this proved to be harder than
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investigators anticipated denny smoked during his interrogation but always made sure to keep the cigarette
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butts detectives offered him a bottle of water but he wouldn't touch it finally they asked him to sign a
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document saying he refused to provide his dna we asked him to put the letter into the
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envelope and seal the envelopes he refused to seal the envelopes and at that point basically told us look you've
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tried three times to get my saliva on something first the cigarette butt then the water bottle and now the envelopes
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seal it yourself is there anything else i can do for you so investigators put denny under
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surveillance at his home and at the computer store where he worked he took a cigarette break every 45
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minutes but was careful to keep the evidence when he smoked his cigarettes he would
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put out the butts and then put the butts in his pocket so they could not be collected
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two days passed and investigators finally got a break just after a brief rainstorm
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denny came outside to smoke but this time he did something different he walked around and then all of a
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sudden began spitting on the sidewalk not once not twice but six times because of the
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rain the saliva was sitting on top of the rain water making it easy to collect and the barrier helped reduce
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contamination it was very easy to designate where it was from that point on it's the same as
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testing for a hair or a blood stain or semester the results left no doubt the unknown dna from corey parker's
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apartment belonged to robert benny the fact that he denied ever having been in her apartment
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made this evidence all the more incriminating and there was one other piece of evidence that implicated denny
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the gold-plated lighter found in corey's bedroom he said it wasn't his but a former girlfriend told police
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it was his lighter she was able to identify the emblem on and she was positive that was his
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lighter prosecutors believe robert denney was obsessed with his beautiful neighbor corey parker
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and monitored her comings and goings he also looked inside her apartment whenever he could
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prosecutors believe denny saw corey get ready to go with her friends on the night before thanksgiving
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[Music] then armed with a knife and wearing gloves he entered corey's apartment through the
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kitchen window the evidence suggests he hid somewhere possibly in her closet and waited
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for her to return [Music] corey had no hint that anyone was inside and went to bed
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[Music] that's when denny attacked [Music] but corey fought back much harder than he'd anticipated
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in the process she pulled out some of his hair which contained his dna his lighter slipped from his pocket
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during the struggle he stabbed her repeatedly at some point he cut himself and bled inside his gloved hand
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as he left the apartment through the kitchen window he left a blood smear on the windowsill
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providing his dna robert denney went on trial for first degree murder the jury deliberated for 45 minutes we
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the jury find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree as charged in the indictment we the jury further find
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that the killing was done with premeditation since he was only 17 years old a minor
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when he committed the crime denny was sentenced to life in prison without parole
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robert denny is a hard person to understand there was obviously some dysfunction in his family that
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is far greater than most of us probably know he was methodical in cleaning up he
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was careful and he almost got away with murder but for that one drop of blood and hair that
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he shed that he didn't ever expect to be discovered this girl was a very likable
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very intelligent very beautiful 25 year old that had a bright future in front of her she came
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from a good family and had a good social network had everything in the world to live for and
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in one instance this cold-blooded killer takes her life [Music]