On September 30, 1979, 20-year-old Dianna Green, who was nine months pregnant, was attacked and raped in her apartment in Tustin, California. The attacker struck Green repeatedly in the middle of her forehead.
Her husband, 20-year-old Kevin Lee Green, a Marine corporal, told police that he discovered his wife when he came home from getting some food. She was transported to the hospital in a coma.
Doctors waited 24 hours for her to stabilize and then performed a caesarian section. The fetus was not alive, however. Green was arrested on October 1, 1979.
However, because Dianna remained in a coma, he was released.
After she emerged from the coma two weeks later, she was unable to speak. After about three months of speech therapy, she was able to communicate and said that Kevin had been her attacker.
In April 1980, he was arrested again and charged with second-degree murder of the baby and attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon on his wife.
In September 1990, Green went to trial in Orange County Superior Court.
The prosecution’s case rested almost solely on the testimony of his wife, who by then had filed for divorce. She testified that on the night of the attack, they quarreled after she refused to have sex with him because of her pregnancy. She said that they quarreled often and that he had complained to his friends because she stopped having sex with him after she entered the eighth month of her pregnancy. She said that he had struck her in the past and that on that night, after she refused, she said he began hitting her on the head with a key retractor and a ring of keys.
Dr. Martin Brenner, a psychiatrist, testified that he had evaluated her and that her memory was reliable.
The defense had asked that she be evaluated by another psychiatrist, but the request was denied.
There was no testimony about serology testing of the rape kit. However, a report of the testing said that only blood type O negative was found. Green and his wife both had O negative, so the testing did not exclude him.
Green testified and denied committing the crime. He said that he had gone out at about 1:30 a.m. to a Jack in the Box restaurant for a hamburger. Police had noted at the time that his food was still warm when they arrived in response to his call to 911.
The defense also called a Jack in the Box employee who testified that Green had been at the restaurant and got a hamburger at the time he said he was there.
On October 1, 1980, Green was found guilty by a jury of second-degree murder for the death of the stillborn child, and assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder of his wife. On November 7, 1980, Green was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
In 1992, the California Court of Appeal upheld the convictions and sentence.
Throughout the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, police in Tustin and nearby Costa Mesa had struggled to solve a series of sexual attacks and murders of young women dating back to the late 1970’s. In the 1990’s, DNA testing had been conducted on rape kits taken from the victims, but it was not until the state of California created an offender DNA database that the DNA male profiles from the retested rape kits was submitted.
In June of 1996, lawyers for Green were informed that the DNA profile from the spermatozoa from his wife’s rape kit had been identified as that of Gerald Parker, a former Marine who had been imprisoned in 1980.
On June 20, 1996, Green’s convictions were vacated, the charges were dismissed and he was released from prison.
Parker, who was labeled “Bedroom Basher,” confessed to attacking Green’s wife. He also confessed to the rapes and murders of five other women. One was murdered in 1978, and the other four were murdered in 1979, the same year Green’s wife was attacked.
In February 1997, Green was awarded $10,000 by the state of California, at that time the largest amount available under the compensation statute. In October 1999, Governor Gray Davis signed a bill awarding Green $620,000 in additional compensation.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 02-13-2026
