At about 4 in the morning on May 24, 1987, Kenneth Parks rose from the couch on which he had fallen asleep. He walked to his car and drove 14 miles to his in-laws` house on the outskirts of Toronto. The drive was familiar;
Parks got along well with his wife`s parents.
Parks pulled into their garage and let himself into the house with a key his in-laws had given him. He was carrying a tire iron. He walked to the bedroom where Barbara and Denis Woods lay asleep. On the way he may have detoured to the kitchen to pick up a knife. Or Barbara Woods may have fled to the kitchen and picked up the knife herself.
The exact sequence of events will never be known. What is certain is that shortly after Parks entered the Woodses` home, he attacked them. He strangled and stabbed his father-in-law. He clubbed his mother-in-law with the tire iron and stabbed her four times, once through the heart.
Then Parks got back in his car and drove to a police station just a block away, his hands dripping blood from cuts that reached the bone. According to police testimony, he told them, ”My God, I`ve just killed two people!”
A year later, Kenneth Parks went on trial for the murder of his mother-in-law. (Denis Woods, the father-in-law, survived.) Parks` attorneys faced a stunning challenge: Their client had surrendered voluntarily while still spattered with blood. Officers found the bloody knife in his car. His own explanation was that he couldn`t remember anything after falling asleep on the couch.
The lawyers decided on an unusual defense. Their client had killed Barbara Woods, they conceded at the trial, but should nonetheless be acquitted.
He wasn`t physically ill and he wasn`t insane. Parks should be found innocent, his lawyers said, because he had been sleepwalking at the time of the killing. He wasn`t responsible because he was asleep, moving on automatic pilot without any awareness of what he was doing. The prosecution labeled that argument ”simply ludicrous.”
Few sleepwalkers find themselves in as much trouble as Kenneth Parks. But his case highlights the features that make even ordinary sleepwalking so strange. The amnesia is common. So is the horror or bewilderment when the sleepwalker learns what he or she has done. And though few episodes are so elaborate (or violent) as Parks`, many sleepwalkers do drive themselves around the neighborhood.
Most of all, Parks` case animates the question that arises with every instance of sleepwalking: Is this just mindless, meaningless behavior, or does it signify some deep psychological disturbance?
Whatever its cause, sleepwalking is not terribly rare. Perhaps 40 percent of all children sleepwalk at one time or another. Among adults, the number seems to be about 1 or 2 percent. It can begin at any age, though children typically outgrow it by adolescence. Men and women are affected equally.
Sleepwalkers don`t look the way they do in Abbott and Costello comedies, moving mechanically with their arms straight out in front. There is no telltale gait. The person might be walking normally, or running, or creeping along slowly. Any talking, however, would likely be simple, and the words might be said again and again. You also might notice something odd about a sleepwalker`s eyes, which are held extremely wide open and staring, the pupils dilated. Shakespeare aptly portrayed the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth:
You see, her eyes are open.
Ay, but their sense is shut.
Although sleepwalkers are at least aware enough to avoid bumping into walls and tripping over furniture, they have scarcely any judgment. One woman was able to make her way to the kitchen and open the refrigerator. But once there, she prepared and ate buttered cigarettes and cat food sandwiches.
Their lack of judgment can be dangerous. One 14-year-old boy got up from bed, sleepwalked to the refrigerator, then stepped out the door-of his family`s camper going 50 miles per hour on the San Diego Freeway.
Sleepwalkers` behavior only looks purposeful. They rearrange furniture for no reason, or press against a wall as if to hold it up, or gather dirty clothes and carefully put them in the oven. ”Laundry seems to be a common theme,” says Harvard psychiatrist Quentin Regestein.
Sleepwalking episodes typically last 5 to 15 minutes and may recur nightly or only once in a while. Kenneth Parks had walked in his sleep as a child.
Once when he was a teenager, his mother caught him by the legs as he was about to sleepwalk out a window. But at the time of the attack on his in-laws, when he was 23, he`d had no serious episodes as an adult.
Hard to rouse
Violent or not, sleepwalkers are not acting out their dreams. Sleep researchers have shown clearly that sleepwalking is distinct from dreaming.
Sleepwalkers typically rise from their beds about three hours after falling asleep. In this deep sleep, the body is free to move, and the mind is quiet. (In dream sleep, on the other hand, the body is essentially paralyzed, while the mind careers through strange, invented landscapes.)
Anyone awakened from deep sleep will be disoriented and groggy. Let the phone ring in the middle of the night, and it can take an almost physical effort to shake off the cloak of sleep and get your bearings. Similarly, it is notoriously hard to rouse a sleepwalker.
Regestein tells of a patient who tied one end of a clothesline around his waist and the other around the leg of his bed, hoping he would be tugged awake if he began to roam.
Instead, he sleepwalked along, dragging the bed behind him. In Parks`
case, even the knife gashing his fingers didn`t pierce his fog. To the astonishment of the police, he arrived at the station apparently unaware he`d been gravely injured.
Sleepwalkers in sleep laboratories do show characteristic sleep patterns. Some can be picked out early: The sleepwalker might sit up briefly, for instance, or pluck at the sheets and blankets. Other patterns can be detected only by machines that transcribe the brain`s electrical activity, scrolling out long panoramas of jagged peaks and valleys.
A sleepwalker`s brain tracings in deep sleep reveal blips not seen in normal subjects. Sleep specialists call these anomalies ”arousals,” but the term is misleading. An observer would see only someone sleeping quietly.
Hereditary, in part
After his arrest, Kenneth Parks was put through extensive sleep tests. His brain scans showed the telltale arousals.
Could he have faked them?
”There`s no way,” says Carlos Schenck, a Minneapolis psychiatrist who has studied the trial transcript. ”You`re already in the deepest stage of sleep, and there`s no way you can program yourself to have repetitive arousals. In fact, if you really tried hard to do that, you`d probably become so aroused that you`d stay in very light sleep.”
Studies indicate that sleepwalking seems to be at least in part hereditary. Kenneth Parks was one of a long line. His grandmother Lillian Hodge testified at the trial that her husband, Stanley, ”used to get up and start cooking in the middle of the night. He was always frying onions and potatoes and eggs.” When he got up the next day, she said, ”he couldn`t remember doing it.”
Mark Mahowald, who directs the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center, has a straightforward theory about sleepwalking. Our lives are cycles of wakefulness, non-Rapid Eye Movement sleep and REM sleep (the sleep in which dreams occur). Ideally, the transitions are smooth, and one state of consciousness at a time holds sway.
But sleepwalkers are caught in two states at once, Mahowald says, neither completely awake nor asleep. The sleepwalker is awake enough to see a window and race to it but not awake enough to realize he`s on the second floor and must not jump-or that there`s no reason to jump, in any case.
”There are multiple parts of the nervous system that have to work in concert to produce these different states of consciousness,” Mahowald says,
”and sometimes errors are going to be made in passing the baton from one state to another.”
Sleepwalkers, in this view, simply happen to be more prone than the rest of us to these neurological fumbles. They plainly have a physiological problem, not a psychological one.
Psychological problems can play a role in sleepwalking, he says, but they`re not the source of the trouble. To sleepwalk, a person must first be neurologically vulnerable. Then, for this person ”at risk,” mental woes and preoccupations can trigger midnight rambles. Among the susceptible, common culprits are stress, too little sleep and fever.
Mahowald`s argument has its loose ends, however: He studied a group of 100 adults who had injured themselves while asleep and found that almost half had ”abnormal” psychological profiles. Depression was the most common feature.
Frantic and exhausted
Kenneth Parks` attorneys argued that he was a classic case. At the time of the attack on his in-laws, he was beset with fears.
His marriage was not going well, his attorneys said, and he was deeply in debt. A prosecutor told the jury that Parks had stolen $32,000 from his employer to cover money he`d gambled away at the racetrack.
What`s more, he had gone virtually without sleep for 48 hours. His worries would have made sleeping difficult anyway, but he also had a 5-month- old baby with colic.
Topping things off, on the day of the attack he had worn himself out playing rugby, his first game in months. On the night of May 23, 1987, as he sank into sleep, Kenneth Parks was a frantic and exhausted man.
For the defense, this view of sleepwalking as a primarily physical problem was ideal. It portrayed Parks as a puppet twitching helplessly on chemical strings. But this notion has prominent detractors.
Its most articulate spokesman is Anthony Kales, director of the Sleep Research and Treatment Center at Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine. Kales believes that sleepwalkers can show neurological anomalies.
But on the evidence of personality tests, Kales finds that adult sleepwalkers are people who become excessively angry when frustrated. (This isn`t true of sleepwalking children, he says. Almost all of them will outgrow it.) Moreover, sleepwalkers direct their anger outward at the world, rather than inward at themselves.
The verdict
When this debate reaches the courtroom, it becomes more urgent. Sleepwalkers are accused of crimes rarely, but regularly. In courts around the world, at one time or another, about 30 sleepwalkers have been charged with murder.
Men, women, even a teenager have been tried for murder or attempted murder. No one has compiled overall figures, but apparently most have been acquitted. (The few convictions have followed guilty pleas.) It seems no sleepwalker has ever murdered twice.
In Kenneth Parks` case, there was no evidence he had a secret urge to do in his in-laws. Although Denis Woods woke up that night with Parks trying to strangle him, though he suffered horrible wounds, though his wife died in the attack, still Woods took the stand and testified to his good relationship with his son-in-law.
From first to last, Parks` attorneys worked to portray him as an ordinary man trapped in a Hitchcockian nightmare: He had gone to sleep one night and awakened, baffled, to find blood dripping from his hands. Would the jurors buy it?
They took nine hours to decide. Finally, late on the night of May 26, 1988, the foreman announced the verdict. Kenneth Parks was innocent. While he committed the most important acts of his life, he had been fast asleep.
Postscript: Since Kenneth Parks` acquittal in a provincial court, prosecutors have appealed to the Canadian Supreme Court, asking that sleepwalking be rejected as a legal defense. A ruling is expected late in 1991.
