DNA Evidence, Tip Crack 1990 Lovers Lane Double Murder Cold Case

HPD and the FBI arrested Floyd William Parrott, 64, in Lincoln, Nebraska on Wednesday, charging him with capital murder in the 1990 "Lovers' Lane" killings of Cheryl Henry, 22, and Andy Atkinson, 21, a double murder that went unsolved for nearly 36 years in west Houston.

Henry and Atkinson were a young couple who went out on the night of Aug. 22 or 23, 1990, in west Houston and never came home. Henry's family filed a missing persons report after she failed to show up for work. Their bodies were found in an area that early 1990s accounts described as remote and largely undeveloped. The case quickly became one of the most haunting unsolved murders in Harris County.

Court records show the break came in 2025, when detectives revisiting the cold case file came across a tip naming Parrott. According to a criminal complaint, as investigators looked into that tip, Sgt. Burrow reviewed a 1996 sexual assault case in which Parrott had already been named as a suspect. Burrow found that male DNA from the 1996 case had only recently been uploaded to CODIS, the national sexual assault database, and that it produced a "case-to-case match" with DNA collected from Cheryl Henry's body in 1990. In that 1996 case, Parrott "admitted to the sexual contact" though he maintained it was consensual, per the complaint. A continuous investigation ultimately led to identifying Parrott as a suspect in March 2026.

That CODIS match was not the first time DNA had pointed toward a break in the case. In 2008, Houston police announced that semen collected from Henry's body matched DNA from a separate 1990 sexual assault involving a 30-year-old exotic dancer attacked in her home in north Harris County. Retired homicide detective Billy Belk called it "the most promising lead we've had" at the time. But because no arrest had been made in the dancer's assault, investigators could not connect either case to a named suspect. Evidence from that 1990 assault took roughly 17 years to be tested. The victim helped create a sketch of her attacker, which investigators later age-progressed. At one point, detectives compared DNA from at least two dozen potential suspects; none matched.

Parrott's connection to west Houston ran deeper than the murders alone. In May 1988, he was arrested and placed on probation for impersonating a peace officer in Harris County, and records show he provided a work address just over one mile from the Lovers' Lane murder scene. In December 1988, he was arrested for carrying a weapon and convicted; that weapon, a blue steel revolver, was later returned to him. Investigators say it matches the description given by a June 1990 sexual assault victim. Parrott was arrested again in May 1990 for impersonating a peace officer and was out on bond when that June 1990 sexual assault occurred, weeks before Henry and Atkinson were killed.

The Harris County District Attorney's Office filed the capital murder charge. Parrott is awaiting extradition to Harris County, and HPD has released his mugshot.

"This case has weighed on the Henry and Atkinson families, as well as our community, for more than three decades," Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said. "Our prosecutors, working with HPD and the FBI, have worked hundreds of leads but they never gave up."

The families never stopped waiting. Andy Atkinson's cousin Tim Godwin, who described the two as so close they considered each other brothers, reflected on how the early years felt: "Initially I thought, OK, three to six months. We'd find out who did this, and they'd be brought to justice." In 2025, Cheryl's father Robert Henry spoke with visible longing about anyone who might have information: "I feel like somebody out there knows something. If they would come forward, maybe they would know."

Atkinson's grandmother Jean Averitte captured what the families had carried since the week of the killing. "I just want justice," she told the Houston Chronicle in 1990. "I don't want the same thing to happen to some of these other young people."

Parrott's extradition to Harris County is pending.