Parker commuted the death sentences of two African Americans, Chester Tyson and Mark Peters, convicted in a notorious murder case in the community of Grove in Webster Parish in northwestern Louisiana. On Christmas Day 1916, the family of John Nelson Reeves, including his wife Maude and three of their four children, was bludgeoned to death by a group of axe-wielding men. The presumed motive for the killing was money that Reeves, who distrusted banks, had boasted of having stashed away in a mattress in his house. The prosecutor in the case, Harmon Caldwell Drew of Minden, had been on the job for less than a month when the crime occurred. The district judge in the case was John N. Sandlin, later a U.S. representative and like Drew an occasional intraparty opponent of the Longs from Minden.