Homicidal sleepwalking

Homicidal sleepwalking, also known as homicidal somnambulism or sleepwalking murder, is the act of killing someone during an episode of sleepwalking. There have been some cases in which an alleged act of homicide has occurred and the prime suspect may have committed the act while sleepwalking. The veracity of recorded cases is disputed. About 68 cases had been reported in the literature up to the year 2005. One such case is that of Kenneth Parks, who was acquitted of the murder of his mother-in-law in 1987 after using the sleepwalking defense.

Sergeant Willis Boshears was a US serviceman based in the UK. He confessed to strangling a local woman named Jean Constable in the early hours on New Years Day 1961, but claimed that he was asleep and only woke to realize what he had done. The following day, Boshears disposed of the body in an isolated lane. Several days later he was arrested and charged with murder. At his trial in February 1961 at the Essex Assizes he pled not guilty on the basis of being asleep at the time he committed the offence and was acquitted.

In 1987, Kenneth James Parks was a married 23-year-old Canadian man with a 5-month-old daughter. He had a very close relationship to his in-laws, with his 42-year-old mother-in-law Barbara Ann Woods referring to him as "her gentle giant." The summer before the controversial events, he developed a gambling problem and fell into deep financial problems. To cover his losses, he took funds from his family's savings and then began to embezzle at work. Eventually, in March 1987, his actions were discovered, and he was fired from his job. On May 20, he went to his first Gamblers Anonymous meeting. He made plans to tell his grandmother the following Saturday (May 23) and his in-laws on Sunday (May 24) about his gambling problems and financial difficulties.

In the early morning hours of May 24, 1987, Parks reportedly got up from his bed, still asleep, drove roughly 23 km to his in-laws' home and broke in, assaulted his father-in-law, Dennis Woods, and stabbed his mother-in-law to death. After all this, he managed to drive himself to the police station. Aside from a few isolated events, the next thing he could recall was being at the police station asking for help, saying “I think I have killed some people…my hands.”

Parks’s only defense was that he was asleep during the entire incident and was not aware of what he was doing. Naturally, nobody believed it; even sleep specialists were extremely skeptical. However, after careful investigation, the specialists could find no other explanation. Parks’ EEG readings were highly irregular even for a parasomniac. This combined with the facts that there was no motive, that he was amazingly consistent in his stories for more than seven interviews despite repeated attempts of trying to lead him astray, that the timing of the events fit perfectly with the proposed explanation, and that there is no way to fake EEG results, led to a jury acquitting Parks of the murder of his mother-in-law and the attempted murder of his father-in-law. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the acquittal in the 1992 decision R. v. Parks.

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Wikipedia