A quarter of a century ago, in May 1987, sometime after two o'clock Sunday night, 23-year-old Kenneth James Parks left his home in the suburbs of Toronto, started the car and covered 23 km to the house of his wife's parents.
He got out of the car, took a tire iron from the trunk and opened the door with the key given to him. Once inside, he strangled his father-in-law, Dennis Woods, and beat his mother-in-law, Barbara Ann Woods, before stabbing the woman with her own kitchen knife.
Parks got back into the car, drove to the nearest police station and said, "I think I killed someone."
All this time, the young man slept, and therefore could not bear responsibility for his actions. In the course of the trial, which took place in 1988, the jury came to exactly this decision after nine hours of discussion. The prosecution considered this laughable and appealed the outcome of the case, but in 1992 the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the original ruling.
Even a sleep specialist, who was invited as a consultant, was initially skeptical about this case of sleepwalking, because the person had performed a whole series of rather difficult actions. Imagine passing three traffic lights without incident, crossing a section of an expressway, etc. Most somnambulists end up injuring themselves or those sleeping next to them, not people tens of kilometers away. However, upon closer examination, it turned out that the man was indeed asleep …
According to the laboratory instruments, Parks had an unusually deep sleep. Even as a child, he often spoke in his sleep, sometimes walked and until the age of 11–12 he constantly woke up in a wet bed. (A 1974 study of 50 adults who indulged in abuse while sleeping found that many of them also wetted their beds and walked without waking up as children.) One night, one of Parks' brothers grabbed his leg when he was about to leave through the window. Similar symptoms occurred in his relatives in three generations.
Sleepwalking is quite widespread in children - about 15% experience bouts of somnambulism in one way or another, but this usually does not lead to attacks on others. As a rule, children return to bed without incident and subsequently simply outgrow their problem.
Adults sleep much less often. However, unlike children, they are more prone to hostile and aggressive behavior when others try to wake them up, which has been documented by a number of studies.
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True, some details from Parks' life do not make him look in the best light. Nearly a year before the attack, he became addicted to gambling, which did not reflect well on his marriage. In the end, he stole $ 30,000 from his job to pay off debts. Two months before the attack, the misconduct was exposed and Parks was fired. He abstained from gambling for several weeks, after which he started again and twice forged his wife's signature to get the money. But three days before the attack, he first attended a meeting of the club of anonymous players and decided to make peace with his wife's parents, with whom he was apparently quite close. Parks even lost sleep as he prepared for the upcoming conversation.
Psychiatrists and others found no signs of brain disease or psychosis in Parkes. He himself was shocked by what he did. Brainwave examinations have shown that his sleep phases naturally follow each other more often than most people. He also did not experience physical pain during the attack, despite tearing several tendons, which required surgery. Parks came to himself only at the police station.
The doctors had no choice but to admit that sleepwalking was to blame. Indeed, research has since emerged that have supported the hypothesis that the brain does not go to sleep all at once. In a small number of people, the synchronization of the process of falling asleep between different parts of the brain is so impaired that complete disorganization sets in: people can talk, walk, drive a car and even cook food without understanding what is happening.
Apparently, Parks went to his wife's parents because the part of his brain that planned this trip was awake. But why did he attack? Even the prosecution could not answer this question - there was no benefit to Parks.
According to experts, the poor man at that moment did not think that he was killing someone in his sleep. The type of sleepwalking that Parks suffered from occurs during a certain stage of sleep, when dreams are rarely seen and mostly consist of fragmentary images. In addition, the part of the brain that tells us what action is needed in a given situation (the prefrontal cortex) is inactive during this sleep phase.
Most likely, Dennis Woods discovered that his son-in-law was wandering around the house asleep, and tried to wake Parks. He took it as if his life was in danger. Unfortunately, the part of the brain that could tell him what was really going on was too exhausted by the previous night's insomnia and worries about debt …