Litigation
Aug. 13, 2002
Tyrant REX
On a cold, wintry night in February 2000, 18-year-old Michelle O'Keefe returned to the Antelope Valley after a glamorous day in Los Angeles working as an extra on a music video shoot. She was still wearing her "stage" outfit - a tube top and miniskirt - as she and a girlfriend drove into the park-and-ride overlooking Lake Palmdale.
On a cold, wintry night in February 2000, 18-year-old Michelle O'Keefe returned to the Antelope Valley after a glamorous day in Los Angeles working as an extra on a music video shoot. She was still wearing her "stage" outfit - a tube top and miniskirt - as she and a girlfriend drove into the park-and-ride overlooking Lake Palmdale.
After the friend dropped her off, O'Keefe jumped into her blue Ford Mustang for the last leg of the journey home to Quartz Hill. The Mustang was parked near the entrance to the lot, but O'Keefe moved it 100 yards to a secluded location to change into less-revealing clothes before the drive home.
The junior college student would never leave the park-and-ride, however.
A few minutes after gunshots pierced the winter air, O'Keefe was found in the driver's seat of her car, her body riddled with bullets, one leg hanging out the open door.
O'Keefe's purse was untouched in the back seat of her car. And a security-patrolled parking lot was an unlikely place for a carjacking. The guard on duty that night, Raymond Jennings, told police he heard shots but never saw the gunman.
The seemingly random killing touched a major chord in the Antelope Valley, where local media covered it extensively. Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives grilled Jennings for eight hours, eventually concluding that he was the primary suspect. However, they made no arrest and have yet to complete their investigation. "America's Most Wanted" couldn't generate anything to break the case.
But someone else is trying to keep the heat on Jennings, someone with as much influence and clout as just about any private citizen in the Antelope Valley. On behalf of O'Keefe's parents, Lancaster attorney R. Rex Parris brought a wrongful-death action in November 2000, naming as defendants Jennings, his employer All Valley Security, and the city of Palmdale. The complaint seeks unspecified damages.
In court, Parris has declared that he believes Jennings committed the brutal murder. Parris also made public what may be the key evidence in the case - the videotapes of the criminal investigators' interview of Jennings - and recently organized a search of Lake Palmdale in the hope of finding the murder weapon.
Jennings filed for bankruptcy protection last year, a move that could have allowed him to avoid a judgment in the wrongful-death case. But Parris has pursued him in U.S. Bankruptcy court, too, his quest taking on an Inspector Javert-like intensity.
A veteran personal injury lawyer, Parris, 50, has built his five-attorney firm into one of the largest in the Antelope Valley. He's also a political power broker whose support almost guarantees election to legislative and judicial office.
"He and a few other people are said to run the Antelope Valley," says Larry H. Layton, another local attorney.
In both his legal practice and politics, Parris is known for playing hardball.
"I don't think I've run across any defense lawyer who says, 'I like him,'" says one attorney who knows Parris and asked not to be identified. "Usually, his name is followed by, 'that SOB.'"
Others call him "Tyrant Rex."
Hardball has worked for Parris so far. But will it work in the O'Keefe case, when the stakes, as he knows, could hardly be higher?
"What we're really doing is attempting to solve a murder," Parris says.
Around the Antelope Valley, it's hard to miss Parris. Tall, with a full gray beard, he wears cowboy boots to court and speaks with a country twang.
"He does the Kenny Rogers look-alike cowboy thing," says Marta Williamson, president of a Palmdale homeowners group.
His advertising billboards feature the all-American image of a bald eagle in flight, and his name is on a continuation high school.
"They wanted to put it on the new high school," he says. "I said that would be excessive. I'm still not sure a continuation school isn't."
In person, Parris is mild-mannered and easy-going.
"I'm one of those people, the further away you are from me, the more you dislike me," he says. "The closer you get, the more you like me. I tend to be high-profile."
That may be an understatement.
Just about any political controversy in the Antelope Valley seems to involve Parris, who is part of a conservative Republican machine that includes businessman Frank Visco and state Assemblyman George Runner.
Earlier this year, Parris supported Runner's wife in a GOP primary election against Assemblyman Phil Wyman. After someone illegally entered one of Wyman's homes, a Wyman spokesman accused Parris of being behind it. Parris called the accusation a "cheap lawyer trick."
Parris' roots in the Valley go deep. He was born and raised there at a time when Joshua trees and jack rabbits outnumbered people and he could ride a dirt bike for miles across the desert without passing a strip mall or a subdivision. His parents broke up when he was 12, and money got so tight that the family's television set was repossessed. He dropped out of Palmdale High School in the 10th grade and went to work busing tables at the Caravan Inn, a Lancaster restaurant where his mother was a waitress.
After working at a plastics factory for less than a year, Parris attended Antelope Valley College, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Southwestern University School of Law. During that time, he worked a series of jobs to pay his tuition - everything from a night auditor to a public relations assistant at the Magic Mountain amusement park. He and his brother also opened a restaurant in Lancaster.
As a teen-ager, Parris faced jail time because of unpaid traffic tickets. A judge put him on probation - a reprieve, he says, that helped push him toward a legal career.
"It was just such a frightening experience," he recalls.
He was admitted to the bar in 1980 and first practiced at Borton, Petrini & Conron, an insurance defense firm in Bakersfield. In 1985, he returned to the Valley to start his own firm.
"I've always loved the Antelope Valley," Parris explains. "I always wanted to come back."
He quickly made a stir by advertising his services by direct mail.
"If you keep that up, you're not going to be well-liked," a lawyer told him, noting that the local bar had an unspoken agreement not to advertise.
"I didn't come back to town to make friends with lawyers," he responded curtly.
The Law Office of R. Rex Parris now occupies a single-story, white stucco building across the street from the Antelope Valley courthouse in Lancaster. A pair of magisterial bronze lions stands guard at the entrance. The firm specializes in plaintiffs' personal injury law and advertises heavily.
"We treat the practice of law as a very competitive business," Parris says.
The three-dozen employees include his attorney brother Robert A. Parris, his wife, and his four children, who range in age from 13 to 23. The oldest child, Ashley, is a student at Pepperdine University School of Law.
Not surprisingly, Parris' prominence rankles some.
"Their objective is power and more power," Williamson says of Parris and his GOP allies.
After the school was named for Parris last year, Palmdale Mayor Jim Ledford - a political opponent - noted that Parris contributed to the election campaigns of two school board members who voted to bestow the honor.
"The man deserves it," the board president, who had not received Parris contributions, responded.
The O'Keefe case is unlikely to make a lot of money for Parris - he calls the chances of collecting a large judgment "remote." Both Jennings and All Valley's insurance carrier have filed bankruptcy petitions, and Parris acknowledges that a jury could limit the city of Palmdale's liability to less than 50 percent of a total award.
But some believe something's "in it" for Parris, perhaps a chance to embarrass Ledford and the city of Palmdale, where he has less political clout than in Lancaster.
The wrongful-death action alleges that the city was negligent in its hiring of All Valley.
"I wouldn't doubt there's political motivations," Williamson says.
Parris ridicules such suggestions. If he'd wanted to make political capital out of the O'Keefe case, he says, he would have put out an "attack" mailer when Ledford ran for re-election last fall. He insists the case is about one thing only: justice for Michelle O'Keefe.
"It's a case that causes you a lot of rage," Parris says in his antique-furnished office.
He points to the terrible loss of O'Keefe's parents, who had a daughter "who was doing everything right."
"The goal of this case," he adds, "is to get some justice out of it."
The murder victim haunts the park-and-ride. In the planter where his daughter's car came to rest after she was shot, Michael O'Keefe has fashioned a memorial that features a photograph of Michelle with her high-school cheerleading squad, a decal that says, "Michelle, We Love You," and a wooden cross. A plaque on the cross lists the dates of her birth and death.
On Feb. 22, 2000, Michelle had a glittering future. Popular and pretty, she was preparing for a career in computers. She also had landed bit parts in Hollywood productions, meeting such celebrities as MTV's Carson Daly and members of the music group 'N Sync. That day, she left her car at the Lake Palmdale park-and-ride beside the Antelope Valley Freeway and traveled with a friend to the Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles to work as an extra on the concert film shoot for Kid Rock.
Michelle returned to the park-and-ride, police say, around 9:25 p.m. Raymond Jennings had just started his shift. A muscular former National Guardsman who recently had moved from North Carolina to California, he was in his second week of $5.75-an-hour employment with All Valley Security.
Jennings told police he had noticed Michelle's car because he was an aficionado of Mustangs. He also said he noticed the somewhat revealing clothes she was wearing, which suggested to him that she might be a prostitute.
At 9:40 p.m., Jennings radioed his supervisor to say he had heard gunshots. The supervisor, Iris Molina, arrived at the lot a few minutes later and found Michelle dead, the fatal wound from a bullet that severed her aorta. Police recovered some shell casings but no gun. They also could not find Michelle's cell phone. The gunman fired at least four shots.
Questioned that night, Jennings told police he never saw Michelle's assailant. And he stuck to that story two months later when he spoke at length with sheriff's Sgt. Richard Longshore and Detective Diane Harris.
"It still puzzles me to this day why is it I couldn't see anybody," he mused. "It's like the man was invisible, the woman, whoever it was, that did the shooting."
He said he took cover behind his truck - 100 yards from Michelle's car - during the shooting.
Jennings failed a lie detector test, and Longshore concluded the interview by saying, "Looking at you right now, you are my primary suspect."
But police did not have sufficient evidence to arrest Jennings. In frustration, Michelle's parents turned to Parris and the civil courts. Their complaint accuses Jennings and All Valley of negligence for failing "to protect [Michelle] against a fatal attack." O'Keefe v. All Valley, MC012059 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Nov. 3, 2000).
Many families, notably those of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, have taken advantage of the lower burden of proof in the civil courts after murder suspects are acquitted in criminal court. More rarely, aggressive civil cases have provided leads for related criminal investigations.
In another Los Angeles County case, the brother of a Canyon Country woman slain in 1987 used the probate courts to implicate the woman's husband, Guy Bouck, in her death. After a probate judge ruled that Bouck had committed the slaying, prosecutors filed murder charges. Bouck pleaded guilty in 1997 to murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
Parris certainly has been aggressive. He arranged for billboards to be posted around the Valley that displayed a photograph of Michelle and the message, "I wasn't ready to die at 18."
To encourage someone to come forward, he offered a $50,000 cash reward for the murder weapon. He estimates he has spent $100,000 on the case, which he has on contingency.
In court hearings, the plaintiffs' lawyer has shone the spotlight on Jennings.
"[W]e think there's a substantial probability" that Jennings "sexually assaulted [Michelle] and then he murdered her," he told Superior Court Judge David M. Mintz in May 2001. "If that didn't occur, we still have negligence. He negligently did nothing. He was a security guard. ... He was supposed to protect her. Instead he cowered under a truck."
Jennings, who is representing himself, repeatedly has proclaimed his innocence.
"They're just trying to use me as a scapegoat," he says of the civil case. "That's pretty much it." In a phone interview, he declined to address specific questions about the case.
"It's just going to get turned around and used against me," Jennings explains. "Pretty much everything I've said has been turned around. The media does nothing but hype it up."
All Valley initially provided counsel for Jennings. But after its insurer, Reliance Insurance Co. of Illinois, went bankrupt, it withdrew the representation. Parris notes that All Valley would be absolved of any liability if a jury found O'Keefe's death was the result of an intentional act.
Things got testy between Parris and Craig S. Barnes, counsel for the security company. One courtroom salvo began with Barnes drawing attention to Parris' cowboy boots. Parris turned to his adversary's footwear.
"I said, 'When you come up here, you shouldn't be wearing your sissy socks,'" he recalls.
The Antelope Valley Daily Press newspaper observed after that hearing that the "courtroom battles sometimes have the ambiance of a schoolyard squabble during recess."
Parris' discovery tactics prompted Barnes to seek his removal from the case. According to Barnes, Parris violated discovery protections for management-level employees by having an investigator interview Jennings' supervisor.
"He has chosen to ignore the Rules of Professional Conduct in his efforts to prove that [Jennings] killed Michelle O'Keefe," Barnes complained to Mintz.
Parris countered that the supervisor no longer was working for All Valley at the time of the interview. He also interjected that Jennings had behaved in a "despicable and irresponsible fashion."
Mintz found no ethical or legal violation and refused to disqualify Parris.
Barnes of Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold in Los Angeles declined to comment. Reliance's bankruptcy forced his withdrawal from the case. Parris intends to seek a default judgment against All Valley and is considering action against its insurance broker.
The key questions in the case, however, remain unanswered. How come Jennings, a trained observer with a military background, didn't see anything when Michelle was shot? Why didn't he do anything to protect her? What happened to the gun? Did the killer act alone?
In May, the search for answers took Parris to Lake Palmdale. A team of volunteer divers he recruited spent four hours probing the lake's murky depths. Some used underwater metal detectors. They were looking in particular for the murder weapon or Michelle's cell phone. If they found the phone, Parris reasoned, that at least would confirm that the killer had gone to the lake and perhaps also disposed of the gun there.
But the lake yielded only a cell phone which O'Keefe's parents did not recognize as their daughter's.
"This is one of those cases we're going to keep working until it's over," Parris told reporters at the scene. "If it takes us 10 years, it takes us 10 years."
What Parris does have is Jennings' interview with the sheriff's detectives - he obtained copies of the videotapes under subpoena. They compose a riveting document, complete with a voluble Jennings speculating in detail about how Michelle might have been killed.
"She got shot in the chest and was trying to get out of there," he says. "When she put the car in reverse and was backing up, that's when the rest of the shots fired out."
He even re-enacts where the gunman likely stood in relation to the car.
After the failed polygraph, Sergeant Longshore confronts Jennings.
"By every test that we've done, every reenactment we can think of, you should have seen somebody," he says. "There's no way ... that you couldn't see somebody."
"It's not a case anymore, Ray, of, Did you do it?" Longshore concludes. "In my mind, it's, Why did it happen?"
Despite the detective's persistence, Jennings refuses to confess.
"The only thing I'm guilty of is not seeing whoever fired the gun," he proclaims.
Longshore isn't too happy that Parris released the tapes to the media. But the attorney is unrepentant.
"If they had not been distributed, this thing would have died," Parris explains. "Until you see them, you might think we're blowing in the wind."
Jennings has yet to testify in the civil case, having failed to show up for three scheduled depositions. Parris brought an adversary action in Jennings' bankruptcy case to ensure that he did not escape a possible wrongful-death judgment. After Jennings was discharged from bankruptcy in February, Parris obtained a court order allowing him to resume proceedings against Jennings in the civil case.
"We're going to take his deposition and see what happens," Parris says, acknowledging that Jennings could well invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Michael O'Keefe believes the civil case "has gotten us answers we've not been able to get through standard channels."
While the case is circumstantial, he says, "I think it's a very strong circumstantial case."
And he has no doubt about his lawyer's dedication.
"He's taken it on as a cause as much as anything else," O'Keefe says.
A status conference in the case is set for Sept. 6. Parris predicts the city of Palmdale will bring a motion for summary judgment based on the theory that cities cannot be held liable for the actions of security guards. His main target is expected to appear.
"I don't think Jennings thought we would chase him this far," Parris says. "It makes me feel good about being a lawyer."
And the chase may be just heating up.
Matthew Heller
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