New podcast revisits 1968 killing of Carolee Ashby, identifies suspect

A new true-crime podcast has pushed Carolee Ashby’s name back into the spotlight, bringing fresh attention to the 4-year-old’s killing in Fulton and the long hunt for the driver who left her in the road on Halloween night. The case, now framed for a new audience through APB: Cold Case, centers on a moment that has never stopped haunting Oswego County: around 6:30 p.m. on October 31, 1968, Carolee was struck and killed while crossing the North South Arterial near Division Street, now State Route 481.

Police said Carolee was walking with her sister and cousin after buying birthday candles and ice cream when a 1962 tan Buick Special hit her. Investigators had little to work with at the start beyond a description of the tail lights. They canvassed repair garages, interviewed hundreds of people and followed lead after lead, but neither the car nor the driver could be identified. For years, the crash remained one of Fulton’s coldest unsolved cases.

The case did not disappear entirely. Former Fulton Police Chief Mark Spawn revived public attention in 2000, and the file stayed alive inside the department even as the trail grew colder. The real break came in 2012, when retired Fulton police Lt. Russ Johnson posted about the case on the Fulton History Facebook page. That post generated a new lead that sent investigators back toward Douglas Parkhurst.

A witness now living in Florida told police that soon after the crash, a member of the Parkhurst family asked her to falsely say she had been with Douglas Parkhurst on Halloween night in 1968. She refused. Police said that account, along with reopened interviews and older reports, pointed them toward Parkhurst as the likely driver. In April 2013, Fulton police identified Douglas Parkhurst, then 62 and living in Oswego County, as the man responsible. No charges were filed because the statute of limitations had expired.

Later reporting said Parkhurst confessed in 2013 after two interviews with investigators, and that he died later that year in a Maine hit-and-run crash. The podcast also brings in Carolee’s sister, Darlene Ashby McCann, retired Fulton police personnel and journalist Carol Thompson, giving the case the family and community weight that has kept it alive for nearly six decades. What still lingers is the same detail that first made the case solvable: a hidden trail of evidence, a witness who finally spoke, and a child whose death was never just another unsolved file.