Trial in cold case killing postponed into the fall

The cold case involving the murder of a former Newhall woman, which prosecutors hoped would see a summer trial, is now inching toward the fall after being rescheduled Friday.

The trial of 58-year-old Harold Anthony Parkinson, accused of killing former Newhall resident Stephanie Sommers, was scheduled to begin in August, but has now been put off until next month.

Parkinson, who appeared Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, is now scheduled to appear back in court Sept. 7, said Ricardo Santiago, spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

On Aug. 30, 1980, shortly after she moved to the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles from Newhall, Sommers, 36, was murdered in her Silver Lake apartment in the 3500 block of Marathon Street.

She was beaten and stabbed.

For more than three decades the case remained unsolved, until detectives arrested Parkinson on June 19, 2014.

Forensic evidence taken from the crime scene in 1980 but processed just four years ago was linked to Parkinson, who is serving a 15-years-to-life sentence for an unrelated 1981 murder in Los Angeles.

The day after he was arrested on suspicion of Sommers’ murder by detectives assigned to the Cold Case section of the Los Angeles Police Department, Parkinson was arraigned on one count of murder with the special circumstance allegation of rape.