A man charged in New Jersey with kidnapping a woman and holding her against her will as they criss-crossed the country for a year apparently has a long history of mistreating women and lying about his personal life.
As CrimeOnline previously reported, James W. Parrillo was arrested on February 7 in New Jersey when a woman he’d allegedly kidnapped in New Mexico last February escaped and begged employees at a gas station to call police. The woman told investigators that he identified himself as Brett Parker when he asked for for a ride to Arizona, and they engaged in a consensual relationship.
A month later, however, the woman said he assaulted her during an argument in California a month later and threatened to kill her and her family, leaving her terrified to leave. He’s been charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault, criminal restraint, obstruction, and refusing to give a DNA sample. He is awaiting an initial court appearance.
But according to a December 17, 2019, article on Outside’s Backpacker, Perrillo has been doing similar things at least as far back as 1993, including months focusing on the Pacific Crest Trail and other long-haul treks in California.
In 1993, the article says, Perrillo, using the name Angelo Anthony DeCompo, told Valerie Earrick in Florida that he was the millionaire son of a Mafia kingpin. And also deaf and mute from a Gulf War injury. He allegedly loaded Earrick into her parents brand new Camaro and took off on what Unsolved Mysteries — which did a program on him — called a “six state, 2,000-mile journey of terror.”
Earrick was repeatedly beaten during the journey, and eventually “Tony DeCompo vanished and is believed to have victimized other people,” the show said.
In 1997, Parrillo was jailed for a short time in Virginia for allegedly threatening then-President Bill Clinton, and in the early 2000s, he was sentenced to three years in prison for helping a California woman kidnap her two young children from her father.
In 2013, he was interviewed on a conspiracy website as a former Greenpeace ecoterrorist who spend nearly 20 years in “the U.S.’s most secure SuperMax federal prison.” That interview is now marked with a disclaimer saying that “Parrillo fabricated his story,” the Backpacker article says.
And that was before he allegedly kidnapped Kira Moon on the Pacific Crest Trail, where he used the trail name “Medic,” in March 2018. Moon, who died in February 2019, told Backpacker that Parrillo told her he was a retired Navy SEAL and had been a Greenpeace deep-sea diver. He’d just sold a home, he said, for $4.5 million and was waiting for the money to come out of escrow so he’d have access to it. And he was in pain after a windstorm blew him off a cliff in Mount Laguna, California.
During their months on the trail, Moon said Parrillo beat and raped her until she finally was able to escape his clutches. He was arrested but never prosecuted, perhaps because, according to an expert who spoke with Backpacker, Moon wouldn’t have made a sympathetic victim.
After Moon got away from Parrillo, he launched a new Facebook page and hiked part of the Continental Divide Trail while claiming to be a stage IV cancer victim.
Online groups like Missing from the PCT have kept his name and face alive, however, cautioning through hikers about him. And when he was arrested this month in New Jersey, the through-hiker community was elated, hoping that this time he is held accountable.
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[Featured image: James Parrillo. Center/New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Left/Facebook 2014. Right/Unsolved Mysteries 1993]
