Personal Life of Gordon Park
| Gordon Park | |
|---|---|
| Born | 25 January 1944 |
| Died | 25 January 2010 (aged 66) HM Prison Garth, Leyland, Lancashire |
| Conviction(s) | Murder |
| Penalty | Life imprisonment |
| Occupation | Retired teacher |
| Spouse | First – Carol Ann Park, 'The Lady in the Lake' Second – Catherine Park Third – Jenny Park |
| Children | Vanessa (adopted) Jeremy (mother – Carol) Rachael (mother – Carol) |
Park worked as a village primary school teacher, but was retired by the time he was prosecuted for the murder of his first wife, Carol. Park had two children by Carol, Jeremy and Rachael. Gordon and Carol also adopted their niece Vanessa when she was 18 months old after her mother, Christie (who was Carol's sister), was murdered by her boyfriend in 1969, aged 17. This was described as a "rare and appalling coincidence", but has been picked up on by the case for the defence since the trial.
Park remarried twice after Carol was murdered. His second wife was named Catherine, and his third, to whom he remained married until his death, is named Jenny. Park met all of his wives through teaching, Carol was a teacher at Askam Village School when she was killed. When rejecting Park's request for appeal, Lord Justice Keene, Mr Justice Beatson and Mr Justice Macduff noted that both Gordon and Carol had had affairs in the year leading up to Carol's disappearance.
Park's interests included sailing and climbing, which was relevant to the case due to the knots used to tie his wife's body. While in prison, Park spent time practising t'ai chi, taking a maths degree and keeping fit.
In an exclusive written interview with The Westmorland Gazette nine months into his sentence, Park talked of how he had struggled with prison, saying: "They may smoke incessantly, play loud music, the TV or video games, rifle your drawers, steal, lie etc. There is not a lot you can do about it... I watched a guy "chasing the dragon". It frightened me to death. I had never seen that before." He refused to answer detailed questions about the trial or case, but protested his innocence, saying "If I knew who killed my wife, how, where, why, then I would have said so. I did not know then. I do not know now."
Read more about this topic: Lady In The Lake Trial
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal, life, gordon and/or park:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, and what circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public igominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)