MOUNTAIN HOME — The stepson of a slain Mountain Home doctor was arrested Monday and charged with capital murder in the 2006 case.
Gary Wayne Parks, 38, is charged in the stabbing death of his stepfather, Dr. David Millstein, 62. Millstein’s body was discovered June 18, 2006, at his Mountain Home residence.
Parks was arrested just before 9:30 a.m. Monday at his home in the Memphis suburb of Germantown, Tenn., said Mountain Home Police Chief Carry Manuel.
“This is an important milestone in the case. But westill have a lot of work to do,” Manuel said during a latemorning news conference at the Police Department.
Fourteenth Judicial District Prosecuting Attorney Ron Kincade said he believed that Parks would waive extradition to Arkansas. However, he said authorities are prepared to seek a governor’s warrant for his return if necessary.
In 2006, police found Millstein’s body at his home at 1707 Stephen Court in Mountain Home. Officers had gone to the residence in a neighborhood near Twin Lakes Golf Course at the request of Millstein’s coworkers at Baxter Regional Medical Center after theytried unsuccessfully to contact him.
Millstein was a urologist in private practice at Mountain Home Urology Clinic. He had moved to Mountain Home from Searcy about seven years before his death.
His wife, Lois Parks, lived in Little Rock at the time of his death, authorities have said. Her son Gary Parks is a former Little Rock resident who moved to Tennessee sometime after Millstein’s murder.
Millstein was Lois Parks’ second murdered husband. A dozen years before the doctor was killed, her thenhusband Luther Gerald Parks Jr., 47, was shot to death as he drove along Arkansas 10 near Chenal Parkway.
Jerry Parks was an owner of American Contract Services. The company, along with a subsidiary, American Janitorial Services, had contracted to provide security guards and janitors for Gov. Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters and transition offices in LittleRock.
No arrests were made in Jerry Parks’ Sept. 26, 1993, slaying, a Little Rock police spokesman said in 2007. Little Rock police didn’t immediately return phone messages Monday seeking comment on the case.
Over the years, Mountain Home authorities have refused to disclose details about the Millstein slaying, including exactly when he was killed, the kind of weapon used, a possible motive or whether a connection to Jerry Parks’ slaying was suspected.
The police chief said Monday that officials would continue to keep a lid on their investigation “to maintain that case integrity. We have to do everything we can to successfully prosecute.”
“We have had many questions [from the public] about the case. We just simply could not talk, and I hope that people could understand that we were working on the case,” Manuel said.
“I just hope they didn’t think that we weren’t paying attention to the case like we should because quite the contrary, we were.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 12/22/2009