Colonel Parker: Illegal indvandrer og morder…

Om der overhovedet er hold i den redelighed, jeg bringer til torvs i dag, aner jeg ikke. Historien vil dog ikke dø. Selv Alanna Nash, velrenommeret journalist for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly og USA Weekend, der har skrevet den meget roste biografi, ‘The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley’, føler sig ikke helt sikker. Havde Colonel Parker myrdet en ung kvinde i Holland, før han ankom til USA som illegal indvandrer i 1929?

“It could have been a coincidence, yes, of course. I cannot say without reservation that he killed this woman. I offer it only as a theory, a possibility. Even his Dutch family is willing to admit that it is a possibility, though they believe, as I do, that if he killed her, it was an accident. I will say that he had an amazing ability to compartmentalize events and feelings in his mind. If something troubled him too much, he was able to store it in a back corner of his consciousness, though he always had trouble keeping it there. Certainly whatever happened in Holland that made him leave his family, with whom he was very close, and to just cut them off, was of a very grave nature. He missed them, but didn't want to foist his troubles off on them. I know that from a letter he wrote to his nephew in the '60s after his family identified him from a magazine photo and began to write to him.”

- Alanna Nash til Elvis Australia, juni 2003.

Smithsonian Magazine dykker dybere ned i Parkers skumle fortid i denne artikel fra 2012.