The man once known as Washington’s most wanted fugitive has been convicted of stabbing a 26-year-old woman to death in her Landover apartment in 1998, Prince George’s County prosecutors said.
Gary Parham Jr. spent more than a decade on the run after the slaying. The 32-year-old was caught in Florida last year when his girlfriend found him listed on a most wanted Web site and called authorities.
On Wednesday, Parham entered an Alford plea, which means he admits prosecutors have enough evidence to convince a jury that he killed Theodora Cooper, but he admits no guilt or innocence in the matter. He faces up to 30 years in prison.
On Aug. 5, 1998, Cooper’s boyfriend, Marco Polo Honesty, found her dead, bloody body in the hallway of her apartment. The ensuing police investigation found that Cooper had been stabbed 13 times and slashed 26 times as she battled her attacker through several rooms of her apartment.
A blood analyst, prosecutors said, believed the attacker had been injured in the fight, and blood was taken from the crime scene and kept as DNA evidence. At the time, there was no hit in the DNA database, and the murder moved into the cold case files.
In December 2004, the DNA sample found a match in Parham, who had just been released from a Maryland prison after serving time for an armed robbery.
As authorities searched for him, Parham allegedly raped a woman in White Oak, and then watched TV and smoked PCP before leaving her house, the woman told The Examiner. Authorities said he then taunted police, telling them in phone calls that they had to work harder to catch him.
Parham was later featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and in The Examiner as the Washington area’s most wanted man.
On Jan. 27, 2009, Miami-Dade County police raided Parham’s home on a tip from his girlfriend. Inside they say they found an AK-47 and a bulletproof vest. An affidavit says Parham struggled with officers and pledged to “kill a cop” before he was subdued.
“You can run, but you can’t hide,” said Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey. “When we put a concerted law enforcement effort into place we will find violent criminals, we will arrest them and we will convict them.”
