She prosecuted BTK and Carr brothers. Now this ‘lucky woman’ is retiring.

Kim Parker was halfway through an animated and anecdote-laden conversation about her time as a Sedgwick County prosecutor when her office phone rang last week.

She promptly excused herself, picked up the line and spent a few moments talking legal shop with the person on the other end.

Just a few days before, she had tried her last homicide case in front of a jury and secured a guilty conviction.

That was supposed to have marked the end of her 32-year career with the district attorney’s office. But Parker, 59, couldn’t help herself.

When she hung up the receiver, she flashed a bashful grin.

“It’s my last week, and I took duty,” she said with a laugh, referring to the responsibility of being on call 24/7 for the week in case law enforcement called needing a search warrant. “I was like, ‘I just want to do it one more time!’ ”

Parker is retiring from the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office on Friday after three decades of prosecuting local criminal cases. She has spent much of that time as the chief deputy district attorney – a right-hand-man of sorts (or woman, in her case) to the acting Sedgwick County district attorney.

In that role, she has supervised and managed dozens of attorneys, investigators and legal support staff members and has acted as lead counsel in more than 200 jury trials.

But she’s perhaps best-known for helping to send some of Wichita’s most notorious criminals to prison and to death row.

“A lot of the stuff that I’ve done people don’t talk about over dinner,” she said. “They’re some really tragic cases.”

For years, she mulled over the identity of the BTK serial killer with the late Ken Landwehr, the Wichita police homicide commander working the case, eventually helping to put together a court case against Dennis Rader that ended with his guilty pleas to 10 murders.

She convinced a jury to hand down death sentences to brothers Jonathan and Reginald Carr, who, as part of a multiday rampage, sexually assaulted, robbed and shot five people execution-style in a snowy field in December 2000.

She secured convictions against Scott Roeder, who killed local physician and abortion provider George Tiller inside Tiller’s church, and against religious cult leader Daniel Perez, who for years had gotten away with murdering a local woman and sexually assaulting the young daughters of his followers.

She also prosecuted former law enforcement officer David Woodward, whose long unsolved 1986 murder of a 5-year-old Goddard girl became the subject of a made-for-TV movie.

As a prosecutor, “you get a little bit of the law enforcement life. You get a little bit of the legal life. And then you get a little bit of the stage life – you know, that ability to work up a case and present it in a way that is understandable and effective,” Parker said. “And that’s interesting. It’s exciting.”

The oldest of six children raised on a family farm in southeast Kansas, Parker ended up pursuing the legal field after first considering a career in teaching.

After high school, she attended Allen County Community College and then the University of Kansas, where she majored in political science. But she wasn’t sure what to do with that degree.

So when someone mentioned that law school was an open road, she said “that sounded good to me.”

While in law school at Washburn University in Topeka, Parker interned for the Shawnee County District Attorney’s Office – offering to work for free after applying too late to get a paid spot.

It was there that she tried her first jury case, dealing with marijuana possession – and won.

Back then, law students could prosecute cases alone, she said.

“I didn’t know how to pick a jury,” Parker said, recalling the experience with a laugh. “So I went to the Supreme Court building – they have a library there – and I checked out a book and read it over the weekend on how to pick a jury.”

In the summer of 1982, the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office took Parker in as an intern while the office was under the direction of Clark Owens. That fall, she was hired full time to work child support collection cases after she passed the Kansas bar exam.

Prosecution wasn’t the only segment of the legal field Parker thought to pursue.

Early on – after reading Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” – she decided she wanted to become a judge.

“I wanted to be Becky Thatcher’s dad,” she said with a chuckle.

She got that chance in May 1996 when Gov. Bill Graves appointed her to fill a vacancy left by retiring Sedgwick County District Court Judge Michael Corrigan. She served just six months before having to run for election.

She lost.

Parker said she considered running again after that. But in a county where district court judges are elected to full terms rather than appointed, Parker discovered that campaigning just didn’t fit her personality.

“I got drawn into battles that were never part of what I imagined … and beliefs were assigned to me based on other people, not really based on me,” she said. “So I hated that part of it.”

Since 1982, Parker has worked under three Sedgwick County district attorneys. Each has “brought something different to my prosecution life,” she said.

Owens, who hired her and under whom she gained “a large stack” of trial experience, was like her father, she said.

Nola Foulston – who brought her back into the prosecutor’s office both after Parker went into private practice for a year in the 1980s and later after she served briefly on the bench – was like her sister.

“She kept me in lipstick, and she kept me on the right path.”

And Marc Bennett, who took over the office in 2013 after focusing on sex-crimes prosecution for years, is like her son, Parker said.

“I have learned from all of them,” she said, “and hopefully I have helped all of them.”

Following are excerpts from The Eagle’s conversation with Parker.

What were your most difficult and challenging cases?

The Carr case, BTK and then the Perez case. Those cases either because they involved so many victims or so much evidence. (Also) the Carr case being the death penalty case. BTK expanded over all those years.

What are some of the memories that come to you when you think back on preparing for and prosecuting the Carr brothers’ cases?

Our training is we don’t let our emotions move into our judgment. We want a clean case. We want a case without error. And so (after the murders) I went in to my legal mode of ‘OK, we need to make sure we don’t have anything that affects law enforcement’s ability to search this area. Is it all screened off? Let’s get our search warrant first. How many warrants are we going to need?’

I stayed in that mode for the next two years. It wasn’t until the sentencing in that case that when I heard actually H.G. (the woman who survived the shooting) talking about the place in her head where the hair will not grow – so every time she combs her hair she has that memory – that I lost it. On TV. There’s films of me crying. It finally got to me.

Talk about prosecuting Dennis Rader and the BTK case.

We worked for about a week once knowing who he was and then grabbing him. And then, of course, he was interviewed for like 36 hours. I watched those interviews and, in a personal way, it was frankly sickening listening to him essentially brag about these murders and all of the other antics that he had engaged in – multiple places where he’d broke in and just watched people, or the way he’d stalked women around the community for years.

The world saw his guilty plea where he treated it as if he were the kind and gentler murderer. And that was disturbing. With the guilty plea, you know there was no trial, the community – unlike when you have a trial – was essentially kind of in the dark about the facts. Because one of the murders required a Hard 40 presentation, we determined that it would be a good idea to have a full sentencing hearing. … That was actually a procedure that I had never engaged in before – that type of sentencing process – but it was something that I felt was really important personally.

Looking back on it, I’m really glad (we did it) because then the public got to see each one of those murders and how they had taken place and not just hear his version of what had happened.

Is there anything else that sticks out with you about the BTK case?

One of the things that really sticks out in my mind is that BTK had these strange proclivities. He had a box of cutout paper dolls from, like, Kmart ads and that sat in the front closet of their house. And there was a full green tub of slick ads – women in their bras that had been cut out of an ad or something. … I picked up this one box and it was, like, so heavy, and I’m like ‘There must be rocks in here. What do we collect? Rocks?’

So I open up the box and, because he was a serial killer, he collected cereal boxes. Like breakfast cereal boxes.

If you know anything about the case, you know that he sent some of his grams to the police in cereal boxes, you know, put the dolls in there and stuff. But this box was part of one of his collections and it was bound-together, folded-up ... empty cereal boxes.

Where you ever interested in running for district attorney?

I don’t want to say I’m soured by campaigning. But it just seems like I can’t get done for the world what I want to do if I spend so much time campaigning. I don’t want to do that.

And I have loved being second. I don’t have to take all the political stuff. … I can just rock and roll doing everyday things I think that ought to be done without having to take the brunt of it.

What’s next?

I’m going to try to live close to my two children, even though they’re in different parts of the United States, to make sure that they have sufficient parental harassment. (Her 26-year-old daughter, Amy, works and lives in Kansas City. Her son, Will, is 22 and wrestles for Boise State University.)

I love travel. I intend to do that.

I’m anticipating working for the Kansas Counties District Attorney’s Association to help them with issues that prosecutors face in our state. And beyond that, I am exploring some other possibilities, but I have not landed on anything yet.

Any other thoughts?

I have come to the conclusion that the one word that can get you through almost anything is the word ‘gratitude.’ … There’s people in the community, there’s people that I work with – law enforcement here, other members of the bar, members of the bench, the judges, staff, people that work so hard just putting all the paper together daily – I couldn’t do my job without all these other people and all of the things they’ve done for me.

I’ve been richly blessed with input from so many people, and as I leave, I think what a lucky, lucky woman I am.

This story was originally published December 29, 2016 at 3:00 PM with the headline "She prosecuted BTK and Carr brothers. Now this ‘lucky woman’ is retiring.."