CANDICE PARCHMENT - 15 yo (2010)/ Convicted: Marshae O’Brian Hickman - Forest Park GA

A Forest Park teen’s diary her mother found months after the girl's death helped lead police to her accused killer.

Clayton County police have
charged Marshae O’Brian Hickman with murdering 15-year-old Candice
Parchment and concealing her body in the woods near her home in April
2010.

She had sneaked out of her house in the early morning hours of April
28, 2010 and apparently ended up with Hickman, one of two boys who
Candice’s mother said had  tried to rape the girl three months before
her death.

“ I told her, ‘if you don’t go to the police and tell them, [those
boys] will probably try to do it to somebody else, or do it to you,’”
Caffian Hyatt told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, noting that her
daughter initially wouldn’t identify the culprits of the attempted
sexual assault. “And they’ll probably kill someone.”

Hyatt had no way of knowing how prophetic her words would be. Just weeks after her warning, Candice was gone.

The girl’s remains were found seven months later on Nov. 24, hidden
beneath a mattress in a wooded area behind a Forest Park apartment on
Sylvia Drive.

Next week, Hickman, already in jail on a burglary charge, will make his first court appearance to answer to the new accusations.

“I need to know why he did it,” Hyatt said Wednesday in an exclusive
interview with the AJC. “I need to know what he said to her to make her
leave her warm bed, and to make her go out to meet him.”

Diary of a rape attempt

From the time Hyatt reported Candice missing, she refused to believe her daughter had run away from home.

“I know my daughter,” Hyatt said. “She wouldn’t want to be on the street like that.”

The Clayton County police
missing persons report said Candice was “having social problems in
school,” and Hyatt pointed to a night in January 2010, when her daughter
escaped an abandoned house where two teenaged boys had tried to rape
her.

Candice was gone late one January night when Hyatt returned home from
work. And she didn’t answer her phone after subsequent calls from her
mother.

“Then, on one call, she did pick up the phone and it sounded like somebody tried to wrestle the phone from her,” Hyatt said.

Hyatt and her fiancé went looking for Candice, stopping in front of a number of abandoned houses on their street.

Suddenly, Candice appeared from behind the car, and told her mother
two boys had tried to rape her. She refused to name the boys involved,
however.

“I told her to write their names down,” Hyatt said.

Candice eventually wrote “Jermaine and Marsha” on a note pad for her
mother, but Hyatt said she couldn’t find the paper or remember the names
after Candice disappeared.

“She never did tell me everything that happened,” Hyatt said. “I only
found out when I found her diary three weeks ago, and read it.”

She immediately took the diary to police.

Candice’s diary entry date from Jan. 5, 2010, outlined a frightening scene inside that abandoned house.

Jermaine Robinson, who recently admitted to police his role in the
incident, and Hickman, trapped the girl in a dark, cold room, trying to
remove her pants.

“Jermaine hit her in the head with a rake and Marsha blocked the door,” according to a Clayton County
police arrest warrant affidavit obtained by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, and recounting, among other things, the diary
entry.

“Jermaine grabbed her and choked her. She begged for him to let her go but he would not.

“They unzipped her pants and her phone rang. She was able to answer the phone and spoke to her mother.”

Candice put up a fight when the boys tried to take away the phone.

“I had to find her,” Hyatt said. “And when we drove past that abandoned home, I thought I saw somebody inside.”

The affidavit said the boys panicked when Hyatt pulled up outside the house, and Candice was able to get away.

Moments later, police say Candice received a text message: “Please don’t tell, I will pay you $100.”

The message blamed Robinson, 17, saying the teen had a gun and threatened to kill the texter’s grandmother.

“He had a gun,” the text read. “Please don’t say anything.”

Death and disappearance

Court records provide a startling account of what happened, but only
raise more questions as to Hickman’s motive or the relationship between
victim and accused.

They were together at some point on that wooded trail behind the
apartment complex at 482 Sylvia Drive in Forest Park – just two blocks
from where Candice lived with her mother.

An autopsy showed evidence that Candice had been stabbed.

But Hickman, a 6-foot-tall,  250-pound teen, admitted only to having strangled the petite girl, the affidavit said.

“He stated that he placed his arm around her shoulders and was trying
to speak with her,” the affidavit reads. “He stated that he then placed
her in a position where his arm was around her neck. He squeezed
tightly and kept his arm there until she fell limp.”

Hickman told police he checked for a pulse and found none. Then he
dragged the dead girl’s body off the trail and found the mattress.

From the time Candice went missing, it appears that Hickman – or
possibly someone working with him – made every effort to cover his
trail.

Text messages were sent to Hyatt from Candice’s cell phone within
days of the disappearance, police say, telling her the girl had left the
state and trying to calm the worried mother.

“He texted my phone about 3 o’clock the Wednesday she went missing
and said, ‘I’m in Tennessee,’” Hyatt said. “And the Thursday night after
she disappeared, I got a text again that said, ‘am OK.’”

In interviews with police, Hickman was dodgy at first, telling
investigators he had encountered Candice in the woods around the time
she disappeared in April 2010, and that he had moved the mattress from
the trail so he could ride his bike through.

Both assertions, investigators said, were ploys to explain away Hickman’s DNA being found on Candice’s body or on the mattress.

And Hickman said he threw away a pocket knife he had when questioned about possibly stabbing her.

Eventually, Hickman told police that he kept tabs on Candice’s body
shortly after her death, looking periodically to make certain her body
hadn’t been discovered.

“He … went back to the scene the next morning,” the affidavit reads.
“It was at this time he observed her feet hanging from under the
mattress and he tucked her feet back under.”

Even after he moved away from the area, Hickman returned, investigators said.

“After Thanksgiving of 2010, he
went back to the scene of the murder and noticed that the mattress and
Candice Parchment’s body were no longer there,” the affidavit said.

Jermaine Robinson, Hickman’s accomplice in the attempted rape, told
police Hickman approached him in December 2010 asking if he wanted to
kill Candice.

Robinson, who has not been charged by police in Candice’s murder or
the attempted rape, told investigators that Hickman threatened to stab
him at one point and to stab, beat and choke Candice.

All cursed out

Asked if she thought her daughter had some kind of relationship with
Hickman or with Robinson, Hyatt was adamant that Candice couldn’t have
had any strongly binding ties to the boys.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “She said in her diary that those boys weren’t her friends.”

Hyatt finds herself asking why, then, would her daughter leave the house to knowingly go to one of these boys.

“If they weren’t her friends, why would she go meet them?” Hyatt asked herself.

The Candice she said she knew was strong-willed, but not rebellious. Soft-spoken, but not a push-over.

The Forest Park freshman was the youngest of Hyatt’s two daughters, and the one who moved from Jamaica to join her mom in 2008.

She was outgoing, a math tutor at Long Cane Middle School,  in the
LaGrange High marching band before transferring to Forest Park, and in
ROTC.

“She was such a beautiful soul,” Hyatt said of Candice. “For somebody
to do that to her and throw her away like she is trash, I can’t
understand.”

Candice made friends easily, and sometimes, Hyatt worried, too easily.

“She was a regular Ms. Sunshine,” Hyatt said. “But she was naïve. I
said to her on numerous occasions that not everybody was her friends.”

The last time Candice was home, she went into her mother’s room and asked to watch a movie together.

It was after midnight on the morning of April 28, and Hyatt was more worried about her teen getting her rest.

“I said, ‘If you watch a movie, you won’t be able to get up for school in the morning,’” Hyatt said.

Then she admitted to often having second-guessed her parental instincts since that night.

“Maybe if I had watched that movie with her, she would’ve fallen
asleep in my bed,” Hyatt said. “But who knows. If she didn’t go then,
maybe she would’ve gone another time.”

When she gave investigators Candice’s diary, they told her that bringing charges against Hickman could bring the family closure.

But the mother said after more than a year of wondering, worrying,
hoping, then finally resolving that her daughter was lost, it’s
difficult to find a silver lining.

“I’m all cursed out,” Hyatt said. “There will never be closure. I would have loved to see her dreams come true.”
http://www.ajc.com/news/clayton/diary-leads-to-alleged-1222277.html

Life sentence for Clayton County diary murderer

Posted: 5:16 p.m. Friday, April 26, 2013
By Marcus K. Garner,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A convicted Clayton County murderer whom police identified by his victim’s diary was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 20 years.

Marshae O’Brian Hickman was also sentenced to a 50-year prison term to run at the same time as the murder sentencing for attacking and trying to rape Candice Parchment months before he killed her in 2010.

A jury found Hickman, 21, guilty earlier this month of malice murder, felony murder – causing a death by committing a felony – false imprisonment, criminal attempted rape, involuntary manslaughter, four counts of aggravated assault, aggravated battery and concealing a death.

In her diary, Parchment wrote that Hickman and Jermaine Robinson tried to rape her in an abandoned home in their neighborhood in January 2010, according to police records.

Robinson pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for hitting Parchment in the head that night, and he would later testify against Hickman.

In April of that year, Parchment disappeared. Her body was found the following November beneath an abandoned mattress behind the apartment complex where Hickman used to live.

An autopsy determined that she had been stabbed and strangled to death, a GBI medical examiner testified.

Nearly a year later, Parchment’s mother found mention of the January rape attempt with the names of both attackers in the teen’s diary and gave the book to police, who charged a then-incarcerated Hickman with murder.

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/crime-law/life-sentence-for-clayton-county-diary-murderer/nXY4Q/